I am well into my promised post on What Happened in Caracas. It's gotten unwieldily, and needs to be edited with a good re-write, and then split into two parts, one about Chavez and my inchoate take on the politics and such down there, and then one with the straight narrative of my trip. I've been too busy the last few days to get that accomplished, but will try to tonight and tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm going to post a couple things I wrote in a comments thread over at Slate under an interesting article by Matt Yglesias about the wealth of the Church. I spent too much time on them to have them get buried in a thread for no one to read.
One of the main problems I have in starting to write on the things I've been mulling and want to express, is that on the one hand I have quite a lot to say, while on the other the basic thrust boils down to essentially a half dozen "tricks" or themes that I am going to play over and over again a few dozen times with various inflections. I've been hesitating because of this, but there's really nothing for it but to just put on my show and hope that all the acrobatics don't get repetitive and boring. So here we go, my first flip:
Yglesias suggests in his article that the Church (a word that in my usage always refers to the apostolic Church, all the churches in union with Rome, and the Orthodox and other Eastern Churches that descend from the apostles - protestants are merely heretics who relate to the Church by virtue of their baptism and faith alone. Their organizations are not Churches in the sense that they are vested with any true authority like apostolic bishops have), should be subject to taxation and auditing by the State.
I disagree. This is why:
Another point: Mr. Yglesias and many commenters here seem to think that the State curtailing Church's freedom and power would be an unambiguous good. That is in effect what giving the State the power to tax and financially audit the Church (and divers churches and other religious groups) would do.
But he misses an important thing: the separation of Church and State is not merely an innovation of the American Constitution. It's deeply embedded in the Christian, which is to say European, hence Western, experience. ("Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, give unto God what is God's.") Unlike in Islam where the Ummah theoretically constitutes the government and there is therefore no public distinction between the sacred and secular spheres; or in the Orthodox annoiting of the imperium, which has stunted the political life of Russia and made the Church there essentially a department of the state, creating an incestuous relationship between political and religious power; the Catholic Church has effectively created a tension in Western society that creates a sphere for conscience and then even legally legitimate political action *supported by the churches* as institutions. The churches act as catalysts or spaces for political action that have often counterbalanced, even frequently opposed, the otherwise overwhelming power of the State. This is counter the Enlightenment narrative of Catholic obscurantism, of course; but I submit that the Catholic Faith - with its doctrine of freedom of individual conscience (human beings are ontologically free, our fate is not predetermined, our actions have meaning) which is concomitant with the doctrine of the sacredness of the human person; as well as the doctrine that political sovereigns are bound *legally* by the Church's law, which demands fair treatment of the poor and places critical limits on use of power such as just war doctrine (which essentially still constitutes the basis for modern international law and human rights doctrine) - is at the core of the Western cultural ascendency.
See Boniface VIII's (the sucessor of the last pope who resigned, Celistine V, whom Boniface imprisoned) 1302 bull Unam Sanctam. It articulates the principal of dual authority. I argue that dichotomy vitally reinforces the moral and spiritual authority and freedom that the churches have had in our society to agitate for everything from emancipation to suffragism, from economic justice for the poor to opposition to war, from prohibition to opposition to (and support for) abortion flows from the legacy of that dichotomy.
The universities are incidentally adjunct institutions that are utter creatures of the Church, and until now have provided a intellectual clerical caste (with authority in the sciences, medicine, law and humanities that is preeminent in our culture) that grew out of, and has now secularized the prior Christian clerical ascendancy. As we eradicate the influence of the Church, the authority of this class will - I predict - also be called into question and eroded. That our universities are now behaving like hedge funds; and tenure is being eroded, only to be replaced by teachers for hire; and universities are now being re-cast as businesses (U of Phoniex type abuse of the student loan system); is actually symptomatic of this. The dogma that human beings are iconic of God; are always ends, never mere means; is fading. Now, the market and cash, and homo economicus are all that is left.
Absent this lingering Catholic dichotomy where an institution like the UN apes the Church in moderating the power of states and arbitrating disputes peacefully between them; we are utterly in the world ruled by the logic of Stalin, Hitler, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Just because we bourgeois think we are just too darn nice to be baldly brutal like them, does not mean that we should glibly dispense with the Church - and the various Christian splinter churches and other religious authorities - merely because we see them as backward and irrelevant in light of progress, which means merely because we disagree or think them ridiculous.
Civilization is a thin skein, and it was woven by religion. Tear at it at our collective risk.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment