Essays

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism Considered in Their Fundamental Principles by Juan Donoso Cortes, translated by Rev William McDonald, 347 pages

In his celebrated 1988 Gifford lectures, Alisdair MacIntyre exposed the failure of both the modernist "encyclopedic" and postmodernist "genealogical" approaches to ethics, a failure rooted in their incommensurability, their inability to meaningfully dialogue with and assimilate alien systems.  Now we stand in the ruins of those towers of human pride, with leaders who, whether from knavery or imbecility or some mixture of the two, leap uncomprehendingly from one to the other, asserting at one moment that "my truth" is something manufactured, and at the next that it issues from the Delphic prophetess Science, once her mad ravings have been suitably interpreted by her labcoated priests.  If reason is the slave rather than the master of the passions, every subjectivity is at war with every other, convenient lies contending with convenient lies, and so the heathen rage.

This was all warned against by Juan Donoso Cortes in the early nineteenth century.  The liberal superstition that truth will triumph in a free marketplace of ideas is belied by the fact that men do not seek the truth, to the contrary, even when the Truth appeared to them they mocked Him, spit on Him, and ultimately crucified Him.  The entire liberal project is founded on the mistaken belief that human freedom consists of the power to choose between good and evil rather than the ability to will the good.  The result is moral chaos, the war of all against all by other means, and sin, Cortes reminds us, is nothing more or less than disorder, the confusion of lesser goods for higher, ending in the disunion of soul and body which is death.  Life, then, is order, true order, the harmony which exists in the presence of the supreme mysteries in the light of which all apparent contradictions are resolved.   

Liberalism

Liberalism: A Critique of Its Basic Principles and Various Forms by Louis Cardinal Billot, SJ, translated by Msgr George Barry O'Toole and Thomas Storck, 67 pages

Written in the last years before the First World War, Liberalism is a masterful critique of the political ideology of the so-called Enlightenment.  Cutting right to the heart of the matter, Cardinal Billot exposes the core dogma of liberalism as the enthronement of liberty as the supreme good, and demonstrates how this is corrosive of every human institution and relationship.  Prophetically, he foresees the paradoxical condition of the thoroughly dehumanized mass man who will tolerate no power above or beside him save that of the omnipotent state.  In closing, he distinguishes three types of liberals - the consistent, revolutionary, luciferian liberal, the supposedly moderate liberal who imagines that he can command the revolutionary forces of destruction to only go so far and no further, and the Catholic liberal who, in attempting to separate his politics from his faith, inevitably betrays both.

As incisive as they are short, Cardinal Billot's essays are, if anything, more powerful today than they were when they were written, since history has only added to the evidence for his claims.

Integralism

Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy by Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, 279 pages

A spectre is haunting what was the West - it is the spectre of Integralism.  All the powers of the old liberalism have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Democrat and Republican, libertarian and socialist, German and Brit, Dorsey and Zuckerberg, Bezos and Gates.  

This may seem a trifle overblown.  It is true, however, that as the liberal consensus crumbles, engaged Catholics, and especially younger Catholics, have begun looking for traditional alternatives to the naked emperor of modernity.  One of the most trenchant criticisms of the movement has been the lack of agreement as to what, precisely, is meant by "Integralism", particularly in a country founded on the rejection of throne and altar.  Is Integralism equivalent to Falangism, or is it a particular flavor of common-good conservatism, or is it a fundamentally unserious social-media phenomenon with no meaningful content whatsoever?

Although disagreements will no doubt continue, with the publication of Crean and Fimister's manual at least the last is no longer an entirely plausible answer.  Without being argumentative, they carefully build their argument for a rational society and a politics which respects the entire human person.  Although their conclusions are unlikely to convince anyone who does not agree with their premises, their political philosophy is at least coherent, which is more than can be said for any of the post-modern alternatives.  The result is a challenge to many, and an invitation to a few.

Before Church and State

 Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St Louis IX by Andrew Willard Jones, 454 pages

Post-enlightenment, the establishment narrative regards the thirteenth century as a chrysalis for the sovereign, secular state, when the irrational, theocratic pretensions of the papacy began to be overcome by the increasingly independent monarchs of the nations of Europe including, crucially, the pious, even saintly Louis IX of France.  As Andrew Jones convincingly demonstrates, however, this is a deformation of the actual history of the period, the product of the anachronistic imposition of modern concepts on medieval society.  For medieval Catholics, the natural state of man was not, as it would be for the "enlightened", a state of war against which the secular State must force a truce.  To the contrary, the natural state of man is peace, a peace broken by sin, but which grace restores and maintains.  It is the role of the secular as of the ecclesiastical authority to be a conduit for that grace, and they are partners rather than competitors.

Jones builds his remarkable book around the person of Gui Foucois, who served as an official in both the French church and state before becoming Pope Clement IV, but it is precisely Jones' point that Foucois saw his public service as a unified whole, not as divided into "religious" and "secular" but as part of the single "business of the peace and the faith".  It followed, then, that outlaws and heretics were equally "breakers of the peace", rebels against a sacramental order whose harmony was predicated upon difference rather than equality, being itself an expression of a Trinitarian rather than a Deist theology.