The Age of Trump, and the continuous support the president receives from Evangelicals, has produced a minor industry of books on the religion of hate. The true Jesus, these authors claim, was an advocate for peace and toleration, a welcoming of all peoples to worship God in whatever way they choose, galvanizing candidates like Mainline seminarian James Talarico of Texas to win the Democratic primary. Cant about faith traditions and wonder has reintroduced a communitarian and non-secular bent into left/progressive politics, even leading theatrical stunts from Mainline clergy in confrontation with the administration and its anti-immigration policies. The age of Gnu-Atheist modernism is over, and instead an older tradition, one that married communitarian traditionalism with social democratic secularity into a modern left that cares less about industrialization or dialectical materialism for intersectionality. The slogan to “Trust the Science” during COVID occurred at the same time when CDC released a statement to justify Black Lives Matter marches because white supremacy kills more people yearly than a world-stopping pandemic. The science includes so-called “indigenous ways of knowing” that defend literal witch-doctors and snake-oil as holistic and alternative, even superior, ways of health and healing.

For some, this turn reveals the “puritanical” nature of the left, superstitious and moralizing about great ideals against the grain of reality. What does that mean? Is it true? If not, what is the “faith” of the modern left? An older, and somewhat antiquated, account of restoring this communitarian vision comes from Philip Gorski and his American Covenant. Written during a time when Ronald Reagan was still the great Satan and the Koch Brothers, with agents like Ron and Rand Paul, threatened to unleash corporate fascism, Gorski wants to chart the true history against radical secularists and the religious right. It is not quite a third-way, because Gorski does not think the radical secularists are wrong in their ends, they only do not understand the nature of Human sociality. Without heroes and villains, without stories, progressive politics is “uninspiring” and the community loses its center (228). Instead, with an appeal to David Foster Wallace’s banality that “everybody worships” (14-15), Gorski hopes to restore the religious and communal center to America through a retelling of its history. It is the use of seemingly conservative and stable categories that advances an entire inversion of the people that claimed to know and worship the true God.

Gorski is a functional atheist, but he knows people need stories, formed through collective experiences that respond positively or negative to symbols. Civic religion is a means to conceptualize a people in a community, something that Robert Bellah and Alasdair Macintyre tried to theorize for left-liberals who increasingly gave into “individualism” and the kind of consumer selfishness that American sociologists have flogged the nation for since the 1970s. For Gorski, it is important to recover this secular Christianity, tolerant to allow outsiders of all stripes but religious in orientation, that could buoy a wider political community. “Republicanism” thus became the means to offer an anti-communist left a justification for civic engagement, against “liberalism” which prioritizes a public/private divide against wider collective engagement in both social and political projects. Only if the religious aspect of this republicanism is reintroduced, only if the symbols and stories retain relevance for a wider public, will democracy persist against the threats of extremism.

The danger is, frankly, the religious right believes a different story about America. It is one that is inegalitarian and imperial, but is is fundamentally a question between two different peoples. Gorski utilizes a variety of analytic frameworks to diagnose the corruption. One is “apocalyptic,” something that is simultaneously a contrived modern corruption and a barbaric relic from the past, that emphasizes Friend and Enemy, Holy War, the final concluding crash to history that is around the corner, where all of God’s saints must battle the dark. It is an ahistorical fiction that galvanized Americans to vote in Ronald Reagan, but it is also something with roots in the foundations of the nation. In comparing it to the true “tradition” of the church, it is impressive, even bonkers, how many howlers Gorski can fit in a single paragraph:

The early church read [the Scriptures] allegorically, rather than predictively. The great battles depicted in the apocalyptic texts stood for great battles within the human heart. The premillennial interpretation is likewise a modern invention that did not become widespread in American Christianity until the early to mid‐twentieth century. Before then, the general view was “postmillennial.” Christ would not return until the church had already transformed the world. Literalist interpretation of Christian scripture is also not traditional but arose during the “fundamentalist/modernist” controversies of the early twentieth century. Before that time, scripture was read in multiple registers (e.g., the typological, the allegorical, the symbolic). Nor was revenge a central motif of traditional Christianity: the Roman church had emphasized redemption with its doctrine of purgatory. In short, the apocalyptic worldview is not an integral part of “traditional Christianity.” Rather, it is characteristic of a certain kind of American Protestantism that arose during the early twentieth century. (22)

Evangelicals defy the early church because they, unlike the venerable fathers, take the text too seriously. The Bible was rather, supposedly, a canvas to project social justice projects, to inspire the masses with dreams of equality and justice for all as the ultimate end to things. Salvation and redemption are simply metaphors for a functioning welfare system. Besides this apocalyptic tradition being a novel and rootless creature, it is also bad because it is scary:

What makes apocalyptic religious nationalism so dangerous? First, it leads to hubris. It seduces its followers into claiming to know things that no human being can possibly know. Second, it leads to demonization of others. Our enemies become physical embodiments of evil. Third, it leads to fatalism, suggesting that wars and other calamities are beyond human control. Finally, and most fatefully, it suggests that the ultimate solution to all problems is a violent one involving the annihilation of one’s enemies. (22)

Apocalypticism is new and old, false because we just know it is not true, and causes violent extremism through apathetic fatalism. To resist this tendency, civic religion stands against the apocalyptic. This tradition is traced through John Winthrop, who, because he commended mutual social relief (despite a socially stratified hierarchy of better and lesser sorts), offers an alternative. Instead of a form of Christofascism, Gorski sees in Puritan New England the seeds of civic religion, a separation of church and state within a somewhat democratic republic. It did not matter that magistrates still consulted ministers, consulting the Bible, with proper interpretation and drafting of laws (45). It did not matter that Puritans hung Quakers, whipped sabbath breakers, and waged wars against Indians as satan worshipers. It also did not matter that “the religious nationalist script was not penned by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s; it was written by Cotton Mather in the 1700s” (201). What mattered was that the Puritans did not practice the Austrian School of economics and held votes. Even though Gorski can admit that Rhode Island was the exception and fairly irrelevant, he also contends Roger Williams represented the truth of puritanism, a republicanism that would move beyond the “godly” (and English) towards secularity and equality for all (55).

Of course it was not everyone, but it was a start. Jefferson and Madison defended a secularity that would allow broad tolerance in a bid to construct public virtue. Hamilton, in contrast, engaged in “proto-liberalism” when he considered that “the chief danger to a republic was not corruption, but anarchy and, more specifically, demagoguery, in which an ambitious man allies with the many against the few” (64). The architect of Washington’s political economy, the very start of the United States, rejected equality and supported empire. While his star fell, another villain arose against the egalitarian republic and its civic religion: John C. Calhoun.

Despite Calhoun being a Deist and an early Jeffersonian republican, Calhoun was like Evangelicals because he was a textual literalist about the Constitution, utilizing “proof texts” against the spirit of the text that was contained in the Declaration of Independence (86-87). In contrast, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass understood civic religion as “prophetic,” a way to criticize interpretations of the text in the name of a “living covenant with an evolving God” (181). Lincoln may have been a conventional white supremacist, whose meeting with Douglass was in a bid to convince the freedmen to voluntarily leave for somewhere else (Lincoln’s preferred destination was Nicaragua). However, Douglass hoped the war would be for abolition and he could force Lincoln into glory (as one book on Lincoln’s racism from a disgruntled black liberal is titled). It was this tradition, this prophetic critique so-called, that stood to replace the misfires from before.

It is why Gorski understands Douglass as the true Lincolnian advocate for democratic equality and a prophetic civic religion. When it came to the Progressive Era, racist liberals like William Graham Sumner stood for free-trade and eugenics (despite being an atheist) against John Dewey’s bid for greater civic equality, Jane Addams’ feminist enfranchisement of women, and W.E.B. Dubois’ advocacy for civil rights. This narrative cuts through the twentieth century, with Roosevelt’s New Deal as economic democracy, as H.L. Mencken sympathized with Germany and sulked about the boobs. Then there was the postwar order, with Reinhard Niebuhr’s self-criticism of American hubris, Catholic inclusion through liberals like John Courtney Murray, leading into the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s crusade for civil rights as the telos of America’s democratic destiny. Obama could have been a hero to continue this movement, the first black president who said Niebuhr was his favorite theologian. But he was too wonky and bookish, he did not have the same kind of civil religious spice to tell Americans that civil rights for all kinds of oppressed intersectional minorities was not only a social good and a nice thing, but a god given demand. Only then will the kooks be put out of power and America could be saved from apocalypticism.

The historicity, or even these frameworks of textual literalism or religious apocalypse, is irrelevant. When Gorski explains his project as the restoration of “a sovereign and democratic people” who exist to realize “universal political ideas” like “freedom and equality” that nevertheless move through time as an “ever expanding river” towards “an uncertain horizon,” it sounds like colorless vague proceduralism. He hopes “quiet conservatives” and “open-minded progressives” would join hands in defending this ideal (222). But why would they do that? To defend the republic? Whose republic? It does not matter that republics have been historically identified with wars of expansion and conquest (which Tom Paine feverishly denied in his propaganda piece Common Sense). It does not matter that republics often practiced slavery, with clear demarcations between free and slave. It does not matter that republican citizenship was tightly guarded and not accessible for foreigners showing up. The real project, behind the proceduralism, was a question of national replacement. If there is a covenant with the American people (despite Gorski’s agnosticism that none of it expects divine judgement), who are they?

As in every republic, citizenship was bound up with kinship and kinship was bound to race. The patrician and the plebeian was not a social artifice, but reflected family relations and the process of inheriting a family and clan name. “Apocalypticism” is dangerous, and therefore evil, because it spends a lot of time talking about blood, and blood involves division. This “tradition” takes blood seriously:

So why does talk of blood sacrifice remain a part of Western political theology? Because the conquest narrative helps legitimate political violence, particularly violent forms of nation building. Blood helps define the nation. Shared blood (“race”) tells us who is and is not a member of the nation. Aren’t the true Israelites the blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Aren’t they forbidden from intermarrying with other peoples? (21)

The real issue is not that the “apocalyptic” wants to define the American people as a particular race, one that includes and excludes, but that it is the wrong race. When Simon Bolivar denounced pardocratia, which he associated with the anarchy of unruly masses against the propertied and educated few, he was also aware of a particular ethnogenesis that had occurred in Spanish America. The pardo was one who was a blend of European, African, and Indio. It was this race that threatened to usurp Gran Colombia from criollos like Bolivar. In America, the term would be better defined as “People of Color,” one that globalizes and integrates the experiences of those whom Franz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” those victims so-called of Western imperialism and racism. Behind the juggling abstractions of “apocalypticism” and “literalism” that somehow define libertarianism as a form of authoritarian fascism, it is, simply, that this covenant between God and the American people was not those English men in the wilderness, but it originated with the first African slaves. The covenant and the republic begins with them.

W.E.B. Dubois understood this point when he rebuffed Yankees with their memorialization of Puritans and Plymouth. Gorski can barely contain himself in summarizing Dubois’ righteous indignation against “the city on the hill”:

“Your country?” he demanded. “How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here.” Following in the footsteps of the black abolitionists, he challenged the Puritans’ status as a chosen people. Were blacks not more like the Israelites? “Fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of right,” Du Bois thundered. Maybe it was the African Americans who were the real saving remnant, he mused. Maybe it was black righteousness that had shielded a white nation from divine retribution: “Generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.” (120-121)

Progressives like Dubois would increasingly swell to dominate the mainstream, with civil rights becoming this civic religion. When MLK would criticize black radicals, like Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael, it was because they were bad at strategy. There was not going to be a global third-world revolution against to overthrow the “white power structure,” it was “fantasy” to think otherwise. Andrew Young, a black liberal who was Jimmy Carter’s UN Ambassador, praised King for this “Christian realism” (152). It is not hard to read between the lines and understand “realism” is an idealism chastened to act at the right pace to achieve maximal results. When Gorski lamented that Memorial Day became a national holiday to remember a tragic war between brothers, it was the black community that preserved “democratic republicanism” by remembering the war differently (which today has been nationally hallowed as Juneteenth). This counter-tradition, this prophetic civil religion, was the “gift of black folks” for the United States (100). Ultimately, it was the mingling of those misguided but well-meaning traditions of the West with the experiences of blacks slaves that has redefined the republic, a different people under a different covenant than Winthrop upon the Arbella.

This critical review may, for some, be disturbing. The attacks upon feminists or communists operate in the realm of ideas, that these defy American norms, that is easy enough. Easier still is reckoning the “apocalyptic” confrontations between the righteous and wicked in Scripture. There is no need for “textual literalism” to see Jerry Falwell’s denunciations of homosexuality as analogous to Isaiah’s attack upon the poles to Ashtoreh. But what about blood? The issue is not truly racism against antiracism, but the redefinition of things to achieve a global ethnogenesis, a community with a tradition that has one form in the arc from slavery to civil rights and beyond. It is this “living tradition with an evolving god” that then marks true civic religion of ecumenical universalism in the new age.

The Puritans were not averse to understanding things this way. Their covenanted towns segregated Indian converts to their own towns. The “Praying Towns” were under the authority of English law and norms, treated as Christians yet different. Puritans had no confusion of peoples, that when St Paul spoke of Greek and Jew as united in Christ, these races were not dissolved anymore than male or female. This republican style of government operated similar to multi-racial empires, where one race often imposed legal norms over others, even while there was relative permission to retain licit customs. The Holy Roman Empire imposed Frankish norms over others, even as these nations persisted. Nations like the Wampanoag and Abenaki were expected to conform, but they remained Indians, they did not become English. Blood remained paramount in Puritan towns for the simple reason that the Puritans read their Bible and understood themselves as the English in covenant with God to bring discipleship to the nations.

Of course, English is a composite identity formed through historical intermingling of Angles and Saxons, as well as with the native Britons and settled Romans, upon the British Isles. Races are historical, with some coming into existence and others fading. In America, that racial genesis involved being “white,” which marked the definition of American during the colonial period well into the twentieth century. It demarcated the method of assimilation, the Anglicization of European peoples (originally from the west, and to a limited extent from southern and eastern Europe). Christopher Columbus (not Cristobal Colon) became a symbol of Italians being assimilated into American. The reality of races is a historical phenomenon, the tree of Adam seeding into a massive forest over millennia, trees not all identical, relative in merit, not all blessed or pruned in the same manner. The social and the biological, the cultural and racial, are inextricably intertwined. Both have their ultimate existence from the God who called all peoples into existence, some with a noble harvest, others with a tiny remnant. Rahab stands near alone as the Canaanites received judgement.

Ultimately, the difference between religious left and religious right is genealogy, how the story is told between two ideas of two peoples. The contrived scaffolding between apocalyptic vs. prophetic, or literalism vs. allegorical, reflect an attempt to seize upon a form with a hostile content, where Puritans with their Bibles most certainly would not recognize the modern left as their descendants, anymore than the modern left would claim them as their forbearers. It is not only a question of ideas, but the people befit to them. The spirit quickens and gives life, but that life is in the blood.

When he took up his post as Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton would offer a comprehensive account of what must be done to preserve the Union of American republics. While each colony had pursued its own vision of economy, more often in conflict with Parliament than not, Hamilton conceived measures to keep this new federation from tearing apart. Like many of the Revolutionary generation, Hamilton cut his teeth on the Scottish Enlightenment, a mix of pessimism in the usual republic-of-letters circuit which praised Human reason and progress. Rather, many Scots enlighteners understood the ignorance and malevolence of men, how vanity and passion not only lead to destruction, but that these affects are natural to all men. Every race of man was prone to the tendency towards degeneration. Enlightened thought was the search for answers, in and out of the Reformed faith.

One of Hamilton’s primary foils in unfolding his vision was Adam Smith. It was not faith in humanity that motivated Smith’s thought, but the tendency of selfishness to correct itself, vanity and passion creating sociality in spite of themselves. The problem for Smith was “mercantilism,” that system of Whiggish state control over the economy that prevented contest through artifice. The Whigs were “neo-Machiavellian,” believing the world was zero-sum and the government must, through the “jealousy of trade,” rig the world-economy to benefit the English state against its rivals. Lesser nations must be placed in conditions where they became net-positive exporters, but also not hoarding English bullion (Istvan Hont, The Jealousy of Trade, 54-62). This required intervention and aggression, what John Brewer termed the “fiscal-military state” which saw England’s rise to continental hegemony.

Smith disdained this system not only because it locked enterprising entrepreneurs from the world of competition through artificial measures like licensing and chartered monopoly, empowering an oligarchy whose interests became identical with the state (e.g. shareholders in the Bank of England or the East India Company) it also provoked war, which was, contrary to republican thought, not the health of the state, but its bane. The solution, as most cursory introductions to Smith emphasize, is a hands-off policy, to permit the flourishing of individual competition which, as if through an invisible hand, would be restrained to promote mutual prosperity. Selfishness could not be overcome, but it could be channeled.

The result was not necessarily an anarcho-capitalist paradise, or even the limited “nightwatchman state” that would later mark doctrinaire liberalism. Rather Smith, in a forecast of how liberalism itself would develop into the twentieth century, recommended government investment into national infrastructure (including schools) to allow this competition to develop. A turn to the natural (not artificial) liberties of trade required the state to not only defend property, but build public works:

All systems, either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society. (The Wealth of Nations, IV.9)

Nature could be manipulated, men can cheat natural law. The state had a role to enforce the rules of the market-place. Smith was never dreamy in his belief that this system could be imposed instantly from above, something he criticized Physiocrats (“a sect”) for failing to understand the constraints of Human nature (Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 99-105). However, Smith seemed to miss how the demands of this policy, the drive towards free-trade, would require an equally interventionist order, though one that will claim the name of Nature or global. This system would require an even more aggressive and interventionist fiscal-military state to prevent the slide away from free-trade. (Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 77-83). There was no escape from Human action in economy, it was always political economy. The difference was, ultimately, for what entity.

Another Scot that influenced Hamilton was David Hume, an enlightened Tory who despised the Whiggish oligarchy. Hume, however, was more concerned with the authority to course correct a government by money. The more money the state (which at Hume’s writing was the Imperial Parliament in Westminster) borrowed, the more power it gave to creditors. The more power creditors acquired, the more they would direct the state to enrich themselves further, particularly through war. Constant battle would cause social dislocation and unrest, eventually provoking social collapse (not unlike what had happened during the English Civil Wars and would soon occur in France). The only hope for Hume was a “patriot king,” a monarch that would repudiate the debt, even at risk of collapsing the economy, before a revolution swept all before it (Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 325-353). Once again, the passions must be actively checked, or lust would ruin the nation.

Hamilton took Hume somewhat to heart, but not entirely. As a Scot by blood, it was no surprise he would adopt their gloomy pessimism (seemingly out of place with the optimism of Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty”). However, contrary to Smith, selfishness could not offer its own corrective. The role of government, be that the states or the federal union, was to induce proper actions and educate. When Smith advocated public schools to prevent brutishness, Hamilton had more a vision for government to create incentives. It was not that the American Treasury would manage the economy, let alone own it, but to create the feeling and energy necessary for it to work in a positive direction. In particular, the wealth of a nation would be linked to its capacity for industry:

Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the [most] ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance and by slow gradations. The spontaneous transition to new pursuits, in a community long habituated to different ones, may be expected to be attended with proportionably greater difficulty. When former occupations ceased to yield a profit adequate to the subsistence of their followers, or when there was an absolute deficiency of employment in them, owing to the superabundance of hands, changes would ensue; but these changes would be likely to be more tardy than might consist with the interest either of individuals or of the Society. In many cases they would not happen, while a bare support could be ensured by an adherence to ancient courses; though a resort to a more profitable employment might be practicable. To produce the desireable changes, as early as may be expedient, may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government.

The apprehension of failing in new attempts is perhaps a more serious impediment. There are dispositions apt to be attracted by the mere novelty of an undertaking—but these are not always those best calculated to give it success. To this, it is of importance that the confidence of cautious sagacious capitalists both citizens and foreigners, should be excited. And to inspire this description of persons with confidence, it is essential, that they should be made to see in any project, which is new, and for that reason alone, if, for no other, precarious, the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles, inseperable from first experiments.

The superiority antecedently enjoyed by nations, who have preoccupied and perfected a branch of industry, constitutes a more formidable obstacle, than either of those, which have been mentioned, to the introduction of the same branch into a country, in which it did not before exist. To maintain between the recent establishments of one country and the long matured establishments of another country, a competition upon equal terms, both as to quality and price, is in most cases impracticable. The disparity in the one, or in the other, or in both, must necessarily be so considerable as to forbid a successful rivalship, without the extraordinary aid and protection of government.

But the greatest obstacle of all to the successful prosecution of a new branch of industry in a country, in which it was before unknown, consists, as far as the instances apply, in the bounties premiums and other aids which are granted, in a variety of cases, by the nations, in which the establishments to be imitated are previously introduced. It is well known (and particular examples in the course of this report will be cited) that certain nations grant bounties on the exportation of particular commodities, to enable their own workmen to undersell and supplant all competitors, in the countries to which those commodities are sent. Hence the undertakers of a new manufacture have to contend not only with the natural disadvantages of a new undertaking, but with the gratuities and remunerations which other governments bestow. To be enabled to contend with success, it is evident, that the interference and aid of their own government are indispensible.

Combinations by those engaged in a particular branch of business in one country, to frustrate the first efforts to introduce it into another, by temporary sacrifices, recompensed perhaps by extraordinary indemnifications of the government of such country, are believed to have existed, and are not to be regarded as destitute of probability. The existence or assurance of aid from the government of the country, in which the business is to be introduced, may be essential to fortify adventurers against the dread of such combinations, to defeat their effects, if formed and to prevent their being formed, by demonstrating that they must in the end prove fruitless. (Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures)

If there was an invisible hand for Hamilton, that hand was inertia and it too could be spurred by outsiders seeking to wreak ruin on the new American republic. Hamilton’s nationalism was not egalitarian or flattening, as if each state or section had identical people. However, if this union was to persevere, with respect to each state and each section, then the federal government must have the power to create incentives to bind together as one. The role of government was to create the desire to be free that would allow the American people, continuously, to resist degeneration and idleness. As one Hamilton biographer, Francis McDonald, summarized his vision:

The function of government should be to promote a general spirit of improvement. It should reward productivity and punish dissipation, idleness, and extravagance. Taxes should be designed to encourage industry, never to impede it. Regulation of productive activity should be confined to inspection to prevent frauds and ensure the highest quality and marketability of products. If such policies were adhered to, every member of society would gain — the poor as well as the rich, the farmer as well as the manufacturer and merchant (Francis McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, 235)

It was for this reason that Hamilton, against Hume, rejected the idea of defaulting on debt (particularly the war bonds sold by the Continental Congress during the war, many ending up in the hands of financiers). To default on the debt would not only lead to possible capital flight from America, but it would induce an unwillingness to advance. On this point, enemies of Hamilton, ranging from the suspicions of Jeffersonians through Charles Beard’s accusation of class interest, accuse him of greed. The Hamiltonian vision was simply the Whig oligarchy redux, with Hamilton as a new Robert Walpole, the greasy first “Prime Minister” of Great Britain. But Hamilton was fully aware of this danger. It was a dangerous game, in the waning decades of the eighteenth century, to court Great Britain’s wealth without falling under its influence. It was only if the federal union was dynamic in guiding and protecting the various state that the United States could become a great power. It was the birth of a “market-state,” a government over governments as part of a custom’s union and shared source of credit, before the letter.

A major plank in Hamilton’s system was the use of tariffs. Though Hamilton disliked overwhelming protectionist policies, which could retard industry or create self-complacency by reliance on the state, the tariff was a way to combat foreign influence. Hamilton personally preferred the use of temporary and precise subsidies, “bounties,” to defend nascent industries under attack. The tariff would become a core issue in American politics, but its early supporters not only included fellow Federalists, but even Hamilton’s great political foe, Thomas Jefferson. While he despised the use of state power in the economy, Jefferson was not ignorant about the needs of national defense from subversion abroad:

Where a Nation imposes high Duties on our productions, or prohibits them altogether, it may be proper for us to do the same by theirs, first burthening or excluding those productions which they bring here, in competition with our own of the same kind; selecting next such manufactures, as we take from them in greatest quantity, and which at the same time we could the soonest furnish to ourselves, or obtain from other Countries; imposing on them duties, lighter at first, but heavier and heavier afterwards, as other channels of supply open. Such duties having the effect of indirect encouragement to domestic Manufactures of the same kind, may induce the Manufacturer to come himself into these States, where cheaper subsistence, equal laws, and a vent of his wares, free of duty, may ensure him the highest profits from his skill and Industry. And here, it would be in the power of the State-Governments to co-operate, essentially, by opening the resources of encouragement which are under their controul, extending them liberally to Artists in those particular Branches of manufacture, for which their Soil, Climate, Population, and other Circumstances, have matured them and fostering the precious efforts and progress of household manufacture by some patronage suited to the nature of it’s objects, guided by the local informations they possess and guarded against abuse by their presence and attentions. The oppressions on our agriculture in foreign ports would thus be made the occasion of relieving it from a dependence on the Councils and conduct of others, and of promoting Arts, Manufactures, and Population, at home (Thomas Jefferson, Report on Commerce).

Jefferson was no liberal or doctrinaire free-trader, but remained aware of that republican concern about the “jealousy of trade” that animated states to wage war by other means necessary. In this case, beyond the division of American history between Hamilton and Jefferson, there was concord on the need to protect America’s industries, and industriousness, from collapsing into torpor from corruption abroad.

These commitments would inspire the next generation of American political economy. Against Southerners who yearned to preserve their squirearchy (known often as the “Tertium Quid”) and New Englanders unwilling to diminish their mercantile dominance (a sectional elite that had ceased to be Puritan and rapidly became Episcopalian or Unitarian), the self-professed National Republicans, carrying the torch of both Federalists and Jeffersonians, would advance a version of Hamilton’s vision. The focus moved away from philosophy and anthropology towards a more concrete set of proposals. The purpose was to develop America as a market to itself, with roads to connect the states, tariffs to prevent outside interference, and credit to fund these operations. Though later critical of how these policies unfolded, John Calhoun lauded these efforts as a means to growth “to every capitalist however inconsiderable” (quoted in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 148).

Without this internal market, America could easily become a pawn to more powerful nations. The paranoia of British subterfuge was widespread, and at times exaggerated, but it was not unjustified. Advocates of what would be termed as “the American System” were aware of an infamous quote from Whig MP, Henry Broughman, in a parliamentary speech:

“It was well worth while [for Britain] to incur a loss upon the first exportation in order by the glut to stifle in the cradle those rising manufacturers in the United States which the war had forced into existence contrary to the usual course of things” (quoted in Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, 34-38)

It was for this reason that the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed, not only a statement about the independence of Spanish America from its metropole, but the aspiration to gain control of the hemisphere. Britain was no mere European power, but the global power to which America would eventually contest throughout the nineteenth century. This vision had many critics (including the Tertium Quid and quondam Federalist Ultras in New England), and it would gain many more as corruption in the federal government raised questions over its accountability. Yet even the rising tide of criticism about a national bank, national internal improvements, and high tariffs did not stifle the original concern. It was Senator Andrew Jackson whose vote passed the 1824 tariff that created higher rates of protection on Pennsylvanian steel and coal. The tariff was to protect the average American laborer from being swamped (Bolt, Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America, 49-51).

Thus, when the issue of tariffs came up in Congress, it was this shared commitment that drove Henry Clay, the champion of the American System, to appeal to the President against a growing interest in free-trade. Clay appealed to this shared defense of national political economy against those like former Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin, who increasingly embraced free-trade as a natural system of prosperity (even if it favors, at least for a time, British industry). Clay denounced these proposals with venom and fire:

When gentlemen have succeeded in their design of an immediate or gradual destruction of the American System, what is their substitute? Free trade! Free trade! The call for free trade, is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child, in its nurse’s arms, for the moon or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It never has existed; it never will exist. Trade implies at least two parties. To be free, it should be fair, equal, and reciprocal. But if we throw our ports wide open to the admission of foreign productions, free of all duty, what ports, of any other foreign nation, shall we find open to the free admission of our surplus produce? We may break down all barriers to free trade on our part, but the work will not be complete until foreign powers shall have removed theirs. There would be freedom on one side, and restrictions, prohibitions, and exclusions, on the other. The bolts, and the bars, and the chains, of all other nations will remain undisturbed. It is, indeed, possible that our industry and commerce would accommodate themselves to this unequal and unjust state of things: for such is the flexibility of our nature, that it bends itself to all circumstances. The wretched prisoner, incarcerated in a jail, after a long time, becomes reconciled to his solitude, and regularly notches down the passing days of his confinement. Gentlemen deceive themselves. It is not free trade that they are recommending to our acceptance. It is, in effect, the British colonial system that we are invited to adopt; and, if their policy prevail, it will lead substantially to the recolonization of these states, under the commercial dominion of Great Britain. (Henry Clay, In Defense of the American System)

Tariffs would prevent foreign industry from sweeping away America’s industrialization. However, part of the American System was not merely the negative effort to prevent foreign meddling, it was also a positive prescription. If America pursued entrepreneurship and industry, as opposed to merely rent-seeking, then it needed a source of credit to encourage investment. It was for this reason that the heirs of Jefferson, including even James Madison, embraced a national bank. Hamilton’s original idea was that a source of reliable and stable credit, particularly through a public debt, would promote bullish investment:

Ultimately, the only way to establish public credit was in the marketplace, and the marketplace dealt in beliefs as well as facts. As Hamilton put it, “in nothing are appearances of greater moment, than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it, and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.” If the market prices of government securities could be raised to their par value by any means whatever, the investing public would be convinced that public credit had been established; and if and when investors believed public credit had been established, it would ipso facto be established. (McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 164)

What originally divided Clay and Jackson (originally) among other “Soft Money” Democrats was where the power of credit creation resided. A national bank, if in the wrong hands, could paralyze as much as it inspired. When the renewal of the Bank of the United States came to an early vote, it had already produced about 40% of the paper currency in circulation (Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, 365). The bank’s stability could be an anchor for investment or become a tool of a rent-seeking oligarchy. For some Americans, all forms of paper credit empowered oligarchs and the only form of money should be in specie, where no government could manipulate credit. This policy not only ignored how Great Britain advocated the gold-standard because it controlled the gold, but it also sapped means of advancement. Jackson would later be won over to the “Hard Money” side of the Democracy, and would implement a policy that, in terms of the South, would kick down the ladder from poor whites:

Furthermore, at the request of Andrew Jackson, Congress had passed the Specie Circular Act in 1836, making it much harder for poorer farmers to purchase land. The act stipulated that the government would accept only gold or silver for land sales. Even banknotes were turned down, meaning that middling and poorer Americans could no longer buy on credit. Saving enough to buy land outright – especially good quality farmland – became extremely difficult for Americans who started life out with little or no wealth inheritance. And as land values rose, it was harder to parcel land out to multiple beneficiaries. This land shortage meant that many sons of yeomen farmers began their adult lives without owning any kind of real estate, causing them to fall into the category of poor white laborers and tenants (Keri Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, 47).

The California Gold Rush and the War (through both the Union and the Confederacy utilizing fiat paper currency and Treasury bonds) would forestall the impact of this credit crunch. The problem was the perennial question of how Spain became so rich in gold and silver and yet was so poor in the eighteenth century. How could a public be animated towards industry? This “spirit of capitalism” that Weber described was not found in finance, despite being the arch-capitalists in most eras. It was in the industriousness of small burghers, who sought to innovate and improve, to experiment and explore. The tendency of the great houses of capital was to rent-seek, often quite cautiously. The Hamiltonian vision against man’s inertia, corruptibility, and laziness was to inspire a spirit to not merely labor, but to create. If the government did not create incentives to enslave finance to industry, then industry would likely suffer enthrallment to finance.

It is common knowledge that Abraham Lincoln was disciple of Henry Clay and advocate for the American System. The South too had nationalists, even if Southern nationalist led away from the Union towards a new federation. Jefferson Davis was a disciple of John Calhoun, who has often been confused for an abstract apologist for states rights and limited government. Calhoun, however, remained a nationalist all his life, though one increasingly focused on a union limited to the slave-holding South. Davis as a Calhounite would advocate industrial development, the use of public credit, and a realism towards conflict with Great Britain as the great hemispheric threat to an independent South (Jeffrey Zwengrowski, Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 27-48).

Against this vision, Davis and other Calhounites contended against the Southern version of New England mercantilists, men who imagined Charleston as part of an international system of free-trade, with loyalty to Liverpool’s textile mills as much as to a Confederate customs-union. Virginians were mostly opposed to this planter agronomic oligarchy for industrial developments, arguing that the Confederate Congress adopt a 15-20% tariff on their coal and steel (a rate that was much more Hamiltonian and less protectionist than the Union). Planters resisted these efforts damaging trade relations with Great Britain. Calhounites had to dance on the edge of a knife, depending on British purchasing of cotton without becoming enslaved to their capital (John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation, 108-139). It was for this reason that Davis, prior to the War, supported William Walker’s coup d’etat in Nicaragua. An American government would roll back the financial influence of Great Britain throughout the hemisphere (Zwengrowski, Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 49-67).

With the defeat of the Confederacy and the defeat of Reconstruction, the task of the grand customs union continued apace. Railroads crisscrossed the Continent, tying together the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, knitting together the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande. The struggle was now to advance American interests in a shrinking world of truly global empires. As Alfred Thayer Mahan schooled another generation of statesmen, the sea was the source of power. Lose the sea, lose your freedom. American growth required the means to protect the sea lanes. President Rutherford B Hayes and Secretary of State James Blaine would advocate further rollback of British interests and securing the hemisphere. As a precursor to the Organization of American States, Blaine would attempt greater cooperation through the International Conference of American States, utilizing soft power and diplomacy. The goal for Republican administrations, stretching from Hayes to Benjamin Harrison, was to acquire Hawaii, Samoa, the Panamanian isthmus, as well as other key locations for coal stations and naval bases (Marc-William Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896, 94-102). President McKinley won on a commitment to retain this strategy, something that continued to mark the Republican Party into the 1930s.

The movement against the American System continued. Some advocacy for tariff reform reflected the fear (and reality) of unfavorable reciprocal tariffs on American goods. Many farmers who joined the populist movement desired tariff reform (Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, 239-245). However others had embraced a more Smithian defense of free-trade, in part because of idealistic commitments to world-harmony against the aggression of empires. Their argument was these customs unions, with Britain nearly turning its white colonies into one, would lead to catastrophic war. However the desire to prevent this catastrophic war and customs union reciprocal tariffs would also require war. There was also a commitment to Anglo-Saxon civilization, something that could unite the United States and British Empire, which free-trade represented.

That was what the Council on Foreign Relations hoped to bring about, uniting the two, or perhaps America operating as the successor state to maintain a free-trade empire into the twentieth century. Edwin Gay, dean of Harvard Business School and the only academic in the original CFR, put it bluntly: “When I think of the British Empire as our inheritance, I think simply of the natural right of succession. That ultimate succession is inevitable” (Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: the CFR and US Foreign Policy, 11-19).

This Anglo-American commitment to the system of free-trade (which meant an Anglo-American global zone) motivated the demand to war with Germany, the great continental rival whose customs’ union threatened to block British hegemony from Europe. The interests of the British Empire took a second place behind a commitment to a global system, one that would sit upon America’s shoulders to uphold. The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt would reorient American political economy substantially towards this vision. Despite being elected on a kind of economic nationalism, FDR’s commitment to free-trade became clear in the Trade Agreement Act and the chartering of the Export-Import Bank in 1934 (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 25-28). The Century Group, an adjunct to the CFR, nudged Americans to support Britain against Germany once again (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 123-137). The postwar order continued these policies through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both of which protected and promoted free-trade (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 166-169).

In a matter of course, Smith’s vision won out, producing not world peace but an even more aggressive world-empire, committed to trade more than industry (except as an adjunct to trade). The “mercantilism” that Smith despised as a form of crude rent-seeking reappeared. The system of free-trade became more important than the energy of a people. The organism was sacrificed to a strange machine. There was also a problem of sustainability. When the postwar order cracked up, when America could no longer operate as the world, members of the CFR split between those who would rather save American political economy and those who would rather save the system of free-trade. The Trilateral Commission, with David Rockefeller and Zbignew Brzezinski as key architects, accepted that the interests of Americans within a customs union were subordinate to the interests of the global economy. Trade had to be depoliticized (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 262-274).

However, plenty of Americans, across the political spectrum, have grown in opposition to this globalism. Even though Reagan was elected to remove regulation and cut taxes, he also engaged in a massive trade-war against Japan (one of the sides in the Trilateral system). The Trump tariffs have also restored a wider awareness that trade is political and other countries may rip each other off. The original vision for the American System still remains paramount in understanding that, whether as a Christian or a naturalist, men are governed by their imaginations, they are susceptible to noble intentions and the lust for filthy lucre. It is in the hands of men, through the cunning of Providence, to resist the slide into decay and advance through the halls of time.

“Before creation there must be destruction. If my soul stands in the way, then I'll toss it aside. Yes, I have no choice but to move forward.”

President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 because “he kept us out of the war.” Then, in 1917, in response to the disastrous Zimmerman Telegram and Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson sought a declaration of war, seemingly giving into the Anglomania war fever of imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Why?

Was Wilson a tool of international capitalists and banking clans, the same who some suspected of starting the war for gain? Or was Wilson enthralled to the British, luring the American public to support a conflict that, seemingly, had nothing to do with their interests? And what was the League of Nations anyway? Was it a harebrained idealist scheme to create one-world government as its critics claimed?

The short answer: No on all charges. Wilson was not an idealist (nor a realist) and he was not ensnared to any but his own conscience. He pursued an ideal that ultimately failed, but offers a vision today for America’s role in the world. It is a paradigm that should inform America’s future relationship not only with Europe, but also, in conclusion, with Latin America. The idea of the League of Nations is a paradigm, though deeply misunderstood, to advance out of the current darkness.

It is important, first, to clear up misconceptions. Wilson was undoubtedly an Anglophile. He admired the premiership of William Gladstone, but his anchor was the political philosophy of Edmund Burke. He rejected the “Whig” view of “Newtonian” government, the state as a machine that could be adjusted at whim. Rather, government reflected the nation as an organic entity, one that grew out of the people it oversaw (Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 54-55). That, however, did not collapse American interests into British interests, even as the two people shared common heritage and virtues. The American nation grew apart, and its own history had carved a very different future with a different canon of heroes. It was why Wilson would praise democracy, though in a way many contemporary anti-Wilsonians may find surprising:

I do not believe in a democratic form of government because I think it the best form of government. It is the clumsiest form of government in the world. If you wanted to make a merely effective government you would make it of fewer persons. If you wanted to invent a government that would act with speed and quick force, you would be doing a clumsy thing to make it democratic in structure. That is not purposed to be the best form, but to have the best sources.

Did you ever think how the world managed politically to get through the middle ages? It got through them without breakdown because it had the Roman Catholic Church to draw upon for native gifts, and by no other means that I can see. If you will look at the politics of the middle ages you will see that states depended for their guidance upon great ecclesiastics, and they depended upon them because the community itself was in strata, was in classes, and the Roman Catholic Church was a great democracy. Any peasant could become a priest, and any priest a chancellor. And this reservoir of democratic power and native ability was what brought the middle ages through their politics. If they had not had a democratic supply of capacity they could not have conducted a sterile aristocratic polity. An aristocratic polity goes to seed. The establishment of a democratic nation means that any man in it may, if he consecrate himself and use himself in the right way, come to be the recognized instrument of a whole nation. It is an incomparable resourceful arrangement, though it is not the best practical organization of government. (Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee: An Interpretation).

The purpose of democracy was not efficient government, but the conditions to allow national genius to coalesce even amongst the most humble. The lack of class meant any man, through his power and charisma, may ascend to the highest ranks of leadership. Wilson’s apology was not an argument for equality, but the possibility of the great man.

It was also a criticism of aristocracy, often degenerating into a self-interested dysgenic oligarchy, that perverted a nation’s greatness. Britain and Germany both had enshrined plutocrats that dominated their governments, and Wilson never conceded his general wariness of the dominant European powers. When the Great War began, Wilson was sympathetic to the Entente because of German brutality towards the Belgians and the subversion of their national sovereignty. Nevertheless, Wilson was no less hostile to the British when brutally repressed the Irish in the Easter Uprising of 1916. As Wilson put it: England had the Earth and Germany wanted it (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 343). Despite Wilson’s reliance on Colonel Edward House, a man he often called his second self, Wilson distanced himself increasingly from the wily Texan when the President learned of his deceit. In short, House sold Wilson as an Anglophile interventionist secretly, in spite of Wilson’s reservations about support for Britain (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 295). In all things, as the President told the press, the policy was “America First,” a term he coined that would later be used against him (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 278).

So why did he change? Wilson did not enter the war for democracy and had no interest to impose democracy on any nation, as some nations were not fit for this form of government (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 431-432). Wilson also did not enter the war as an eager ally of the Entente, with the American Expeditionary Force operating under its own separate command (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 402). It was the case that German aggression, in Mexico and on the high seas, eventually forced Wilson’s hand. But that does not explain why Wilson sought war, what he hoped to gain. It was, ultimately, to bring the Monroe Doctrine to its full form:

On January 22, 1917, the president delivered his “peace without victory” address to the Senate. The war must be ended on terms that would establish, declared Wilson, “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” The only way to achieve that end was through “a peace without victory. It is not pleasant to say this ... I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser” and would therefore “rest only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.” Wilson hoped to establish such a peace through “an equality of rights” among nations. The indispensable right was self-government, he contended, “not because of any abstract principle . . .but for the same reason that I have spoken of the other conditions of peace which seem to me clearly indispensable—because I wish frankly to uncover realities. Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections and convictions of mankind.”

Wilson also proposed to build lasting peace upon the free use of the seas for commerce and upon relief from the burdens and dangers of excessive armament. Above all, he pledged “that the people and government of the United States will join the other civilized nations of the world in guaranteeing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I have named.” Wilson closed with an argument intended to disarm domestic critics. “I am proposing, as it were,” he asserted, “that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world ... I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power; catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences obtruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection.” These were, Wilson insisted, “American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others.” Since they were also desired by “forward looking men and women everywhere,” these were “the principles of mankind and must prevail” (Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 313).

Contrary to conservative critics of Wilson, he had not begun a new form of American imperial internationalism (something that bubbled to the surface during the administrations of McKinley and Roosevelt). Rather, Wilson fulfilled the essence of the Monroe Doctrine, not to entangle America in one set of European powers against another, but to end entanglement altogether. The American cry — “Lafayette, we are here!” — reflected Wilson’s vision, it was time to unite Europe around a new and lasting peace, one that flowed from the bosom of Columbia. If Wilson’s intervention had any parallel, it was Metternich’s Concert of Europe to reset affairs after the revolutionary fires of Jacobinism and Bonaparte. America did not enter the Great War to change human nature or unleash an ideological end to all war. Rather, it was in recognition of man’s frailty and sinfulness that a new international order, among civilized peoples, could bring collective justice and prosperity. Wilson did not want the war, but he would risk all in the strife:

Wilson’s basic argument in the war address was analogous to Luther’s contention. In trying to make the world freer, more just, and more peaceful, both he and the United States confronted the sin of the World War. Yet, as he argued, continued armed neutrality would result in much of the destruction of war without the advantage of being able to influence the war’s conduct and aims. Wilson’s choice, therefore, was not the possibly lesser, but also less promising, evil of staying out. Rather, for the sake of greater leverage in pursuing his international program, he would “sin boldly” by going into the war. He made the decision, not as a Nietzschean Priest or Superman, but as the protagonist in a Christian tragedy (Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 323).

As the title of Cooper’s work suggests, Wilson did not fit the Nietzschean paradigm of charismatic genius. He was not the warrior, but neither was Roosevelt, who was more the blustering and scheming priest who used the name of God to advance his own interests (it was unclear if Roosevelt even believed in the existence of God or an afterlife, despite his frequent use of KJV English; Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 88). Wilson was reserved and he did not dare to casually invoke the Bible to advance his political aims. Rather, like the prince of a Trauerspiel, Wilson risked his reputation and his very soul in a bid to bring about a true peace, one not forced upon one set of Europeans by another. American power and American distance could bring all to the table, England and France as well as Germany and Austria (even Russia), to forge a new settlement.

This mutuality did not mean neutrality. Wilson blamed the Second Reich for the ravages of France and Belgium, and it was they that must bend the knee to the Entente. The Germans must remove their armies from the field and cease their attacks upon commerce. Wilson, however, did not want to punish or ruin the Germans. There was no talk of invasion, let alone unconditional surrender. It was the ultimate decision of the German people to determine their own future, one that would only happen through diplomacy (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 444). War was the ugly sin of directing this process, not letting Europeans butcher themselves until none were left. America had a role to fulfill in brokering a peace, and Wilson risked America’s soul in the contest.

America won, the Central Powers ended the war, and Wilson failed. The story of the League’s rise and fall is commonplace. The French scorned the Fourteen Points as more onerous than the Ten Commandments, Wilson more demanding than God. The British rejected any idea that the seas did not belong to them. Wilson’s good-will and lack of experience (in spite of The Inquiry, an expert team to compile policy dossiers on all the powers involved) doomed his efforts. The treachery of Colonel House left the British delegation incensed that Wilson had no intention to posture as the victor over the defeated. The French wanted blood, bearing a hatred of Germans unmatched until the Red Army and the Morgenthau Plan in the Second World War. The border realignment with Italy failed, setting the stage for the 1920s. The Ottoman Empire was carved into Protectorates that the victorious powers would fail to maintain, ultimately creating the conditions of Middle East chaos today. The Entente shattered the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in spite of Wilson’s effort to retain the polity (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 395). The settlement of the Great War reflected less Wilson than David Lloyd George, who coined the phrases “the war to end all wars” and “self-determination” for the new states of a deimperialized Europe (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 6).

The idea of a League of Nations survived, but the American public rejected it (with imperialists, like Lodge, switching to isolationists out of cynicism). Wilson had his final, debilitating stroke, and while his subordinates broke the power of the reds in the United States, his vision was dashed. In his last days, still frustrated with the stupidity of French wrath, Wilson predicted that one day soon another Bismarck would appear in Germany and this time France would be steamrolled for good. Then that day came, the new Germany departed from the League of Nations, and the toothless body came to an end. Wilson’s dream incinerated in the conflagration that Wilson had fought to prevent.

Liberals have claimed Wilson as the progenitor for the United Nations, that feckless impotent chamber of internationalists, but that is far from true. First, the United Nations is clearly structured as a postwar spheres-of-influence foreign policy that Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, advocated. The security council was intended to be a means for the Allies to govern the world, something that eroded into the Cold War tit-for-tat. Secondly, the United Nations did not have qualifications for membership, which was early married to the American policy of decolonization. While the nineteenth century brought the nadir of colonial empire, with all the hopes of uplift and regeneration belied through uprisings and self-criticism. Wilson did not favor naked dominance of non-European peoples, though that did not mean they had a right to govern themselves or possessed peer status to sit in a concert of power (Wilson was opposed to Japanese equality with the League nations). Third, even more importantly, the League of Nations did not come with a policy of economic globalization. There was no talk of a Bretton Woods agreement to strap Europe to dollarization. Rather, the Bank of International Settlements would have likely come about to continue a mutuality between the various powers of Europe, good or ill.

It is precisely because globalism has failed (the postwar order’s transmutation from Bretton Woods to Trilateralism), it is precisely because the United Nations is worthless, that Wilson’s dream should not be forgotten. It is easy for Americans to posture as isolationists, but the interests of Americans (as a people) cannot forget or ignore the needs of Europe. This need is not only for economic purposes, though the tendency towards widgit protectionism (i.e. to onshore industrial wage jobs in America because they’re jobs) would plunge America into the nadir of Kirchnerismo. Free trade with other western peoples, markets opened to American production, is a positive good. However, the concern is also in terms of culture and foreign policy. The performative scorn that some online Americans indulge is counter-productive. Americans should not laugh at Europeans struggling against demographic and cultural crises, especially as America’s foreign policy establishment (especially under Clinton and Obama) has driven political alternatives to the blob out of the political mainstream, even to the point of targeted prosecution.

The League of Nations was an attempt at confederated mutuality, America providing the balance to unite Europe. Obviously, this disposition involves a high view of America and Americans, a nobility of spirit and intentions, that not a few Europeans may find haughty if not ridiculous. It may not have much empirical evidence, but it is an aspiration in the genius of the nation, one that produced men like Sergeant Alvin York of Tennessee and continues to create American heroes today. It is to reject both chauvinism and retreat, let alone their loathsome combination which has reared its visage during the Carter and Obama administrations. Nationalism has a higher end beyond itself, the freedom and prosperity of nations maintained through cooperation towards a shared civilizational end.

In ecclesiastical terms that may have sat in the recesses of Wilson’s soul: it was neither the imperialism of the papacy nor the retreat to a national church-structure as some Anglicans have pursued. Rather it was a confederation of sister churches that supported one another in their plurality. It was the Reformed consensus that could unite Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Scots, Swiss, and imperial Germans to issue a dogmatic statement in the Synod of Dort. Per political theology, concepts of church reflect concepts of states and vice versa. It is Christian nations in cooperation, brothers dwelling in peace, that will bring shared prosperity and justice to all involved.

The League offers a way forward, not simply contempt for America or neglect for American friends abroad. It is for this reason that a similar model should form America’s partnership with Latin America, a concert of power that is dedicated to the same civilizational aim without confusion or conflation. America plays the role of the keystone: a burden that may easily be resented or abused, but it is a burden that must be risked. A neo-Wilsonian League for the Americas constitutes the coalescence of what shall be called “the Pan-American Network,” a concept that will become more important as the century unfolds. It is neither swinging a big stick nor groveling for being a bad neighbor, but is the alliance of mutual support and trade, towards a similar end of national leaderships derived from a similar heritage.

It is hard to say what Wilson would make of the contemporary world. But his vision should not be abandoned. It is, perhaps, the only workable future.

America needed a national exorcism after Obama’s second term and Willy’s Wonderland delivered a cinematic expurgation. An absurd slasher film, utilizing standard tropes almost like a genre parody, Willy’s Wonderland combines horror, action, and black comedy into a masterpiece that serves as a backwards look on America and its filth, demanding retribution. Like the silent and nameless protagonist (played by Nicolas Cage and listed as “The Janitor”), only an outsider in the twisted end of the twentieth century can sever the ties of darkness.

The plot is very simple and the writing sub-par. After witnessing the brutal death of a couple at the hands of murderous animatronics, a stranger in a Camaro runs over a spike strip in Anywhere, USA (Hayesville, Nevada, a location that has little to do with the plot). A tow truck “happens” upon the traveler and gives him a ride, informing him he can fix the car for a few thousand, but only in cash (he does not trust credit cards and the ATM does not work because the town does not have internet because they just don’t). This ridiculous set-up is to get this nobody to work a night at Willy’s Wonderland, a Chuck E. Cheese-esque playhouse that is an homage to the popular horror-survival game Five Nights at Freddy’s. The victim is not intended to survive and his car will be added to the personal collection of the owner (a ten-gallon hat snake oil salesman named Tex MacAdoo).

As the town’s sheriff later explains: the animatronics require constant human sacrifice so they do not then feed upon the people of the town. Forgettable outsiders, especially of a low moral character, are offered to Willy and his gang as part of their mutual pact. These animatronics were once humans, a gang of pedophiles and serial killers assembled under Jerry Willis, the original owner. After a spree of rapes and murders, the numerous missing children and strange smells summoned the police to arrest Willis, but, before they could, the gang had committed ritual suicide in a bid to transfer their souls, in a Satanic ceremony, to inanimate bodies. Thus they became the mascots of the playhouse and feasted upon the witless townspeople. This movie, however, is not a survivor horror story.

The deuteroprotagonist, Liv, was the little girl of the murdered couple. The sheriff, a world-weary old hag, felt compassion on the girl and raised her as her own. This guardianship, however, was resented (to keep Liv from screwing around with Willy’s, the sheriff handcuffed her to a radiator and left her some chips and a bucket). Nevertheless, Liv persisted and got her clueless townie friends to join her in burning down the creepy evil Willy’s Wonderland. The group is a standard stock of slasher tropes: the jock, the slut, the nerd, the protector, and the extra (though, defying the usual gag, it’s a white guy, not black, who dies first). Before they light the match, Liv notices the Janitor inside and begs him to escape. He is disinterested. Perplexed, Liv enters into Willy’s to discover that this man was no sacrificial lamb, but a reckoning.

The Janitor is mute, stoic, and possesses an immaculate work ethic. Even when it is clear that the building is infested with murderous robots, and he has been tricked, the Janitor continues to work. He mops, polishes, sweeps, trashes, wipes, and organizes, punctuated with the occasional break (following the advice from Tex). After beating the first animatronic to death and ripping out its mechanical spine, he gets back to work. One after another, the Janitor slays them, changing his employee shirt every time it gets stained with the oily blood of the machines. It is never a competition (though he bandages himself with duct tape). Even the final boss, Willy, is nothing. The Janitor receives a beating, rearms with taped together sticks and a bag of sodas, and beats Willy to death, severing his head. Instead of Liv and her friends saving this witless victim, the Janitor puts an end to Willy’s once and for all. However, he saves neither the complicit townsfolk, who are brutally killed when they come upon the animatronics, nor Liv’s friends, who are systematically killed as they tried to help Liv (though their entrance into the building was an accident). With the town judged, the Janitor, with Liv as his apparent ward, drives out onto the open road on the wings Skynyrd. The end.

Willy’s Wonderland is not interesting for its plot, dialogue, character development (there is none), or cinematography. It is a vignette of mythical Americana, a symbol of rejecting the malaise of Obamunism and turning to an undisclosed future.

In Obama’s first campaign, the fairly unknown Senator from Illinois kindled the sparks of Populism into a rhetorical revolt from the Elite. It was Main Street against Wall Street (which Fox News, ignorantly, called class warfare). Republicans and other Free-Traders had opened the borders to depress the wages of American workers. The nation was ruined through endless wars in the Middle East (though Obama was careful to distinguish the good war in Afghanistan from the war-for-oil in Iraq). Predictably, Obama rode the wave of anti-Bush and anti-establishment sentiment into the White House, even capturing red states like Indiana and North Carolina.

Obama’s first term was a struggle against the superficially libertarian Tea Party, which was motivated against government bail outs for large reckless corporations more than Austrian economics. Obama had signaled, through his administrative selections (relying on old Clinton hands like Larry Summers) and his uncritical acceptance of the TARP Act (2008), he was no different. He was a “neoliberal,” a Clinton Democrat that was indistinguishable from the Bush people, fiscally conservative and socially ambivalent, committed to an internationalist globalist foreign and economic policy.

Occupy Wall Street from the left and the Tea Party from the right, neither failed to unseat Obama or substantively restrain his agenda. Republicans could be blamed to marshal leftist voters for something closer to universal healthcare. Democrats were blamed for introducing death-panels and a rebirth of totalitarian Leninist-Hitlerist thought under the guise of an Islamic atheist. The end result was Obama’s uncontested renomination and the Republican nomination of Mitt Romney, a formerly liberal governor of Massachusetts who first introduced Obamacare at the state level. According to Jane Meyer’s book on the Koch Brothers and their involvement in the Tea Party, Obama had to pull back the staffers who wanted unleash sentiment against the “vulture capitalism” of Romney when he was CEO of Bain Capital, a notorious line-go-up asset stripper firm. Obama wanted to win, but not to destabilize his continuation of the same. Many rustbelters, the same who had voted for Obama at least once and would later vote for Trump in 2016, could only hang their heads and shrug.

It was only after 2012, when the opposition died, that the truth of Obamunism emerged. He was not a Populist, but an idiot contortion of The West Wing’s Jed Bartlett, Aaron Sorkin’s self-professed mediocrity’s idea of a smart leader. Obama was the cool and slick sheen of the Blackberry (an obsolescence symptomatic of the entire administration). The jobs were not coming back. Immigration was not going to be solved, but intensified (the DREAM Act was a fitting coda to thirty years of NAFTA). The kulturkampf was over and the so-called progressives had won. America would face its legacy of sins and mistakes, it would bow its head to the yoke of rainbow nation squalor of controlled decline. Obama may have been a betrayal of more classically class based politics, but that was dust that had already been blown away in the seventies. The intersectionality of the New Left had already gutted the strictly economic arguments of labor Democrats. Instead, now was the time to avenge the oppressed identities that suffered under the hegemony of straight white men. Black Lives Matter surged, its excesses mostly overlooked. The “Social Justice Warrior” began his war against the bigots. Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015) cemented gay marriage as constitutional. None of these reforms had anything to do with reviving American industry. The Sorkinite staffers ruled. The lizard people were in charge.

Obama was, retrospectively, the last twentieth century President. He represented the climax of the Bush-Clinton synthesis of vain technocracy that could only have the appearance of solutions. America was in a state of managed decline, a reality that the Trilateral Commission in the seventies was called upon to solve. The Reaganite hopes of “Morning in America” dashed against the shoals of this dour multipolarity. Western Europe and Japan, possibly also Dengist China and Glastnost Russia, would join to manage a new world order. Man was a series of interconnected sense organs. The end of history had arrived in the form of mail-order steaks and internet pornography. What began as George H.W. Bush’s pseudo-Reagan internationalism continued into Clinton’s New Democrats. He balanced the budge, cut taxes for the middle class, continued welfare reform. Clinton also brutally repressed the fringes of the New Right, with theatrical displays in Ruby Ridge and Waco. Multiculturalism, multiracialism, religious plurality, these were in service for a vulgar materialism that treated politics as a matter of stomachs and wallets. It was the economy, stupid! It was an identity politics that treated intersectionality as consumer choice. It was why, in spite of the possible crusade that 9/11 could have unleashed, the second Bush told the American people to shop and that Islam was a religion of peace.

This banal worldview was consistent with its nocturnal underbelly. The internationalist world-order of globalism facilitated the expansion of occult perversion. The Satanic Panic was real, with the country rocked from the seventies into the nineties with cases of ritual abuse. Tim Tate’s Children for the Devil is a stomach-churning documentation of how police and politicians callously allowed children (not teenagers) to be molested, sodomized, forced to consume drugs and excrement, commit cannibalism, and witness animal (even human) sacrifice. The public was outraged that strange weirdos (such as the family that ran the McMartin preschool) were allowed to commit the most vile atrocities. While not overtly satanic, the Franklin Scandal (well documented by the eponymous book by Nick Bryant) revealed the interlinkage between state politics, local business, and charity organizations in service of drug dealers and pimps. The lavender mafia had been pulsating in Washington DC for decades, but it seemed to become increasingly ravenous. The Finders of Lost Children was never fully explained beyond being an anomaly, an odd, possibly criminal, experimental school that operated in Georgetown and Northern Virginia. The discovery that this group had engaged in the same occult rites of animal sacrifice and child abuse has led nowhere. And these groups did not simply operate for themselves, but an international black market of child pornography and snuff films. The sewer surged beneath the streets of American Sodom.

As Wikileak’s Podesta email dump demonstrated, many high profile figures liked to wade in these dark waters. Representative Madison Cawthorn was likely only describing the tip of the iceberg when he recounted, in an interview, that he was asked by a senior Republican lawmaker to come to a sex party. This refusal to play ball may or may not have caused him to get primaried for fairly pedestrian offenses, but its likely the norm in the Capitol. Whether its for pleasure or a conviction to overturn God’s world, these parties also serve as mutual blackmail, a pledge to be apart of a system. The more heinous, the more one is sealed. Thus the discussion about pizza and hotdogs is the revel of truly being an insider, of truly being beyond the simple ideas of good and evil, to enjoy a richer palette of tastes that defy the increasingly debauched American public. The revelations around Jimmy Savile should dissuade any incredulous peacocking.

What Obama accomplished was making perversion boring and banal. Comet Ping Pong Pizza was not a secret hidden venue that kept its tastes a secret. Rather, it made tasteless social media posts indulging in their interests. One involved a little girl with arms taped to a table, kneeling, with a man standing behind her with a comment “new seating area/procedure for your youngest guests? Hilar.” The shop also would regularly invite a band, Heavy Breathing, that made recurring references and jokes to pedophilia. It was in line with Obama’s culture, where John Podesta was known for sexually graphic art that involved minors (Phillip Fairbanks, Pedogate Primer: The Politics of Pedophilia, 123-126). Eight years of Obamunism made the Pentagon’s operations predictable based on which nights the gay bars were empty. The ugly animation of Rick and Morty expressed this vile cynicism as boring and exhausted. Whatever the social commentary, most episodes involved drugs, orgies, and monologues on the meaningless of life (so get power through “Science” and enjoy what thou wilt). Perversion had become commonplace.

Trump, symbolically, disrupted this arrangement. Trump waved a banner (regardless of his failures) against the Beltway Babylon. It was now possible to name and drain the forces that held a vice grip around the spirit of a depleted nation. As Trump’s first term demonstrated, the problem was not just in the Capitol, it was all throughout the nation, in the form of disloyal Republicans and local businessmen. Obama may have lied about his promises, but he was right that the average Republican donor was one who depended on a world of vampirism, national dissolution, and a predatory approach to the youth of America. As the case in Springtown, Ohio demonstrated, it was not deranged gender goblins that overturned the demographics of a sleepy rustbelt town. It was a sleazy alliance between landlords, regional industries, and local government that partnered with relocation NGOs to bring Haitians into the middle of nowhere. It has often been a similar kind of partnership, as it was in the case of the Franklin Scandal, to rape the youth for the pleasure of deranged and flatulent geriatrics. The whole country, even down to Hayesvilles, needs cleansing through fire. Thus, the Janitor arrives.

The outsider is a consummate figure in Americana, the roady who appears from nowhere and disappears after the problem is solved. He has a fast cast and a can-do attitude. The Janitor is so sober, he does not even drink alcohol but soda (from cans with a fist to make the imagery clear). Throughout Willy’s Wonderland, there is an inexplicable power to the animatronics that seems to fail when it comes to the protagonist. While Willy can sever a body in half with a swing of his claws, he is helpless against the Janitor beating his head in with a pair of sticks and a garbage bag of cans. The friends of Liv are unceremoniously sliced, eaten, skewered, and disemboweled. But she, a mere waif, is able to stand her ground. Why? Is it just bad writing? It was, per the slasher genre, because the Janitor and Liv were good. The corrupt townspeople suffer brutal deaths, and so do the friends (who indulged in pot and sexual exploits [or would-be for the protector who is Liv’s simp]). Any attempt at compromise, whether it’s the protector falling for a plea from one animatronic that she is not like the others or it is the original pact with Willy, receives death. The righteous, instead, have an effortless ability to beat the satanic serial killer machines to death.

The film dramatizes this effortless vengeance in a pinball montage. The Janitor discovers, as he is cleaning the kitchen, a custom game designed for Willy’s. After cleaning it on his break, the Janitor will eventually play it, with joy and odd dancing to a synthpop track, and win. The entire movie is recapitulated in this scene, with the ball running over the heads of all the characters of the playhouse. There are even tables full of hotdogs and cake, with a quick flash to an actual hotdog (the first time food is actually shown), which are not so obscure references to the world of child abuse. The Janitor overcomes them all, kills the evil, spares the innocent, and sets out onto the next town. It is never clear why he is traveling, what he wants, or what he is doing (besides his love of soda and pinball machines). He is the wanderer.

The Janitor is the judgement on Obamunism, a diseased nation found wanting. All this elaborate evil is overcome through one roving outsider. Walter Benjamin referred to the violence that sweeps away without a seeming purpose or replacement as “divine violence” and the Janitor bears that upon the town. He is not there to fix the town, but to sweep it clean. Anywhere, USA must be the site of this purgatorial fire, not just in Washington DC but everywhere. This cleanse is as unceremonious as it is total, like David felling the glorious Goliath with a single smooth stone.

There is no battle of wills, there is no white magic vs. black magic, there is no existential struggle. It is not the enemies of the free that stand against Mordor. There is simply a man with sticks and sodas that removes the head of the damned. It is the stranger who comes to town.

Asa Gray stood at the threshold of the Evangelical crisis. As one of the premier scientists of the nineteenth century, a unique American contribution in a sea of Europeans, Gray was both an orthodox Calvinist and an evolutionist. Nearly beating Gregor Mendel to the discovery of genetics, Gray stood against the doctrinaire agnosticism of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, the circle around Darwin who popularized his theories and supposedly misrepresented their master. Instead, Gray defended Darwinism (natural selection, descent with modification) as not only compatible with theism, but a sure proof of theism against the regnant materialism of his contemporaries. While Gray would later be embarrassed with Darwin’s more explicit drift towards agnosticism, he would never accept the criticisms of his fellow orthodox Calvinists, be he Charles Hodge or Robert Dabney, that Darwinism was incompatible with faith. Rather, Gray’s apology for Darwin opens a vista on rethinking the core theological problems of evolution and creation, their origins in a very different set of categories.

The problem was not mechanism, but Naturphilosophie. Over the course of the nineteenth century, philosophy and natural philosophy (the sciences) had drifted against the occult mechanisms of Newton. German Idealism had depicted an interlocked organic world that pulsed with life. These Romantics toppled the watch-maker tyrant of Christo-Deism (which Wordsworth most vividly depicted in Prometheus Unbound) and exalted Nature. The world was god-intoxicating because the world was God. Pantheism became regnant (that dark night, Hegel would later mock, in which all sheep are black). This Naturphilosophie would also dominate Western biology, particularly in the immigrant and premier American scientist, Louis Aggasiz. Life burst forth from life, nearly spontaneously, and it followed the ever-churning of Nature. Aggasiz had defended a kind of materialist creationism, that all the various species appeared in their own form according to Nature’s generations. The whole formed the particulars and thus individual organs were formed according to function.

Aggasiz was Gray’s foe, who appealed to empiricism against idealism. When the biologist discovered seemingly useless organs, how could Aggasiz defend them? Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace had led a counterattack against this pantheistic creationism, noticing that organisms appeared adapted to their environment, rather than a randomly generated manifestation of holistic Nature. Some organs appeared vestigial, no longer in use, remnants of organs that lay dormant in the organism without contributing much to their function. Aggasiz had denied the meaning of these vestigial organs, whereas Darwin had discerned some logic behind their existence.

Against Naturphilosophie and its American advocates (such as the Transcendentalists, like Thoreau and Emerson), Gray rejected this pantheistic, magical materialist, creationism, Nature spitting out combinations that conformed to the existent sea of being. Against randomness, Gray saw “evolutionary teleology” (as he named his final essay in his Darwiniana [1876]) as proof of Providence. When biologists saw so many organs that seemed redundant, useless, or wasteful, it was proof of God’s plan over time. When biologists found a variety of organs that were nearly similar, but performed a variety of functions (as if they adapted to aid the survival of the organism), God guided the direction of these changes. It was Darwin’s theory that revealed Christian Providence in Nature against the pantheists:

By the adoption of the Darwinian hypothesis, or something like it, which we incline to favor, many of the difficulties are obviated, and others diminished. In the comprehensive and far-reaching teleology which may take the place of the former narrow conceptions, organs and even faculties, useless to the individual, find their explanation and reason of being. Either they have done service in the past, or they may do service in the future. They may have been essentially useful in one way in a past species, and, though now functionless, they may be turned to useful account in some very different way hereafter. In botany several cases come to our mind which suggest such interpretation.

Under this view, moreover, waste of life and material in organic Nature ceases to be utterly inexplicable, because it ceases to be objectless. It is seen to be a part of the general “economy of Nature,” a phrase which has a real meaning. (Darwiniana, 375)

Redundant, useless, or wasteful organs or systems were not signs of randomness, unless one already presupposed randomness. Rather, it revealed God’s cunning. Creation was not something done in an instant, but was ongoing through the ages, creatures molded and changed as they moved across the vast expanse of God’s world, all of which was in his Providence. God did not create as if he started at the beginning, but God is beyond time, seeing beginning and end simultaneously. The whole plan was not necessarily visible in any particular moment. If God could so foreordain Joseph’s enslavement, through the treachery of his brothers, to save both Egypt and his own people, how much more could God ordain the various adaptations through natural selection to the developments of creatures to his glory? What the environment meant for evil, God meant for good.

Of course, these claims could be a convenient just-so story to explain away disorder. Hume noted, long before Darwin in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), the problem with all arguments for design are in the perspective. The order of the spheres happened alongside seemingly useless destruction and catastrophe. Gray was not unaware of this problem, but this further strengthened his case:

What results are comprehended in a plan, and what are incidental, is often more than we can readily determine in matters open to observation. And in plans executed mediately or indirectly, and for ends comprehensive and far-reaching, many purposed steps must appear to us incidental or meaningless. But the higher the intelligence, the more fully will the incidents enter into the plan, and the more universal and interconnected may the ends be. Trite as the remark is, it would seem still needful to insist that the failure of a finite being to compass the designs of an infinite mind should not invalidate its conclusions respecting proximate ends which he can understand. (Darwiniana, 380)

In other words, Gray, as a good empiricist, ends up a presuppositionalist through the backdoor. One must have a vision of the whole, which no concatenation of observations and facts can grant, to understand the arrangement of the whole. One must understand the plan to understand the significance of action. In an earlier essay, “Design Versus Necessity, a Discussion” (1860), Gray compared natural teleology to two pool players shooting from different sides of the table, striking their balls in the middle and redirecting them. This distinguishes mere actions from intent:

Now, let it be remarked that design can never be demonstrated. “Witnessing the act does not make known the design, as we have seen in the case assumed for the basis of the argument. The word of the actor is not proof; and that source of evidence is excluded from the cases in question. The only way left, and the only possible way in cases where testimony is out of the question, is to infer the design from the result, or from arrangements which strike us as adapted or intended to produce a certain result, which affords a presumption of design. The strength of this presumption may be zero, or an even chance, as perhaps it is in the assumed case; but the probability of design will increase with the particularity of the act, the specialty of the arrangement or machinery, and with the number of identical or yet more of similar and analogous instances, until it rises to a moral certainty—i. e., to a conviction which practically we are as unable to resist as we are to deny the cogency of a mathematical demonstration.” — in relation to the example of two pool players having their balls connect as they struck in opposite directions (north to south pocket, west to east pocket). (Darwiniana, 70)

Gray also used the example of a man striking another man with a boomerang. Superficially, a man throwing a curved stick away from a man seems to have no ill intention. But given enough throws, and the discovery of the concept of a boomerang, even the greatest imbecile will begin to suspect that the man is trying to hit him. How can anyone know if the two pool players are trying to hit their balls in the middle? Do the players even know? The plan, and the mind of the planner, would have to be presupposed to make sense of the coherence of actions that accomplish their goal. In the realm of biology, it was life always moving to find a way against hostile conditions. The design behind natural selection accumulates in the same way that watching those two pool players, time and again, strike in the middle may create the inference that they know what they are doing. Of course, these collisions may be a series of coincidences. There is no amount of demonstrations that can ever prove design.

Therefore, given the plethora of these examples of seemingly redundant/useless/wasteful organs in Nature, one must either presume a great design or sheer randomness of ever-churning Nature:

It is very easy to assume that, because events in Nature are in one sense accidental, and the operative forces which bring them to pass are themselves blind and unintelligent (physically considered, all forces are), therefore they are undirected, or that he who describes these events as the results of such forces thereby assumes that they are undirected. This is the assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr. Agassiz, who insists that the only alternative to the doctrine, that all organized beings were supernaturally created just as they are, is, that they have arisen spontaneously through the omnipotence of matter. (Darwiniana, 153-154)

It was Darwin that armed the Christian to assert the scientific basis of Providence. Here was a teleological, and theistic, evolution against materialist creationism, God against Chance. While many other orthodox Christians considered Darwin as further atheism in the reign of randomness, Gray was not entirely alone. He found a friend in fellow Yankee and orthodox Calvinist, George F. Wright, who had prompted him to collect and edit the Darwiniana. Wright was a Congregationalist minister and geologist. He would remain committed to creationism, even as he had to let go of some aspects of evolution as Darwin’s agnosticism became undeniable. Even so, this later contributor to The Fundamentals against theological liberalism, remained committed to theistic evolution. Wright would go even further than Gray in arguing that Darwinism shored up Calvinism as the proper interpretation of natural revelation:

Wright contributed to the discussion the idea that the tenets of Calvinistic theology had much in common with Darwinism. For instance, he said that the “Calvinistic doctrine of the spread of sin from Adam to his descendants has also its illustrative analogies in the Darwinian principle of heredity.” Also, the “adjustment of the doctrines of foreordination and free-will occasions perplexity to the Calvinist in a manner strikingly like that experienced by the Darwinian in stating the consistency of his system of evolution with the existence of manifest design in nature.” (A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810-1888, 363)

Gray and Wright would later fade from the scene as the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy would place Darwin surely on the side of the Agnostics. Many Christians agreed with their Spencerian liberal opponents, if Darwin was right than the Bible was wrong. It was not that Darwin created theological liberalism, but theological liberals shifted from Naturphilosophie to Darwinian evolution as the exuberance of liberalism waned. Darwin was something of a conservative, though ameliorative, rearguard defense against the further development of liberal revolution, where Idealism (albeit turned on its head) found a full expression in Socialism, especially Marxism.

Socialists did not altogether accept the Darwinian, and neo-Darwinian (after integration with Mendelian genetics), paradigm of finding adaptability within individuals. Instead Lamarck made a return, a Naturphilosophie that was shaping and guiding Human history towards an evolutionary rebirth. Neo-Lamarckian theories marked Socialist sciences, particularly in the Soviet Union and its variations in the form of Lysenkoism (often conclusively blamed for the rippling famines that nearly killed more Communists than the Third Reich). Liberal Darwinists and orthodox Christians in the West often joined forces against the pantheists and their magical materialism, but that was a lopsided partnership. Creationism has fled, legally and educationally, from the public. Creationism now only exists in nooks and crannies of home schools and Christian private schools, reduced to a disreputable opinion that kooky and dimwitted Evangelicals maintain.

Of course, modernist Christians accept orthodox neo-Darwinism and what it entails for the Bible. Even the Vatican accepts a “theistic evolution” which makes the account of Genesis a pious myth at best, bronze age nonsense from barbarians at worse. The current debate is between the reliability of Scripture against the scientific consensus. Critics may point out that neo-Darwinism has changed significantly from the Victorian era, and that many of Darwin’s theories have been modified beyond recognition, but that has done little to dislodge the basic paradigm.

But that may simply be the wrong way to frame the problem. What Gray understood was that Darwin was a question of mechanism or means, not why. Many Creationists accept the basic mechanisms of evolution (descent with modification, natural selection) without its cosmology. Does knowledge of evolution require a particular history to life? Darwin had come to believe that all living organisms had descended from an original life-form, usually told in the mythologeme of a lightning bolt striking a soup of amino acids. Is that the case? The problem was not evolution, but a certain interpretation of natural history through geology, where there was progressive, not catastrophic, development that could be read as ages. Only if Earth is billions of years old with incremental development of life that the standard Darwinian attack on Creationism holds. But apocalypticism (repressed for political reasons as much as, or maybe even more than, theoretical failures) has made an increasing return. The uncontroversial theory of punctuated equilibrium would see massive changes in life-form that interrupted periods of stability. There is no reason to interpret these demonstrations according to a barren and dead cosmos.

Darwin had begun his work with an account of domesticated animals, their variety of breeds that look remarkably different. Wild cows may be mistaken, at first blush, for a different animal than the standard meat and milk cows of industrial factories. Man plays the role of the designer on his farms, creating a variety of life-forms to serve particular designs and plans. Evolution is true, but perhaps within certain limits, according to certain kinds. Modern Darwinists reflect the same incoherent conclusions of modern globalists. The fact that national identity can be blurred on the edges does not mean nations do not exist. In a different light, one may note that God established seventy nations in Genesis, and yet those nations do not exist, at least not in any original form, by the time of the New Testament. God created all nations from one blood, as St Paul preached in Athens (Acts 17), and yet these nations still persist as distinct races, with their own borders and cultures. The kinds of creation are not fictive taxonomical categories, anymore than national existences are fictions of international law. The natural selection of various kinds into various forms does not deny divine election in the calling of the saints.

The problem is paradigmatic. All accounts of non-biblical natural history invent just-so stories. All evolutionary science can demonstrate is the mechanism, not the whole scope of its occurrence. Appeals to geology are just as unreliable as in Darwin’s day, where opponents of evolution argued that the fossil levels did not bear out incremental development. That cuts both ways, requiring a presupposition of a framework to interpret the evidence, even if the framework is not arbitrary. Evolution also does not require any singular or unitary origin point, something Darwin believed originally, as well as Gray. Evolution was not an iron law of nature, but the normative means of continued and active Providence. Returning to Gray, there was no need to equate design with a miraculous, spontaneous, appearance:

If he cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said, “Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe.” How strange that a convinced theist should be so prone to associate design only with miracle!

All turns, however, upon what is meant by this Nature, to which it appears more and more probable that the being and becoming—no less than the well-being and succession—of species and genera, as well as of individuals, are committed. (Darwiniana, 389)

The problem with Darwinism, ultimately, is its implicit cosmology, one that is sometimes shared with some Creationists that fundamentally brackets Providence. God the Creator is almost treated as the Deist watchmaker. Instead, Gray’s creative adaptation can be leveraged further. Again, there is no reason to accept actual boundaries between kinds even as there is wild diversity from within. There is also no reason to think that rapid changes cannot be a Providential design in and through history. Therefore, one can suppose, following the mythopoetic history of Genesis, that God created kinds that would find rapid change in a cursed post-Edenic world. Noah’s ark did not need to preserve every single variation and breed along an evolutionary branch as long as it preserved the kind. It was, perhaps, the vile antediluvian world that produced horrible and vicious birds that today are referred to as dinosaurs. The current extinction of species does not mean man has overcome man’s creation. Natural history and man’s history are integrally intertwined, where God preserves kinds as God preserves man. It does not mean all creatures are equal or have the same longevity, even as the general race persists. There are no more Amorites or Hittites, yet man survives. There is unity in Adam, but that does not mean a Roman is a Papuan.

These considerations are not for doctrinaire agnostics. An atheist scientist may scoff at the appeal to Genesis as so much mumbo-jumbo, but has an instinctive attachment to the questionable Out of Africa theory. Even more, every agnostic scientist accepts non-empirical claims about the possibility of his research, such as the uniformity and intelligibility of nature. Why suppose that an ape brain can learn anything about the nature of the world, except in as much as it seems to work? A biologist has no reason to accept the equality of races, anymore than a neuropsychologists accepts free-will, yet both act as if they are true in their interactions with the world. One cannot prove that human rights exist, and yet the standard academic will without fault pull the lever for the center-left or left candidate. The point is not that they are wrong intrinsically, but rather they cannot give an account of the paradigms they utilize. Appeals to decency and Human progress are just as mythopoetic as the revealed Law in Genesis, though ones that are even more empirically ridiculous. It is to take the boomeranged man as a victim of random circumstances, correctable through school lunches and counseling services.

When it comes to presuppositions and a “worldview,” it is not the question of a randomly confected paradigm to explain events ad hoc. It is not merely the venerable status of the Bible, but its maximal coherence in interpretation of Human history and, arguably, natural history. The idea of an originally good man that has fallen and has destroyed the world with him seems to have played out as millennia of the two pool players synchronizing their shots. The Bible is science, it is knowledge of the shape of the world and its progression. It is a glimmer of Providence, the plan that all things, be they flora or fauna, follow, willingly or unwillingly. This claim does not mean the Bible has instructions on how animals and plants procreate, but it does explain what this progeny means.

There is no need to repeat errors with dubious moral evaluations about how Darwin led to imperialism and racism. There is no need for naive, and false, appeals to naturalistic design. Creation is not so much a theory of science, but the science itself, an interpretation of the facts that requires a paradigm beyond mere naked facts. One does not need to lapse into the insipid idealism of Naturphilosophie to stand against halfwit mongers of the empirical. There is a dynamic relationship between interpreter and the interpreted that, while unfolding through time, may receive a revelation of the eternal. The problem is, as George F. Wright forcefully understood, was not empirical observations, let alone the theories that bubbled up from these investigations. It was always the presupposed cosmology behind these:

The worst foes of Christianity are not physicists but metaphysicians. Hume is more dangerous than Darwin; the agnosticism of Hamilton and Mansel is harder to meet than that of Tyndall and Huxley; the fatalism of the philosophers is more to he dreaded than the materialism of any scientific men. The sophistries of the Socratic philosophy touching the freedom of the will are more subtle than those of the Spencerian school. Christianity, being a religion of fact and history, is a free-born son in the family of the inductive sciences, and is not specially hampered by the paradoxes inevitably connected with all attempts to give expression to ultimate conceptions of truth. The field is now as free as it has ever been to those who are content to act upon such positive evidence of the truth of Christianity as the Creator has been pleased to afford them. The evidence for evolution, even in its milder form, does not begin to be as strong as that for the revelation of God in the Bible. (“The Passing of Evolution”)

The generation, regeneration, and degeneration of orders that have seemingly apparent boundaries, in nature as much as in history. These facts conform fully to the biblical account of life, the world, and man. Such is the cunning of a solemn Providence, from whom all things flow and to whom all things bend.

The West is a Concentration Camp Nursing Home. Giorgio Agamben has found this process in the production of the Homo sacer, the man who had no legal-ontological existence, an offscouring non-man that could neither be killed nor sacrificed, only eliminated. How did this come to be within the West? Why have more and more aspects come under governance at the same time that constitutional law has become suspended? The problem is rooted in the modern definition of sovereignty.

Carl Schmitt understood that the rule was best defined by its exception, that the law (recht) was best understood in its suspension. The state of exception was not a rejection or overthrow of the constitution-state (rechtsstaat), but rather its protection. The nineteenth century had seen the dominance of liberal jurisprudence, where law not men ruled. However the capacity to suspend certain constitutional provisions in a time of emergency was necessary. The body that could decide the moment of exception was the sovereign, a figure (individual or corporate) that stood outside of the law simultaneously as it stood within the law. He stood inside as constituted through law, but outside to decide when the law must be set aside, that an exception must be made. For Schmitt, who also pioneered study in political theology (where all secular political concepts originate theologically), the exception was the legal equivalent of a miracle, where God set aside his normative government (Nature) to intervene. The purpose of the exception was ostensibly to save the constitution, but what if the crisis never ended? It is this problem that has become endemic to the modern West:

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of a state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones. (State of Exception, 2)

The origin of the constitution-state are also the origins of permanent crisis. The National Assembly of the French Revolution was ever writing a constitution to define and defend the rights of citizens. Who were these citizens? Did it include counterrevolutionaries? Aristocrats? No, they were no longer citizens, they had excepted themselves, they had become the legal equivalent of bandits or pirates, literal outlaws, that could be exterminated as if insects, vermin, or contagion. While the Revolution would conclude in the reign of Napoleon (who was never emperor of France, but of the French), the constitution-state became normative throughout nineteenth century Europe, especially in the unification projects of Germany and Italy. These states were constituted for the national community, The People, the sovereign that stood both within the law and outside of it. The People, through their representatives, could determine the state of exception for the constitution-state, including excepting some peoples from the provisions of national citizenship.

The United States pursued this same trend, but its federal structure retarded centralization. Abraham Lincoln may have utilized the powers of a commissarial dictator in preserving the Union, but these were within the purview of the President as Commander-in-Chief. The real advance towards modern sovereignty came with Woodrow Wilson, who received dictatorial powers to censor the media, fix prices, and detain citizens without due process. The shift was not simply Lincoln’s use of presidential power in a military capacity, but that Congress had legislated to set aside constitutional provisions. Congress, as The People, could abrogate the constitution to defend it during a period of war. Franklin Roosevelt would follow Wilson, asking Congress for laws that entered a state of exception, but without the pretext of international war. Like many interwar European states, Roosevelt had suspended the constitution to combat an economic crisis. The United States entered the same incoherence that has continued to blanket the West:

It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series of statues culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country - a fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallels between military and economic emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century. (State of Exception, 22)

Roosevelt was a good Schmittian. But what was the higher law that justified the New Deal? The People themselves, who both constituted and were themselves constituted through the written constitution. The appeal to natural or divine law had become defunct for many nineteenth century jurists, with the constitution being the necessary instrument to define and invest political authority to act, defining and delimiting all rights and responsibilities of the citizenry. What happened when a crisis occurred outside of the constitutional provisions to settle it? The law was set aside, leaving only lawless authorities that operated as if they were constitutionally constituted government.

Who had this right? It was arbitrary and anarchic. This modern phenomenon was not like Roman dictatorship which was an office included within the Roman constitution and judged by the senate. Rather, it was like the Roman legal category iustitium, which suspended the law and justified lawlessness as if it were lawful. When Scipio Nasica led a mob to lynch Tiberius Gracchus, the Senate deemed that Scipio had not murdered the land-reformer but he had executed him as if he were consul. This “as if” marks the lawless capacity within any constitution, which has only become more arbitrary as it morphed into the blob of democratic sovereignty. Violent mobs may assault, loot, and destroy “as if” they were state agents:

If we wanted at all costs to give a name to a human action performed under conditions of anomie, we might say that he who acts during the iustitium neither executes nor transgress the law, but inexecutes [inesgue] it. His actions, in this sense, are mere facts, the appraisal of which, once the iustitium is expired, will depend on the circumstances. But, as long as the iustitium lasts, they will be absolutely undeniable, and the definition of their nature - whether executive or transgressive, and, in the extreme case, whether human, bestial, or divine - will lie beyond the sphere of law. (State of Exception, 50)

It is no surprise that Western democracies, for their own purposes, implement a form of iustitium for its preferred agents. The problem today is not authoritarianism or dictatorial uses of the power, but the opposite, the suspension of law enforcement, the state of exception where violent mobs are mostly peaceful protestors, a constitutionally legal body. Juridically, the reasons for these exceptions are mysteries, exercises of arbitrary acts of state power. The secret, as Schmitt understood, was that every constitution-state had its ultimate power in lawless anarchy. As the inability to legislate has increasingly dominated the West, so too has the state of exception become the abnormal norm.

The state of exception operates as a threshold between the creation and destruction of law, where law is set aside. This legal blur is similar to the ancient definition of civil war (stasis), which con-fused the distinct realms of private and public, of the household and the city. The Greeks had nearly perfected the chaos of civil war into an art, where political allies were renamed “brothers” and kin could be denounced as political enemies. The civil war was not a division between in favor of the law and those against the law, but the law had to be set aside to determine the law. The civil war is a moment of anarchy:

The stasis - this is our hypothesis - takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In transgressing this threshold, the oikos is politicised; conversely the polis is ‘economised’, that is, it is reduced to an oikos. (Stasis, 16)

The Ancients, however, knew how to reconstitute the boundaries after the crisis had passed. The settlement included political ignorance (amnestia) for all deeds committed during the crisis, kinship and citizenship were restored and the boundary between household and city repaired. Forgetfulness was necessary to normalcy. The West, however, has inverted this legal counsel, with disastrous result. The crisis must never be forgotten, and therefore the law can never be reconstituted. The sovereign is incapable of determining the close of the exception.

Why has sovereignty become impotent? The early modern drive towards absolutism had defined sovereignty in terms of will. Like God for Late Medieval Nominalists, the sovereign acted for inscrutable reasons, beyond appeal to an intelligible divine or natural law. The sovereign could decide the exception, but this very resolution could breed its own crisis. Reflecting a century of European civil war, Thomas Hobbes grasped this problem in the image of the Leviathan.

Contrary to the interpretations of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, Hobbes was not an esoteric thinker. The magisterial Leviathan was intended to be the future textbook of political theory, not a cryptic expression of atheism and materialism. Hobbes, a royalist during the English Civil Wars, was concerned in placing the kingdom on firmer ground, a sovereign that contained all power, temporal and spiritual, to resolve conflict. But Hobbes was aware that this very process provoked its own collapse. Many critics of Hobbes failed to understand his project as descriptive. Many critics failed to understand why Hobbes named his “mortal god” state after a devilish figure from the Bible. The key to understanding Hobbes is in the carefully drawn frontispiece to his opus.

In the image, Leviathan stands large and looming, a crown upon his head and with a body made of many souls staring upwards to their monarch. On the surface, here is the omnipotent state that rules over all, absorbing all subjects into his person. But it is not that simple. The Leviathan holds a sword and crozier, representing temporal and spiritual power respectively, but in the wrong hands. Medieval iconography recognized the spiritual as superior to the temporal, the former God’s normal means to govern and the latter as the necessary coercion in a Fallen world. Christ, therefore, ruled with the crozier in his right hand and the sword in his left. Images of antichrist inverted this arrangement of power, and thus Hobbes intentionally depicted Leviathan as an antichrist. Even more oddly, Leviathan stands outside the city, likely on the waters beyond the cliff (and perhaps even on a fish, which was a common image of antichrist upon the sea beast, Leviathan). Additionally, the city itself is nearly empty, with the only identifiable figures being armed guards and plague doctors. Who is it that the state rules over?

Who is the Leviathan? His face appears like a Stuart monarch, even as his body is made up of various, upwards looking, subjects. But the Leviathan may be nobody. Noel Malcolm has demonstrated that Hobbes was fascinated with optics, particularly the development of camera obscura and kaleidoscopic images. Contemporaries had invented an illusory image where a single face would emerge from viewing multiple faces through a kaleidoscopic lens. What if the sovereign is only an optical illusion? When the various individuals in a state of nature, seeking to escape lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short,” they invested their power as The People (populus) into a sovereign, be it a monarch, a senate, or an assembly. What if that was always an illusion to avoid the irrepressible viciousness of Fallen humanity? The state is collective optical illusion to keep power from the other biblical monster that terrorized the land, Behemoth.

When The People are forged into a state, the varied individuals dissolve into a non-political mass of subjects (multitudo), who may threaten to subvert and rebel against the state. This Behemoth required restraint lest a state of nature return, and thus the Leviathan, though satanic, must restrain the other demonic beast. Rather than a positive recipe to bring peace, Hobbes offered a pessimistic account of Human sin, one that was unleashed in the Civil Wars through religious zealots, political intriguers, and greedy merchants. God had given one demon to restrain another until the end of time came.

For Agamben, Hobbes is not the theorist of authoritarian statecraft, but the anarchy of sovereignty. The state of nature is buried within the absolutist state, a necessary evil that is always at war with itself. Western democracies have not abandoned this definition of the arbitrary sovereign, The People who are the highest law in their own representatives that exist to contain them. The COVID-19 panic made these dynamics manifest, a state of exception that offered to strip constitutional rights of citizens because they had become, through being unvaccinated, contagion. The iustitium that Black Lives Matter protestors were exercising their rights to assemble, while lockdown protestors were superspreader contagion, reflected the arbitrary judgement of The People. It was fitting too that, in America, that the mindless Joe Biden was an optical illusion of a presidential administration, operating arbitrarily according to the swarm of bureaucrats each pursuing their own ends for their own inscrutable reasons. The COVID-19 panic never concluded, it simply faded away.

The Hobbesian nightmare, however, contains a seed of hope. The reason Hobbes detested both Papists and Presbyterians (discussed in Book IV of Leviathan) was due to his own eccentric ecclesiology, which radically separated the kingdom of God from the church. Clerisy and priestcraft always threatened to marshal Behemoth against Leviathan, more despicable because they claimed to speak for God. The only end to this cycle of monsters was the Appearance (parousia) of the Christ. Hobbes had placed this event at the end, but it may be theorized for a different vision of political theology:

If we take seriously the Hobbesian assertion according to which the Kingdom of God should be understood not metaphorically but literally, this means that at the end of time the cephalic fiction of the Leviathan could be erased and the people discover its own body. The caesura that divides the body political - a body visible only in the optical fiction of the Leviathan, but in fact unreal - and the real, yet politically invisible multitude, will be bridged at the end in the perfect Church. But this also means that until then no real unity, no political body is actually possible: the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and the Leviathan can only live together up until the end with Behemoth - with the possibility of civil war. (Stasis, 63)

Moving beyond Agamben, the Appearance is the extra-constitutional power that can restrain both Leviathan and Behemoth. Like Psalm 74 (“Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.”), the absolutist sovereign can be smashed to pieces following a higher law. James called the gospel the “law of liberty” (James 1:25) and Paul referred to the “law of faith” against the “law of works” (Romans 3:27). Applied politically, it is a recognition of a law beyond law, where the fulfillment that Christ worked in his resurrection forms the basis of a new kind of jurisprudence, one formed on wisdom, or what Agamben had called “play:”

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of [Walter] Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical. (State of Exception, 64)

The problems of the state of exception and civil war, one which threatens to dissolve citizens into Homo sacer which may be eliminated as vermin, operate in the modern West. They derive from a broken attempt to solve gaps within Western law, to overcome dualities that have existed since Antiquity, through collapse. Modern sovereignty attempts to solve the problem, but only produces more crisis, an anarchy unleashed on the basis of state incapacity. In contrast, a different, divine, kind of anarchy, one that authorizes prophets and judges to remove the wicked. The West has become paralyzed within itself, but there is a solution from beyond, not in the destruction of the old system and the creation of the new, but through an appeal to a higher law than law itself. Only a political theology that recognizes the Appearance, a the righteousness that the law cannot produce of itself, can restore the West.

However, before further theorizing a solution, it is necessary to explore that this problem in law and politics has deeper roots in Western metaphysics. The limits on thought reflect limits in language The problem of the categories is next.

The West is a Concentration Camp Nursing Home. Why? To answer this question, Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher and public intellectual, has contemplated the collapse of man into the blob of flesh known as the Homo sacer and the Messianic politics to overcome this nightmare.

What is the Homo sacer? Literally the “Sacred Man,” a man was ritually assigned in ancient Roman law as one who could not be killed or sacrifice, only eliminated. Puzzling even the great jurist Cicero, this ancient law removed man as such from the world of Humanity, set apart for the gods, without him becoming anything else (he does not become god even as he leaves the realm of men). He was not-man, but also not-not-man. He entered a zone of indecision, being nothing and not-nothing, and thus his eradication was not liable to law, since he no longer existed as man under the law that governed man. The Homo sacer was simply destroyed, his life already gone in spite of his continuing existent flesh. In this odd figure lay the secret to the incoherence, and barbarism, of Western jurisprudence.

Utilizing the concept of “apparatus” (dispositif) from Michael Foucault, Homo sacer was a category of an apparatus that organized sheer facticity into an order of things. The Homo sacer may appear as a man, but he was not, legally and even ontologically, man any longer. As it was in Antiquity and remains so in Modernity, no man is ever merely a man, but is recognized through the lens of a law-order. In Ancient Greece (and subsequently Roman and European civilization), man was bifurcated into man-in-household (oikos) and man-in-city (polis). As Aristotle categorized these distinctions, the man-in-household was the master over sheer animal corporeality, regulating the bodies of wife, children, and slaves. The household was the site of mere living organism (zoe). In contrast, customary-law (nomos) recognized man-in-city as a citizen who obeyed a certain form-of-life (bios). The man-in-household was a master over the creation of sheer life, but when he left the boundary of his household into the city, he was now a citizen, bearing equal rights with fellow citizens as they deliberated over the course of action to preserve and enact their form-of-life. Here was the fountain of both cult and culture.

How did the man-in-household ever cross into the man-in-city? Aristotle puzzled over this question of origins, of who created who first: did city create the household or did the household create the city? At what point did an aggregate of households form a city? And how could a city, emergent from this bond of households, ever delimit the boundaries of the household? At what point did the city recognize the man as no longer master of the household but citizen of the city? What was this threshold which man passed through? Could he ever get stuck between these two realms? What was a man who stood in the gap between household and city? And what if these two realms ever became confounded as one and the same? That latter possibility marks the transition to modernity, the political foundation of the Concentration Camp Nursing Home:

The entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis - the politicization of bare life as such - constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political philosophical categories of classical thought. (Homo Sacer, 4)

Unlike Antiquity, which policed and ritualized the transition between the household and the city, the modern world, in its liberal globalist form, has collapsed the political into the economical, the city into the household. Politics is now the question of hungry stomachs and diseased bodies, manifest in the role of governments during the COVID-19 panic, which had an unlimited commission to prevent the loss of life, whatever curtailments of freedom or destruction of business. Biopolitics was the preservation of bare life, the determination of the human from the not-human, the capacity to determine which pound of pulsating and rotting flesh was a man and which was not. Such power was demonstrated in the ritual designation of the Homo sacer:

The inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original - if concealed - nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond [...] between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii (Homo Sacer, 6)

Before returning to the Homo sacer as the product of this juridical-political collapse, it is more important to reflect on this problem as first visible in ontology. Agamben pursued this study in an earlier work, The Open, to understand man from the animal world that surrounded him. For Alexandre Kojeve, the animal world was what would finally win over man the historicized beast. It was because man was historical that he felt alienated from his own nature that was intrinsically historical. Only as a material dialectic unfolded, completed in the republican citizenship of Napoleonic France (and repeated ever since), could man escape his lack of belonging. It was only when man became fully de-politicized, no longer seeking the cultural expressions against the brute nature of the Ancien Regime, when man would be free to be post-man, to be an animal. Kojeve had seen this process in the rapidly socializing America and the rapidly capitalizing Soviet Union. Both led to statecraft that was the allocation of resources for the post-human, one produced art as unreflectively as a spider produced web. All that remained left for man was “snobbery,” the formal criticism one saw in Japanese culture, a meaningless enterprise that only had meaning when it was executed properly. Art was now the mere sign without signification. History, and with it the false ideal of transcendence, had come to a close.

Or had it? Agamben rejected this idea, the post-man as cultural ape, as insufficient. Kojeve misunderstood the problem, politics was not complete in economical man but politics-as-economics provoked the never-ending crisis of man. The state did not wither, but gave birth to endless governmental agencies to regulate every movement and frailty of the body. It was precisely at the moment that government exalted man that man disappeared. Man was linked to an integral set of functions of this warm and pulsating body, but when was this congealed flesh something called man? When did it cease to be man? When did man emerge?

Unlike medieval theologians, who debated the nature of man in paradise (would he have intestines if he did not defecate? would he have genitalia if he did not procreate?), modern anthropologists had no interest in seeing the earthly body in service of some heavenly eschatology. Man was man according to his biology, but how did that remove him from the apes? Pico della Mirandola’s Renaissance humanism, through neo-Platonism, recognized man lacked dignitas, he had no fixed rank. Man may ascend to become like the angels through intellectual contemplation, or man may descend down to the beasts in his use of intestines and genitalia. If treated strictly according to the body, Carl Linnaeus, pioneer of modern biological taxonomy, could see little difference between man and ape on the bush of evolutionary life. It was unclear that man had any particular end in himself if he was more than an ape, which modern enlightened struggled to refute. If anything, man was the ape who could speak, but the capacity for language was something risked in time (as the example of the Wild Girl of Champagne [1731] demonstrated, a woman who failed to enter into language). There was no other “missing link” between man and ape, man’s very body was that missing link:

Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which - like a ‘missing link’ which is always lacking because it is already virtually present - the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself - only a bare life. (The Open, 37-38)

Ontologically, what the modern state had done was to collapse the speech of man into the body of the ape, thus struggling to ever distinguish the two. The category of Homo sacer was a means to disaggregate, to determine the living man as no longer man, as a blob of flesh that could not be killed or sacrificed, only eliminated. It represented the fundamental problem of a law-order, which struggled with its own internal tensions between the justice it secured and the violence it wielded. Nomos, Hesido sung, brought divine justice (dike) unlike the animals, but yoked it with the violence (biaia) of the animals. Beasts hunted and killed, but not so with man. Yet the law had the capacity to remove men from its political rights, permitting the reemergence of the jungle that allowed the elimination of life. The law included exception (ex-ceptio), the recognition that it could remove the protections of the citizen and subject him to the world of beasts. The exception proved the rule. Given that justice was natural and divine, the removal of citizens from its protection, executing or exiling them, was part of the Greek law-order. But what happens when law is no longer natural nor divine? What happens when the state must decide not between citizens, but all as household dwellers who was truly human, who had emerged from the “anthropophorous” ape-body as fully human?

Part of the problem lay in Aristotle’s categorical distinction between actuality and potentiality that would mark Western metaphysics, physics, and thus jurisprudence. Potentiality, the possibility of an act, was only proven in actuality, the execution of a potentiality. The state only demonstrated its right to take a life and to remove a citizen from the law-order of the city when it did so. It was only when the violence of the jungle reappeared that the divine law was reaffirmed. But what if the state refrained? Was the refusal the act a demonstration of its capacity to act, or its incapacity to act? At what point did a state’s inaction signal its impotence? But if a state always acted, this action was only potential in hindsight, a counterfactual of what it could not have done but did do. Modern states, as they have rejected the death penalty, have forsworn the willingness to declare a citizen stripped of a right to life, but that does not mean that the process of disappearance has disappeared. Instead, the question is not whether one has warranted the justice of violence, but whether one simply ceases to become a citizen without becoming something else. There is no longer death penalty, but the state has excepted abortion and euthanasia as a form of killing. These are lumps of flesh that are eliminated. Through these processes, all citizens of a modern democracy have become potential Homo sacer:

Homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life - that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed - is the life that has been captured in this sphere (italics original, Homo Sacer, 83)

It is the decision of the state, designating this fetus or this euthanasia applicant, as no longer alive, only a lump of flesh can be eliminated. This process is entirely arbitrary, since modern jurisprudence, without Nature or God, has no basis for decision besides its own will. It is no longer man because the sovereign state, be it in the form of one man or a committee, decided it so. It is no surprise, therefore, that the rise of legal positivism coincided with the rise of modern sovereignty, where there is some final arbiter, a god on Earth, that can decide with finality. However this sovereignty is, as it reflected theological trends, arbitrary. It has no basis outside of itself, which is, in principle, outside of its own decisions codified as statute. The secret is bald: the modern state is the only permissible outlaw that may commit licit crime because it has ex-cepted itself from these legal norms. The modern sovereign is the one who enforces the law lawlessly. It was for this reason that Thomas Hobbes identified the modern sovereign with Leviathan, a satanic figure, though one hidden through compact and mutual support:

The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to conform the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy incapable of truly thinking a politics freed from the form of the State.

The relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it, at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. (Homo Sacer, 109-110)

Because modern democrats, through figures like John Locke, failed to understand the Hobbesian sovereign as a ban, and instead saw him as the instigator of a constitution, they failed to understand the nature of what they undertook. The Hobbesian People who constituted Leviathan did not make a contract with Leviathan. They, instead, banned themselves through the erection of a representative, dissipating into a “multitude” that always threatened to reemerge as Behemoth, the threat of civil war between a legitimated and an illegitimate god. In modern democracy, every election summons the people to vote so they may exile themselves from the politics, subject to a government that rules as them over the multitude that remains. While ancient democracy, in contrast, never transferred its rights from the assembly and asserted a law-order to which men conformed, modern democracy is in a constant state of crisis and has only considered the body as political. Citizenship is something corporeal, reflected in the liberal nationalist uprisings of the nineteenth century to create racial nation-states. Napoleon I was not emperor of France, but emperor of the French. As liberalism developed, in pace with its civilization mission to regenerate inferior races, so too did its mission expand. The nation-state became the welfare-state, an agency to regulate the bodies in its zones of jurisdiction. Citizenship became increasingly abstracted. It was all the economy, stupid.

Modern democracy, unlike royal kings, multiplied the bodies politic. As Ernt Kantorowicz excavated, kings had a double-body: one was his earthly form and the other his undying royalty as state. The two overlapped, especially in early modern absolutism, where the fornications and bowel movements of kings became a matter of aristocratic attendance. This collapse of political into earthly frame has expanded in modern democracies to make “The People” apparent in the diverse swarms of citizenry. The state could appear in any of them. The mistreated minority is now the bearer of “The People,” requiring the welfare entitled to all who may bear this sovereign crown. The welfare-state is not a departure of the nation-state, rather it is the full development of it. The government need to regulate, supervise, and watch the race transferred to the teeming population who may, at any time, appear as sovereign. Thus the strange irony: the totalized nation-state of National Socialism was far exceeded in its successor states. Social and Christian Democracy took National Socialist regulatory logic far beyond the Third Reich:

On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed representation and protection of a bare-life that is more and more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be rectified into a new national identity. (Homo Sacer, 132-133)

Agamben’s point has become in the politics associated with the Anglozone film Adolescence. The minority’s plight is a reflection of the sovereign, as the radicalized white teenager has ex-cepted himself through his misalignment. The refugee reflects “The People” while the native Briton has become an outlaw. Wrong-think has, in Hobbesian fashion, manifested Behemoth who threatens the satanic state Leviathan. It was also manifest in COVID-19 quarantines, with each lock-down as a ban on an threatening Behemoth population. In these constant crises, which representatives of Leviathan bemoan, potentiality is actualized. Every outlaw justifies the outlawry of the sovereign state. Every case where the state determines “The People” status of an agitator justifies it.

In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the non value of life as such. (Homo Sacer, 142).

It is for this reason that modern medical jurisprudence cannot decide who is dead or not. Traditional definitions (incapacity to breathe) have faded with machinery that can produce organ function. Machines can conduct kidney dialysis, machines can pump blood, machines can even maintain a man who has suffered brain death. The latter category, despite the man being biologically alive (“warm, pulsating, urinating”), has been ruled dead. He is a “neomort” who is no longer legally alive, even as the body continues to exist. He may be terminated without legal recognition. He is Homo sacer.

Agambem lived experienced modern democratic sovereignty through the COVID-19 panic. He refused vaccination, and thus he, in an Italian state of exception, was not an Italian citizen but a plague-bearer. Without MRNA vaccination, his body was no longer citizen. The Concentration Camp Nursing Home became life, it is:

The new biopolitical nomos of the planet. (Homo Sacer, 176).

There may be no way backwards, no way to restore the ritual ordering of Greece. But it was in the Homo sacer that Agamben saw a hope of escape:

Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body - a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body - in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe. (Homo Sacer, 188)

What does Agamben mean by “a bios that is only its own zoe?” To answer this question, one must turn to the thought of Martin Heidegger, an important source for Agamben’s philosophy. Heidegger became fascinated with the biological experiment, where a tick was contained in a jar. The entirety of a tick was contained in its instinct to search for blood. What was life to a tick in a jar? What was time? Instinct revealed that animals were neither world-less like a stone nor were they world-builders like man, they were world-poor. They could only follow the drive, be it the tick in search of blood, the bee in search of nectar (who would continue to suck if the inhibitor, his abdomen, was removed), or the moth in search of light. The last of these could even self-destruct, as a moth would fly into fire to satisfy this instinct. Man has an inverted experience through boredom. A man waits for his train, walks about, observes objects, checks his watch — it has only been ten minutes. While man is the world-builder, he cannot function when he is bored, when he is forced to wait. Nothing holds his interest, nothing is meaningful. But that is when self-consciousness may occur, when what Heidegger called “the originally possibilitization“ [die ursprungliche Ermoglichung] was possible. In the moment that nothing became possible, man could imagine the possibility of the possible, opening a whole new vision.

This Heideggerian observation is the key to inverting modern politics. Modern man has collapsed the political into the economical, where the role of government is to check temperature and pulse. It has resulted in the dull meaningless search for a job:

Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity - who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity [inoperosita] - and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanity’s last historical task -if indeed it makes sense here to speak of a ‘task.’

The traditional historical potentialities - poetry, religion, philosophy - which from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historic-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden - and the ‘total management’ - of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate.

It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by de-ciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. To be sure, such a humanity, from Heidegger’s perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus closes itself to its own openness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man. (The Open, 76-77)

In other words, while modern democracies may be in crisis, constantly justifying their own sovereign potentiality through arbitrary decisions between man and the not-man lump of flesh, it is here an alternative may become presence. Zoe cannot provide its own bios, but what if bios became its own zoe, that biological life was set aside in pursuit for a form-of-life according to a law-order? As Agamben noted in Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd (1570), the two lovers face away from each other, exhausting their sensual use of bodies, now to gaze beyond carnal relations. Only when they understand the expanse of celestial possibilities beyond flesh may they forgive each other for their fleshiness, that there is more to life than intestines and genitalia. Thus emerges Messianic politics, thus emerges the original possibilization. But before that can be fully grasped, the weight of the crisis in law and politics must receive further attention.

The Kennedy family is one of the worst things to happen to America. Within their rapid ascent and their progressive fall, the would-be royalty defined the American crisis of the twentieth century, its mastery of the world and internal collapse, the Liberal Establishment that would commit suicide and form the basis of the exhausted, post-something, that came after it. This blame is not simply heaped upon Irish Catholic interlopers, clannish and sexually depraved, who invaded a fine-tuned WASP establishment. Rather, it was the WASPs, the blue-blood Eastern/Liberal Establishment, the “Yankees” of the Preppies and Ivies, that the Kennedys exemplified as near caricature paragons and as the nadir of their bankruptcy and corruption. They represent a curse on the United States and the near total disaster that this country faced through their near-fifty year dominance over the political ideals of the nation. Many problems today have roots in the Kennedy rot.

The story begins in the the death of Boston. Contrary to stories of “successful assimilation” that many Americans tell of earlier waves of immigrants, the Irish successfully invaded and conquered the land of John Winthrop and Samuel Adams. Perhaps blame can be placed on these Yankees for their several apostasies that their forefathers swore to Jehovah, but nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, New England had rapidly changed. The “Curley Effect” of Irish party-bosses meant a mayoralty that was committed to ethnic chauvinism and strategic immiseration to drive the native stock away, leaving those who remained in a constant dance to negotiate. That was the world that Jack Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald helped erect, a monument that the languid Henry Adams could only weep over.

In this world, a man like Joseph Kennedy would have heaped scorn on the dilapidated world of Puritans. But the Boston Brahmins were not finished yet, not when American destiny was on the cusp of fulfillment. That was what Theodore Roosevelt saw and, befitting his place as one of the ancient Four Hundred who preserved noblesse oblige in advancing a continental empire of Anglo-Saxons, he forged a new path forward. American Empire was a shot in the arm to a dying quasi-aristocracy, not only in bringing together southern and northern blood, but even reaching across the Atlantic. Cuba, the Philippines, the growing clouds of clashing dominions in Europe, America’s place on the world-stage beckoned, a destiny beyond America simply slumping into a northern Argentina of political radicalism and agitated labor. Roosevelt had made the WASP into an ideal, an ideal that Old Joe found attractive. He was an outsider, but he would fight his way to the top. The importance of Old Joe was not simply his naked and seething ambition, but the filthy lucre he accumulated. He was a stock-market fixer, he built his empire on the back of his father’s modest wealth, married into Irish political royalty, and forged important ties with the crooks and gangsters that would define the legacy of Camelot:

Kennedy was one of the first to seize dominant position in the liquor importing business. He used medicinal permits to avoid the restrictions of Prohibition, gaining intimate knowledge of the industry that would place him ahead of his competitors for the legal trade when the moment arrived. He swept into London in the fall of 1933, when it was clear that Prohibition was about to end, and signed agreements making him the sole American distributor of two premium scotches and Gordon’s gin. Kennedy established Somerset Importers Ltd., and operated it until its sudden sale, for $8 million, in 1946. (Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 46-47)

For Old Joe, the Great Depression was creative destruction, an opportunity to leap further upwards. But he was not the kind of man that made Roosevelt’s New Deal, even as he represented a potential partner. Contrary to many misaimed criticism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, carrying the flame of his cousin’s muscular aristocratic leadership, was neither a class-traitor nor a socialist. He welded together masterly a majority of minorities that would mark Democratic dominance into the twenty-first century, but the New Deal was not to be led by anyone. It was for the poor and destitute, be they little white farmers of the South, ethnic white ward gangs, or the growth of a politicized black vote. But its leadership was for the WASP:

Drawing on novel theories of economic regulation and European ideas of social reform, America’s twentieth-century patrician reformers discovered a new means of enjoying the old feudal pleasures, and they found in the Creed of the Expert a way to effect their salvation as a class. They claimed a mandate for a new and Enlightened approach to the problem of human pain and human suffering, but beneath the trappings of science and economic sophistication lurked the familiar paternalistic ideas of the past. (Michael Knox Beran, The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy, 21)

When Roosevelt, in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tones, denounced “economic royalists” and made gestures towards Christ cleansing the Temple as Roosevelt’s war against the filchers and looters of America’s hallowed civics, he was not going after his own. He was going after the ethnic mobsters and corporate heart-landers. He was avenging the WASP against the upstarts (Beran, 25). The Expert could not supplant the new money. The Expert could squash Old Joe. But Joseph Kennedy had already planned for these contingencies. He was part of Roosevelt’s coalition, receiving the top job at the Security Exchange Commission (FDR commented that it took a thief to catch a thief) and later the awkward diplomatic post at St James in London. An Irishman representing America to fellow Anglo-Saxons, it was a nasty joke. But it also removed Kennedy from threatening Roosevelt, two enemies poised to destroy one another with blackmail until Kennedy’s loud-mouth spoke too highly of Germany. Old Joe was finished, cemented with the victory over Hitler in World War Two. But hope would be kindled in his WASPified sons.

What did it mean to be a WASP? It meant pragmatism to solve problems. FDR, like many other WASPs, admired Mussolini as much as they admired Stalin. Stripped of ideology, the two were treated as democratic strongmen, flexible and domineering leaders to guide society through bold and dynamic leadership. Nationalism was always civil and fluid, against both crusty principled conservatives and utopian socialists. Mussolini broke FDR’s heart with Rome’s pact with Berlin. Soon Stalin would break the hearts of WASPs with his doctrinaire Communism. But the spirit that defined these hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-playing, consummate mediocrities was Stimsonian (named after Henry Stimson, FDR’s liberal Republican Secretary of War). Depth and purpose were alien, but action was paramount (Beran, 34). These were men who read in order to perform at a cocktail party serious though contrived discourse. Nevertheless, this led into the WASPified Kennedy’s transmogrification of the times:

For all its notions of progress and possibility, the American liberalism that grew out of the Stimsonian philosophy was a curiously regressive phenomenon: though it ostensibly celebrated the Forgotten Man, it in fact trivialized and diminished him. Where compassion had once consisted of giving a man the tools and the opportunity, as well as the self-confidence, to forge his own destiny, it now consisted of making him more comfortable in his mediocrity. (Beran, 45)

After the war’s conclusion, Old Joe would rail against the betrayals of Roosevelt, another dispossessed Catholic drunk like Al Smith, who resented the budding socialism. FDR was red and Bob Taft a hero (Beran, 63; 79). But the Kennedy sons took flight from this miserly attitude, theirs was the Congress and then the Presidency. Thus, they put their shoulder to the wheel as arch-WASPs, more refined than refined, more Georgetown than Georgetown. Thus, Jack (Joe Jr. perished in the war) bore the weight of his clan’s legacy upon his twisted spine. He would be elected to the Congress, in the class of 1946 alongside Richard Nixon, as a representative from Massachusetts. Accomplishing little, he would squeeze his Irish Catholic vandals to overcome the old hand Brahmin, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., for the Senate in 1952.

While Nixon had ascended into the Vice Presidency for his anticommunist crusading, Kennedy would do nothing in the Senate, attaching himself (and his name) to the push for an independent Algeria. Decolonization was, in the main, a strategy to pivot between European imperialism (which had become increasingly unpopular and sclerotic for most of Western Europe) and Soviet Communism. The Pied Noirs would resent this obnoxious grandstanding American, but it did not matter. It was a step to improve the Kennedy name, a process that primarily unfolded among the Georgetown Set. Befriending and fucking the world of Phil Graham, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, and the Alsop brothers. This was a world of WASPs that quizzled over “what are we going to do about the Italian election?” as they wobbled plastered, martini in hand. How to maintain Liberal America and rollback Soviet Communism? It was their world. (Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, 8). With Germany shattered and the Soviet Union actually communist (a true shock to Liberal ideologues), only these Stimstonian WASPs could perform the Atlas task of holding the world, through Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods, for not apparent reason at all. That was Kennedy’s destiny and he would bide his time, waiting out the two-terms of Me Too Republican, New Deal-lite, Eisenhower.

When 1960 came, it was never a fair fight against the stiff shouldered, Middle American, Nixon. While Kennedy and Nixon were friends in Congress, two Liberals allied against the Communist menace, Kennedy never returned Nixon’s sincere affection. When Jack nearly died during back surgery for his scoliosis, Nixon wept. Unlike Nixon, who had accomplished flagship legislation (e.g. the Nixon-Mundt bill that curtailed Soviet influence among labor unions) and forged a reputation as a red-baiter, Kennedy had little but money. That was enough to turn Kennedy into the presidential JFK. Thus, against a prince of labor, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Jack bought the Democratic primary in West Virginia:

In interviews for this book, many West Virginia county and state officials revealed that the Kennedy family spent upward of $2 million in bribes and other payoffs before the May 10, 1960, primary, with some sheriffs in key counties collecting more than $50,000 apiece in cash in return for placing Kennedy’s name at the top of their election slate. Much of the money was distributed personally by Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. (Hersh, 95)

Jack with Bob and Ted, along with the occasional phone call to Old Joe — that was how the game would be played. With the Democratic nomination tied up, Jack made a deal with the leather-faced crow of Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to shore up his support. It was no easy thing for a Roman Catholic to become President of the United States, as even secular Protestants remained uneasy. But Jack promised never to be a Roman Catholic in the White House, he was an ardent Liberal through and through, which stung, but did not kill, his Catholic support among ethnic whites.

Against Nixon, it did not matter that the Vice President had experience, will, and a bulldog capacity to fight on the issues. He had inherited the Eisenhower gilded age, but for the youth, Nixon appeared as old and colorless. Nixon was weak, Nixon had allowed a “missile gap” (a term coined by Kennedy friend and ally, Joe Alsop) to close between America and the Soviet Union (Herken, 242). Kennedy also punched Nixon where it hurt, the loss of Cuba to revolutionaries that seemed to drift further into the Communist orbit. Nixon knew Kennedy had an inside man, he thought it was Allen Dulles, but it was likely Missouri Senator Stuart Symington (a former Defense Secretary under Truman) or his aide, Thomas Lanphier, who told Jack about the plan to invade Cuba. Nixon was sworn to secrecy and could only appear lame against the robust hawk Kennedy.

Did this strategy work? Was Nixon the weakling? It did not matter. Kennedy stole the election anyway. Through the machine of Mayor Daley of Chicago in the black wards of the city (2, 3, 4, 6, 20, 24) and Democratic machine of Texas that mined predominantly black votes (Brooks, Cameron, Dimmit, Duval, Hidalgo, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kleberg, La Salle, Nueces, Starr, Webb, Willacy, Zapata), Kennedy clinched the votes necessary to appear decisive (see Irwin Gellman, Campaign of the Century for conclusive proofs). Nixon suspected Jack and the Democrats stole the election, but conceded for the sheer point that any irregularity in an America election would be fodder for the Soviets. JFK was now President of the United States and poised to absolutely destroy his country.

What was Kennedy’s presidency? On domestic affairs, JFK was ambiguous and mixed, combining soaring rhetoric with tepid policy maneuver. Civil rights was mostly fobbed off with a paternal smile. JFK was primarily concerned with foreign policy, which would engulf the White House in a series of roiling crises.

The first, and most obvious, was Eisenhower’s planned overthrow of Castro. The Bay of Pigs, as all know, was a disaster. Was it because Kennedy, the innocent dove, fell victim to the cruel schemes of fasciti WASPs like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell? Not a chance. Kennedy was averse to military conflict, not unlike Eisenhower, but was vain enough to screw an operation to save face. JFK would never damage his reputation through a “send in the tanks” policy that smacked of the Soviets in Hungary in 1956. JFK wanted Castro dead without finger prints, a James Bond-esque operation. (Hersh, 200). When the invasion failed, and calls came in for further bombing, JFK was confused. The original plan involved cooperation with the Syndicate, the Jewish-Italian-Cuban organized crime that had ruled in Havana prior to Castro and failed to assassinate the leader. The only way to save the Cuban exile militants was to offer them military support, which JFK would not do. He backed away, better a little dirt than infamy. The CIA and their parapolitical web had screwed up. JFK apologized and moved on (Hersh, 214). Or so the public thought. Liberals were in disarray and confusion, as Richard Helms, future Director of Central Intelligence, would testify:

In a letter to his former boss, Richard Helms confessed to Wisner that the agency remained in “shell shock” since the debacle at the Bay of Pigs: “I do not have to paint a picture for you of the gloom and bitterness which have pervaded these halls. The former is the obvious reaction to a failure, the latter results from what many of us feel to be the high-handed manner with which the activity was mounted” (Herkel, 266)

As part of saving face, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell were fired, the controversy swept away. JFK aped penance for a cud-chewing public so he could privately carry on with the operation. Dulles and Bissell had not gone anywhere, but were shuffled. The new plan was ZR/RIFLE, a new plan to kill Castro with a CIA now squeezed under Kennedy pressure, particularly from Bob. Tapping Bissell and William Harvey, as well as secular Jewish socialist and would-be chemist assassination connoisseur Sidney Gottlieb, JFK pioneered Task Force W:

In the fall of 1961, Harvey was assigned to what became known as Task Force W, the CIA component in a get-Castro squad that was assembled by the White House. He spent much of the next year and a half plotting to overthrow the Cuban leader — and growing increasingly frustrated about the constant pressure to do so from Robert Kennedy. Harvey’s animosity toward the attorney general grew with each failed assassination attempt. It was Harvey’s frustration, apparently, that led to a breach of hsi rules about never talking out of turn. At some point he told a valued colleague, Samuel Halpern, the executive officer of Task Force W, what no one in the CIA would ever tell Congress: that Jack Kennedy had personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE before his inauguration. (Hersh, 192)

JFK never gave up on killing Castro, even as he offered official promises to leave him be. All the better to lull him into a false peace. ZR/RIFLE gave way to Operation Mongoose, where the CIA would again try to use the Syndicate, the combined might of Meyer Lansky, the Five Families of New York and the exiled Trafficante brothers, to reclaim Cuba. Bob would lead this task force to Get Castro. The failure of the Bay of Pigs introduced the first crack where the Kennedys no longer trusted their WASP sycophants, admiers no different than a gaggle of whores gawking at wealth or celebrity. The administration began to mirror Jack’s body: superficial public images of toughness, but private bouts of degenerated incapacitated weakness. As almost a fitting allegory, JFK personally suffered from debilitating venereal diseases that were easily transmissible to the hookers that circuited the White House (Hersh, 232). As Jack put it, “You know, I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day” ( Hersh, 389). That would later bite him.

While Mongoose continued, Kennedy applied his strategy to face down the Soviets over the threat of an armed Cuba. The USSR had placed missile weapons, and Kennedy balked. Genteel WASPs, like Dean Acheson, suggested that JFK get tough and bomb the Soviet sites in Cuba. Jack, more like an Eleanore Roosevelt dove, refused (Herken, 272). The JFK strategy was to talk tough, call a bluff, fail, turn to back channels, and save face. Thus, JFK boldly stood against Soviet aggression in public, while privately sending Bob to beg for a compromise with Soviet ambassador Gromyko. The result was the Soviets appearing to back down, only at the cost of American missiles in Turkey (Herken, 276). JFK appeared to be the bold hawk, but in reality this Soviet gamble to support a far-flung ally with a gesture of military build up helped secure their own borders. JFK failed privately, succeeded publicly, but the blame fell on those WASPs who did not offer their unqualified support to the Kennedys.

It was not that JFK was a secret conservative or ally to the right, as foolish rightwing dissidents today believe. To the contrary, Jack hated the American right, especially its media network working through talk radio, and summoned United Auto Workers union president, Walter Reuther, to draft a plan to shut them down (see Paul Matzko, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement). Even so, Jack had begun to despise all those who refused obedience and locked them from power. The WASP establishment was useless if it was not bought. Therefore, the Kennedys unleashed another CIA op, Mockingbird, to put a leash on already friendly journalists:

Not trusting Hoover and the FBI, the Kennedy brothers turned to the CIA to preempt future news leaks by spying on selected reported. Under pressure from the attorney general, the director of the CIA, McCone, ordered the agency’s Office of Security to wiretap the home and office telephones of Robert Allen and Paul Scott, two Washington-based journalists who, like Baldwin, had recently published classified information in their syndicated column. (Hersch, 282-283)

The CIA was not JFK’s foe, it became a neutered pet. Cuba taught Jack and Bob a valuable lesson: trust only family (Hersh, 221). Delegated to Bob, the glorious crusading Attorney General and ruthless bagman, the Kennedy true government would browbeat, harass, humiliate, condescend, and storm out on his dumbfounded WASP peers. Task Force W, a Kennedy creature, would receive repeated tongue-lashings:

There was further humiliation for the men of Task Force W. Bobby Kennedy, increasingly impatient with the lack of progress in Cuba, decided in the early spring of 1962 to run his own operation. He once again moved into the back channel, as he had done with the Soviets, this time working with the Mafia. […] “[Charles Ford, AG’s personal agent as CIA operative] spent the next eighteenth months, until the assassination of President Kennedy, making secret trips, at Bobby Kennedy’s direction, to Mafia chieftains in the United States and Canada, while continuing to serve with Harvey. (Hersh, 286)

Contrary to wet-eyed liberals like Oliver Stone, JFK never gave up on getting Castro’s head. Even worse, he had no idea how to do it. Convinced that the Syndicate had connections still in the Cuban cities, Bob hammered the CIA to make use of them to invade and assassinate. The result was insane and dreamy plots, like one from Edward Lansdale who believed spies could insert a rumor of Jesus Christ’s imminent return to the Catholic population, paint Castro as a Communist antichrist, and then fire off some fireworks to signal that Jesus was on his way. Experienced CIA hands found these plans ludicrous, but that was Operation Mongoose, that was the President’s order, and thus they played stupid with Bob’s incessant demands to get it done (Hersch, 375-376). At the same time, JFK sealed this partnership between government and organized crime through his recurring relationship with girlfriend Judy Exner, a courier and slut between the President and mafia boss, Sam Giancana of Chicago (Hersh, 295). As CIA failures mounted, Bob took things into his hands more and more, giving personal orders to Cuban exiles that contradicted, and confounded, CIA orders to eliminate Castro (Hersh, 379).

The failure of these dirty tricks in Cuba reflected failures elsewhere. An oft forgotten case was in Indonesia, where Kennedy had banked on a democratic strongman to win over the anti-Soviet left and advance a middle-course. JFK’s plan had clashed with Me Too Republicans, particularly Allen Dulles who pursued a realistic strategy of effective rule. JFK, instead, chose a bungled compromise of indirect military rule through social democratic form and reform:

Kennedy’s plan clashed with the ongoing strategy of regime change that DCI Dulles had set in motion six years earlier. JFK intended to utilize the Indonesian army as “servants of the state” of Indonesia, not for the army to assume power. And second, Kennedy’s intention was to maintain the presidency of Sukarno” […] Unlike Dulles, Kennedy’s plan to make use of the large number of Indonesian army officers being trained in the United States did not have violent regime change in mind. While both Dulles and JFK intended to use the army as a modernizing force, Kennedy was advocating “civil action programs that dovetailed perfectly with modernization theorists’ emphasis on the constructive role of the military safeguarding and shepherding the development process” (Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, 195)

Between the lines of this parapolitical author, JFK wanted a military junto that worked through social democratic means. It was to be softer, less effective, and more wildly unstable. JFK wanted an army rule that had a humanitarian face, though this policy would lead to incoherent support for nationalist wars. Removing the Dutch to forestall the Soviets, JFK would even support Indonesia in a territorial war against Malaysia, which did not serve American interests but did save face for Indonesia’s social democratic independence leader, Sukarno. Additionally, the failure to bridle this crude nationalism resulted in the expulsion of the Han Chinese, which inflamed the People’s Republic of China. These efforts at meddling and backing a mediocrity like Sukarno had further increased a Soviet-Sino alliance that was increasingly on the rocks. JFK nearly used a potential ally to fortify international communism. It was this same incompetence that would mark JFK in Vietnam.

From the end of World War 2, Indochina was an American-adjacent quagmire. While Japanese partisans had warred against the colonizers, Vietnam remained French despite pressure for independence. Though a compromise with the royal prince, Bao Dai, was possible, Eisenhower effectively supported Ho Chi Minh against the French through a policy of inaction and intelligence sharing. Rocked by labor strikes in the metropole and losing military effort (with no help from America), Vietnam achieved independence through a settlement that divided the nation. Even though American ex-OSS officers flanked the triumphant Ho, his doctrinaire communism (once again shocking Liberals) alienated him from the Americans. The solution was a South Vietnam under a social democrat, American educated, Catholic, Nho Dinh Diem. The Americans, however, ended up pushing an immigration policy that destroyed the cogency of an independent South Vietnam:

This influx of over one million northern Catholics [whom Diem felt closer to than most Southern Vietnamese] was, without question, one of the most inflammatory causes of hostility throughout South Vietnam, as the CIA and its allies intended it to be. The stable, nonmobile natives of the south were overwhelmed by these new arrivals, whom the Diem government favored and had settled on their land, into their established way of life and inflexible economic system. (Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate Kennedy, 249)

While JFK was sympathetic to Diem for his social democratic Catholicism, he was also frustrated with Diem’s inability to maintain the stability of South Vietnam against this admixture. Diem was more sympathetic to these Catholic refugees, but they immediately found themselves impoverished and radicalized. Additionally, the native South Vietnamese were besieged with immigrants that threatened their ancient livelihood. Combined with Northern pressure towards unification, Diem pursued the militarized resettlement of government funded “Strategic Hamlets” that would prove a disaster:

Knowing what we do now about the Strategic Hamlets, the million Tonkinese “refugees,” and all the rest of the Saigon Military Mission’s make-war mission from the CIA, it is staggering to realize that by September 2, 1963, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could write, in a memorandum to the President: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.”

The government provided food in vast quantities, medicine, and small-arms ammunition for the inhabitants of these Strategic Hamlets. Because of the enormous number of starving, homeless people wandering around the country, it was inevitable that they would direct their attacks at these well-supplied hamlets. It got so bad that the new hamlet residents would have to leave the hamlet at night as swarms of bandits pillaged these government stockpiles. They were afraid to live there because they were unable to withstand the ever-present threats from the outside […] By this stage, the Kennedy administration had begun to experience serious doubts as to whether the Diem government was “winning the war,” or even capable of doing so. (Prouty, 254-255)

Throw bags of money and pull the plug when failure inevitably set in, thus was the method of technocratic WASPy Liberalism. JFK was sick of Diem’s failures, but that did not mean he gave up on South Vietnam:

President Kennedy had reached the decision that the United States should do all it could to train, equip, and finance the government of South Vietnam to fight its own war, but that this would be done for someone other than Ngo Dinh Diem. (Prouty, 272)

Vietnamization, which was Nixon’s bluff towards a triangulated peace in 1972, was JFK’s policy from the beginning. Throw money and weapons, hope it all settles out in the end (especially if it improves the poll numbers). Most of JFK’s Foreign Policy strategy depended on his second term, which he would win if he could maintain the suave, robust, image that sort of launched him into the White House and the pool-side orgies he would oversee. When JFK’s senior military advisers, Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, returned from South Vietnam, acknowledging the need for substantive military support for a flagging military, with the suggestion for eight thousand combat troops, Jack snorted and sent more guns (Herken, 284). It was not about success, but the appearance of success, which was always difficult to stage manage between the brothers. Thus JFK, humiliating the bureaucracies of the Military-Industrial-Complex, would threaten to willy-nilly move money around to make a point. Fletcher Prouty’s Kennedy partisanship cannot disguise the naked use of power:

Kennedy’s plans for reelection were based in large measure on the allocation of billions of Defense Department dollars available in the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) construction program. This money was going to states and counties that had had the closest balloting during the 1960 election. The $6.5 billion TFX budget made it the largest government contract ever put together. In the process of divvying up the funds, Kennedy had made it clear to the gnomes of the military-industrial complex that he was in control and they were not. (Prouty, 287)

The “gnomes” were simply creatures to be creatures of the family, one that had no concept of honor beyond what could be cast in a ghost-written frauds of valor. If patrimonialism was ever in the United States, it appeared in the hands of the Kennedys — diseased, intoxicated on power and barbiturates, hungry for more. When JFK supposedly pledged to shatter the CIA into a thousand-pieces and cast them to the wind, it was so he could later regather them and hammer them into a private Kennedy organization. That was Bobby’s job and he found it frustrating to deal with bureaucrats whom he did not own:

According to a former Senate investigator, who worked with Senator Long’s committee on eavesdropping, “Bobby Kennedy had a lot of problems with Hoover. There were things Hoover simply wouldn’t do for him — usually because they were illegal. So Bobby created I-don’t-know-how-many proprietaries, including a couple of detective agencies, basing them in big cities down South and in the Midwest. Places like Milwaukee and Detroit. Anyway, they were the Kennedy’s babies, and they did what they were told; sometimes they worked against Hoffa or organized crime, and other times they did political stuff. Actually, they’re supposed to have been set up with discretionary funds from the White House, but there’s no way to be sure. You had a unique situation back in ‘sixty and ‘sixty-one. You had one brother controlling the Presidency, and the other brother, Bobby, wearing a couple of hats. He was Attorney General, sure, but he was also overseeing the CIA: I mean he ran it. What I never understood was all that stuff about Jack’s supposedly wanting to ‘smash the CIA into a thousand pieces.’ Hell, it was his brother’s operation! Anyhow, they had a thing called ‘the Five Eyes’ or ‘the Three Eyes’ — I swear it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the CIA. And it was a Kennedy enterprise — not legally, but in fact. They got their orders from Bobby, and they carried them out.” (Jim Hougan, Spooks, 101)

The names were an acronym: International Investigators Incorporated (Three Eyes), chartered in Indianapolis, Indiana (Five Eyes), founded by three former FBI agents (George C. Miller, George W. Ryan, and Thomas A. Everson) with a total of thirty-four years between them. The liaison between Three/Five Eyes and Bobby was Walter Sheridan, a possible contender for one of the people that made up the composite character “Deep Throat” in the Watergate coup (Hougan, 102-103). The Kennedy family even made use of the security firm Intertel, which some, like Nixon, feared as effectively a bought and paid arm of the Kennedy mafia:

Under Peloquin’s leadership, Intertel’s acquired more than two hundred clients, most of them under “oral” contracts and most of them blue-chip corporations. […] Intertel will protect “proprietary information” (secrets), whether it’s on tape, in print, or an employee’s head; perform background investigations and “employee attitude assessments”; establish industrial “intelligence systems” and guard against corporate espionage; provide “defensive electronic surveys” (debug); authenticate, or discredit, documents using state-of-the-art laboratory equipment and techniques [some of Intertel’s clients included Resorts International, McDonald’s, and ITT] (Hougan, 331-336)

When Nixon formed his “Plumbers” as President, it was in response to the fear that he would get raided through Kennedy private assets. Nixon was paranoid, but reasonably so.

However strong the Kennedy network was, with the capacity to buy-out any blackmail, no matter how many affairs and murders the Kennedys committed, the sleaze would become fatal. In the fall of 1963, an investigative group of Republican senators uncovered the identity of one of JFK’s pool girls, Ellen Rometsch, an East German spy (Hersh, 387). Rometsch frequented the pool parties where “everyone ran around naked.” (Hersch, 390). This kind of scandal had already tanked a British government in the Profumo scandal. Would the Kennedy clan go down in flames? JFK was already sharpening an axe for Lyndon Johnson, his iced out Vice President whose power in the Senate had languished in his absence. Scandals involving his bagman, Bobby Baker, could easily justify JFK dropping Johnson from the ticket. Could Republicans strike a blow, against either figures in the administration? Would they want to? A diseased, crippled, sex maniac who turned the CIA into a hit-squad, that relentlessly pursued Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the Teamster Union, less out of justice than personal vendetta? The man who stole the 1960 election and bought, bribed, murdered, fucked, and ruined countless WASPs and would-be contenders? What would that make of the Liberal Establishment but a bawdy joke in Moscow? It was probably the case that men, who may or may not have personally liked Jack, decided it was time for his apotheosis.

Cloaked in mystery still, November 22nd, 1963 remains difficult to parse. JFK was blown away and the blame, after some waffling on right-wing extremism and an international Communist plot, fell on the lone-nut shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald. Contrary to the Warren Commission (which was quick to lionize and bury the rotting corpse of Jack), it was likely that several moving parts brought the President down. Johnson, now the presidential LBJ, had saved his hide from a possible jail sentence. The Liberal Establishment, seething with resentment for how they were used, had secured their reputation, now even with martyrial glow of St Jack. JFK died for America against the kooks and the Communists, even perhaps against an international Fascist conspiracy. Parapolitical Kennedy investigators never contemplate that the men who shared so many of the President’s ideas feared what he could do to them, whether his own private army or his own mountain of scandals.

While Oliver Stone piously depicted JFK in films, like Jesus Christ in Ben Hur, as the off-screen titular hero, he was likely a fundamental threat to the social democracy that latter day conspiracy theorists believe as the last great hope. It can be conjectured that the CIA hired hitters from among their ex-Fascist contacts (organized in Madrid) to pull off the hit. It was likely French Algerians, including Pierre Lafitte and Jean Rene Souetre, who gunned down the President. They had reason to hate the man who had pointed a finger against the Pied Noirs for their rule. Having created the opening, figures in the CIA likely called upon the Syndicate to clean up the mess, with a Lansky lieutenant, Jack Ruby, silencing Oswald forever. This runs against the usual JFK conspiracy literature, but it draws upon the deep wells of their research. There is no final proof either way, but H.P. Albarelli Jr.’s Coup in Dallas excavates the actual shooters that would tie this theory altogether.

The epilogue to this tragedy involved a William Stockdale, a Kennedy supporter tasked to raise off-the-books money, $50,000. For what? Stockdale did not know, the money was received in a brief-case, tossed, reportedly, into a closet with so many other unmarked briefcases. Was it for Ellen Rometsch, which may have required an endless flow of cash to keep her mouth shut? No one knows. With JFK’s death, the disappearance of this money, which was supposedly for the reelection of the President, disappeared. Stockdale was accused of theft and promptly, within two weeks, committed suicide. His son still wanted to know, as late as the 1990s, why he raised the money (Hersch, 408-411).

Thus, the mantle fell upon Bob, who took to reinventing himself as the nation changed. Jack was indifferent towards Civil Rights domestic policy (which has, ever since, occasionally been mistaken for his nascent conservatism). Bob would rectify this mistake by adopting, a surrogate for the failures in foreign policy. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a progressive, a champion of black plight, one that was far to the left of LBJ’s southern swagger. Bob would make civil rights his legacy:

He was therefore determined to foster the notion that his brother had been a consummately progressive President, one whose last wish had been to launch a great federal war to “end” poverty. The fact that Jack Kennedy had been, in Bobby’s view, so distinctively progressive a President made it all the more necessary for Bobby himself to embrace the progressive cause with a becoming zeal. (Beran, 93)

As Bob persisted forward, bracketing out the death of his brother (he was seemingly careless, or disinterested, enough to refer to the shooter as “Harvey Lee Oswald”), he would hammer LBJ for his failed paternalism. Johnson did not do enough, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, to alleviate the poverty of blacks, he did not allocate enough funds for public housing (Beran, 99). But as the welfare state became, conceptually, insufficient for the New Left, who found it demeaning from an out-of-touch elite, Bob jumped ahead of the problem. He would become the champion of the New Left by attacking all simple solutions through central bureaucracy. The age of the Stimsonians, with their paternal expectation to win votes for material support on a technocratic basis, was over. Following the New Left, the emphasis was on community against corporations and complexes. Now Senator of New York in 1964, Bob would be a leftist critic of LBJ, attacking the administration for its failure in Vietnam. There would be no victory. Instead, the focus should be on the bleeding hearts of the people in the slums and barrios of America:

The “rebuilding” efforts that Bobby proposed in the January speeches were to be the work of individuals and communities, not of government bureaus; Bobby called upon individual citizens themselves to “take the first steps” toward a restoration of their blighted neighborhoods.”; thus he admired Cesar Chavez & his movement: “You are winning a special kind of citizenship,” Bobby told Chavez’ people in Delano, California “no one is doing it for you — you are winning it yourselves — and therefore no one can ever take it away.” (Beran, 107)

To be an American was, for this Kennedy, to build a community, to agitate and seize your rights. The problem with welfare was that it still prioritized the WASP as the fatherly help. But America’s Left no longer wanted that pat on the head and patronizing wink. It wanted empowerment and dignity. Welfare was, thus, considered a kind of dirty bribe to the minorities of America whose time had come. Bob would embrace the New Left with its hope for empowerment. Thus the would-be RFK would declare to the same Chicanos of Delano:

“In our generosity we have created a system of hand-outs, a second-rate set of social services which damages and demeans its recipients, and destroys any semblance of human dignity that they have managed to retain through their adversity.” (Beran, 108)

This rhetoric came with later policy suggestions of federal investment to aid private neighborhood activism. It was the folks that would be given the means to support themselves. Bob had presaged both conservative Jack Kemp and neoliberal Al Gore in their schemes for empowerment and enterprise through federal investments in failed and failing urban blight (Beran, 130). What if it did not work? Did it matter? The point was a willingness for abasement, a willingness to suffer abjection on behalf of left behind minorities of color. Bob was no mere Dixiecrat hustler, appealing to the populist of poor whites, but appealed to black radicals directly:

Bobby Kennedy began to listen to black voices, “he seemed almost to enjoy the degree of humiliation involved. And these encounters were exercises in humiliation, exercises in which Bobby very deliberately abased himself.” Andrew Young was “impressed” with Bobby taking tongue-lashing from angry blacks; Bobby said later “After all the abuses the blacks have taken through the centuries,” he continued, “whites are just going to have to let them get some of these feelings out.” (Beran, 139)

These rhetorical moves were an attack on the Liberal Establishment as a cynical elite that attempted to solve social ills through pay-offs, reflecting a guilty conscience that they had failed in their stated mission. To turn against welfare, however, could sound rightwing. Nixon agreed with Bob that they were both on the same page in 1968 against the Liberal Establishment. Reagan joked that he and Bob must be using the same speechwriters (Beran, 202). Bob had become the torchbearer of the New Left, not only distinguishing himself from LBJ and the Liberal Establishment (many of whom were Kennedy men), but also stole the thunder of Nixon’s Silent Majority. Could Bob have pulled it off? Certainly he may have seemed a serious, even saintly, alternative to the ragged Tricky Dick and the growing civil war within the Democratic Party between old Liberals and the New Left.The bullets of Sirhan Sirhan, or more likely another Liberal Establishment assassin, silenced another Gracchi demagogue, forestalling the collapse even as it ushered it forwards. The Kennedys remained martyrs for a system that they repeatedly tried to raped.

The mantle then fell upon hapless Ted, a bagman without honor. He took up his brother’s senatorial seat until the day he died, seething with ambitions that he never was able to fully execute. It is quite possible that Watergate, the seemingly minor burglary that had little ties to major figures in the Nixon administration, became a bonfire through Kennedy gasoline. Kennedy Democrats made up part of the coal raking to ruin the reputation of the President, perhaps being the goons that encouraged John Wesley Dean III to turn against the President (Geoff Shepard, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, 32). It also did not help that John Dean had a hooker girl friend, Maureen Binder, who was a call-girl for Heidi Rikan, the madam that was running a honey-pot out of the Columbia Plaza Hotel, right across the street from the Watergate (for more, see Phil Stanford, White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story). But that is another story.

Ted tightened the noose around Nixon with loyalists that flanked the office of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Nixon may have fired him out of principled opposition to a conflict of interest, or maybe he acted out of good strategic sense. Either way, the firing provoked media screeching of executive abuse and corruption, with a media complex still in love with Camelot denouncing the President (Shepard, 167). Beyond these pressures, leading to the resignation of Nixon, another result of Watergate was the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Campaign Contribution Task Force, which targeted and threatened Republic donor networks. 158 companies and 131 private citizens (including Ross Perot) were investigated. The scare, and threat of litigation, did not make Ted President in 1976, but it did damage Republican efforts to retain the White House (Shepard, 199-201).

Ted had all the cards, but he already lost the game. The drunken murder of Mary Joe Kopechne in 1969 at Chappaquiddick had basically sealed his fate. Kennedy money and sanctity could secure his senate seat, but could not fully overcome a media spectacle around a murder. Nevertheless, Ted persisted. With the election of Jimmy Carter on hapless dim-bulb populism, Carter’s technocratic willingness to slash welfare and his reliance on the “Georgia Mafia” clique had increasingly alienated Democrats, especially Kennedy Democrats, from the seemingly conservative Carter. Ted would exploit this rift. In an elegy to the sitting President, Ted would try to bury him. He denounced Carter as a traitor to the New Left-inflected Democratic Party:

It is wrong that prices are rising as rapidly as they are […] It is wrong that millions of our fellow Americans are out of work […] It is wrong that cities are struggling against decay. It is wrong that women and minorities are denied their equal rights. And it is wrong that millions who are sick cannot afford the care they need […] There could be few more divisive issues for America and for our party than a Democratic policy of drastic slashes in the federal budget at the expense of the elderly, the poor, the black, the sick, the cities, and the unemployed. (Rick Perlstein, Reaganland, 411-413)

The solution was, like Bob, doubling down on the New Left synthesis into the Liberal Establishment. It was not to give them welfare, but to empower them to run their own communities (even join the hallowed halls of power). Ted clearly favored universal healthcare against Carter’s two-faced lies and deficit hawking. Ted was also in favor of increased immigration from the Third World. While the would-be EMK did not topple Carter, broken on the rock of Chappaquiddick, he would remain in the Senate until 2009. He was architect of the Immigration Act of 1990, prior to the signing of NAFTA, that has formed America’s current demographic dilemma. The Kennedy curse seemingly had stalled

There have been aftershocks and ripples. John Jr. was a playboy who died in a plane crash. Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter, married into New York Jewry and has disappeared, as much as the WASPs have disappeared in the intermarriage with the rise of new elites. It is fitting that the Irish family that had barged their way into WASPdom, also participated in its extinction through intermarriage. Many Kennedys have met untimely ends, with political careers ended through nymphomania, drug-abuse, and cartoonish corruption. Until Donald Trump saved him (for the small-bang of some loyal “Independent” cattle), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had embroiled his campaign with an absurd sex scandal of sleeping with the reporter who covered his campaign. His vocal paralysis is the product of venereal disease and a worm, according to him, has eaten part of his brain. Maybe Jack Schlossberg will enter Congress, like his cousin Joe III, as an inept himbo.

The Kennedy clan has been a scourge on this nation, everything horrible about the WASP ascendancy and Irish assimilation welded into a family of satyrs. At the very least, in the very end, one may hope that poor Rosemary, Old Joe’s daughter whom he callously labotomized, may find reconstitution in the Final Judgement. And in that may the Kennedy name ascend in the smoke of torment, a monument of oblivion.

The Everlasting Struggle for World Supremacy Fought between the Powers of Technology and Magic.

Thus opens Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, an epic fantasy adventure with a blunt political vision. Bakshi is one of America great animators, an Ellis Islander from the Pale of Settlement, who reflected, in his peak decade of output, the cultural vision of the New Left. Bakshi attacked not only Capitalism, Imperialism, and White Supremacy as expressions of the ur-evil of Fascism, but also Communism. All technocratic regimes of modern states reduced man to inhumanity, a core commitment of the New Left against both the United States and the Soviet Union, a revolt against the System. However, this analysis is entirely consistent with the personalist drift of Catholicism that marked the development of Christian Democracy (one that could retain traditional aesthetics or modernize). It was no coincidence that the Bakshi who created Wizards would also make an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rights. While the two had a slightly different cosmology, they shared the same vision of man’s humanity, one that would degrade man into the quaint fantasy of the village against the glory of man’s technological accomplishments. It was the same rot of communitarianism that has plagued the West for the last several decades.

Wizards is a colorful film with a very simple message: stop Fascism. The story begins in a far distant future, one where nuclear apocalypse annihilated most of the population on Earth. The remnants of Humanity coalesced into two different groups: the mutants on the bad lands and the fair folk on the good lands. The former represent the First World nations that depended on the toxicity of industry and thus poisoned the land. They became a race of dimwits, sneaking and useless without firm leadership. The good land, the Third World untouched by the poisons of the West, restored the purity of the Human race in the form of elves, fairies, and dwarves, the primordial ancestors of Humankind. They live in peace and harmony, in spite of the scattered mutant hordes, in the kingdom of Montagar.

However, the queen of these folk, Delia, sensed a foreboding time of crisis, taking ill and giving birth to twins. Like Jacob and Esau, the two boys became good and evil, Avatar and Blackwolf, who would eventually war. The good son Avatar defeated the evil son Blackwolf, who fled into exile and rued revenge. While he initially gathered the mutant forces, along with literal servants of hell, this plan failed. While he had rediscovered Technology, through the use of guns and bombs, the mutants were too cowardly to execute the invasion of the good lands. More was needed in the form of ideology. So Blackwolf searched and found an answer: Hitler edits.

The discovery of ancient reels of film, Nazi propaganda that proudly played the Horst Wessel Lied, inspired the troops and debilitated the enemies. Elven armies fell before the mutants. It led even to the successful assassination of the Montagar president, a likely stand-in for JFK, with the narrator explaining the degradation of the times meant that the people of Montagar would likely blame internal forces, than the Fascist International, for the murder of their leaders. Avatar, in a boozy daze, is finally propelled into action to stop his brother in his desolate capital of Scortch I. Taking his well-endowed fairy girlfriend, Elinor, along with an impulsive, but good hearted, elven warrior Weehawk and the reprogrammed assassin robot, now named Peace, Avatar seeks to prevent another Holocaust. The imagery is not subtle: Blackwolf’s men wear iron crosses and swastikas, he is referred to as the Fuhrer, and he mumbles “Sieg Heil” as he paces within his castle. Blackwolf’s ultimate plan is to take the good lands so he may have a healthy environment to make an heir. When the leader is informed his wife (or concubine?) is pregnant and will give birth to a mutant, Blackwolf callously remarks that he will have to try again. Technology is a way to force the evil upon the good who live in communion with nature, not exploiting it.

The mutants themselves are simple and comically foolish. Two recurring soldiers, who act as a running gag of incompetence, interrogate priests of a temple in Montgar. With the holy relics are Sixties era peace-signs and hippy paraphernalia, the two ministers put up a charade for several hours to prevent their demolition (with one lisping “o Lord!” in an Episcopalian prayerbook affect, and the other a rabbi chanting in a garbled Hebrew). Eventually the two soldiers catch on and artillery levels the temple. Scortch itself is no better, with ugly mutants being accosted by ugly hookers. The life of technology is the impurity of whores, degenerates, guns, bombs, poverty, and oppression. The simple elvish swords and arrows of this world’s Vietcong do not compare to the vicious instruments of war.

Against Blackwolf and his hellspawn, Avatar is a bit of a bumbler. Given to spirits and platitudes, Avatar always finds himself in the moment of need. He seeks the simple things of life: food, drink, a good woman, plenty of rest, and nature’s bounty. And while he has no desire to save the world, he is willing to do it, even if he, along the way, gets frustrated and acts out of impulse. While infiltrating Scortch, Avatar gets upset with the ugliness of this dark and metallic city, summoning flowers to beautify it. He is bearded, small, in his cups, but he remains tough as he is humble. Elinor, her cleavage bursting, always teases him and pushes him to act beyond his immediate self-interest. When Avatar finally confronts Blackwolf, the bathos is stupid, with the former simply pulling out a pistol and shooting the fuhrer, putting an end to the whole empire. Leaderless, the mutants melt away, the literal demons retreat back to Nazi hell, and Montagar is now safe, where Weehawk may return as chief of his village and Avatar, though thousands of years old, still has a thousand more to pluck Elinor as his wife and have a few kids. Earth returns to the bounty of banquet, booze, butterflies, and the harvest.

Wizards offers a simple opposition between militaristic technology and the humane desire to return to nature. Is that not the ethos of the New Left? The goal is the reestablish the truly Human against the inhuman ideologies that continue to afflict the West. Obviously the New Left sees the Right, and its enablers like Nelson Rockefeller, as the great enemy, the Fascism found in cops, soldiers, and junky Neo-Nazi bikers. For Bakshi, this cruel and violent force exists to victimize, particularly the downtrodden blacks of AmeriKKKa. In an early, and far more violently explicit, film, Coonskin, Bakshi depicts America as a buxom slut, seducing virile black men and then beating them to a pulp or killing them. It is not far from a similar anti-American sentiment found in the Canadian band Guess Who, where “American Woman” is the great imperial whore with her ghetto scenes and war machines. In the Seventies, when self-criticism was not verboten, the crude criminality of blacks was used as a call to action, to give up on the false white America and pursue something else. The human, for Bakshi, must overcome the inhumane of Fascist capitalism.

This critique, however, involves a level of inside criticism. Fritz the Cat, Bakshi’s first major film, opens with a gaggle of white women ogling a black man (an anthropomorphized crow) with a litany of college liberal platitudes. They love blackness, make reference to authors like James Baldwin, and the Jewish girl even claims Jews are closest to blacks (and she’s a Jew by the way). The beatnik crow stomps off with a lispy affect: “I ain’t no jive ass black nigga honey.” They’re left stunned as Fritz snickers. But he is no different. After a failed orgy and a police raid, Fritz takes cover in a synagogue where two literal pig cops follow him. While one is puzzled with the mumbling rabbis, the other explains (as a fellow Jew) that they are in a synagogue. As he crawls on the floor apologizing to every rabbi (who intersperse their mumbled Yiddish with petty jealousy), they eventually come upon Fritz. But before he can be caught, the radio announces the United States will be selling weapons to Israel, which causes the rabbis to dance in celebration. Fritz easily escapes. Later, after meeting with some black crows in Harlem, Fritz preaches Marxist revolution, which falls on deaf ears until he denounces the pig cops for their oppression, sparking a race riot. Fritz escapes, the military intervenes, and Disney characters celebrate on the side lines as Harlem is bombed into rubble. The inside critique, a secular Jew who detests not only the Judaism of the rabbis but the Communism of the garment district, is more than on the nose. Jews are part of the problem when they cling to their worthless traditions and their ethnic pride. Take off the yarmulke and fight for the liberation of mankind. It should be no wonder that a number of New Left Jews lead the marches for a free Palestine.

It is from this attitude that Bakshi fell in love with the world of Tolkien, even later claiming to understand him against the clueless and gaudy Peter Jackson interpretation. Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings is parallel to Wizards, only the tone is more serious and there are no large breasted fairies. The battalions of orcs, speaking phonetically German gibberish, take the place of the mutants with their swastikas and guns. It is not hard to see Avatar in Gandalf and Blackwolf in Saruman, though both partake of a more theatrically English demeanor. Tolkien, like Bakshi, despised industrialization and modernization, the reduction of man to machine and the horrors of war. They both despised authoritarian dictatorships and found solace in the vulgar materialism of simple village life.

Tolkien’s Catholicism, though claimed as Traditional, reflected Rome’s increasingly positive approach to the body. Neo-Thomism’s reinterpretation of natura pura meant something like a natural world, with natural goods, that could be judged independently of the supernatural (even as the supernatural completed ultimate questions). The worldly life of the hamlet, with its dances, festivals, and simple indulgence in food and drink (and sex) represents the purpose for which God made the Earth. Not a few cultural Catholics today, especially as they hover among the communitarian right, juxtapose hearty and human Catholicism (with its river dances and siestas) against the heartless Protestant Work Ethic which expects more from mankind than mud villages. Hilaire Belloc’s praise of Catholicism as the world of laughter and glasses of wine is the ideal of which the Hobbits in the Shire, as much as the fairies of Montagar, partake. It was precisely the worlds of Bakshi that Tolkien did envision.

But before the inevitable roar — that Tolkien imagined heroism and bravery, he had kings and traditional hierarchies — it is important to not fall for simple forms. Tolkien did not think highly of authority and power, even as he draped his world in kingship and sorcery (so did Bakshi). In his own words, writing to his son Christopher, Tolkien painted his own anti-politics of anarchism (quoted in full):

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo efiscopari as the best reasona man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals.The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still smalls words to use. ‘I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.’ Have at the Ores, with winged words, war-adders, biting darts – but make sure of the mark, before shooting. (November 29, 1943)

If Tolkien praised kingship, it was because he hated all forms of modern politics. He had no sense of court life or the governance of historical kingdoms. Instead, it was government with a personal touch, which loathsome states, be they fascist, democratic, or socialist, had rejected. The idea of a king, for Tolkien (as well as for many self-professed traditionalists), was the kindly quest-giver, someone who never bothers even as he may be bothered. It is an early manifestation of the anti-politics that led socially conservative Libertarians, who wanted to be left alone to grill in peace, to embrace caricatures of royalism and mock appeals to Francisco Franco. The telos of this political vision is the simple village, left alone and in peace to pursue its traditions since time-out-of-mind (though, in reality, recently contrived and compiled). There is really no difference between this Traditional Catholic ideal and the New Left’s communitarian ethic. Contrary to many critics, the New Left did not advise individualism or atomization, but organization. The Traditional Catholic, who slinks into a form of Christian Democracy critical of capitalism and socialism, is on the same field and same side as the Social Democrat, hostile to both AmeriKKKa capitalism and Soviet Communism. The New Left who welcomes foreigners with their Third World traditions and food is no different than the Traditionalist who considers Catholicism a race and the familia of Latin Americans superior (and mucho conservative) to white American capitulation.

While it may shock to hear a comparison between Bakshi and Tolkien, a New Left Jew and a Reactionary Anglo Catholic, it is not historically odd or radical, not now and not then. Consider the warm friendship between Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, the personalist Catholic (whose theology heavily influenced future pope John Paul II) and the “takin’ it to the streets” leftwing activist who formed Obama. Christian Democracy and Social Democracy may have disagreed on the basis and justification for their particular politics, but they shared a commitment to a nearly identical policy. Activism, be it a clerical procession or an activist march, could pressure the evil and chaotic forces of democracy towards a more just end, uplifting the material and natural conditions of the common citizen. Mauritain and Alinsky even agreed on the race problem in America:

The Montgomery bus affair—inspired by Gandhi and the Gospels—implied in actual fact a certain conquest of power. Your own bus affair for Negro registration—inspired by your ideas about power—implied in actual fact the exercise of moral power (the only power and weapon by which oppressed black people can immediately manifest superiority with respect to white people).

In the spiritual realm (the Church as Mystical Body of Christ) the only power to be essentially and primarily aimed at is the power of love, which is that of a transcendent order. (Other kinds of power, in the ordinary sense of the word, are also necessary—because such a realm exists on earth and in this world,—but only in a secondary way.)

In the temporal realm (civilization) it is normal to aim primarily at power in the ordinary sense (implying coercion, pressure), but such power will inevitably become corrupted if the only incorruptible power, the power of love, is not quickening the whole business. (Your own case, my dearest Saul. Remember your conversation with the guardian of the cemetery. All your fighting effort as an organizer is quickened in reality by love for the human being, and for God, though you refuse to admit it, by a kind of inner pudeur.)

As a result: there will be no solution to the racial crisis in the US if people like you and Silberman and people like Martin Luther King do not meet together and recognize the essential unity of their effort, and the essential complementarity of their methods and inspirations, different as they may be and appear. (Maritain to Alinsky, September 14th, 1964 in ed. Bernard Doering The Philosopher and the Provocateur)

The Human spirit would triumph through love, either one understood through Vatican Catholicity or through Human Rights. Both sought to curtail the inhumanity of the modern world through an appeal to the equality of man. While issues like abortion would continue divide ethically, Christian Democrats could come to understand the need to provide and protect the woman and her child, even if she was promiscuous and conceived out of wedlock. The modern Catholic magisterium seems unwilling to personally condemn politicians that support a women’s right to choose, reflecting this ethical “complexity” that the Bible would condemn as whoredom and murder. With a phenomenon like Liberation Theology, or the hippy-adjacent theology of a Thomas Merton, there was even the possibility of more thorough commingling in pursuit of Human love against inhuman technology and industry, one that would bring the Liberal Establishment and its postwar order to its knees in the Seventies. This overlap continued into the Twenty-First century, with frivolous academic books of political theology, such as Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantment of Mammon (published by Harvard) which advocated for Occupy Wall Street Bernie Sanders with Franciscan characteristics. This common bond continues through a Vatican magisterium allied with antifa against the Trump administration’s “cruelty” towards illegal migrants and criminals.

It is funny that Bakshi’s final film in his decade run, Fire and Ice, conceded (perhaps accidentally) to the cultural counterrevolution. Under the influence of Frank Frazetta’s primordial and fleshy imagination, magic is now entirely associated with the evil prince Nekron (a recycled named from Wizards), who unleashes brown hordes of literal subhumans to destroy the world. Only the axe of Darkwolf’s revenge against Nekron and a literal holocaust of a triggered volcano, which genocides the subhumans, restores the Earth to the kingdoms of man. While similar to many other Bakshi works, its tone reflects (even if accidental) a very different spiritual climate, one of the New Left’s utter defeat against Reagan’s Morning in America.

It may be a bitter pill to swallow that all the communitarian, environmental, little guy concern about the Ring of Power is identical to the New Left and its hippy affect. It may be a bitter pill to realize the hollowness of much Traditionalism as nothing but a gloss for the same politics that have been spinning in the mud since the Seventies. It may hurt to realize that this dead-end results in nothing but a trash heap of middle-brow mortal filth. But it is time to gird thy loins and put away the fairies.

Moreover Uzziah built towers in Jerusalem at the corner gate, and at the valley gate, and at the turning of the wall, and fortified them.

Also he built towers in the desert, and digged many wells: for he had much cattle, both in the low country, and in the plains: husbandmen also, and vine dressers in the mountains, and in Carmel: for he loved husbandry. (2 Chronicles 26: 9-10)

Straightforward narrative, this passage of Scripture describes the prosperity of King Uzziah for his fidelity, one of the godly kings of Judah in its latter days who, like the kingdom, would fall into grievous sin. Some ancient Christians, however, warped this passage, through allegory, to become an account of the soul’s aptitude and pursuit of virtue. It was this method that Maximus the Confessor utilized to explain what he saw was an incongruity in this passage, explaining away difficulties in Holy Writ. But in so doing he, and the allegorical method he utilized, made a mess of the Word of God.

In general, for Maximus, this passage is laden with a-textual symbols that describe the ascent and purification of the nous to participation in the divine energies. As a figure of Christ, Uzziah reveals the divinization of the soul. Therefore the “towers” he built signify the pious feelings necessary to acquire virtue in the flesh. The towers are the “correct spiritual principles of the doctrines concerning natural contemplation” (On Difficulties in Scripture, Volume II, 48.6). The “corner” where the tower was constructed was the union between flesh and soul, between the sensory and intellective. The “valley” where the tower was built represented the flesh, the corner as the flesh’s union, and the tower as the pious feeling to transform flesh upwards. Similarly, the “cisterns” that Uzziah built in the low valleys were the means to purify the Human soul, transfiguring the receptive flesh of the low valleys so it can receive “divine rains of wisdom and knowledge” (48.7). Therefore, this passage instructs Christians in metaphysics and the right kind of disposition necessary to achieve righteous immortality.

In the same vein, and the reason Maximus commented on this passage, was Uzziah’s vine-dresssers in Carmel. These laborers represent the souls that are at the height of divine contemplation, seeking a noetic vision of the divine. They were in Carmel because Carmel is a reference to circumcision, not the Jewish meaning of a circumcision according to the flesh, but the spiritual circumcision that “circumcises matter and material things from the intellect” (48.10). In this telling, the significance of circumcision marks the need for the highest aspects of the mind to remove attachment to sensory and material phenomena. These interpretations, so far, depend on seemingly contrived identification of various symbols of wealth and growth with the ascetic life of the monk. However, these receive a justification because the text contains an error (though one Maximus identified as intentional):

Before touching on the contemplation of these matters, however, I am astonished and amazed at how Uzziah, though he was king of Judah, according to the literal account, had “vine-dressers on Mount Carmel,” which did not belong to the kingdom of Judah, but rather to the kingdom of Israel, during whose reign the city of the kingdom of Israel was built. But apparently the text has mixed into the web of the literal account something that has no existence whatsoever, thereby rousing our sluggish minds to an investigation of the truth. (48.11-12)

Because obviously Uzziah could not have control of Mount Carmel, located in the northern Kingdom of Israel, it was clearly a divinely scripted error to provoke this allegorical interpretation. In reality, there is no textual problem or error. Carmel did not refer to a single location, and it did not always refer to the mountain in the North. Land near the southern hill town of Maon, deep within Judah, was also referred to as Carmel within the Scripture (described in detail when David met Nabal in 1 Samuel 25). There is no reason to think Uzziah did not possess this land. Maximus was simply mistaken. However, the allegorical method offered a way to avoid the meaning of the text and fly into fantasy.

This judgement, however, is not to pit antiquity against modernity. Not every ancient Christian believed in the allegorical method, which had a contested place in the Hellenic toolkit of literary criticism and analysis. Though it may elicit pearl clutching and howls, some of the best surviving ancient commentary on Scripture came from the School of Antioch, that matrix that produced the heresiarch Nestorius and his two teachers, Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who were condemned centuries later, having reposed in the peace of a church that had overcome Roman paganism.

Diodore, in a preface to his commentary on Psalm 118, explained his method. There were multiple layers of Scripture, and there were different rhetorical methods to understand what the text taught, usually with reference to intra-textual reference. There were two means, the original surface meaning and a prophetic meaning, that both flowed from the text:

In any approach to holy Scripture, the literal reading of the text reveals some truths while the discovery of other truths requires the application of theōria. Now, given the vast difference between historia and theōria, allegory and figuration [tropologia] or parable [parabolē], the interpreter must classify and determine each figurative expression with care and precision so that the reader can see what is history and what is theōria, and draw his conclusions accordingly. (Diodore of Tarsus, Preface to Commentary on Psalm 118 in Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church)

History was the meaning of the text in the time it was written, but there were additional meanings that either emerged from within the same text, or from a later text that deepened the significance. History was never at odds with Theory, or the contemplation necessary to fully understand the text in question. One of the more obvious occurrences in Scripture, for Diodore, was figuration, or tropologia. It was when a symbol was used to describe something in more colorful language. Diodore gave the example of Psalm 80 when Israel was compared to a vine, a vine transplanted out of Egypt. It was not a stretch to understand the vine was the people of God, for the text immediately qualified that God removed the heathens from Promised Land it was placed within. Figuration was simply knowing the symbolic register that the Bible used. Vines did not mean divine contemplation, but the Israel of God. More could be said on why a vine was chosen, the tactile aspects of what a vine is and how a vine exists, but Diodore did not dwell further on this point.

Another aspect to Theory is recognition that later Scripture deeps the meaning of earlier, enigmatic, Scripture. Thus, Diodore gives the Serpent in Genesis 3 as an enigma, a mystery whose later significance is fully unveiled. Adam and Eve conversing with a Serpent, that deceived them and led them to disobedience and rebellion, was odd. No snake talks, let alone possessed rational thought. Nevertheless, later Scripture unveiled this mystery, that the Serpent was none other than a manifestation or form of Satan, the Devil, that wicked incorporeal intellective spirit that is chief rebel against the LORD.

Prophetic fulfillment also deepened the Historical reading of the Bible. Diodore thus compared the double-meaning of Psalm 118, which was about the return of the Jews from Exile in Babylon, but also had reference to the war against death that the saints continued to wage:

Now, if this is the subject of the Psalm and someone says that Psalm 118 fits all saints everywhere and that one should always pray to God for the general resurrection, as the exiles in Babylon prayed for their return to Jerusalem, this is no violation of propriety. Being so rich and lavish, the Psalm adapted itself readily to the exiles in Babylon for their request and prayer, but it adapts itself even more precisely to those who fervently long for the general resurrection. (ibid)

History and Theory did not contradict, but the latter intensified the former within the matrix of the text. Psalms about escape from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan, the glorious enthronement and reign of King David, his ignominious exile during Absalom’s coup, the destruction of Israel and Judah, and the return from Babylonia. All of these have Historical significance, but they also continue their meaning under the immortal reign of the Christ, as he gathered a people from the nations and leads them into the Promised Land of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Both the History and this Theoretical signification are simultaneously true, both enlightening the minds of the saints within the intra-textual canonicity of the Scripture.

But the above is entirely different from the equally Hellenic rhetoric/hermeneutic of allegory. This “other-reading” was a means to deactivate problematic texts. As one example, Diodore cites the poetic incest of the gods:

Zeus called Hera his sister and his wife. The plain text implies that Zeus had intercourse with his sister Hera so that the same person was both his wife and his sister. This is what the letter suggests; but the Greeks allegorize it to mean that, when ether, a fiery element, mingles with air, it produces a certain mixture which influences events on earth. Now, since air adjoins ether, the text calls these elements brother and sister because of their vicinity, but husband and wife because of their mixture. Of such kind are the allegories of the Greeks. (ibid)

One might object that Maximus did not engage in this kind of allegory, but it is not terribly controversial to see the lineage of Origen’s adaptation of allegory for the Old Testament continue through the centuries. As is commonly known, the Cappadocians considered Origen as a whetstone. His later condemnation involved errors that did not involve his exegesis (namely his supposed belief in preexistent souls and a recurrent cycle of the Fall). The above passage does not shy away from an open recognition of error in the text itself, not an error in a manuscript copy, though an error that was, supposedly, divinely intended. The allegorical method thus saved this text, and many others, from the carnal, fleshly, “Jewish,” interpretation that simply cannot be true, because it would mean later monks had a more divine understanding of the cosmos than the authors of Holy Writ. It was a pious desire, but one that leaves the text in disrepute.

If Origen’s method could be salvaged despite his personal errors, there is no reason to set aside Diodore and the School of Antioch, especially because its most famous son, John, remains a sainted hero of the pulpit. Below, Chrysostom preached from Galatians 4, explaining that the Apostle Paul’s use of the literal term “allegory” did not mean the Hellenic sense of the term:

Contrary to usage, he calls a type an allegory; his meaning is as follows; this history not only declares that which appears on the face of it, but announces somewhat farther, whence it is called an allegory. And what has it announced? No less than all the things now present. (Homily on Galatians, Ch. 4, vs. 24)

Thus, in interpreting the lives of Hagar and Sarah, Paul understood them figuratively as enigmas for the coming fullness in the Church of Christ:

Who is this who before was barren, and desolate? Clearly it is the Church of the Gentiles, that was before deprived of the knowledge of God? Who, she which has the husband? plainly the Synagogue. Yet the barren woman surpassed her in the number of her children, for the other embraces one nation, but the children of the Church have filled the country of the Greeks and of the Barbarians, the earth and sea, the whole habitable world. Observe how Sarah by acts, and the Prophet by words, have described the events about to befal us. Observe too, that he whom Isaiah called barren, Paul has proved to have many children, which also happened typically in the case of Sarah. For she too, although barren, became the mother of a numerous progeny. This however does not suffice Paul, but he carefully follows out the mode whereby the barren woman became a mother, that in this particular likewise the type might harmonize with the truth. (Ibid., vs. 26)

The “allegory” of Paul referred to the revelation of the Church, which has now encompassed the Nations, leaving the unbelieving Jews in the bondage of the flesh. They had relied on parentage and mere biological descent, and not the Promised Word that had drawn life from the dead. There was no embarrassment or error in Abram’s mistaken conception of Ishmael from Hagar, a half-brother that was not the promised seed, an enigma that would be fully unveiled in the coming of the Messiah. This reading is intrinsic to the whole text of Scripture, without the alien imposition of what would later simply be monastic common sense.

One does not need to heap contempt on Maximus or other Byzantine exegetes to grasp the point. Not unlike today, the educated and culturally attuned find the Bible to be an embarrassment. It contains many odd and bizarre stories from an era that appeared to later peoples (ancient as well as modern) to be barbarian. While Origen had no trouble with the supernatural and ascetic world of the New Testament, the Old remained a thorn in the side of any Hellene trained in the halls of Athens or Alexandria. Origen, however, was not alone in his embarrassment, as elite schools of philosophers struggled to appreciated their own cultural patrimony in Homer. Here was a world of petty gods and blood-smattered heroes, both puppets of a fate they could not resist or fully understand. It was simply not the case, for a Neoplatonist like Porphyry, that Homer sung of the carnal relations between Calypso and Odysseus, a lesser divinity lusting for mortal flesh that the hero, however reluctantly, supplied. To the contrary, it was a poem of the soul’s ascent from fleshly sense towards the One, acquiring virtue and purified from lesser attachments. Both the Old Testament and Homer could service the higher calling of an ascetic cleanse of the nous.

The same kind of uneasiness that Origen experienced with Israel’s conquest of Canaan is still contemporary. The simple, and at times rough, texts of Scripture are targets of Christianity’s cultured despisers. One need not be a Liberal Christian, who has rejected all forms of supernaturalism (and even theism), to understand the gravitational pull of this method and disposition. Allegory may no longer have any academic cache as literary criticism, but not a few commentators profusely apologize for the barbarity of Scripture as an ugly by-product of a less enlightened time. God had to work with the material he had, no matter how rude and unfit. These accounts undermine the sovereignty and majesty of God, as if he were a prisoner to time rather than its creator and lord. With Maximus, at least, there was praise of divine cunning to lure the mind upwards. Instead, God is reduced to the powerless sufferer of man’s many crimes, a strong right arm reduced to handwringing.

It is necessary, then, to embrace the better textual method. What was once urbane and learned now appears as ridiculous mental gymnastics, crazed toothless monks squeezing their moth-eaten scrolls. There is no reason to pursue these methods, no matter how traditional or seemingly spiritual. Instead, there are better, well-trodden, roads that continue, no matter how painful, to learn and embrace the ethos of Holy Writ, Scripture interpreting Scripture within the matrix of its own canon. Only in this way will Christians develop an understanding of their worldview to fight back against the typological Jezebels of today, against the degenerate will-worship and Human Rights fairytales that marks this age.

In my opinion the present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes—rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments. By these general views of the subject have my reflections been guided. I now offer you the outline of the plan which they have suggested. Let an Association be formed to be denominated, “The Christian Constitutional Society.” It’s objects to be

1st The support of the Christian Religion.

2nd The support of the Constitution of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton to James A. Bayard [16-21] April 1802

Alexander Hamilton died from his wounds shortly after his baptism into the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. His conversion to the Christian faith was not sudden, but the product of living through the turbulence of the French Revolution. There is no need to narrate the rise of the Third Estate, the creation of the National Assembly, the never-ending pursuit of writing a constitution, the continental wars, and the final fall of Patrollism (as Thomas Carlyle called it) to the earthquake of Jacobinism. These radicals mocked and scorned French Christianity, committing ever more audacious acts of sacrilege almost unto the point of state atheism. This Christian Hamilton was not the same Hamilton who, in a nasty quip, said the Convention simply forgot to include God in the new Constitution of 1787. But Hamilton’s turn to faith was not novel, but reflected the mood of many of the original patriots (particularly in New England) who defended their Christian republic. Federalism became identified with a strong central state and a Christian political theology. This vision became identified with an American Union.

As Hamilton’s idea for a Christian Constitutional Society had two components, this essay will follow these two distinctions, beginning with the latter.

As both Libertarians and Marxists have argued, the Constitution was a “counterrevolution” against the excesses of the 1780s. Many elite patriots, having fought for independence from the British Empire, were disgusted with rapid pace of social collapse. Independence was a fight to conserve the rights of self-governing assemblies, the idea of “True Whiggery” in the name of English liberty and faith exemplified in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. An Imperial Parliament had, supposedly (there is still a historiographic debate over how much Parliament really changed and whether the Americans ever really understood their constitutional position in relation to Westminster), threatened to rescind these liberties and Americans fought to preserve them. But now what? It seemed, to not a few, that America was dissolving into acid, with nothing to hold together a Union against European intrigue. Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, the year before the Constitutional Convention, saw western Massachusetts farmers (many of them patriot veterans) arm themselves against the tax collectors from the city-state of Boston. They were angered that the tax burden crushed them as the eastern merchants continued to accumulate wealth. They no longer felt represented in a government that they had helped to liberate. What was to stop western Massachusetts from fragmenting from the rest of the state? What was to stop the states from fragmenting from America? These new state constitutions were not universally beloved and there was little reason a new nation would endure. Many of the men who would become the Framers were mortified:

The Federalists, and Madison in particular, as they went about their work in the late 1780s were much more troubled over the irresponsibility and small-mindedness of the state legislatures in the years immediately following the Revolution than they were over the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. What most offended them were such short-sighted actions as paper money laws, debtor relief laws, local tariffs, tax postponements, and a tendency to beat down court reforms and similar undertakings intended for the larger public benefit, all amid a babel of contending local demands, selfish private and parochial interests, and the pushing and shoving demagoguery of popular politics. (Elkins & McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 702)

Contrary to received wisdom, the American Revolution was not fought for liberalism and liberalism did not frame this new Constitution. Even if James Madison was something of a proto-liberal, in his obsessive desire to limit and divide powers of government, he was an outlier among the men who gathered to draft a replacement for the Articles of Confederation. The goal of this new constitution was to limit parochial, small-minded, democracy and forge a powerful American state that could engage the powers of Europe without becoming a pawn (Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government, 3-4). Enemies of this new constitution, the Antifederalists, were an odd alliance of elitists and democrats across the nation, incoherent and unified only by an inchoate fear of “aristocracy” (which more often than not meant the weakening of local elite for a new national elite). They lost and pivoted to becoming strict constructionists, using the bare bone letters of the Constitution to hamstrung its intent that the Washington administration sought to implement (ibid., 29-30).

But what was the intent of this counterrevolutionary recht? In the main, it was, following the Glorious Revolution, statecraft that was married to a defense of liberty. It was a constitutional elective monarchy working through a new kind of parliament, constituted not by birth but by merit (Ibid., 63-69). For Hamilton, the British model, despite its faults and weaknesses, was still admirable. The English had built the kind of republican system that could preserve liberty through a strong state, not liberty at the expense of strength. Therefore, a standing army was necessary to not only defend the rights and interests of American citizens, but to prevent petty militarization of local militias that would not only lose in war, but could be used to divide the nation into competing confederacies (ibid., 123). Many of Hamilton’s enemies considered him a new Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, who maintained international peace through a strong military presence. In contrast, it was a “Country Party” Whig like William Pitt the Elder, advocating for local militia mobilization and decrying the tyranny of a standing army, who led Britain into the Seven Years War (one that nearly broke Britain’s financial back).

For similar reasons, Hamilton also advocated for federal tariffs and a national bank to foster a more stable economy. An indirect, but national, tariff would offset the burdens of taxation, allowing the federal government to assume many of coastal needs of the states. As Hamilton thought, the First Bank of the United States and federal tariffs reduced the tax burden as states charged less and placed more economic weight on mercantile commerce (ibid., 191-192; 211-212).

What motivated Hamilton and his fellow Federalists was a very different vision for the American state. In contrast to Jefferson, who advocated an “empire of space” to escape the Malthusian population trap, a never-ending popular expansion, Hamilton advanced an “empire of time” that could accept the civilizational necessity of a commercial republic while offsetting its possible corruption. (McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 5-11). As a disciple of the Scots Enlightenment and student of David Hume, Hamilton believed that the luxury and prosperity from a mercantile economy did not necessarily lead to vice, but could forge a virtuous and industrious people. Wealth did not necessarily lead to effeminacy and vice if proper channels and supports were in place (ibid., 29-32). A dynamic, even imperial, republic would allow both a strong and free nation, something that many “Country Party” Jeffersonians excoriated as impossible and absurd. Despite their own wealth and local power, they believed anything beyond the agrarian yeomanry, befitting the seventeenth-century republicanism of James Harrington, would be doomed to tyranny and wickedness. Federalists defied this pessimism in industry, but only if handled well.

How was this possible? If Britain was the model, did America need a royal family (which produced dynastic struggles and courtly intrigue that disgusted all republicans)? Did America need the patronage system of a hereditary nobility, which often acted as a burden upon talented commoners (such as Walpole and Pitt), to preserve social hierarchy? What about religion? Many republicans, in the tradition of Machiavelli and later Rousseau, believed Christianity as unfit for the masculine energy necessary to defend and uplift the state. Historians have debated whether Harrington was really a Calvinist Christian or disguised his pagan state-worship to avoid censure. How could Roman virtue be combined with the holiness of the saint?

The answer was not only in the Senate’s natural aristocracy, but even more primarily in the President as chief magistrate. The Constitution provided all the tools for an energetic elected monarch, a constitution, though powerful, executive that could preserve the nation. John Adams feared the growing power of a plutocracy, many being foreigners, who would corrupt and degrade America as an oligarchy. Only the One could overcome the Few and preserve the Many, who were often prone to self-destruction. Commerce may be necessary (though Adams believed it a necessary evil, with emphasis on evil), but His Excellency the President would be able to keep it from enslaving the population under financial speculators (Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many, 232-269; 399-432). Washington and Adams both demonstrated these virtues admirably during the crisis of the French Revolution, pursuing a neutrality against the revolving democratic tides of Francophilia and Francophobia. What caused Washington to be hated in his own time became his great credit in generations succeeding him.

It was necessary, therefore, to produce virtuous and talented men through national academies. During the 1790s, Federalists promoted the creation of these institutions to hone good breeding into virtue and learning, the gentlemen necessary to restrain democratic excess and dissolution (Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic, 3). Contrary to the trend in English schools, American academies would focus on moral philosophy and political economy, an emphasis drawn from the Scots Enlightenment opposed to Francophile emphasis on courtly dance, music, and modern language (particularly French and Italian) (ibid., 37-38). The emphasis was on citizen-saints of a dynamic republic, not courtiers in the royal houses of Europe. President Washington even pushed for the creation of a national university, one that focused on talent over birth, though this received scorn from enemies of the administration (ibid., 75-76; 139). Only through a focus on institution building could the forces of dynamic growth be harnessed towards excellence, not excess.

It was for this reason that Federalists were accused of facing East, concerned with Europe, than West, the supposedly limitless frontier. Hamilton was concerned with competing among Europeans, but that did not mean Federalists were not expansionists. Rather, Federalists were concerned for an orderly settlement, one that brought civilization and social hierarchy into new territories. The Ohio Company, which handled much of the federal land in the Northwest Territory, was primarily a Federalist enterprise, particularly veterans of the War of Independence. Through the constructive use of public credit, a federal tariff, and a focus on domestic manufacturing, America could absorb more of its surrounding territories to replicate the growth and virtue in the original thirteen states (Maulden, The Federalist Frontier, 5-10). Per Manasseh Cutler, a US Representative from Massachusetts and Congregationalist pastor, the Ohio Company would provide that “every man could sit under his own vine and fig tree, with none to molest or make him afraid” (ibid., 11-12). As architect of the Northwest Territory’s boundaries and settlement, Cutler, among other Federalists, a controlled but sustained migration westward would bring peaceful communities that were not subject to the anarchy of squatter fights and Indian wars. A strong military presence and the development of new gentry, men of good breeding and ability, would bring an ordered liberty to the territory (ibid., 31-33). The Ohio Company even included land provisions for new churches, incentivizing eastern pastors to move west to shepherd these expanding flocks (ibid., 69).

In all of these ways, the Federalists had a design to advance an imperial commercial republic. But this republic had its reason in the Christian faith. While Hamilton was a later convert to this unique political theology, many Federalists advanced a broad Evangelical union of churches that would direct the spirit of the nation. These Federalists stood opposed to secularists, such as Jefferson and Madison, who increasingly sought to diminish Christian influence within the American public. This secularization included education, with Jefferson passing over a divinity department in his newly crafted University of Virginia. Instead he preferred a geology department (Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, 43-47). Similarly, Madison had defeated Patrick Henry, an antifederalist convert to the Washington administration, in his bid to create a multi-confessional Protestant establishment in Virginia. It was for these reasons that New England Federalists saw these Jeffersonians as an image of antichrist, traitors to the spirit of American Independence.

Contrary to claims of American liberalism, the reason for American Independence included fear that Parliament was betraying the Protestant Interest, the broad irenic political theology that bound many British Evangelicals together in common cause. But Parliament, it seemed, had subjugated the interests of faith to political necessity. There was a growing fear that India would increasingly provide a role-model for colonial rule, where colonists (regardless of their race or faith) would be stripped of their rights and forced to pay tribute to Westminster. The East India Company’s control of India signaled future imperial rule over North America (Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, 8-16).

But that was not all. This same fear applied to the newly acquired colony of Canada, filled with French Catholics who were now subjects of Great Britain. Parliament’s Quebec Act permitted public Catholicism, not only a betrayal of the Protestant Interest but a possible threat to New England. John Jay, a New York delegate to the Continental Congress, excoriated the Quebec Act as a means to divide and rule in New England, pitting foreign Catholics against Evangelical Englishmen (Den Hartog, Patriotism and Piety, 23-24). Similarly, the controversy over an American bishop from the Church of England reflected a fear that Protestant unity would be shattered through inter-ecclesial infighting. Like the defense of their established rights, which the Austrian Conservative, Frederich von Gentz had defended as fundamentally different from the French Revolution (with approval and translation from the once Federalist John Quincy Adams), the Protestant Interest was undermined through a new approach to Parliamentary overlordship.

It was this same Protestant Interest that formed American political theology. The Federalists, against strict constructionists, did not believe the Constitution was sufficient in itself. It was a “roof without walls” if a broad cultural Evangelicalism dissipated, a national faith that exceeded any single institution (ibid., 4-6). Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and Congregationalist who was convinced Jefferson represented the secular revolutionary interests of the Illuminati, rejected all leveling and all separation of church and state. Dwight argued for the public role of pastors in the social hierarchy, an armed populace, a limited franchise, and the priority (even majority) of small native property holders in a Christian republic (ibid., 63-64). New England would persist with its partnership of magistrate and minister well into the nineteenth century, with state sanctioned bible societies and evangelism.

But New England was not alone or alien in this drive towards a national Evangelical political theology. Georgia, Maryland, and South Carolina gave state funding for Evangelical churches after Independence. Even Pennsylvania, famous for its toleration under a Quaker non-establishment, required an oath for all public officers to believe in God, providence, and the divine inspiration of the Bible. This “Christian Republicanism” defined many of the new states and their Federalist advocates, a political theology that advanced good breeding, social hierarchy, and faith in Jesus Christ as the savior and ruler of the universe (Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 20-22). Even blasphemy laws continued in the early republic, with the New York Supreme Court ruling in the People vs. Ruggles for the constitutionality of blasphemy laws (ibid., 65-68). Even after the Federalists fell from national power, reduced increasingly to a rump party against Jefferson’s conciliatory efforts (winning over some moderate Federalists), they continued to shape the nation’s religious ethos. The American Bible Society continued the drive for Christian Republicanism, where a commercial republic and social hierarchy flowed with a public faith in Christ (Den Hartog, 111-115). The Constitution and Christianity would only persevere together to maintain the ethos and structure necessary for republican government, under a monarchical chief executive, to resist the constant corruption that threatened to destroy it.

Jefferson may have succeeded in forestalling this problem through unbounded expansion and limited conquest, but with the close of the frontier, the same problems reemerged. Despite the defeat of the Federalists and this particular visions, instances of it continued to reappear in the birth of the National Republicans. Even the early Antimason Party was a populist expression of Christian Republicanism against the international infidelity of Masonry, which brought together European revolution and democratic leveling under a supposed occult elite (Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic, 22-33). John Quincy Adams, returning to Congress after his presidential term, ran as an Antimason against the threat of an upstart monied oligarchy that Antimasonry stood against (ibid., 154). Though the Whigs were incoherent and divided in their opposition to Andrew Jackson, leveler and Mason, Peter Augustus Jay, son of John Jay, still supported them against the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren. An incoherent, but somewhat Christian Republican, party was better than the advocate of egalitarianism and infidelity (Den Hartog, 184-185).

This energy would continue through the nineteenth century, eventually influencing the muscular Christianity that propelled Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. It would continue, ebbing and flowing, throughout the twentieth century. After the Fourth Great Awakening of the postwar era, the heirs to this tradition, as part of the New Right, would eventually help catapult Ronald Reagan into the Presidency in 1980 and, in a similarly age defining election, Donald Trump as GOP nominee in 2016. While now far more populist in orientation (a product of mass democratic politics), the same vision can be seen throughout its many shifts, permutations, and turns. A strong dynamic commercial republic, with muscular imperial attributes, went hand-in-hand with a strong Christian political theology. The national-interest was not necessarily in contrast to faithfulness, as much as prosperity did not contradict virtue. The greatness of America could, and possibly did, flow with submission to the law-word of God. This vision provided an alternative to Jeffersonians and Jacobins in the past. It may once again offer light against the continued tide of darkness today.

Despite his scattershot political attachments, Richard Baxter was an architect of Christian Empire for an Evangelical England. During the Civil Wars, Baxter tepidly sided with Parliament in light of Charles Stuart’s supposed pledge to Irish Catholicism for an army. He deplored the Regicide, disdained the Republic, and disliked Oliver Cromwell, until he understood what the Protectorate had accomplished. Baxter then became a strong partisan for Richard Cromwell, never forgiving John Owen for his involvement in the Army coup and the restoration of the Rump Parliament. During the Restoration, Baxter quietly supported the monarchy as he continued a reluctant non-conformity outside the national Church. With the rise of James II, Baxter flirted with quietism and permanent separation, only to become a wholehearted supporter of William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution, believing that comprehension (the reabsorption of Presbyterians into the Church of England) could still work before his death in 1691.

Despite his oscillations between a reluctant parliamentarian, a partisan for the Protectorate, and then an apologist for royalty, a single vision of Christian empire unified Baxter’s political theology. The godly prince was the head of his realm, supporting righteousness through his justices and ministers. Baxter rejected the idea that power was ever fragmented into the highly tendentious categories of “civil” and “spiritual” which then belonged to prince and prelate respectively. Rather, this dichotomy corrupted reality, leading towards the transmogrification of ministers of the word into usurping prelates, who sought to build a Judaized universal empire under their own authority. Ministers had a unique delegated authority to teach, celebrate the sacraments, and discipline the congregation, but that authority was not a unique spiritual province that was equal to the prince.

It was for this reason that Baxter despised popery as the ultimate corruption of the Christian eschaton, where the gospel would not only conquer the hearts of princes but lead them to implement Christian kingdoms. Papists not only attacked this vision, but also both clerical Presbyterians (usually of a Scottish variety) and High Church Episcopalians (who were jealous to protect their power over the conscience as spiritual monarchs). Like Hobbes, Baxter rejected these divisions as subversive fictions, though unlike Hobbes, Baxter believed in a limited constitutional polity. Nevertheless, for Baxter, the Christian prince was paramount to the success of the gospel. High Church Episcopalians, in contrast, sought to bolster their authority by linking arms with the increasingly independent French Catholic Church. Under the sway of Louis XIV’s ambitions and Gallican ecclesiology, where the church was basically independent of the pope’s universal authority even as it preserved Tridentine dogma, some High Church bishops saw an opportunity to link England and France in a conciliar episcopal conference. For these High Churchmen, Christian princes, more often than not, hindered the spiritual principality of the Church.

Baxter had nothing but scorn for this disposition, writing in a letter to a friend:

Would we not have Christian Kings? Was not Constantines Reign a grand blessing to the Church? who knoweth not that it was he by advancing Christians that let in the Crowd of Hypocrites. And that they will come in when ever prosperity and Godly Princes do invite them: The most will be on the upper side. Shall we therefore be against the Kingdom of the world becoming Christ’s Kingdome? Or wish the Church to continue persecuted? If that be best, why write we against the Beast for persecuting? Why pray we not for persecution but against it? (in William Lamont’s Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution, 59)

The problem for Baxter was not with bishops (Baxter accepted a “primitive” episcopacy where bishops governed with and through their presbyters, not over them). The problem was the vaulting of a supposedly independent sacred authority in ministers that was antagonistic towards “secular” authority so-called. While Baxter opposed classical Erastianism, where ministers had no authority to discipline and only the state (be it king or senate) could enact moral censure, he believed that the success of Christian ministry depended on succeeding in converting the chief magistrate. It did not mean the churches were powerless in a time of heathen rule or anarchy, as Baxter’s Worcestershire Association (a cooperation of ministers — Presbyterian, Independent, and even some Episcopal — to effectively catechize the laity and maintain order) had accomplished. It was this spiritual union that the early church possessed until Constantine. But that spiritual union was always oriented towards Constantine, the telos of the Kingdom of God appearing among the realms. Under the Protectorate, Baxter’s associationism found legal sanction, where a generous orthodoxy was instilled through a Board of Triers, who tested ministers for competence and moral probity. With the threat of antinomians (who disdained any outward discipline), Richard Cromwell promised the restoration of a broad Evangelical front that had existed during the Tudors and would return under William.

Baxter’s vision for Christian Empire derived from his reading of the Apocalypse. Like many who have a brush with end-of-time doomsday hucksters, Baxter was initially sour on the use of Revelation to give any sense of interpreting the times. Quaker women ran naked into churches, Diggers enacted imbecile communism, and Fifth Monarchists were willing to pursue anarchy because of their false prophecies. Baxter, however, rediscovered the work of Thomas Bilson, a Tudor bishop who understood Revelation as the historical war between the rise of godly kingdoms and the sacerdotal antichrist of popery. Even more, to the consternation of Baxter’s peers, he followed the Tudor historian and theologian John Foxe, taking a more dynamic view of antichrist. While the papacy was one form of antichrist, it was not the exclusive preserve of darkness. All forces, Roman or Reformer, that sought to depreciate a Christian Emperor, that forestalled or subjugated Christian Davids, partook of antichrist. Revelation was the struggle between the godly to disciple the nations and the Satanic attempts, through beasts and whores, to destroy this work. Baxter called this polity “Theocracy,” a state “when Princes govern from God, by God, and for God in all things.” (ibid., 187). Revelation promised the saints eventual triumph to bring Theocracy, the iron rod of Christ unsealed in the scrolls of ancient prophecy.

Before he died, Baxter did see this unfold in the broad Protestant Interest of William III, with the 1690s unleashing a wave of patriotic fervor for an English Evangelical Empire. This attitude spilled across the Atlantic, influencing the growing sense of a Protestant nation of America. The Great Awakening, which gripped the colonies more than the metropole, forged a growing sense of a national religious ideal. In the lead up to the Revolution, many Americans had become frustrated with the increasingly secular imperial Parliament that would permit legal popery in Quebec and the plan to place a Church of England bishop over North America. The latter was hateful not because it was a bishop, but because it signaled an attempt to break up the broad Evangelical union. Defenders of an American bishop argued, instead, for a dichotomy of powers, a secular civil authority and a spiritual monarchy of prelates. This theopolitical concern was part of the broad Whiggish revolt against an imperial Parliament and its enablers (including, eventually, the king).

After independence, while the Constitution barred the creation of a national establishment, it did not dissolve the broad Protestant Interest that united Americans. Early fears of Presbyterian dominance (influencing the [in]famous letter to Jefferson from the Danbury Baptists, eliciting his support for a wall of separation) gave way to a desire for an Evangelical Union, one that intensified after the reports of Jacobinism. Much of American history can be divided between political secularists and political evangelicals, the latter coalescing into the Whig party. Part of the opposition to Jacksonian Democracy was the general unwillingness to be a public Protestant, with Jackson himself refusing to call a national day of prayer and fasting when cholera ravaged New York City. After the Civil War, a Third Great Awakening brought about the strong Evangelical presence in the Republican party, advocating for restrictions on alcohol, popery, and Mormonism. The president was expected to operate as a godly chief magistrate, to set the example and govern the nation. In retrospect, the arc of history, beginning with Washington and Jefferson, through Lincoln, led to Roosevelt Rex. Unitary executive theory has continued apace. It does not mean every Christian “prince” will be good (with Baxter having admitted that a Nero was preferable to anarchy). But it is the trend in the history of the establishment of godly empire, even in spite of efforts to forestall it.

To interpret and apply Baxter further, the distinction between the promise of godly empire and the antichrist inversion of it reveals different forms of universality. Godly empire was an instantiation of the New Jerusalem, a drawing down and figuration. It is the catholicity of this “form” that shaped the empire of the Franks and the empire of New Rome, where emperors were enthroned as new Davids and new Solomons to rule from God’s law. Edward VI was hailed as a new Josiah and Elizabeth as a new Deborah. In contrast, false universality is to forge the New Jerusalem on Earth. Most particularly this effort has come through the papacy, moving from a patriarchate that had become the province of Italian aristocrats towards the global institution of universal immediate judgement. Not all popes, let alone all Roman Catholics, have endorsed or have support this movement, but in retrospect historians have marked the rise of the papacy towards this imperial role as its destiny, especially those of a Newmanian bent. The church, and the entirety of the kingdom of God, was forced into a universalized institution, one that has also adopted increasingly, post Vatican II, a universalized humanity under a global government, which includes the spiritual sovereignty of the Pontifex Maximus.

For Baxter, the errors of transubstantiation or justification by faith and works were of a secondary order to this division and subversion. In principle, Catholics who were anti-papal were less obnoxious than Protestants that vaulted an independent spiritual authority of the church against the state. It was not a question of the state controlling the conscience, which no creature had power over, but the laws of the realm.

These arguments for an independent “spiritual” power have far less purchase today, but they have an analog in the “social” (or “private”) that has an inviolable and total separation from public state authority. Per the thought of Jurgen Habermas, the “Social” became the domain of producing legitimacy and legitimation, with battles over the independence of the social from the political. Liberalism, in its start, operated as a strong demarcation between the two, usually at the expense of the latter. When Thomas Paine argued that society is independent of government which was only a handmaiden to the former at best, he can almost sound like Pope Gelasius. The Voice of the Church is now, in modern parlance, phenomena like Society, The People, Public Opinion, or even History (all equally malleable for the needs at hand). It is no surprise that the papacy has morphed increasingly towards being a global NGO, an arbiter of social opinion, a deterritorialized office that has increasingly little to do with Europe proper.

American Evangelicals, out of instinct, have condemned globalism as evil or satanic for impinging upon American national sovereignty. In spite of globalism being a tool for a certain vision of American dominion, these Evangelicals understand that something is wrong with this vision. The American state has become subverted as a tool for a kind of universal project, be it more pragmatic through the multipolar Trilateral Commission agreements and the World Trade Organization or something more dreamy through the United Nations. These NGOs often appear to be beyond the reach of American law to punish them when they fail the American people. It is not absurd to imagine a scenario where laws recognizing the spiritual inviolability of Roman Catholic confession may be used to protect illegal immigration and impose functional open borders. American Evangelicals, as part of the broader right, have generally been wary of “statism” and “authoritarianism” as the true threats to their freedom, but they have begun to come around the importance of robust executive power, especially in service to erection of a godly empire.

America has a long way to go before that epithet is applicable to the foreign or domestic policies of the United States, but there is hope through analogs to the Baxterian associations. For whatever reason or purpose, America has been gifted a strange and rapid place on the world stage. There is no need to retreat to weak and inept “ethno-states” that often demand to simply be left alone. Not all nations are equal and not all receive the call and means to rule over others. By providence, America has a call to rule over other nations and bring the light of the gospel. Charlemagne’s Franks ruled over a diversity of tribes and unleashed a renaissance of learning. Alfred of Wessex united the Angles and Saxons into a single empire, bringing enlightenment in the Dark Ages so-called.

America is certainly not the only, and will likely not be the last, great power to command others towards the illumination of divine law. But Baxter’s understanding of theocracy demonstrates the stakes. These are no mere accidents of history, but all contingencies bend toward the Book of Revelation, as the scrolls of time unfold. It would be better for American Evangelicals, in charity and unity, to understand the vision for a godly chief magistrate. Man lives not in the end-of-time, but the time-of-the-end, where the saints will persevere against the beasts and the dragon. May King Jesus rule with an iron rod through his president in the time that is given to the American race. By solemn providence, the angels shall continue to read the scrolls and sound forth the trumpets.

Like trauma in psychoanalysis, crisis, which has been removed from its terrifying place, reappears in pathological forms in every sphere and at every moment. It is separated from its “decisive day” and transformed into a permanent condition. Consequently, the faculty of deciding once and for all disappears and the incessant decision properly decides on nothing. Or else, as happened to Pilate, it suddenly reverses into catastrophe. The indecisive one — Pilate — keeps on deciding; the decisive one — Jesus — has no decision to make. -Giorgio Agamben

Time is important to Christianity because of God’s providential acts. There is no endless seasonal cycle or wheel of time, but God’s guidance towards an end, where the divine will be all in all. In the coming of the Christ, the end of man had come. The time of night had given way to the morning star. Yet even the Apostles were confused about the time of the Christ, asking Jesus before he ascended: “wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) In Pentecost, Christ fulfilled his promise to return again to his friends, present now through the Spirit of God. It was now the time of the end.

Early Christians had different expectations of what this temporality meant. Some early Christians expected a soon coming material millennial reign, but others condemned this view as Judaized and confused. Christ’s kingdom was not a mega-Israel, even it included some nations besides Jews. It is the Heavenly Jerusalem, the eternal city, that is, like the Spirit, throughout the world and definitive for the world-order. It was this order of things that Eusebius of Caesarea articulated in his history of the Church, which concluded in his own day where a Christian Augustus had put an end to persecution and welcomed Christian teachers into his court.

Eusebius has always had his critics, especially in more modern times. After Carl Schmitt had wrote a short work on the importance of theology for understanding political concepts, Erik Peterson, a convert to Roman Catholicism, criticized this Eusebian, as well as pagan, “political monotheism” as unbecoming of the Church. Augustine, in Peterson’s contrast, had rejected all political theology and revealed that Christian was incompatible with it. Writing at the height of the NSDAP in Germany, and thus somewhat cryptically, Peterson saw the Augustinian Trinity as the end to all politics. The City of God was manifest in the Church and the Church was manifest in the liturgy. It was in the worship of Christians, not any Christian king or court, that Christianity demonstrated a fundamentally a-political disposition. History was emptied of all significance, where Rome had no divine purpose. Eusebius, instead, had reimposed pagan significance to empire, and thus supposedly confused the sacred with the saeculum, this worldly age that has, ultimately, no significance. Schmitt was thus Eusebian and betrayed the Church in the days of the Third Reich.

With the defeat of Germany and the ruin of Europe from the war, this interpretation seemed to be vindicated. Conservative Catholics, looking for a way out from either revolution or reaction, sought in Augustine a justification for a secular politics under, or beside, a sacred church. R.A. Markus, a Hungarian Catholic living in England, adopted this paradigm in his explication of Augustine’s ecclesiology. In Markus’ analysis, Augustine understood the Sixth Age of the Church as a flat line, though one full of struggle, between incarnation and final judgement. There was no meaningful significance to the conversion of Constantine or the Christianization of Rome, mere accidents of time that had no prophetic significance. Instead, the good of a Christian Rome was the good of any secular authority, namely to reduce trouble and support order. According to Markus, the Church was only ever a partner to these efforts, criticizing failures or supporting successes. Augustine thus not only paved the rejection of all charismatic dictators, but also all revolutionary socialist politics. There was nothing beyond this saeculum until God ordained it, but that seemed only to provoke agitation. Secular democracy was thus of no ultimate significance beyond its ability to preserve order, and therefore Catholic embrace of democracy for a pluralist and neutral society was entirely consistent with Augustinian apolitical theology. Nevertheless, Markus admitted that Augustine’s heir did not understand:

Orosius, who wrote his Seven books of histories against the pagans at Augustine’s suggestion, had wholly failed to understand his master’s mind. Orosius once more reverted to the tradition of Origen, Eusebius, Prudentius and the rest (Saeculum, 161)

Orosius was Augustine’s disciple and friend, who sought to carry on Augustine’s City of God and formed the Medieval basis of Christendom. But, according to Markus, he had slipped into the same political monotheism that other Christians accidentally fell into because of their polemics against pagans. Origen had, in his debates with Celsus, fallen into the trap of arguing the Christian God as guiding Rome against the pagan emanations of the Platonists. But behind Markus, and his version of Augustine, is an entirely different theological project. Schmitt had discerned the current direction of Europe, writing about a decade earlier than Markus, in response to Peterson’s criticism:

Our contemporary society is progressive. This unfettered progress entails a value-free and scientific attitude, the commodification of all values and the augmentation of liberal human consumption. Furthermore, our society is made up of a plurality of social groups in which everything becomes plurivalent, and it is finally, as J. B. Metz says, a hominising [humanisierende] society. I think that such a progressive, plurivalent, hominising society permits only that kind of eschatology which is immanent to the system and therefore also progressive and plurivalent. This kind of eschatology can therefore only be a homo-homini-homo eschatology. At most this eschatology is an utopia on the principle of hope, the content of which is an homo absconditus who produces himself and, moreover, produces the conditions for his own possibility. (Political Theology II, 54)

Schmitt thus revealed the great modern departure from the world of Eusebius and Augustine. There was no great break in political theology. Eusebius gave an account of victory through centuries of martyrdom, Augustine confirmed that suffering continued, even under persecuting or apostate caesars. Eusebius was not so narrow to limit imperial conversion to Rome and Augustine was not so secular to discount the triumph of Constantine. What Orosius, as Augustine’s disciple, transferred to the Germanic kings was this sense of universal cosmology, passing to them the mantle of not only Christian Rome, but Israel. They were not simply new august Constantines, but new Davids, the recurrence of the biblical forms among new peoples and new places. This political theology was thoroughly Pauline, in that the juxtaposition of Galatians 4 is between spirit and flesh, the Heavenly Jerusalem as the city of all the elect. It was from this source, of an eternal throne and eternal altar in an eternal city, that all Christian culture flowed, where even Franks could be baptized as Israel.

Biblical political theology was not the removal of sacred-history (heilsgeschichte) from a secular, this worldly age straddled flat between incarnation and parousia. But, rather, it was the expansion of sacred-history to be capable of absorbing all polities. As much as a people were in the Kingdom of God, their history was bound to the Bible. As much as a people were still under the rule of Satan, their history was still bound to the Bible as the Heathens and rebels. Under the rule of Christ, the whole cosmos was in the time of the end. It contained within it both apostasy and rebellion, it contained prophets and martyrs, saintly kings and pious judges, wicked rulers and compromised tyrants. The Church was thus the entirety of believers, not limited to a clericalism identified with sacred officers. It was the whole elect, of Christian kings and Christian bishops, of Christian nobility and Christian burghers, drawing down the forms of the City of God.

The corruption, inversion, and even parody of this vision was secularization. This process did not begin with liberals or republicans, though they advanced their own cosmological schemes. The process began often from within the church, the reduction of royalty and estates to purely secular authority as a means to assert clerical privilege. Crowns were simply of this saeculum, ultimately irrelevant to the sacerdotal power of priests. Concordats of mutual recognition often buried the irrepressible conflict, especially as Christendom, as Tyconius, the brilliant exegete and teacher of Augustine, understood, was simultaneously the Body of Christ and the Body of the Devil cohabitating the same space. The same body contained the two, as much as the same body produced Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob. It was this eschatological conflict within Christendom that would be twisted, that the instruments of godliness would receive a perverse parody. Every city may exhibit the Heavenly Jerusalem or it may become like the earthly Jerusalem, a diabolical Babylon.

The contemporary era, as Schmitt discerned, is a Humanist eschatology, where the saeculum has become the only reality. The Bible’s continued interpretation of events has been bracketed because the time of the end has been perverted into the end of time. New revelations, new prophecies, new time tables for the conclusion of this age become the oozing puss of this blackened satanic corruption. Various spiritual movements sought to turn the page and find the end of time, be they the medieval Spiritual Franciscans, the early modern Fifth Monarchists, or modern day Dispensationalists. Whether it was the coming Age of Spirit, the physical reign of Jesus in England, or the soon to come rapture, all reflected the need to bring something new beyond what Christ accomplished. His ascension, symbolized in the book of Revelation, has been diminished. Post-Christian ideologies, such as Jacobinism or Bolshevism, exude similar expectations of a fresh new world, of a liberated man and withered state. Like other apocalyptic movements, they find that they never arrive. They are stuck at the end of time, when the revolution breeds reaction and the intermediary stage never comes to a close.

It is for this reason that current debates about millennialism are misguided. The question is not premillennialism or postmillennialism, but whether the Bible still speaks. Many millennialists reduce Scripture to merely speaking of the beginning of the church-age (in a form of preterism) or the end of the church-age (predicing the final doom of things). Revelation is simply about already happened (perhaps with Domitian) or what never seems to come about (and therefore a book irrelevant outside the very end of time). But Revelation was a book not only for the time of St John, but for all Christians everywhere, an exposition, in visionary symbols, of the time of the end. With the perversion of this order, while some certain millennarians have abandoned all notions of a Christian politics, a vision of saeculum has moved into the void, marking the current neo-/post-liberal global order. Because Progress never quite arrives, it is simply management of resources and bodies to approximate a greater sense of human flourishing in a time without any form or meaning. It is, as Schmitt called it, Homo absconditus, the victory of man at the same time he disappears, or that the man global governments govern for is never yet there.Past man is always inhumane to present man, as present man shall shortly become to future man. Even though many Dispensationalist Christian would abjure this idea, they are no different, localizing all sacred-history in the supposed prophecies surround the Zionist state of Israel. Is it any wonder that apocalyptic media, be it ecological or extraterrestrial, is indistinguishable from fiction about the rapture and tribulation?

This irony marks this supreme corruption of Christian cosmology. The time of the end becomes the end of time. The state of emergency, the coming end, is always occurring but never comes. All laws become suspended in the urgent expectation that the crisis is coming, but it never does. Nothing ever seems to happen because crisis is always happening. It is this lawlessness that the Apostle Paul described in his 2nd Letter to the Thessalonians:

The day of Christ is at hand.

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.

Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?

And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time.

For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. (2: 2-8)

The appearance of Christ, the parousia, is not limited to the final judgement, in which all the sheep and goats shall be assembled together in the resurrection. But the appearance of Christ was in 70 AD, that shattered the Jewish construction of a saeculum, the end of time was upon them, even though they lived in the time of the end in the Christ. Their forces gathered and were smashed through Rome. What was an antichrist, hailing the lamb with the voice of the dragon, gathered together the deceived and was eviscerated through the Spirit. The Man of Sin was the Outlaw man, the man of Crisis, whom the Spirit overcame.

Giorgio Agamben understood this eschatological perversion in the resignation of Josef Ratzinger from the papacy. Seeing in this act great courage, Ratzinger had demonstrated the impotence of a Jerusalem (Rome) that had become earthly, that had become Babylon. In the Vatican’s embrace of the saeculum, as a partner of this liberal global order, it had made the focus the end of time, the endless progress never quite leading out. That was what Peterson and Markus, incidentally, theorized, an embrace of antichrist as the supposed accomplishment of Augustine. But the time of the end was a time of judgement, and judgement was something that broke into history:

I believe that only if the mysterium iniquitatis is restored to its eschatological context can a political action again become possible, in the theological sphere as in the profane. Evil is not a gloomy theological drama that paralyzes every action and renders it enigmatic and ambiguous, but it is historical drama in which each person’s decision is always in question […] And it is in this historical drama, in which the eschaton, the last day, coincides with the present, with the Pauline “time of the now,” and in which the bipartite nature of the Church’s body as of every profane institution is finally reaching its apocalyptic unveiling — it is in this drama, always underway, that all are called to play their part without reservation and without ambiguity. (The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, 38-39)

It is in judgement, which is given form and name through the symbols of the Bible, that reveals Christ’s lordship. It was a parousia at the Milvian Bridge that judged Rome, leading to the defeat of the reprobate and uplift the saints. That was what Eusebius understood, not as an imperial toady or wig dresser (as liberals have slandered this great history). Rome had become, in the biblical cosmology an instance of Israel, Moses the former prince of Egypt had now led the people of God out of the darkness. But this parousia is not localized to victory. For the appearance of God led also to the division of the kingdom into two and, ultimately exile. But a remnant, in all times and places, will persevere until the end of the end.

The goal, as Agamben wrote, is to free up action. It is to know the divine judgement standing over this world, that the Bible still speaks over all peoples, places, and polities. The body of Christ and the body of Satan coinhere in the same place, and the former will defeat the latter as it coalesces. When the global order’s sins have reached the fill, then it will be judged, slain with the breath of Lord, the one who already has arrived overcoming the ever failing attempt to appear. The saeculum is the perversion of the Kingdom of God, the exaltation of the flesh as an antichrist. It is only a matter of time when the mystery of iniquity is revealed, and the writing on the wall is read once again.

“Thus if there is a final answer or a first principle, investigation must stop somewhere; but if there is no final answer, there is no knowledge out of which to construct the objection” -Gordon Clark

Modern traditionalism has traded on its semi-awareness of epistemology to put down the simple Evangelical who appeals to the Bible in hand. If pushed on the reliability of Scripture, whether by a Traditionalist or an atheist, most Evangelicals will appeal to historical reliability and textual integrity. The Evangelical will demonstrate the basic case for Christ through the historically document death of Jesus of Nazareth, his publicly known burial, his bodily disappearance from the tomb, and his reappearance to his disciples. Taken together, the explanation that Jesus did rise from the dead as the Son of God, thus validating his words and the authority of the Old Testament which he cited, seems plausible. But does this case really establish the reliability of the Bible, Old Testament or New? What about the authority of other texts? What does any of the above have to do with knowledge of God?

The Traditionalist, like the atheist, forces the Evangelical beyond history and beyond the text. Higher Critics, such as the preaching atheist and New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, will not take texts as givens. A historical text is only an approximation of the real events that took place, and historiography is a further modeling from all the relevant sources. Form criticism was pioneered within the New Testament guild to explain the mostly unreliable nature of the four canonical gospels. Oral tradition congealed over decades, if not centuries, to produce texts that had the sayings of the historical Jesus lined with later fabrications due to polemical necessity from the various peoples that constituted these groupings. There was no single church, there was no single apostolic witness, but various competing factions that invented the myth of a raised savior god that comported well within a wider Hellenic world. It is unclear even who wrote the gospels, even if the historic Paul wrote at least some of his attributed letters.

The acid bath of most modern academic work on the New Testament is mostly a product of cynicism and criticism. Better historians have rightly course corrected against some of the most egregious forms of incoherent skepticism. Richard Bauckham in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses demonstrated how the gospels were ancient biographies, like the work of Plutarch but dependent on living witnesses that contributed to forming static textual traditions. Most stunningly, Bauckham argued that the gospel of John was authored directly by an eyewitness (the historic “John the Elder”), not mediated through translation (Matthew possibly), the oral tradition of the twelve (Mark), or a historian (Luke). Even the claim of oral tradition has been mostly wrong, given that oral traditions do not permit accretions and oral societies rigorously judged good and bad recitations. One can see behind much of modern New Testament studies the empty hermeneutic of suspicion, that reduces anything the analyst does not like to class conflict or psychological disturbance. But even while Bauckham is a superior historian, this method cannot demonstrate the inspiration of these texts as a single canonical instrument. These texts may be reliable as far as historical witnesses go, but they are only probable approximations of the past.

What is wrong with probability? What is wrong with reliance on a probably accurate reliance on texts? Like the gospel authors, Plutarch wrote volumes of ancient biography about the great men of Greece and Rome, but many of these stories included the supernatural and the weird. Does the modern reader really believe the ghost of Caesar appeared to Brutus, for example, and presaged his impending death? Even if Plutarch’s witness was accurate (e.g. Brutus did have this vision of Caesar), does that entail the straight forward reading of the account? One must believe that wrathful spirits walk the earth to assume that is the most likely explanation, instead of this story reflecting a self-fulfilling prophecy from a guilty conscience. It may be probably true, from the historical witness, that Brutus met Caesar, but ghosts do not exist and therefore another explanation is more likely.

This same problem applies to the gospels. Even if Jesus did exist and die on a Roman cross, he was buried in a tomb known to all in Jerusalem, that his body did disappear, and that his apostles did see visions of him, none of that requires the belief that Jesus rose from the dead, let alone that he is the Son of God ruling over the universe. Perhaps, Jesus swooned and somehow, against all odds, survived, leaving the tomb, meeting his disciples, and going into exile. Perhaps, dogs ate the body of Jesus and the disciples, in grief, had a collective mass psychotic vision. Perhaps, God so loved Jesus that he swapped him with someone else and spared him the indignity of a shameful death, so he may bid farewell to his disciples and leave this world behind. Perhaps, Jesus did rise from the dead, but that meant he was a great prophet or this event was some weird extremely improbable happening that later science will somehow explain. These accounts all may appear to be special pleading and demand a revision of what the gospel authors themselves thought took place. But that is precisely the work of history, not simply to dredge up ancient texts as proof in itself, but piecing these witnesses together to create a mental construct to best explain the past. If one does not believe that the dead can rise, if one does not believe in any gods, one does not have to accept the Christian account. Even if Jesus did rise from the dead, that does not intrinsically validate the truth claims of the gospels.

This problem, the value of the witnesses themselves, was something the early Church faced immediately. So-called “Gnostics” (a term originally for Christians, but then associated with smaller esoteric sects) had claimed they had received additional, even superior, revelations about the nature God and the cosmos, which allowed them to more correctly interpret the New Testament than the “worldly”(psychikoi) Christians in the churches. Jesus is not the divine Son of the God of Israel, but reflected one of the archons that represent the One’s effusive efforts to rescue trapped spirits in the corrupted demiurge’s world of mud. Irenaeus, writing Against Heresies to refute these schools collectively, attacked reading the New Testament against its grain. If one may read the gospels this way, then the Gnostic revelations may be read as a story about melon farming:

There is a certain Proarche [eternal power], royal, surpassing all thought, a power existing before every other substance, and extended into space in every direction. But along with it there exists a power which I term a Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power which again I term Utter-Emptiness. This Gourd and Emptiness, since they are one, produced (and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves) a fruit, everywhere visible, eatable, and delicious, which fruit-language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. These powers, the Gourd, Utter-Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon, brought forth the remaining multitude of the delirious melons of Valentinus. For if it is fitting that that language which is used respecting the universe be transformed to the primary Tetrad, and if any one may assign names at his pleasure, who shall prevent us from adopting these names, as being much more credible, as well as in general use, and understood by all? (I, 11, 4)

The reductio ab adsurdum demonstrated that textual witnesses reflect the authority of the authors. One cannot claim to speak for the true Christ if one reads against the literal meaning of John’s Gospel, given that the author John was Jesus’ closest friend. It destroyed the integrity of the text as sacred writing, replacing it with a more sacred authority. It was a similar rhetorical strategy developed earlier by the Stoics, who reread ancient myths in accordance with their philosophical ethics to justify participation in civic cults. It was hardly consistent with wisdom to valorize the many rapes of Zeus, and so these were reinterpreted as the soul’s pursuit of virtue.

Early Christians deployed this literary method, particularly the great commentator and systematician Origen, to deal with the Old Testament. Stories of a wrathful God that destroyed the first-born of Egypt and commanded the total destruction of the Canaanites would be barbaric if literal, and therefore they must be re-read as part of the soul’s war against sin and vice. Origen was highly influential, but not every early Christian liked this perversion of the Old Testament in service to the New. Diodore of Tarsus attacked Origen’s glosses as “nocturnal emissions,” distorting the Old Testament as part of God’s unfolding salvation-history with his people. Particular Psalms may be prophecies of Christ Jesus, but they were also about the crises that Israel faced in the times that the Psalms were written. Psalm 23 prophesied Christ’s resurrection, but it was also the harrowing exile David faced against Absalom’s coup. Diodore defended the unity of both canons without having the New override the Old.

These conflicts reveal that hermeneutics flow from dogmatic commitment, and that included attempts to further buffer the sacred texts. When it came to questions of heresies within the church, councils were local means at consensual government. After the Roman Empire became Christian, these councils took on greater political significance, where caesars established dogmatic norms for the Roman “household” (oikumene) of faith. But these councils took on their own epistemic inspired authority, a “conciliar fundamentalism” that made ecumenical councils inviolable:

This new conciliar fundamentalism, where all the acts and not just the decrees were treated with exaggerated respect, not only developed after Chalcedon, but was closely connected to the dissemination of its acts, since no such acts survived from the ecumenical councils of Nicaea and Constantinople I, and only partial acts from Ephesus I. It found eloquent expression in a letter written by Deacon Ferrandus of Carthage in the mid-540s in protest at Justinian’s First Edict against the Three Chapters (which seemed to reverse some of the decisions of Chalcedon):

If there is disapproval of any part of the Council of Chalcedon, the approval of the whole is in danger of becoming disapproval… But the whole Council of Chalcedon, since the whole of it is the Council of Chalcedon, is true; no part of it is open to criticism. Whatever we know to have been uttered, transacted, decreed and confirmed there was worked by the ineffable and secret power of the Holy Spirit.

Whence came this failure to make appropriate distinction between the decrees of the councils and their debates? The explanation lies, I would suggest, in the likening of conciliar acts to the books of Holy Scripture. As Ferrandus wrote in the same letter, ‘General councils, particularly those that have gained the assent of the Roman church, hold a place of authority second only to the canonical books.’60 Of course not everything in conciliar acts was accorded equal weight, and they manifestly contained utterances by heretics, such as Nestorius and Eutyches;61 but after all not everything in Scripture was of equal weight, and Scripture likewise contained the utterances of the ungodly, such as Jezebel and Caiaphas. Perhaps a still more apt comparison would be with the writings of the Church Fathers: not all of the Fathers were equally venerated, and some of the writings of each one were more central in the tradition than others, but all of them had to be treated with respect and had prima facie authority.

The Council of Chalcedon was the first ecumenical council of which complete and full acts were published, and the emperor Marcian in authorizing their publication must have calculated that their honest disclosure of tensions and disagreements would prove the thoroughness and the freedom of the council’s work. For a modern reader they show the human side of what was brought about ‘by the ineffable and secret power of the Holy Spirit’. But by the sixth century the Acts of Chalcedon had come to be read by Chalcedonians as an authoritative text, and the story of the Council of Chalcedon, as revealed in the acts, was viewed as akin to sacred history. (Richard Price, “The Council of Chalcedon: A Narrative”)

Conciliar authority (which only claimed to clarify what was always believed, not implement a new dogma) offered a clear statement of dogma to read sacred scripture. But the councils themselves became embroiled in their own history and thus required further interpretation. Chalcedon, for example, had condemned Nestorianism once and for all, yet many Cyrilian partisans in Egypt and Syria claimed that the council was a victory for Nestorius. Later councils had to further interpret Chalcedon, to understand the extent to which it condemned Nestorius and the extent to which it confirmed Cyril. It was not enough to simply point to this statement or that council father. Emperor Justinian, who would eventually proceed over an ecumenical Second Council of Constantinople to clarify Chalcedon, understood that further dogma was necessary to interpret dogmatic councils:

Often at councils some things are said by some of those found at them out of partiality or disagreement or ignorance, but no one attends to what is said individually by a few, but only to what is decreed by all by common consent; for if one were to choose to attend to such disagreement in the way they do, each council will be found refuting itself (On the Orthodox Faith)

Just as the Bible included the words of the wicked (e.g. Caiaphas, Judas, Satan), so too did councils include statements from heretics. The fact that Chalcedon quoted moderate “Nestorians” favorably did not protect them from censure. Both Diodore and Origen, who had both died centuries before in the peace of the church, stood condemned in Justinian’s council. The clear victory for Cyril did not win back the hardliners and, in a sense, the council was an ecclesiastical failure. It also further revealed that councils offered no solution to the problem of interpretation. Every ecumenical council could receive a counter-council, every ecumenical council could receive a clarification or revision. How did one know which one was correct, or if a future council was not a betrayal of a previous council? The victors saw victory as proof of verity, while the losers saw their loss as consolation that the righteous suffered under the unjust. Dogma controlled the interpretation of the times.

It is no surprise, beyond the power games of princes and patriarchs, the thoughtful sought other dogmatic grounds for truth. The restoration of Aristotelian philosophy offered an empirical starting point that, seemingly, could overcome the naked assertion of sacred texts and living authorities. Aristotle was not an empiricist in the sense of what came later, but knowledge of the forms only came through sensory experience. For some Aristotelians, this philosophy fortified the naturals means man knows his world, leaving room for supernatural intervention. For Thomas Aquinas, man may learn virtue in this world through socialization and understanding man’s nature, but he needed God to show him the supernatural truth that would save his soul. But other Aristotelians threatened to overhaul Christianity, or quietly reduce Christian dogma to empty signals of loyalty. The Renaissance and Reformation saw further attempts to discover or discern the origin of thought, only to see Europe burn. Confessional statements (both Catholic and Protestant) sought to settle the issues once and for all, but they too suffered the same problems of external rejection and internal division. The Enlightenment, when it began, was an attempt to overcome the fragmentation of Christendom towards a unified Europe, a politics that reflected epistemology.

That was the context for the work of Rene Descartes, who wrote during the French Wars of Religion. It was not only that France divided between Catholics and Protestants, but even the old Aristotelian science came under renewed scrutiny for being insufficiently empirical. The hylomorphic intermixture of sense and intellect snapped, as the physical world appeared more and more mechanical and deterministic. Descartes attempted to solve these problems through an increasingly radical dualism. The sensory world operated according to matter and the soul operated in an intellectual world that somehow connected to the other. The Cartesian demon may destroy all reliability in what man sees or touches, but the fact that man thinks was enough to justify the existence of the mind. Therefore the beginning of knowledge was a set of logical axioms (e.g. Law of Identity, Law of Non-Contradiction) from which all other knowledge could be gleaned.

Rationalism was developed in different directions in Leibniz and Spinoza, among many others, but Empiricism was a firm rejection of this dualism and the forfeiture of material to the machine. John Locke, far more famous as an epistemologist than a political theorist, lived under the shadow of Thomas Hobbes, a seeming materialist that would dissolve the freedom of the soul into the machine of nature. Instead, nature was an unfolding force that impressed itself on the blank tablet of the mind. Unlike many philosophers who never dared to define the “matter” that made the sensible world, Locke was bold enough to profess ignorance. Matter was the know-not-what that separated the real world from dreams and visions. However, contrary to Hobbes, that saw mental operations as a by-product of bodily existence, Locke accepted the mind did not belong to matter, yet its relation was unknown. The mind was simply superadded to matter, distinct but not separable. The unity of the person was the mind’s capacity for memory, a continuity that held a subject together. While the soul would cease with the death of the body, it was God’s active involvement, including the resurrection, which made a final sense of self possible. Finally, it was this mind that could then take all these experiences and then abstract knowledge, deriving from experience the primary categories of space and time.

But Locke’s solutions were often too weak to be credible. Abstract knowledge of primary categories of space and time assumes the Human mind’s perception of space and time reflected a general real world. Did worms or bugs experience space and time the same way a Human mind did? Does the seemingly unbridgeable space between atoms mean a man can phase through a wall? Locke had tried to distinguish these primary categories from the secondary categories of unique Human experience, like color (which depended on the Human eye and refraction of light). But this distinction did not hold. Even definitional abstractions, like a triangle being three angles equal to 180 degrees, could not be known by various real existing triangles. Memory did not establish any unity to identity, as if a man ceased to be himself if he forgot something. But not all critics saw Locke as a threat as much as incomplete. David Hume thus rejected all claims to knowledge and identity. Man only relies on faith in custom, but this gave no knowledge for knowledge, at least it has been defined, is impossible. Things only seem to be the case and that was the end of the matter.

Hume had drawn these conclusions, he thought, from the incomplete criticism of the bishop George Berkeley. Against Cartesian dualism, Berkeley rejected the existence of matter as a nonsense category. Locke could not define matter because there was no substance beneath sensory experiences. It may sound absurd to place dreams and imagination on the same plane as “real experiences,” but the contemporary world of virtual reality should deflate some of these criticisms. For Berkeley, all sensory experiences were “ideas” that the mind, which he called “spirit,” perceived. Therefore, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. Halfwits will criticize this claim as refutable by kicking a rock, but that only proves Berkeley’s point. The rock has existence precisely because the mind experiences it as a rock (hard, heavy, rough), and all things continue their existence because God actively perceives all. In snapping the knot, Berkeley had overcome Locke, but this new dualism, between spirit and idea, left a variety of new problems, including the existence of spirit. For Hume, spirit was a jumble of bundled experiences, and thus had no unique existence form an idea. Additionally, what brought ideas together from constituent ideas? How could one discern “rock” from the ideas of hardness, heaviness, roughness, greyness, and so on?

Berkeley developed his thought further through the unsaid problem of language. Man thinks in language and through language, and it was impossible to separate the problem of knowledge from the problem of speech. Locke had attempted to clarify language as a means to clarify thought. Speech was purely denotative, it had clear referents. But how could theology be practiced if God had no clear objective referent in the sensory world? Locke was not a Deist, but his thought fit well the Deist removal of God actively from the world. The world showed the intelligence of design, and therefore logically entailed a designer, but the designer was not himself visible except indirectly. If the world was a clock, logical and directed to a purpose, then it required a clock-maker. But it did not need an involved and active force that sustained the clock, anymore then a clock needs the constant presence of the clock-maker. Lockean language then made God necessary, but distant. For Berkeley, however, God must directly gather and govern, forging the intelligibility of the world which spirits constantly received and organized:

187. At the transfiguration, the apostles saw our Saviour's face shining as the sun, and his raiment white as light, also a lucid cloud or body of light, out of which the voice came ; which visible light and splendor was, not many centuries ago, maintained by the Greek church, 'to have been divine, and uncreated, and the very glory of God : as may be seen in the history wrote by the emperor John Cantacuzene. And of late years bishop Patrick gives it as his opinion, that in the beginning of the world, the Shecinah or divine presence, which was then frequent and ordinary, appeared by light or fire. In commenting on that passage, where Cain is said to have gone out from the presence of the Lord, the bishop observes, that if Cain after this turned a downright idolater, as many think, it is very likely he introduced the worship of the sun, as the best resemblance he could find of the glory of the Lord, which was wont to appear in a flaming light. It would be endless to enumerate all the passages of holy scripture, which confirm and illustrate this notion, or represent the Deity as appearing and operating by fire. The misconstruction of which might possibly have misled the Gnostics, Basilidians, and other ancient heretics into an opinion, that Jesus Christ was the visible corporeal sun. (Siris)

The same way energy is in and through all things, so God actively is present in guiding and organizing the ideas before the spirit. It was this fire and force that interconnected the cosmos as a revelation of divine glory:

220. Force or power, strickly speaking, is in the agent alone who imparts an equivocal force to the invisible elementary fire, or animal spirit (a) of the world, and this to the ignited body or visible flame, which produceth the sense of light and heat. In this chain the first and last links are allowed to be incorporeal : the two intermediate are corporeal, being capable of motion, rarefaction, gravity, and other qualities of bodies. It is fit to distinguish these things, in order to avoid ambiguity concerning the nature of fire.

(237) [...] Nor will it suffice from present phaenomena and effects, through a chain of natural causes, and subordinate blind agents, to trace a divine intellect as the remote original cause, that first created the world, and then set it a going, We can not make even one single step in accounting for the phaenomena, without admitting the immediate presence and immediate action of an incorporeal agent, who connects, moves, and disposes all things, according to such rules, and for such purposes as seem good to him.

What Berkeley discovered, but Hume did not grasp from him, was that the mind was an actively creative imagination, working through all things as fire or light, shining out simply through subsistence. The mind is always active, not always passive, and thus God is active in every crevice of the universe. While Kant later depended on Locke in a novel way to abstract the limited knowledge man can know, saving both philosophy from being collapsed into mechanized pantheism, where everything is just everything humming along its course, he also followed the Deist theological drift. The world was signs that signified other signs that did not so much as reach God, but hit the ceiling, which meant the presupposition that there was something above what could not be reached which explained the existence of what could be grasped.

But this dualism, as in every dualism, is unstable and veers towards collapse. The history of German Idealism was, in many ways, an attempt to break the Kantian ceiling. But left behind in these accounts was the foundation of the faith which drove bishop Berkeley to reject Locke in the first place, namely the Word of God. What Berkeley had accomplished, whether or not he fully understood it, was what Plato had accomplished through the dual move of Socratic dialectic and myth. The defeat of empiricism, the unreliability of all sensory data which began a hopeless quest that ended in defeat, can only lead to dogmatic declaration. But what each dogmatic claim revealed was the possibility to dogmatize in the first place, that knowledge revealed knowability. It was this space of knowability that modern Platonist, Giorgio Agamben, understood. Plato’s description of space (chora) as the insensible sensibility that permitted sensory experience was the unfolding of the real:

Possibility ceases to express the relation of an object to the faculty of cognition and, detaching itself as the same time from every relation of presupposition with regard to the act, presents itself instead as the experience of a subject affected by its own receptivity. At the point where I experience my receptivity, this experience is perfectly real; however, to the extent that it has no object other than itself, and that subject and object coincide within it, it also discloses the space of a pure possibility, in which life and the world for the first time become possible for me. A receptivity that suffers itself is, in this sense, the only adequate definition of a possibility that does not remain imprisoned in a merely logical-modal dimension, and of a power that has no need to realize itself and to transition to the act. (The Unrealizable, 139)

But this space, as Agamben tacitly understood in his criticism of his fellow Italians bent over their phones, has an order. The possibility of the possible is constantly molding. It is not a space as much as a fire, consuming and purifying through sheer subsistence. Thus Ezra Pound, in his criticism of will-to-power, offers a useful corrective to Agamben’s possibility of the possible:

The will to power (admired and touted by the generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ill-balanced hysterical teuto-pollak. Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the world, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia. Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power. The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order. Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds. (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 99)

Knowledge is not a collection of all existents, but the order in which they exist that gives them meaning, and thus being. The rock reflects the order of ideas, not merely the set of ideas. It is this order that is intrinsic to man’s mind, one that the Cartesian project had tried to find in the monologue of the soul. But if the soul must remember what it knows, as Plato believed, it is found in a word of address, for language is reason and man, as the image of God, is a word of God. The recollection comes in man’s capacity to speak, language that suffuses not only actual words but the constant experience of consciousness itself. Thus, the ancient Christian hymnographer, Ephraim the Syrian, understood the nature of man as an image of the divine in language:

For animals cannot form in themselves pure thoughts about God, because they have, not Speech, that which forms in us the image of the Truth. We have received the gift of Speech that we may not be as speechless animals in our conduct, but that we may in our actions resemble God, the giver of Speech. How great is Speech, a gift which came to make those who receive it like its Giver! And because animals have not Speech they cannot be the likeness of our minds. But because the mind has Speech, it is a great disgrace to it when it is not clothed with the likeness of God; it is a still more grievous shame when animals resemble men, and men do not resemble God. (First Discourse to Hypatius)

The search for knowledge, the basis of knowing that allows anything to be known, was found not above in Heaven or deep down in the being of things, but in the mouth and tongue that can speak blessings or curses. The Bible has the authority it possesses, along the literal interpretation that it means what it says, because it is the Word of God. Visions and miracles may have confirmed this case for those original witnesses, but it remains the same. The Word of God is the starting point of knowledge, one fully contained in the Bible, which remains the rule of interpreting all else, but exceeding it into all things. The Word of God is a rational fire, the cosmic order, discovered in the very fact that world unfolds before man as he speaks. The Bible authenticates itself in its very reading, interpretation emerging out of the text, for the words of the texts are the words of the Spirit of God.

It in this way that man knows God, the world, even himself. It is the word in the mouth and in the heart that saves. And when that shepherd of the cosmos comes speaking, the sheep will certainly know his voice.

“The Messiah will only come when he will no longer be necessary. He will come one day after his advent. He will not come on the day of the Last Judgement, but on the day after.” -Franz Kafka

“That these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from a multiplicity of rulers and ten thousand tyrants.” -Tatian

When Proudhon, the nineteenth century patriarch of anarchism, brandished his pen against the constitutional liberals of his day, he did not do so as a theoretician or policy-maker. Proudhon did not criticize liberals for inefficiency, that their form of government did not benefit the majority or remove social burdens. Rather, Proudhon made a theological critique, a counter-myth against the God of liberalism as the Satan of freedom:

God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God is evil. As long as humanity shall bend before an altar, humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned; as long as one man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath of another man, society will be founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my reason, the spectre of my conscience. (God is Evil, Man is Free)

Proudhon’s rage was directed focused on the liberal reformers of his day. It was Voltaire and Rousseau who, not believing in God personally, believed God was a necessary fiction for morality to sustain society. But Proudhon believed that even if God did exist it would be necessary to destroy him. God was the idea of government and authority, though one that was associated now with the bourgeoisie and not the throne or aristocracy. The new clergy of France advocated for a political theology of parliamentarian debate, a far cry from the royal absolutism of Bossuet but no less tyrannical. No different than Deists, the new liberal Catholics valorized the constitution and rule of law. Therefore, Satan was still necessary to war against this god, a demand to tear down all powers for a religion of man. Mixing his metaphors, this liberation was also the essence of Jesus Christ’s mission when he overthrew the money changers. “Christianity has been the prophecy, and socialism the realization,” Proudhon proudly declared against all capitalists. A new theology would soon set man free.

What Proudhon grasped, along with other Romantics (such as Blake and Wordsworth), was the need for a new myth to establish a new order. Every polity, even an anarchic socialist polity, required a divinity to found it. The new order could only come through the voice of a god, even if that god was man himself. Antiquity bore this out consistently, where Sparta had her Lycurgus and Athens her Solon. Even Socrates, after his dialectical rejection of all custom and opinion, relied on the divinity of his daemon to craft the myths of the new Republic. Only a god could legislate and only a new law could establish a new order.

A century later, Alexandre Kojeve understood this process unfold through the Hegelian dialectic. A Marxist and Materialist, Hegel had alone accomplished what all philosophers sought for Human history, an exit from history and the completion of the myth. Every myth, even Plato’s myths, could be challenged and remythicized. The theology of deistic liberal Christianity could elicit Proudhon’s Satan, Wordworth’s Prometheus, or Blake’s Orc. The process had no end, and thus the tradition of Western philosophy was an endless search to prove these myths, only ever eliciting an eventual backlash as a process of social forces. Every myth and counter-myth engaged in monologue, even when it was formed as a dialogue (as Augustine’s discussions with God or his soul were, according to Kojeve, only monologue). Hegel, in contrast, finished the dialectic as it worked through political history. Royal and Jacobin absolutisms resolved themselves in Napoleon on horseback, the weltgeist at the Battle of Jena. History had closed in this synthesis and the ideal had emerged as an end. It was not the need for a myth, but for the mythic powers to be imbued in a historical figure. In Napoleon “world history judges the world,” and brings the political-theological conflict to a close.

What this dialectical historical completion meant was visible in the ultimate political question of justice. The ancient aristocratic thesis was Equality, the peerage of great men that existed clearly in the Homeric world. These nobles, however, depended on a sub-world of drudgery, the existence of the non-person slaves. These slaves would then negate the peerage of Equality for an ethic of Equivalence. For the slave, all should receive an equal share regardless of social status. The distinction between better and lesser was dissolved into masterless slaves, the bourgeoisie. It was the regime of Equality that the Jacobins turned against for Equivalence, but this flattened equality masked a greater division. Not everyone had the same possessions, even as they were all treated as equals. The classless society of the bourgeois masked the division of those who owned and those who continued to labor. The class-war, marked in the Thermidorian Reaction during the Revolution, threatened to tear France apart until the great tyrant, Bonaparte, resolved the contradictions. The synthesis of Equality and Equivalence was Equity, the republican citizenry that received what they needed (be it less or more) in service to the state (embodied in the tyrant). Napoleon overcame the contradictions between Ancien Regime and National Assembly, the living lawgiver and historical god.

For Kojeve, the Hegelian dialectic was a logical process that unfolded in time, but was not part of some evolving organic process. The Cold War was thus once more the appearance of the historic myth, with both America and the Soviet Union moving towards this historic synthesis. Kojeve had high hopes that Stalin would carry this process through, uniting capitalism and socialism in his person for a new republican polity. Kojeve later translated his loyalty to Charles de Galle, who he hoped would forge a Latin Empire of Equity against the Anglo-Saxons and the Soviet-Slavs. American Capitalism and Soviet Socialism were still mired in bourgeois Equivalence, still failing to rectify the inequalities in a formally equal polity. Through the tyrant, be he Stalin or de Gaulle or some other figure, the contradiction would be overcome through time. Then man would move into post-man, an animal that had finally achieved his place in the world as an unconsciously performing creature. Art would no longer exist as art, it would have no intention towards something but be generated by instinct, like a spider crafting a web. There would be no more need for escape for man would become the perfect animal that he struggled to become.

Kojeve’s odd Hegelian Marxism overcame the core problem of time, where the revolution and end never came, for Communists. It could only be embodied in a tyrant, the philosopher-king of Plato, that could solve the constitution crisis of justice in his own body. He could issue law that was not simply one more myth, for he had absorbed the anti-myth into himself. He was neither God nor Satan, but some hidden figure behind both. There was, therefore, little need for ceremony or pomp that was not directly related to his person. He did not need a choreographed reception of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the incineration of atheism, as Robespierre did. He crowned himself, without appeal to God through pope or statues of Reason. The National Assembly could never exercise the constituent power to craft a constitution because they were a teeming abstraction of politicians. They could not become, let alone claim, to be the constituent authority of the law-giving tyrant. They failed to overcome history through power.

But there was a way this process could unravel. What was this power to act in this way? Baudrillard understood the antithesis once more appear in the work of Michel Foucault. The power of this political theology was only through the secret of power, namely that power did not exist. Like his fellow anarchic socialist, Foucault was a critic of power and he crafted a counter-myth through genealogy. A technique learned from Nietzsche, but flipped on its head, Foucault’s historical analysis demonstrated how Power was an evil god that became worse as it spread. The limited power of the royal monarch was not erased through the French Revolution, but dispersed. Liberalism, in concentrating power in a self-disciplined citizenry, forged a race of masterless slaves. Or, rather, all slaves were their own masters, and thus projects like Bentham’s Panopticon was a way of instilling this Power over self into every citizen. Everyone, from highest to lowest, was both a prisoner and a jailer. Every system of law, knowledge, science, and so on reflected accretions of Powers. Therefore, Resistance, the rejection of Power, was the only means to true liberation. Satan once more took flight against Heaven.

But, Foucaultian genealogy hid the secret. Proudhon’s counter-theology was open and symbolic, Foucault’s disguised. What was “Resistance” than simply one more counter-theology? The process of critique was a never ending excoriation of Power, but, like a shattered windshield (an image borrowed from Deleuze), no matter how many criticisms the whole persevered. How could Power withstand this force? How come Resistance never came without becoming another mode of Power? That was because Power was nothing. The erasure of Power did not come with criticism of the powerful. It was not the jeering of the crowds the destroyed the Ancien Regime in the Revolution, it was the moment Louis XVI donned the red-white-blue cockade. Power “seduces,” it summons men to play the game, a rule that does not have ontological existence until the game starts. The National Assembly had rejected royal power, but could not fully absorb this power without immediate contradiction. Every speaker for the People was shouted down by another faction who also claimed to speak for the People. Every act of Resistance reinstantiated another form of Power. Every anarchist becomes a government of sorts.

Therefore, the utility of Foucault is to understand a clever process of counter-theology. Foucault did not unearth some thing called Power, but he had created a way to move it from one group to another. It took an atheist, for Baudrillard, to grasp the nonexistence of the god he criticized:

Power did not always consider itself power, and the secret of the great politicians was to know that power does not exist. To know that it is only a perspectival space of simulation, as was the pictorial Renaissance, and that if power seduces, it is precisely - what the naive realists of politics will never understand - because it is simulacrum and because it undergoes a metamorphosis into signs and invented on the basis of signs. (This is why parody, the reversal of signs or their hyperextension, can touch power more deeply than any force relation.) This secret of power's lack of existence that the great politicians shared also belongs to the great bankers, who know that money is nothing, that money does not exist; and it also belonged to the great theologians and inquisitors who knew that God does not exist, that God is dead. This gives them incredible superiority. Power is truly sovereign when it grasps this secret and confronts itself with that very challenge. When it ceases to do so and pretends to finds a truth, a substance, or a representation (in the will of the people, etc.), then it loses its sovereignty, allowing others to hurl back the challenge of its own life or death, until it dies in effect at the hands of that infatuation with itself, that imaginary concept of itself, and that superstitious belief in itself as a substance; it dies as well when it fails to recognize itself as a void, or as something reversible in death. At one times leaders were killed when they lost that secret" (Forget Foucault, 59)

Foucaultian counter-theology of Resistance, like Proudhon’s Satanism, was always stuck in its own trap. It would immediately immolate the moment when Resistance became Power, but Resistance was empty because it was not Power. Baudrillard compared this destituent impotence to some graffiti he found in Los Angeles: “when Jesus arose from the dead, he became a Zombi.” That was Foucault’s counter-theology, a zombified messiah that could never act, but only shamble, always chasing life to feed upon but never, in the process, returning to life. Every act of reversal, every defeat of Power by Resistance, led to dissolution, a game that did not understand itself as a game. Or, rather, a game that made the playing of the game into another game, which meant the original game could never be played. It was dead, yet alive, empty and meaningless.

What can break this cycle of death? Kojeve was right in that a living theology was necessary to overcome the constituent crisis involved in any law. Yet that process itself could dissolve itself, even if understood as process through historicity. The problem of political theology in the twenty first century is not the existence of tyrants, but the existence of zombie governments. Power is always seized in the name of Resistance, which then is never exercised, but only possessed until seized from another faction. But the refusal to exercise Power does not mean there is no governance. The tyranny of petit bureaucrats suffuses throughout every western polity, preventing any means to play the game through a never ending consultation of the rules. Like the AIDS that ravaged Foucault himself, Resistance eviscerates all polities into maximal governance through political anarchy. Satan has expanded his wings over the whole West.

But the alternative to the problem of law and power was an issue that defined the (political) theology of the Apostle Paul.

In Galatians 4, Paul offered a typological interpretation of Isaac and Ishmael, the son of the promise and the son of necessity. It is worth quoting Paul’s analysis in entirety:

Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?

For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.

Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.

Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.

So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. (Gal 4: 21-31

This passage perplexed Martin Luther, for he expected Paul to compare Sinai and Moriah, the place where man received the Torah and the place where God had provided the sacrifice for Abraham:

A little while ago Paul called Mount Sinai, Hagar. He would now gladly make Jerusalem the Sarah of the New Testament, but he cannot. The earthly Jerusalem is not Sarah, but a part of Hagar. Hagar lives there in the home of the Law, the Temple, the priesthood, the ceremonies, and whatever else was ordained in the Law at Mount Sinai.

I would have been tempted to call Jerusalem, Sarah, or the New Testament. I would have been pleased with this turn of the allegory. It goes to show that not everybody has the gift of allegory. Would you not think it perfectly proper to call Sinai Hagar and Jerusalem Sarah? True, Paul does call Sarah Jerusalem. But he has the spiritual and heavenly Jerusalem in mind, not the earthly Jerusalem. Sarah represents that spiritual Jerusalem where there is no Law but only the promise, and where the inhabitants are free.

To show that the Law has been quite abolished, the earthly Jerusalem was completely destroyed with all her ornaments, temples, and ceremonies.(Luther, Commentary on Galatians, 4.25)

Luther had expected the binary between Law and Gospel to be in terms of imperative and declarative. The Law threatened sinners, while the Gospel offered satisfaction. As in the Old Testament God made provisions for forgiveness, which foreshadowed the sacrifice of Christ, so too did the New Testament tighten the demands of obedience. But for Luther, the spiritual Jerusalem must have meant a total abrogation of the Law, framing the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem as the destruction of the Law. But the Law is not destroyed for Paul, but the power of the flesh. An earlier commentator, the sixth century Augustinian Isidore of Serville, offered a better schematization:

The difference between the Law and the Gospel is that in the Law there is the letter, in the Gospel, there is grace. The Law holds a shadow, the Gospel, a form. The first was given because of transgression, the latter for the sake of justification. The Law shows sin to the ignorant, the Gospel helps the one who acknowledges sin, so that it may be avoided. , Book of Differences, 31)

It was not that the Gospel was the satisfaction of the Law, but rather the fulfillment and end of the Law. The shadow gave way to the reality, in the same way that an earthly Jerusalem was only ever a symbol for the ideal City of God. The binary was not between imperative and promise, but between what was purely temporal and mortal, under the corruptible mind of men, against the eternal order that would transfigure men. What the earthly revealed was the earthly status of men. Every commandment was twisted, every promise abused. The Law given to establish the polity of Israel became a means of death and betrayal. Israel saw the glory of God and then went whoring after Baal. God gave purification to Israel, who then immediately polluted its flesh in the most vile forms of demon worship. The crisis in Pauline theology was how God seemingly failed with the Law, that it did not produce holy men but made sin utterly sinful. But that had been the purpose of the Torah, to draw out wickedness and smash its head under the Christ, in the fullness of time, to cleanse sin and redeem the remnant.

The Gospel, for Paul and Augustine, was the spirit’s victory over the flesh. As Kojeve failed to understand in Christian theology, there was a historical dialectic of failure, the moment of political theology met with a counter-myth. The Davidic monarchy was replaced with alternates. The Temple in Jerusalem and its Levitical priesthood was replaced with rivals in Dan and Bethel. The revelation of Jehovah as the God above all gods and Lord above all lords resulted in new pantheons. The historic Gospel was, and remains, the revelation of heilsgeist on the back of a donkey at Jerusalem. This end to history would be revealed, and break into time, repeatedly, most importantly in the rise of Constantine and the foundation of a Christian New Rome. The Gospel is the eternal order now transfiguring the universe into a new order that defies any single location of flesh or stone. It defies a center and can be replicable anywhere and everywhere, for the Kingdom of God, the Gospel, is within you.

This political theology recognizes the capacity for any people, in any time, and in any place to receive this lordship. As God blessed Constantine and the New Rome as a new Israel, the blessing was contingent on the fidelity of the elect. As Augustine understood, seeing his Roman African being conquered by Germanic Vandals, the lordship defied any single empire. In an age of corruption, God could raise up an Geiseric to judge. Kingship and authority was not something localized in a way that could become corrupt, but authority was a gift from God. In a much later time, the radical Augustinian John Wycliffe understood that lordship was the gift of righteousness and did not inhere in a single institution or bloodline. While not calling for the downfall of the Plantagenets, Wycliffe understood that the authority of kings reflected the authority of God, and God could raise up a David from the sheepfold. The universal monarchy of the Spirit did not work according to the logic of flesh. The empire of Spirit did not construct Babel.

The historical dialectic comes to an end in the resurrected Christ, an authority that has continued to rule over the cycles and spirals of time. The Christian is not, contrary to liberal interpretations, mere refusal. The Gospel does not end in the death of Christ, but in the Spiritual Christ who cannot be grasped, who appears and disappears, who reveals himself in the unexpected day. A true political theology, one that would overcome the constant siege of counter-myths, is one that defies the logic of time, the necessary decay and death of all mortal flesh, for resurrection, the restoration of the eternal law in time and space, may appear at any moment. In a flash a judge may be lifted up and satan fall like lightning.

The Slogan is: Discard or Define!

It is quite common, in the current fad of Traditionalism, to uncritically appeal to the old creeds. The problem with Evangelicals, it is claimed, is that they have cut themselves off from history, from the millennia of the church, and thus have fallen into every evil and heresy under the sun. Evangelical Christology, it is claimed, is always defective because ignorant. The average Evangelical will commit Arianism, Nestorianism, and Apollinarism without batting an eye. Therefore, Evangelicals are doomed to apostasy of lesbian priestesses and Israel worship if they do not abandon the sinking Pizza Hut church for the safety of Rome or Constantinople or “Reformed/Augsburg Catholic” confessionalism.

But what do these formulae even mean? What does “nature” or “person” mean in defining the standard that Christ is one divine person in two natures (with two energies/wills)? What do these terms mean when we use them? How is the ancient definition of nature (physis) pair against modern notions of DNA and genes (let alone their relation to the mechanisms of descent with modification)? What is a person (hypostasis)? The ancient definition has almost nothing to do with individual subjectivity, let alone psychology, yet “person” is almost exclusively used in these ways. It is one thing to repeat the creeds and it is another thing to understand them. It is not enough to simply recite the Chalcedonian definition; what does it mean? For many eager converts, it may seem creed recitation operates as signing the EULA to play Churchcraft.

Gordon Clark, an eccentric and misunderstood Calvinist philosopher, attempted to wade into these muddy waters in his unfinished The Incarnation (1988). Unperturbed in critically assessing ancient landmarks, Clark wanted a fresh assessment of the Chalcedonian Definition so as to ascertain what it meant. What is a “nature” and what is a “person” and how can Jesus have two of the former and one of the latter? How is Jesus fully Human but lacks a Human person? What is the relationship of “will” to “person” and “nature” in the “one man Jesus Christ” (1 Timothy 2:5)? This essay draws from this work to investigate the question.

Clark’s problem is fundamentally ontological, though he makes no reference to Heidegger. The biggest problem in theological grammar is the mixed use of “is” between the copulative and the non-copulative existential. “What is God?” is an entirely different question from “Does God exist?” or more clearly “Is God?” What is an existent and on what register of reality? Dreams “exist” and so do fairy tales, even nonsense like “married bachelor” exists as a notorious contradictory statement. Anselm had demonstrated God’s existence through the ontological argument, but that does not mean it is “real” as Gaunilo’s “In Defense of the Fool” had shown. The idea of an island does not necessitate that the island is somewhere that can be found. In a similar form, Kant’s argument that the hypothetical one hundred thalers was equivalent to one hundred thalers in hand (which drew later ridicule) seems patently absurd. Obviously, something is missing and what is that for God? What is the substance of God? What is substance in general? Few attempted to solve this problem in the modern era with any rigor. Locke was one of the first and his definition was learned ignorance: it is not know what it is but it is necessary for existence. In Aristotle, essence existed through matter, which he termed hyle, or wood pulp, pure stuff.

These definitions appear useless and viciously circular, that there must be something there that allows things to exist (as opposed to a theoretical essence) but is itself non-existent. There is no pure matter and, outside of Clark’s treatment, that was what Berkeley excoriated Locke’s reformatted dualism for. The basis of empiricism was non-empirical. One could not examine how essence became existence as form was pressed into matter. This “substance” was unclear. Thus, for Clark, it was very confusing that the original Greek term translated into the Latin cognate substance, hypostasis, was used for the three in the Trinity. Hypostasis, like the Latin substantia, was the under-stand, the standing-under, the pillars that upheld a structure. A spatial term, but what did it mean? What was the standing-under that allowed existent things to be? And, even more, how did this apply to the Father, Son and Spirit of the Christian God? By the end of the Nicaean era, hypostasis was translated into Latin as persona (a stage actor’s mask that identified his character), but this term had previously been used for the Greek prosopon (face, but also sometimes used for masks).

It is not surprising that the original “Arians” (none of them read or cared what Arius taught) were primarily bishops who were flustered with these terms. Better to say Father and Son are homoi, alike, without attempting to explain ontological depth. When more extreme forms of difference appeared, with novel ontological schemes (that the Son was homoiousios or anomean, a like substance or different substance), many homoians switched to the Nicaean party. But that is a lesson in ecclesiastical politics and the fourth century Roman Empire, not good theological grammar. So what did it mean for Christ to have three hypostaseis? For some this account smacked of some form of tritheism, yet the idea of God having three personae sounded a bit like Sabellianism, where God played three discrete roles as an actor wearing three masks in the divine drama of salvation.

But Clark is not interested in this earlier period as much as the fifth century. The Chalcedonian definition not only retained this Nicaean grammar, but then attempted to solve the relation of God and Man in Christ. The title of theotokos was less about Mary than Christ. The question was: who or what did Mary give birth to? But, more importantly, it was how the divine and human came together as Christ. For Theodore of Mopsuestia (not only the teacher of Nestorius, but also a friend and teacher to the sainted John Chrysostom) the incarnation was analogized to a marriage, where the man and woman form single person out of the two (with one nature superior to the other) in a union of wills. If that sounds like the older heresy of Paul of Samosata, who made Christ into the conjunction of the divine Logos and the human Jesus, two sons brought together through a united will, then what Cyril offered was no less difficult. Cyril defended his position with a pseudonymous work of Athanasius that was actually from Apollonaris of Tyre. An advocate of Nicaea, Apollonaris suffered later condemnation for teaching that the Logos took flesh as the man Jesus, but lacked a Human nous, therefore lacking a fully Human mind. This view seemed to undermine verses throughout the New Testament where Jesus grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52) or claimed there were things he did not know (Matthew 24:36). If the Logos was mutable in that way, then it would be impossible to claim his identity with God.

The Chalcedonian Definition reaffirmed that Christ had a fully Human mind, but then how did the conjunction take place? In his “person?” But what a “person?” Clark offers a useful, though at first odd, definition: a person is a “composite of truths” or a “composite of propositions” (54).

This definition, first of all, must operate univocally, or it is meaningless. In recent decades, long after Clark, traditionally oriented Christians (particularly Radical Orthodox) considered analogical grammar as the only one fitting for God. Equivocal grammar (same terms but two different meanings) was mystical agnosticism. Univocal (same term with same meaning) reduced God to a creature (a caricature that was lobbed at Fundamentalists, who had incited the New Atheists). Analogical grammar (same term with like meaning) was the only way to preserve God’s unique transcendental qualities. God is just and man can be just, but these are not the same thing. Clark, however, preempted this position by asking what it is that these two meanings have in common. How is God’s justice like man’s justice? If one says “here is a cheetah” and points to a large cat and then, later, says “here is a cheetah” to a fast Human runner, the analogy is clear. The common meaning is speed, and thus the term “cheetah” could apply to the animal known by that name and to a Human who is fast like a cheetah. But what is the commonality between God’s justice and man’s justice, but justice?

Against accusations that univocal language makes God entirely known, and thus creaturely, Clark rejected the idea that knowledge implied extensive knowledge. One can know God in part without saying God is entirely knowable. Thus God’s justice can be known, but not exhaustively. Attempts to squirm out of these problems through mysticism fall into the same problem. Any negative statement about God requires some knowledge. To say God is ineffable means you know God and know that you cannot speak of God. How that knowledge was acquired is a different story, but the knowing remains. Therefore, if the Chalcedonian Definition is theological then it knows something about God, and that something is that Christ is one person in two natures.

So what does it mean Christ is one person if a person is a “composite of truths?” For Clark, a composite of truths are the content of discrete actions that belong together. That the Son walked to Jerusalem and the Father did not walk to Jerusalem does not dissolve their unity or shared traits of omnipotence and omniscience. The Son “knows” the truth in a way that is different than the Father or the Spirit without reducing their attributes. The Son knows he was incarnated and the Father knows he decreed the Son’s incarnation, but the Son did not decree the incarnation of the Father. And neither the Father nor the Son overshadowed Mary in the miraculous virgin birth. Therefore, this definition of person means there is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “each omniscient without having precisely the same content” (55).

Important for this definition, Clark thus ties intellect and will to person. The person is the one knows certain truths in a certain way. When it comes to God, that has some important consequences. First, it means that God’s knowledge that he created this world in this way is tied into his personhood. If the Father created this world through the Son, speaking the fiat lux and all the other commands of Genesis 1 and 2, then he could not have done otherwise without ceasing to be the Father. In this way, Clark is the antithesis of Nominalists, who believed that God’s inscrutable will meant that God really could have made a world where rape was moral, the Father took flesh, and the atonement was accomplished through a lightning bolt splitting a rock. For Clark, this world was necessarily so because God is the God that created this world and God is immutable. Man may know God in that he knows God created this world with mosquitos. He will never know exactly how many mosquitos God created, but God created world with x amount of mosquitos and could not have created it any other way without ceasing to be the Father, for the Father is the Creator God who spoke his Word to create this world with x amount of mosquitos. If God is God then he, by definition, is the creator and preserver of this world and no other.

This account can sound very similar to Neo-Platonic ideas of emanation, where the One successively oozed out lesser divine beings (the Nous, the World Soul) until echoing farther away to the dark world of matter. God, by necessity, created the world. But that does not mean God is subject to time or that the Heavens and the Earth were not a product of God’s will, as opposed to the begotten generation of the Son. The former is extrinsic and the latter is intrinsic. The Son is God’s Word and equal to God, the world is not. There was never a time when the Son was not, but there was a time when the world was not and then came to be after God spoke. It is no degradation of God’s omnipotence, let alone his will, to say that God cannot create a rock so heavy that he could not lift it. These are nonsense claims that are cleared away through clear definitions. It is for this reason that Clark also rejected calling God “infinite,” which in mathematical terms was absurd (e.g. infinity is equal to infinity+1). God has boundaries, otherwise he would have no superlative attributes (i.e. if God’s knowledge is infinite, then he could not be omniscient because it is impossible, by definition, to know everything, otherwise it would not be infinite).

Clark never quite finished his work, but he had stumbled towards something that would be considered, conventionally, heretical. If Jesus is a divine person, then he would have to know suffering. But God is impassible by definition and cannot suffer (otherwise God the Father could know suffering). Therefore, the reality of the cross, where the Man Jesus Christ suffered for the sins of the world, requires a Human “person” to experience the imposed upon pain. If it is because Jesus has a Human “nature” then what is a nature? If Jesus had a Human nature but not a Human person, then did Human nature die on the cross? Can the essential nature suffer if not through existent persons? It would seem, on the surface of things, that Nestorianism was not wrong by Chalcedonian terms, even if the council had decreed against it.

Going beyond Clark, there are ways to keep Clark’s clarity without some of the obvious problems that appeared in later councils, but only if the terms themselves are clarified and the historical context reestablished.

Jumping forward a century, the second council of Constantinople was, in effect, a neo-Cyrilian attempt to fix Chalcedon. The Tome of Leo, speaking of two natures operating two sets of discrete but unconfused works, left open what Cyrilians (who later formed the separated Oriental Orthodox churches) considered Chalcedon’s fundamental Nestorianism. The Empress Pulcheria had invited Nestorius to Chalcedon and may have offered him reconciliation, if he had survived the trip. Overseeing this new council, Emperor Justinian canonized Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas, forged a new symbol that the Cyrilians still rejected, and anathematized Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia as proto-Nestorian heretics (though they had been dead for centuries). Of course, Justinian was not a reliable friend to the orthodox. Possessing a theological mind, Justinian had near the end of his reign embraced a new dogma, taught by fringe Cyrilian Julian of Halicarnassus, that Jesus received his mortal flesh from heaven. Justinian was in the process of enforcing this new orthodoxy when he died. If Jesus’ flesh was pre-divinized, this further explained the divine union, where the Word of God assumed Human flesh. But this made Jesus’ humanity oddly unreal. He would be more demigod, than man.

This emphasis on Christological unity rolled into the next century, where John the Grammarian had offered the unsatisfactory, but neat, solution that Jesus possessed Human nature in general. This solved his lack of a Human hypostasis, a term that meant (as Gregory Nazianzus used it in his pro-Nicaean apologetics) an individuated instance of a nature. God is three persons in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as Human nature individuates into the three persons Peter, James, and John. Divine nature, unlike Human nature, was not a genus like Human nature, and therefore it was not tritheistic. John the Grammarian’s solution meant that Jesus had no individuated Human nature, but that appeared absurd on the face of the claim. Did Jesus not have a distinct Humanity? Did he not have a unique instance of size, height, weight, and various other descriptive qualia? Leontius of Byzantium and Leontius of Jerusalem (who, at some times, were confused for the same person, fittingly enough) both criticized John’s absurdity and pioneered the alternative that a later theologian, Maximus the Confessor, would perfect in his defense of two wills, and two energies, in Christ.

For Maximus, it was true that Christ had one person in two natures, but the process of the one person in two natures meant that his person was, in a sense, composite. Jesus had a Human hypostasis, otherwise he would not be Jesus but some monstrous Everyman. But this process came from above to below, the divine hypostasis taking the hypostasis of a man into the Godman. One contemporary historian of theology summarized Maximus thus:

Therefore, Christ, the incarnate Logos, is a composite hypostasis in terms of his two natures, on the level of 'what'; or of 'material' hypostasis.' On that level, it is a mistake to say that Christ is either a divine or a human hypostasis. The Logos incarnate--namely, the divine person of the Logos which has assumed a human nature--is a divine personal, albeit a theandric 'material' hypostasis. (Demetrius Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ)

In other words, Christ is fully Human only because of the union with the Word of God. Jesus would not have existed without the Word of God, or, better put, Jesus only exists as the Word of God having taken flesh. In terms of subjective identification, Jesus is the divine Word of God, that is who he is. But in terms of what he is, his material hypostasis, Jesus is theandric, a simultaneously divine set of attributes united with a united human set of attributes. But this theandric union did not confound the qualities. It was not the creation of a tertium quid, where all the qualities of divinity and humanity were mixed up. In other words, from a different context, the theandric Jesus retained the extra Calvinisticum, that he was still the Word of God governing the universe and sustaining it, even as he was also circumscribed as this man. The Son of God did not offload his responsibilities as God before resuming them again later, as some advocates of kenotic theology seem to suggest.

But the original problem remains: how can Jesus be said to suffer if he is a single divine person? Clark is absolutely right when he rejected the mystobabble redefinition of paradox. A paradox was a difficult puzzle that, seemingly, was unsolvable until it later resolved. A paradox was not a set of contradictions and logical errors that were gloated over as profound. What Maximus preserved in the third council of Constantinople, where he was vindicated from earlier condemnation, was this ability to speak of unconfused natures in a single divine person.

The third council of Constantinople involved the question of Christ’s will: did he have one will or two? While, on the surface, this question appeared nonsensical (two wills means some kind of schizophrenia) and arcane debate, it was necessary to clarify Chalcedon’s definition. Maximus was adamant that Christ had two wills because wills were attributes of a nature. Christ exercised one willing through two wills, but to say that Christ had one will because he is one person would mean that the Father and the Spirit had independent wills. Will was a category of nature, as were all aptitudes to act (what has been translated as “energies”). In other words, the will (and the energies in general) was a question of how rather than what. Christ wills in two different ways as the single person. Thus, as divine, Christ willed the cosmic-order of submission to the Father, which, as human, Christ willed to submit to the Father. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ fear was not mortal weakness that was then put in turbocharge through divine acceptance. It was as man that Jesus trembled as sin-bearer and it was as man that Jesus submitted to the Father. Similarly, it was as divine that Jesus ratified the good of not being cursed under the reign of sin and it was as divine that Jesus sustained the need for obedience to God.

This framework may appear odd or wooden, but approach it a different way. Every act of Jesus, as the Word of God, chose to live this kind of life for this end. The Word of God willingly chose to experience this set of creaturely experiences, including pain, as the Man Jesus Christ. Jesus (to use this name for the Word who was made flesh) predetermined this course for himself, which he experienced also as a man. The two energies, the two hows, explain overlapping realities that do not collapse into one another. Jesus did not turn on Godmode for his miracles (for mortal prophets had healed the sick, performed great wonders, and even raised the dead) and revert to Manmode for his feebleness. The Word of God foreordained he would do these actions, that he was the Lamb that was slain before the foundations of the world, as the Word and as the man, as the foreordainer of suffering and the sufferer.

In this way, what matters most is the how, not the what. Human nature is a set of aptitudes, defined functionally. Thus, the Bible groups bats with birds, not because it claimed bats were not mammals, but because they both had wings, they both flew, their domain was the air. Cut the wings off a bird and it is still a bird, but a de-formed one. Mankind bears the image of God, the rational capacity to reign (through naming the animals, through language, which is thought itself). Men may be de-formed, but that does change the original definition of kind. Thus, moving away from ontology, the question of Human nature is the how of this one. In Christ, there are two hows for this one, composite, but revealing a single who had willed to will in a different way, adding a human how onto the divine how.

It is this dual structure that marks most of the Bible’s superficial contradictory frameworks. Pharaoh hardened his own heart, but God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Satan inspired David to number Israel, but God instigated David. Judas betrayed Christ into the hands of his enemies, but God had foreordained that the Christ would suffer and die. God’s foresight is never at odds with his predestination, as if God willed strictly in reaction to events unfolding below. God commands Isaiah and Jeremiah to preach, having already closed the hearts of his apostate people. The Psalmist prays for God to turn the hearts of the people, so that they, having turned, would turn to God who would then turn to them. God wills the willing disobedience that he then punishes for having violated his will. God is not the author of sin, in that he did not authorize or command it, but he does permit it to take place and thus wills it so.

What is at work in this strange dynamic? It is not unlike the oddly binary passages of Scripture where the Lord rains fire down from the Lord in Heaven (Genesis 19:24). God wills both the righteous and unrighteous, even as he wills God who authorizes a law unto life or death. Though a self-professed pantheism, Girogio Agamben incidentally offers a framework to think this odd claim through. The core concept that Heidegger had discovered to finally overcome ontotheology was not Dasein, not Being, but the Clearing. What did this clearing mean, that Plato had discovered as chora (space)? It was the pure possibility of possibility:

What is at stake here is not the relation between two beings in the world, between a knowing subject and a known object, but between a being and what we could call, according to the above mentioned etymology of the term spatium from patere, ‘being open,’ its ‘patency’ or opening, which medieval thought still knew by the name intentio. And this opening is not in its turn a substance, but a pure mode — not a quid or a what, but only a ‘how.’ (The Unrealizable, 244)

Having examined the work of Plato and true Platonists like Isaac Newton, the possibility of possibility, the space in which something to exist, is the definition of God. There is nothing that exists that does not have the mandate to exist. All things that exist are from God and God is experienced, as Agamben cited from Medieval heretics, the rockness in rock. But that is not all there is in the Bible. God does not only create, but judges. He wills the wicked to flourish for a time and then suffer judgement. God is pure how, pure modality of all modes, and the judge of the exercise of these modes. Agamben cannot accept that the opening is not only sheer openness, but also the will-to-order what appears in his opening. To restate the point once more, men can only sin because God wills them to be able to do so, but God also judges these sinners. As Paul put it towards a very different cosmological point:

What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,

Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? (Romans 9: 22-24)

The person of the Father wills for the sheer possibility of all possibilities, which the Son then orders into the created-order through the Spirit who empowers the Son in all places to act. Each “person” is a composite of thoughts that in no way contradict, even as they are discrete. The Man Jesus Christ is the mediator between God and Man, the one appointed to judge both the sheep and the goats, the living and the dead. It was the Word of God that cut a covenant with Abraham, passing through twice for both God and man. It is in this dual capacity that Jesus stands as mediator of all, until the Father is all in all.

If one still considers this a little Nestorian, it is in the sense of actual Nestorians. The Church of the East taught that Christ had two natures, two hypostaseis, and one prosopon. The unique identity of this one, who stood in both capacities, these two hows, of the will-to-order per the Father as his Word and the ordering-will as the man, are united, but there are no two actors that act independently of one another, as if the Word assumed Jesus like a spirit taking possession of a body. Thus Jesus could say, to the confused and shocked Pharisees, that Abraham rejoiced to see Jesus’ day. For before Abraham, I am — a clear and shocking identification with the divinity of God. Jesus united two hows as a single who, one who in the fullness of time tabernacled among men through the curtain of his flesh. Did God suffer? Not in the sense that he was imposed upon, but authorized the experience that racked the flesh he had assumed. Was Jesus a Human person? In the sense of a concrete instance. God is the source of both necessity and contingency, of is and ought, that all happens in accordance with God’s will but God will vindicate disobedience. As St Paul queried over the Promises and the Law: a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one (Galatians 3:20).

This reflection may raise some uncomfortable truths. God has not merely permitted, but actively willed through his permission, the sins that plague the Earth. He did not authorize these sins, but his will let them take place. This includes the damnation of the wicked, which he did not redeem. Clark was more Augustinian than conventionally Calvinist, but that did not make him any less harsh. That allowed him to face down these troubles without the retreat of pastoral rhetoric. It is not to say that pastoral rhetoric does not have a place. A woman suffering loss does not need to hear that God had actively permitted her child to die, only that God would avenge this corruption brought upon the world through the disobedience of Adam. But pastoral rhetoric cannot replace clear thought, and that has been what the work of Gordon Clark inspired in this reflection.

It is important to understand that God is both he in whom we live and move and have our being, and yet will one day stand against us, to vindicate or condemn, as the Judge of all the Earth. But who is that judge? Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the Son of Mary, mediator between God and man, who will make God all in all.

The core problem of liberalism is individualism — this claim is boilerplate for most self-professed conservatives and right-wingers. The Community, the Local, a People in a Place, these are claimed as the basis for Western civilization, which the advent of liberalism (beginning with the Enlightenment, or perhaps further back to the Renaissance-Reformation, or even more implausibly John Duns Scotus’ criticisms of Thomas Aquinas) dissolved. Beginning with the postwar consensus, Americanism (or globalism if less self-hating) became the deracinated plastic ideology of McDonald’s and the Ford Motor Company. But the ideological roots of this conquest far predate American hegemony, with the advent of Capitalism, Imperialism, and the rejection of all forms of natural hierarchy. Therefore, to restore civilization against barbarism the West must rediscover its ancient roots in Tradition and Community before it’s too late.

The irony in this assessment is that it has its roots in self-professed liberals and socialists, frustrated with the failures of their world. Edmund Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution derive from Whiggery and the first members of the British Liberal Party defended a long, organic, creep of Anglo-Saxons in pursuit of liberty (it was not an idea fit for all peoples). Later liberals attempted to expand these ideas to other races (be they central/eastern Europeans, and eventually even non-white peoples), and this idea went along with state-churches and what in America would be known as the Mainline. It was self-described New Deal liberals that attacked the acid bath of unfettered Capitalism and Wall Street.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was one of the first to speak for the Mainline Protestants in America (being a converted Jew to Lutheranism from Germany) in arguing for a moral equivalent to war. The Civilian Conservation Corps and his very own Camp William James were efforts to bring about the unity and labor necessary to unite people for the common good. He was one of the first who would call themselves postliberals, rejecting naked moralizing for something more rooted and community focused. The Bible may be a seat of ancient myths, but it could not be set aside without the total loss of religion. The Bible formed a people in where they came from, who they were, and where they were going. It was the churches, not the psychiatrists, that could save the liberal project from annihilation, a turn to save Western civilization from the “totalitarian” philosophies of the early twentieth century.

Postliberals awkwardly saw similar movements critical of individualistic capitalism in favor of new kinds of community. The Hippies, as well as the New Left that they formed, rejected corporate capitalism in favor of new organic communities. The problem with the shop floor, with or without labor union organization, was that it was alienating. The suburbs were alienating. It was free-love and experimental drug-use that could liberate man for a new communal existence. While aspects of Hippies transmuted into the Yuppies (drugs and sex, but no longer seeking a commune), something of the New Left spirit persisted in these more straight-laced communitarians. Christopher Lasch, an ex-Marxist, lamented the narcissism and self-indulgence of corporate America. It was arch-liberal Robert Putnam that penned Bowling Alone and lamented the loss of Small Town America with its voluntary local associations. Robert Kennedy’s bid for the presidency in 1968 was simultaneously a recognition of the New Left’s anger and a wounded conservative’s lament for America. Like Obama forty years later, RFK claimed to restore Main Street against the militancy, finance, and bureaucracy in Washington.

Postliberalism was very much at home with a liberalism that had become wayward (but was fundamentally sound). And while this attitude attracted some newly identified conservatives, it also drew socialists disillusioned with the Soviet Union’s experiment in socialism. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the greatest ethicist for the postliberal project, Alasdair MacIntyre, was an ex-Trotskyist. Drawing on the genealogical history of French Catholics like Etienne Gilson, where the turn away from Thomism was the dissolution for civilization, MacIntyre in After Virtue diagnosed that the modern collapse of ethics has been due to the loss of the teleological. There was no longer a unified vision of Human nature and its beatitude, the end for which men strove as the happy life, but now only the failures of Kantian deontology and Utilitarianism. Aristotle summed up the Great Tradition (a claim that MacIntyre admits that Aristotle would have never made for himself) and offered a teleological model for all communities, grounding morality in an interconnected Is of Nature with the Ought of well-being.

What Aristotle lacked was universal reach. The Aristotelian virtue-ethics only pertained to the city-state and the city-state, for Ancient Greeks, had mythological origins with little to no awareness of historicity. What Christianity offered (as well as Judaism and Islam) was a universal ethic of love (defined as the capacity for reconciliation and a concept of Human rights). The Abrahamic monotheist traditions each had an expositor who integrated Aristotle into these respective traditions. Islam had Avicenna, Judaism had Maimonides, and both of these contributed to the Catholic synthesis of Aristotle, primarily worked out through Thomas Aquinas. This synthesis allowed a triplex notion of nature that could be perfected through time:

The threefold structure of untutored human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be, human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos and the precepts of rational ethics as the means for the transition from one to the other remains central to the theistic understanding of evaluative thought and judgment. (53)

The historical nature of progress towards nature’s telos allowed communities to adapt to a closer approximation of the ideal. The Church, as a slice of the Heavenly-perfect on Earth, remained a check against self-exalting political entities. Henry II may have allowed the murder of Thomas a Becket, but they existed in an Aristotelian thought-world that allowed a process of self-correction. Under the auspices of the Church, Henry II submitted to the canonization and cult of Thomas as a martyr. The king’s will was not the end of his subjects, the Church could legitimate the true expression of virtue that all men, even Henry II, looked upon as a closer proximate of the ideal. Medieval Europe was a stable, but historical, set of societies that were always judged in light of a perfect Heavenly society that they pursued. This conception did not leave a slow evolving society that never had institutional processes of self-correction (something MacIntyre ascribed to Burkean Conservatives). Instead, the normative virtues could correct erring princes and reestablish the common good.

This harmonious, self-correcting, system pilgrimaging through time broke against enemies of the teleological. Augustinians (Protestant and Jansenist) shattered the Is and Ought through a rejection of man’s natural aptitude and capacity for virtue. For them Nature was always incomplete and incapable of producing the ethical vision. Instead they appealed to the shadowy will of God, which, for MacIntyre, was a turn to irrational voluntarism. This theological redirection thus changed the relationship between Church and polity towards an individual sovereign. Unlike the battle between Henry II and Thomas a Becket, a different Henry appealed to his right to discern whether he had broken God’s law and a different Thomas appealed to his conscience in refusing to obey. The execution of Thomas More under Henry VIII represented now two rival moral visions, one where the common good was dissolved for competing natural goods. The capacity for communal ethical decision-making and a shared ethical vision of the good life had dissolved.

The voluntarism that had led to the Reformation was naturally oriented towards the individual and the individual conscience, something that the Enlightenment had brought to fruition. But it was precisely at the moment where the individual man, valorizing Mankind, became paramount that he ceased to matter. The moment the individual replaced the community, the general sense of Human nature (and its end) collapsed. The ends of natures were radically separated, and made unknown, from the means of Nature. Thus Kant, in his own ethical theory, attempted to salvage ethics through the categorical imperative, actions that were good in themselves whatever results they may bring about. Ethics no longer had connection to a life well-lived, but was now merely duty that one experienced in the abstract relationship between action and the absolute subject. It was no longer a question of nature and blessedness, but the individual’s capacity to will what he ought to will.

This emphasis on will, MacIntyre surmised, created the bridge between Kant and Nietzsche. Kant had rapped himself in systems of thought that were, ultimately, arbitrary. The means were ends in themselves, which meant they could be deployed for a variety of determined ends, regardless if they were natural or not. Nietzsche’s exaltation of the will to power was what energized Max Weber’s sociological analysis, where bureaucracies were good if they were efficient. A bureaucracy was a rational system in service to its creator’s end. Therefore, a good bureaucracy was one that exercised its tasks efficiently, detached from any single or united end. A bureaucracy that brought equitable distribution and a bureaucracy that fleeced the outsiders were both good if they both were run well. It was this amoral sociology that constituted both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, whose own Marxism was a cover for its Weberian engine. Therefore, in MacIntyre’s reconstruction, totalitarian bureaucratic states were Weberian and Weber’s sociology was Nietzschean. Therefore it was Nietzsche, the logical product of Kantian ethics, that stood as the greatest challenge for the modern ethicist:

The power of Nietzsche's position depends upon the truth of one central thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will. (117)

If civilization was to recover from this voluntaristic, amoral, barbarism, then Aristotle (modified through traditions of charitable universal monotheism) was the only solution. Nietzsche can first be criticized for failing to understand the Homeric age he praised. The ancient Greeks were not ubermenschen imposing their individual wills, but acted upon communal binaries of honor/dishonor and piety/impiety. Achilles’ refusal to fight was not a product of his will-to-power, but the dishonor he felt as a peer. No individual can ever created ethics for himself, but derives his moral compass from his communal surroundings. MacIntyre can, thus, only treat law-givers as myths, since there was never a new break when Lycurgus legislated for Sparta or Moses for Israel. The communal was always the beginning, based upon its preexistence in time, changing, evolving, determining itself in light of its common good and common idea of a happy life.

However, MacIntyre is not a slavish Aristotelian and he is fully at home in the modern world. While Aristotle is made into the vehicle of the Great Tradition (contrary to what Aristotle would have ever said about his own project), Aristotle also failed to criticized the evils of his own day. Without the monotheistic tradition, the polis could never receive correction of failing to live fully up to its ideals. Thus, Aristotle justified slavery as natural, was racist towards barbarian people, and was crudely elitist in believing that certain virtues (like magnanimity) were beyond common and laboring peoples. Similarly, MacIntyre acknowledged that Medieval Christendom has moral flaws. But it was obedient to a model that was capable of self-correction, one that led to Vatican Two and Catholicism’s acceptance of Human Rights and democratic procedure. Individual passions and arbitrary decisions were restrained through a commitment to a common end and common vision.

While Human Nature was a universal, it was something progressively formed in dialog across borders of space and time. What was good for a fifth century Athenian was not the same as for a thirteenth century Benedictine, but the universal charity that Thomas had imbued into Aristotelian virtue ethics allowed a reconciliation towards a final end. There was no way besides traveling through time, more fully refining these practices within communities. Thus, while Francis of Assisi was a medieval exemplar, so MacIntyre considered Leon Trotsky to be an exemplar for more modern times. In this way grace, as Thomas taught, perfected nature.

With a few speed bumps, it is not hard to see why MacIntyrean ethics became attractive to conservatives (particularly Catholic conservatives) and why After Virtue became a classic. The famous last line of waiting not for Godot but another St Benedict inspired Rod Dreher’s crunchy conservative journalism. Virtue was historical and one that juxtaposed the lived life of the local community against large government or corporate bureaucracies. It was necessary for morality to have a common myth, and therefore religion, which some more rabid secular leftists tried to banish, was necessary for society. Just as a music academy had rules and practices to produce virtuosi, the rules of society were oriented towards producing good citizens. Political society, contrary to the quasi-liberal claims of shared goods and shared protection (a view retrojected back to Hobbes) that modern political theorists believed, was for building good Human beings.

Despite these accolades, MacIntyre remained an unapologetic Socialist in the stripe of someone like Herbert McCabe. He had no interest in political conservatism, despite attempts to distance these rightwing postliberals from the Reagan and Thatcher years. They do despised individualism and unfettered capitalism, as well as corporations and even some forms of foreign intervention. The irony, again, was that the liberalism they raged against was the same liberalism liberals raged against, often ascribing it to the center-right. If this theory was the way forward, why was Obama hailed as a communitarian, someone who supposedly read Thomas Aquinas to form his decision-making? The constant refrain for the Community is not something antithetical to the current moment, but the constant moan of frustrated liberals. The enemy, for MacIntyre, was liberalism in the abstract, which meant, in practice, Reaganomics.

The dependence MacIntyre has on formation through history and in history is a blow to all revolutions and counterrevolutions. The ecclesiastical ephors stand as the guardians of true virtue, and thus the Word of God is always bound to the processes set in motion since forever. God is primarily a postulate for moral communal life, the definition of a happy existence, that has continued on in the modern period through various smaller religious groups (in America, MacIntyre lists some ethinic Catholics and Orthodox, as well as some Jews). Postliberalism is no way out from the rot of the current order, but simply to make one’s place within it.

Strangely enough, this captivity to history is found an equally communitarian Peter Leithart. Though postured as a (friendly) critic of Natural Theology and Classical Theism, Leithart’s Delivered from the Elements of the World (his self-proclaimed opus) is an exposition on this Pauline syntagma to comprehend the mission of the Church through all time. What stood opposed to this vision was Kantian ethics and its Pelagian soteriology which stood behind the corruptions of the modern world:

If humanity is going to achieve a state of health (what Christians call salvation), we are going to have to be saved in our social and political situations; our social structures and political institutions are going to have to become conducive to harmony and justice, peace and human flourishing. For Christians, the health of the human race turns on the work done by Jesus, and that means that the good of social life must somehow have its source there, on Calvary and at the empty tomb. Ultimately Jesus died and rose again to bring the human race to its final end in glory, to gather a people who will one day be a spotless bride, without blemish or wrinkle or any such thing, a perfected humanity to be presented to the Father. (13)

The core error is in the choice of prepositions: in.

For Leithart, all theology is sociology (or all sociology is theology). Therefore, the Apostle Paul is the great sociologist in his expositions of God and the covenant. What Paul understood, what the Old Testament taught and every ancient society expressed, was cosmological division. Every society had notions of clean/unclean, pure/impure, holy/common. Every society understood boundary crossing between these divisions required ritualization, lest what is holy be profaned. Sacrilege was the greatest crime, for it was a functional rejection of these divisions. However, contrary to most atheistic sociologists, these divisions came from God and were reflected in “nature.” Physis (nature) and Nomos (customary constitutional law) were intertwined, with Leithart emphasizing on the latter over the former. Biology and culture were intermixed, thus Paul could refer to himself as a Jew kata physein, belonging not only by lineage but through ritual circumcision. Jesus Christ came to overcome these divisions and bring unity, to deliver from the elements of the world.

In the Old Testament, God implemented these socio-biological divisions in light of Adam’s fall into sin. God divided the nations at Babel when they sought to build a tower to Heaven. But division is more intrinsic to God’s creative process, with Genesis creating Sky/Earth, Land/Sea, and Man/Woman. These divisions are not wholly rejected, though they are united in ways that, in Leithart’s handling, are odd. Circumcision divided the Children of Abraham from the Nations, but it also ritually emasculated the People of God. The phallus was a symbol of man’s pride, his ability to reproduce and acquire a clannish immortality. In making this cut, Israel was marked as an enemy of the flesh, the valorization of man’s native capacities. This blurring between reunion and collapse of division will later mark Leithart’s political analysis, but that will come later. Suffice to say that, for Leithart, the Old Testament was given to intensify these ritual division and mark out Israel as an enemy of mere mankind.

All of these rituals, particularly ones of sacrifice, demonstrated man’s insufficiency. The goal of mankind was not simply to be man, but to become spiritual. Man could not re-enter Eden, and thus spotless animals in the Tabernacle/Temple (designed as symbols for Eden) ascended to God as smoke, dying, being divided, and reuniting in fire. These all testified to the sacrifice of the Messiah, who would be the sinless offering that would enter Heaven through his unspotted flesh, unleashing the reign of the Spirit to finally overcome these ritual divisions of the flesh. Jesus’ atonement was not merely justification, with Leithart poking at traditional Protestant theological categories, but also lived redemption. Using the clunky neologism “deliverdict,” the atonement not only wiped away the guilt of sin but also freed man from the elemental forces of the world that ancient societies (including Israel) ritualized in divisions. Paul was not simply thinking about a divine courtroom, but a spiritual war against the dark forces that keep mankind in bondage. The sacrament of Baptism granted cosmological citizenship in the Spirit, no longer bound to the world of the flesh. The Church was this new polity that Jesus created, his Bride, that would be the process through which the world would be redeemed.

Leithart is an unapologetic ecclesiocrat, and thus soteriology is sociology. Salvation is the Church, worked out in history as various peoples are rescued from the elemental nations into this kingdom of the Spirit. The Church is ultimately the Universal society, one that did not erase, but absorbed, all sociological differences. The Church contained all races and all classes, making them all one people while also not (in Leithart’s example, a Korean was still a Korean but not a Korean kata sarkein). Not unlike MacIntyre, the historical Church represented this universal ideal that was slowly absorbing all peoples in reconciliation. However, unlike MacIntyre, this vision is emphatically Christian. Of course, this quality makes it worse.

Did it work? Not really. Leithart’s understanding of Church history makes the Church to be a generally broken institution. It has failed consistently in almost all places and times, with one exception being maybe the Jesuits forming a multi-racial theocracy in seventeenth century Paraguay before the imperial forces of Spain and Portugal shut it down. Christians have consistently warred against other Christians. Christians have divided into separate nation-states, Christians have been purveyors of gender-war (both as Feminism and masculine movements), Christians have engaged in racism, and Christians have built economic systems that foster class division (both as unfettered Capitalism and Socialism). Christians have even divided into different kinds of Christians, with mutually hostile churches. How can Leithart explain the fact that this experiment failed? Man’s sinfulness cannot work, because Jesus ushered in a new age of Spirit that was radically unlike the Mosaic dispensation. Appeals to the godly elect will not work because the Church is a sociological institution. Leithart’s explanation is heresy:

This is the apostasy of Galatianism. Paul indicates that it is possible to leave the Christian era, to reerect the boundaries and divisions of Torah, to leave Eden after being readmitted and to reestablish the dividing walls between nations that Jesus broke down. The world entered the Christian era by the justifying act of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but it is possible to renounce and leave it. (194)

Christ brought a new world of unity, but it can be simply defeated through neglect or rejection. From the very beginning, in Paul’s letters, this apostasy took root, but was held at bay (a judgement Leithart can only make about a millennia of Christian history through willful ignorance). Now, after the advent of modern Liberalism, Galatianism (not Judaizing, used outside of Paul as mostly an antisemitic slur) has reared its ugly head. The false gospel of universal liberalism has reintroduced xenophobia, racism, nationalism, and various other forms of tribalism across all the divisions that Christ had overcome. Nevertheless, the Church is still at work, wherever it is and whatever it is, being the vehicle of salvation.

MacIntyre’s god may be a theory and Leithart’s god a moron, but both depend on the Community as the locus of mankind’s redemption. Individualism is the great evil that rejects this role, either in the form of fostering teleological virtue ethics or as the Spirited Bride that forges a new creation. History remains a set of shackles that is constantly renegotiated to no end. The eternal cannot strike without a consultant class. Both MacIntyre and Leithart imagine Medieval Christendom as a stable fabric where the supernatural was integrated fully into historical form, unfolding until Christ’s return that modern liberalism derailed it. If theology is sociology and righteousness is communally formed virtue ethics, then there is no way off this train. MacIntyre, as a leftist Catholic, is entirely fine with this turn of events, as the former Francis papacy (and likely Leo’s papacy) will continue this centrist drift. The problem today is Donald Trump and the “populism” that once more destabilizes in favor of individualism. Instead, Popular Front governments must retard the West and contain it within this temporal blanket

However, the way out of these paradigms, that lead nowhere with no hope, is to attack the idea that the Bible is a “historical religion.” The Bible is not the only text that takes chronological time seriously. Various reigns kept records and ancient astronomers noted the seasonal cycles. Even the first realist historian, Thucydides, was not captive to mythic origins and ends. Instead, Thucydides denied that history contained any significance or meaning intrinsic to itself. The heart of Time was empty, Chance seemed to reign over all the gods and men as a fickle despot. It was this claim, as well as the rule of the stars and the gods of the nations, that the Bible attacked.

The uniqueness of Christianity was in the apocalyptic, the unveiling of God that suspended the course of time. Providence was God’s active intervention, through a judge or prophet, to break the current mold. There was no expectation that the communal institutions were immune to corruption, could self-correct, or offer a unified vision. All too often the Ashtorehs and Baals would redefine the very norms of Israel. And this ebb and flow crossed boundaries of space as well as time. Ancient Israel began with Abraham leaving on his own for a Promised Land, with his sons that would be led into Egyptian exile and led out to Canaan.

The righteousness of a moving people marked not only the people of God in the reign of the Patriarchs, but also the Christianized Germans who settled across Europe. Crusader kingdoms brought new colonies to the Levant and early modern empires settled the Americas. It was fierce commitment to a moving pillar of fire and cloud that marked the virtue of these people. These norms were not fixed in time, but stood above to call the elect out of mere historicity. The life of God was not in the community, so much as a promised Word, a Word that could assembled all those with obedient hearts and willing hands. That even as the land was scoured by ravaging beasts, a scattered remnant would remain, a holy seven-thousand who did not bend the knee.

For all the criticism that MacIntyre and Leithart, among many others, place on the Renaissance and the Reformation, as events that vaunted the individual at the expense of communal fabric, it was these events that breathed life into decrepit institutions. The Medici revived mystical learning in imbuing Florence with new institutions of study and organization. The networks that beautified Rome, the Erasmian circuit that emphasized renewed learning, and, eventually, the networks of Luther and Zwingli, brought a renewal of time. Contrary to the dilapidated modernism that made history an ever-flowing insuperable river that could never be crossed twice, the expectation the a primordial age could break into the gothic, “modern,” present was what animated men to rethink what was possible. It was not in the community, but in individuals, that life reignited once more. It was in the individual, the great man, where a burst of time could come upon us and redefine the age through shared spirit, tongues of fire.

If anything, the eternity of the Word of God could appear and any moment to bring rebirth. The Word of God could appear at any moment to bring reform. This ethos not only marked the Renaissance and Reformation, but various creative explosions throughout the Middle Ages (e.g. the Carolingian Renaissance), which were anything but static. It is to this sense of historical awareness, where the ancient, even eternal, standards may force their way into the Present, that man may find a way out of this current darkness. A law-giver appears with an oracle. What is needed is not the eternal community, but fire from Heaven.

Prologue: This essay is only comparative literary analysis, but it has significance for the future of Christianity in the West. If the Gospel will thrive, it will rejuvenate politics and culture in its wake. Today, America is the only Western nation with a meaningful Christian population. While Roman Catholics make up roughly a quarter of Americans, many of them draw little to no significance from the Church or its Traditions (including the Bible as a normative guide), though the choice of an American pope signals that America may be the future home of Western Catholicism. In contrast, American Evangelicals, making up a little over a fifth of the total population, consistently claim their faith as the source of their daily ethics and general views. American Evangelicals are solid on almost all ethical and social questions that face the West today, despite the fact that many are disaffected with their local church and larger para-church professionals. In many cases, these are sheep without shepherds, or are actively fleeing hirelings pining for a New York Times editorial. Evangelicals will persist through their individual emphasis on conversion, but without direction this spirit will dwindle into an increasingly irrelevant ghetto, de-Christianizing like Europe.

But, contrary to many social conservatives, de-Christianization will not lead to imminent social collapse. There are other social phenomena besides religion that can unify a people and there are religions that are vaguely theological that provide social cohesion. Contemporary Europe is suffering shocks from non-White immigration and geopolitical repositioning. The center of most European politics, be it center-left Social Democracy or center-right Christian Democracy, mostly consists of a welfare pensioner blob that cares little for the future. Thus, in response, new “populist” forms of nationalist have appeared on the right, resisting the current status quo. In general, this new political movement appeals to the broad brush of European cultural history, including Greece, Rome, Medieval Christendom, and the French Revolution. For many, “cultural Christianity” (that has absorbed quasi-atheists like Richard Dawkins, Ali Hirsch, and Tom Holland) is part of an appeal to a shared European identity against foreign interlopers. For others, Christianity has been part of the problem, especially with churches (both Roman and Protestant) embracing limitless refugees and multiculturalism. Nietzsche then offers a breath of fresh air, a culturally (if not racially) European alternative to the moribund Christianity that endorses (if not accepts) Brussels bureaucrats imposing austerity and regulation, sometimes even Green eco-suicide.

To resist this tide of self-destruction, some on the European right (and also in the Anglozone and in America) have opted for this anti-Christian Nietzschean persuasion. The time of Abrahamic monopoly has come to an end, and there is no reason to prop it up. Christianity is accused of being the fount of modern leftism, with its fixation on equity and de-racialized social uplift. New Age spirituality has often been associated with the political left, but there is little reason why horoscopes and will-worship witchcraft could not be deployed in service of the European races. This claim is not even dealing with the Anglozone embrace of Indian theologies (be they Hindu or Sikh) as religion simpliciter in the fight against globalism so called. Nevertheless, with the death spiral of Christian churches in Europe, it is unlikely that Christianity will have anything to say as a living tradition in Europe or the wider Anglozone. That leaves only America, with its decrepit Moral Majority, with a meaningful Christian population that could pursue a Christian cultural project or a distinctly Christian politics. Yet these people have no leaders. Even worse, some seek some accommodation with the “Nietzschean” or “Vitalist” right that aesthetically exceeds the fumes of derivative, mediocre, Evangelicals. It is the latter who appear as vulgar and excited parasites, looking to conform so as to feel alive.

But if the Gospel is true, then it will provide a source of culture independent of well-meaning, but heathenish, movements. If Christians will renew America, if not the wider West, then they will need a uniquely Christian culture. Against this Nietzschean tide, that is what consummate Puritan John Milton provides. Only if an artistic vision can accompany a political platform, used to influence and inspire, will American Evangelicals not melt away into the nothingness that Europe has become. It is up to American Evangelicals to see, once more, Satan fall as lightning and reclaim the flame of their civilization.

Part I — Dionysus

Friedrich Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for his contemporary Germany. It was a swarm of dour dimwitted bureaucrats and corporate minions. The junkers were dull brutes, kultur was a pathetic moralizing brew of neo-Kantian duties, and the rising tide of Socialism was the victory of rats over lions. At the very moment of German unification and the creation of a new Reich, Germany had already long lost its soul. It was a technocratic and rational civilization, one consumed with the Apollonian principium individualis that had no place for the “folk diseases” of the peasantry Wagnerian opera. The Birth of Tragedy was a genealogical critique of German corruption, falling away so far from the Hellenic foundations of Aryan civilization. “These poor creatures,” Nietzsche lamented, “have no idea how blighted and ghostly this ‘sanity’ of their sounds when the glowing life of Dionysian revellers thunders past them.” In the embrace of Apollonian reason, Germans had forgotten the truth, they forgot the “mysterious prime oneness” that gave birth to all and will receive all in death. Quoting old Silenus the Fawn, only a few could bear the truth of this world:

Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you - to die soon.

Nietzsche did not despise Apollo or the joys of Olympus, these had a role to play in the world of day, the affairs of the polis and the agora. But never should a civilization forget the fount from which it sprung, it should never forget Mother Night both births and devours her brood. The individuated life of man must never be alien to the ecstasy of the dithyramb and the flute, the Dionysic revel of wine and dance. The dark wisdom of Silenus must be heard to speak once more.

The muses of the arts of 'illusion' blanched before an art that voiced the truth in its intoxication - the wisdom of Silenus cried 'Woe! Woe!' to the cheerful Olympians. The individual, with all his restraints and moderations, was submerged in the self-oblivion of the Dionysiac state and forgot the Apolline dictates. Excess was revealed as truth, contradiction; the bliss born of pain spoke from the heart of nature.

Apollonian civilization must not forget that it too shall die. Every life ends in death, every city is the site of future ruins. The only reason for man to bother with any of these futile tasks is for their aesthetic value, for it only by an “aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Therefore, plow the fields, have many children, discourse in the assembly, and conduct business in the market, but do not forget that all of these will end in Hades. The only reason to bother is for art and the best art celebrates, in ecstatic frenzy, the dark truth of all things. The Greeks understood this truth best of all, especially the Athenians, celebrating it upon the stage. Tragedy alone experienced and reveled in this reality, lost in the frenzy of chorus, lamenting the loss of all that is great and beautiful in this world in unflinching pride.

Great poets like Aeschylus and Sophocles captured these moments, showing “that light-image that healing nature holds up to us after we have glimpsed the abyss.” Unlike Semitic myths of the Fall, with its account of impiety and decay, the Aryan myth of Prometheus (best exposited in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound) valorizes sacrilege, where man only can find his nobility in a willingness to defy the gods and suffer. By stealing fire from Olympus and refusing Zeus’ entreaties, Prometheus bears witness to the Void out of which all things, even the gods, emerge. The tragedy is to see, through a reflection, the horror of finitude and embrace this truth. These myths were not to be taken seriously and metaphysically, as if there were hierarchies of gods, but expressively. The great sin, therefore, would be to moralize these tales, to expect more than catharsis. That sin belonged primarily to the Socratic Eurpides.

Nietzsche, who styled himself antichrist, was not surprised that early Christians praised both Plato and Euripides, these Socratic fools that sought a truth beyond the great void. They babbled about Good and the soul, poisoning the only release (and true beauty) that man possessed. Euripides was the corrupter of Aryan myths and deserved judgement:

What was your wish, sacrilegious Euripides, when you tried to force that dying myth into your service once more? It died beneath your violent hands: and then you needed a counterfeit, masked myth which, like Heracles' monkey, could only deck itself out in the old finery [...] And because you abandoned Dionysus, Apollo in his turn abandoned you; though you rouse all the passions from their beds and bewitch them into your circle, though you whet and hone a sophistical dialectic for the speeches of your heroes, they too will have only counterfeit, masked passions, and speak only counterfeit, masked speeches.

Euripides refused the release, he suspended the Dionysic revelry and expected the audience to participate in his criticism. He forced “bourgeois mediocrity” to the fore in questioning the gods, in demanding redemption for man. The mere man thus replaced Silenus, the ecstasy of pride with the dialectic of justice. Euripides hoped to free man from myth, but, in so doing, trapped him further. What good was a democrat that hated the people? What was one man in the name of the people against the mob? He who sought to liberate the city was in turn liberated through hemlock. As a disciple of Socrates, Euripides pursued universal truth and found that it was hardly universal. What was common belonged to almost no one and what was Human did not exist for the many. He shattered myths, only to be repaid in hostility.

What Socrates brought was true nihilism. It was not that the Void was not the mother of us all (it was), but the great dialectician expected the Void to be moral and lead to Elysium. Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, the oracle declared, but only because he knew that he knew nothing. That alone warranted wine, not sobriety; that warranted a violet moon, not the withering sun. By introducing ethics into tragedy, to demand reason and justice from Fate, to place circumspect speeches of impotent agnosticism into the mouths of the gods, was to destroy tragedy. Ugly boredom replaced the beauty of release in service to the truth, but there was no truth to be found.

Euripides finally surrendered in his last play, The Bacchae, where the impudent Pentheus, the petulant royal Apollonian, found himself outmatched and destroyed by Dionysus. Having persecuted the acolytes of the god and blasphemed his rites, Pentheus ultimately find himself ultimately seduced into his own self-immolation. At first mocking grand-father Cadmus and blind prophetic Tiresias for taking the garb of revelers, old men dressed as women, Pentheus would later find himself doing the same. The Theban king loses his mind under Dionysus’ influence, seeing two suns in the sky as his sanity cracked and will dissolved. Like playwright himself, Pentheus had abandoned Dionysus and, in turn, the light of Apollo had abandoned him. Like an old drunk, Euripides drank not for revelry, but to try to forget his own rotten life.

Like Socrates, Euripides’ plays birthed the “theoretical man,” the rational man who annihilates not only art but reason itself. A tragedy that rationalizes suffering was a tragedy that asked its audience to commit suicide. Knowledge could never be found, there was never an actual way for the philosopher to gaze upon the Ideas. Instead, reason was only rewarding as an experience, the process to know as superior to knowledge (something Gottfried Lessing, historicist and nihilist, came to believe). Socrates only had his fun in his questions, not in his attempted descriptions of reality through myth. The Socratic man was soon the bored man, the principium individualis leading to a desire for self-dissolution.

That was why the tragic was necessary, for only “while in the mystical triumphal cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken and the path is opened to the Mothers of Beings, to the innermost core of things.” Despite the Socratics and Christian theologians (who Nietzsche would describe as peddlers of Platonism for the masses), Aryan man preserved some of the tragic art (e.g. Tristan und Isolde, Lutheran choral music, Wagner) through the pallor of Christendom. Nevertheless, the Apollonians, the Alexandrians of speculative theology and philosophy, dominated the current era of Wilhelmine Germany. They must be thrust aside, these irrational rationalists, and Dionysus must restore the vitality of his volk.

Nietzsche’s criticisms leave only enough room for modern Euripideans to squirm. Why expect morality from art? Why impose it as a cosmic-order that has little proof? If Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism) is true, as it is believed to be, then why would you ever dare moralize beyond the aesthetic pleasure of the fit? Yet modern Darwinists, in Nietzsche’s time and ours, endlessly moralize about the value of Human Rights even as they turn around and announce the meaningless of Mankind, Earth, and all of existence. What does it matter? Even Richard Dawkins has backed away from the edge, not from intellectual rigor but cowardice. He is the last true Victorian, a decent and proper chap that will not face the Void under natural selection. Like Euripides, he is miserable vagabond in his own civilization, scolding the gods for their injustice but fearing the rumble of the Dionysic chariot. There is poor Dawkins, with poor Euripides, alone in the principium individualis, strangled by the irrationality of his morality.

Nietzsche’s conceit, of course, is no less moralizing and metaphysical. The void of death, the darkness of sheer potentiality, is prime. Through her chaotic generations and gyrations, the ephemeral reality is birthed and it has a duty, a Dionysic mandate, for the theatrical. Nietzsche is not truly a relativist, he is not Pentheus who scorns the gods. He honors them through sacrilege, a reminder that there is a reality beyond the gods that even they must pay obeisance. Contrary to an egoist, who may take pure pleasure in choosing to live the life of a dimwit or a slave, Nietzsche just knows that the life of a lion is more noble than the life of a rat? But how? And why assume this nocturnal matrix is the bottom? What if it is only His dark material?

Part II — Christ

The arch-Puritan John Milton thus begins from another starting point. In the beginning, God. And like Nietzsche’s appreciation for the tragic, the Source cannot itself the prime actor in the play. Maternal death is everywhere, but cannot be the protagonist. God has a few speaking lines, but Milton’s Satanist is the villainous protagonist in Paradise Lost. For some critics, the fact that God seems distant and aloof, and Satan writhing with passion and rage, makes Milton of the Devil’s party. But such a judgement is to read the poem in isolation, a tragedy overcome through true comedy. For Milton, as for any Puritan (no matter how heterodox), Christ is the protagonist of Human history, but only in his role as Man. The Son of God makes a brief appearance, during Raphael’s narration of the War in Heaven for Adam and Eve, acting as plot-advancement against the rebellious host. After days of intractable battle between the elect and fallen angels, down descends the Only Begotten to sweep away the wicked off Heaven’s heights. Having fallen for nine days and nights, Satan and his minions begin unabated in the fires of Hell. Thus, even as the Son of God delivered the fateful blow, he did not put an end to their existence. True victory for the race of men, and their glory, was to overcome Satan at his own game. It was only when the Son of God became the man Jesus of Nazareth (the role promised by the Father to the Son in Book III). Only through the Son of God’s victory would Heaven become all in all.

At the beginning of Paradise Regain’d, Jesus entered the Wilderness, where he “lay down the rudiments/of his great warfare,” unclear about his path forward. The Father had clearly given him a great destiny, for even as a boy, Jesus reflected, he never indulged in fancy or worthless trifles. He had no time for distractions or games, but only for the study of the Word of God. He would achieve “victorious deeds” as liberator of Israel, only concerned for “public good,” and would finally topple “brute violence and proud tyrannic power” through “winning words to conquer willing hearts.” The Word of God would glorify the universe and liberate man from the darkness of ignorance and vice. This assurance and destiny would propel Jesus, seemingly without effort, against his baffle foe.

Satan, on the other hand, was himself unsure of this new adversary. He had heard prophecies of a Messiah king, and here John the Baptist had hailed him as the long awaited one. To test the waters, Satan first approached Jesus as an old man, counseling him to seek food in the wilderness. But Jesus sees through this disguise immediately, and rejects the idea that he, though hungry, would use divine power to conjure food. Man is not a walking stomach. Satan, recoiling, promises his friendship. He had misled man, but now both of them were exiles. He had grown sympathetic to mortal plight and even God still let him visit Heaven now and then (as he had done in Job). But Jesus only held him in naked contempt:

As a poor miserable captive thrall

Comes to the place where he had sat

Among the prime in splendour, now deposed,

Ejected, emptied, gazed, unpitied, shunned,

A spectacle of ruin or of scorn

Stunned, Satan retreats to his airy council to recalibrate his strategy (shrugging off the satyrial Belial’s suggestion to tempt Jesus with women; this man was no vulgar goat). Returning the next day, Satan offers the Son of God a feast, which Jesus rejects as “pompous delicacies” unworthy of him. If not a banquet, what about money? If Jesus was a king, he needed wealth to gain allies and equip supporters. Virtue alone was insufficient. But again Jesus rebuffed him: had he never heard of Gideon or Jephthah, who subdued nations through righteousness? It was true that money could buy a throne, but then that power was a “scepter oftest best missed.” If not money, what of glory? Great heroes captured the hearts of their people through spectacles of triumph, winning their affection. But Jesus had no interest in popularity:

For what is glory but the blaze of fame,

The people's praise, if always praise unmixed?

And what the people but a herd confused,

A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

Things vulgar, and well weighed, scarce worth the praise

A true king did not need ceremony, wealth, or fame. These rulers were also stupid enough to believe in their own laurels, calling themselves gods “till conqueror death discover them scarce men/ rolling in brutish vices, and deformed.” The caesar of Jesus’ day, Tiberius, was a diseased and bloated corpse, and yet he was hailed as divine. What good was popular acclaim if it was so stupid? Only glory from God mattered, who also could provide feasts and funds. Satan then offered not the trappings of power, but power itself, the thrones of Persia and Rome, giving Jesus the force to acquire the kingdom of Israel. Again, Jesus had no interest in this path, especially not when Satan added the caveat that the Son of God would have to pay obedience to him as king of the world. Jesus would take no heathen empire as his own.

At this point in the poem, one can almost hear the arch-fiend snap his fingers. Satan has figured it out, Jesus is really just a philosopher, another Socrates fixed on his principium individualis. Jesus “seem’st otherwise inclined/than to worldly crown, addicted more/to contemplation and profound dispute.” Of course the vistas of power would never win his heart, and so Satan shows him the golden age of Athens. Jesus had argued with the scribes in the Templ as a boy, now he can debate in Plato’s grove, among the Stoa, or with the Aristotelians pacing throughout the city. He can listen to the great tragedies of the poets. If Jesus hopes to win the hearts of all men to the Word of God, he needs to know his rivals and their systems of thought. He can pass his days in debate and discussion, slowly winning over converts to his system of thought. But Satan was wrong again. Jesus had nothing scorn for logomachy and literary criticism:

However, many books,

Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads

Incessantly, and to his reading brings not

A spirit and judgement equal or superior,

(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)

Uncertain and unsettled still remains,

Deep versed in books and shallow in himself

Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys

And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,

As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

Jesus was not Socrates. He did not know that he knew nothing, he knew the Father. His mission was dogma, not dialectic. Infuriated, Satan storms off (probably with most readers) to brood. Immune to the desires of man, either base or noble, Jesus was immune to want. He did not want food, luxury, wealth, power, philosophy, or culture. Therefore, in his final gambit, Satan attacked the roots of this faith. After a night of tempest to inspire a feeling of dread (Jesus sees through this immediately), Satan inquires if Jesus is really that special. There were lots of sons of God, including mankind and angels (even fallen angels, for “if [Satan] was. [Satan is]; relation stands”). Taking Jesus to the Temple pinnacle, and reminding him that the angels would not the Son of God dash his foot, Satan gives him a chance to prove his unique identity. But once more Jesus rebukes Satan and it was the archfiend, not the Son of God, who was hurled down to the Earth. Concluding his Wilderness trial, angels carry Jesus down from the Temple and feed him. He wanders back home, now ready to begin his crusade.

Milton’s Jesus is not an empty shell or sheer negation. His lack of desire is not like Meville’s Bartleby the Scrivener who can only “prefer not to” when confronted with demands. Jesus has the Word of God, he has prophets and the psalms, he has knowledge of the Father. Compared to all the treasures of the world, this knowledge, the truth itself, was sufficient. It was not the horror of the void, the dark secret that all came from nothing and all would soon return. It was, rather, an equally terrifying reality: that all sat in the hands of a living God who would rise to be the judge of both the living and the dead. Paradise Lost had no hero because the hero had not yet been born a man. Satan may have had his victory, a restored House of Stuart that corrupted the godly. But he would be crushed under the heel of man, the Son of God who would bring victory over despotic rule and reign (and thus, in so issuing his poems, Milton rightly predicted the overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688/1714).

This Jesus is the victor over both Apollo and Dionysus, a triumph over both the principium individualis and the dissolution of self in the orgy. The fallen Adam, enslaved to the powers of sun and moon, of arid rationalism and drunken frenzy, had found his redemption. He was not alone on an island of self and he was not in need of plunging into Void. Instead, he heard his Father’s voice and rejoiced. He could freely converse with his Maker. As Jesus could say “I and my Father are One,” so too could the saint, an inheritance won as an adoption into the family of God. They too could, with one little word, hurl Satan from the precipice. The happy saint has no truck with the snorts and sneers of Nietzsche, who (with his followers) will immediately turn to the arsenal of higher critics and liberal moralists. Mother Night has been silenced in the light of Anastasia, death emptied through the promise of resurrection. Nietzsche knows that the lion is more than the rat, but only the Word of God that created all things in their hierarchies, sustaining them, lifting them high or casting them down, deserved absolute obedience. The wine of God gladdens the souls of his saints. Sleep is a happy rest. There is no misery, but for the joys set before him, the saint can triumph over the trials of this world.

Milton’s Jesus captures something of the biblical spirit that is often lacking in both critics and adherents. Jesus is not dispassionate, but fiery. He is not a moralizing scold, but a prophet. He comes as a rising and falling of many souls. He is crisis incarnate, cutting through heart and slicing through bone. He comes not to bring false harmony, but a sword. He brings a baptism of fire, that will consume the chaff and melt away the dross. He is not the beautiful soul, a misfit in a brutal and ugly world. He is a conqueror through the word. He is not unsure of himself or his mission. Zeal has eaten him up, a fire ever consuming an unburnt bush. This mentality, familiar to many Puritans but alien to contemporary winsome Evangelicalism, belongs to the fanatic and the totalitarian. Jesus is not interested in leaving the masses alone, but that the time of decision is at hand. The pride of Heaven always stinks of arrogance to the damned. Holiness, not sacrilege, is aesthetic. There is only scorn for the drunken dithyramb and its contemporary bastards in the culture of rap.

Pentheus stood alone, and then insane, for refusing the tyranny of the grape. He had wanted to stand alone in the sun, and in so doing Apollo abandoned him. The only hope for man was beauty leaving an imprint, a release of ecstasy and passion, before the night swallowed him up. Euripides may be dead, stone turned to dust, alone and forgotten. But the saint is no Apollonian, a principium individualis afloat upon the void. He is the son of God, and within his heart is a love greater than he ever dare hope.

Postlude: It is all too common to simply wave away Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity as strictly applying to liberalism or modernism or Protestantism. His appeal to a Homeric age of heroes and vitalism (whatever that precisely is) can be reappropriated for images of Crusader knights or other Christian warriors. But not only does this philistine aesthetic ignore the philosophical challenge, it is an absurd confession of failure. It is not a self-professed Nietzschean who wants to adapt his views to the powerful current of Christian faith, but the opposite. For most of the West, Christianity is in steep decline and its symbols belong to the crumbling center. There is no need for the modern adherents of Dionysus to make any compromise. The panthers are ready to pull the ivied chariot blazing across Europe. Arguments can be made (and have been made) that all that was good in European Christendom was a Heathenish underground that persisted. Even if untrue, this historical genealogy justifies a further rejection of Christian norms, which have little to no purchase outside of the modern democratic ethic of intolerance for intolerance and equity for all. There’s no reason for the heirs of Nietzsche to not move in for the kill.

I do not know if Christianity will return to Europe in any meaningful way any time soon. But I am a Christian and I do not wish to see it destroyed in America. I also do not think foreign, explicitly anti-Christian, ideas are necessary for inner renovation. There is no need to adopt the finger-wagging attitude of the emasculated scold, a posture that marks most critics of Nietzsche and Nietzscheans so called. Instead, hatred and scorn for the ungodly, which includes perverters who teach the gospel as an anti-civilization of suicide, is a rhetoric intrinsic to some of the most attentive readers of the Bible. Against decades of illiterate genealogies, the Puritans deserve a time once more in the sun. They were not the progenitor of “Woke” moralizers and scolds, and they certainly did not birth the modern political left. Yet they were also not blockhead conservatives. In the stupid terms of mediocre babblers, the Puritans were the “woke right.” They tore up moribund centers of power that thrived in iniquity and ineptitude, purveyors of ugly smut and international weakness, to make England glorious again.

Milton was by no means an orthodox Puritan, but to be a Puritan was not a narrow set of dogmatic commitments. It was a revolutionary reaction to preserve the pillars of truth. It was precisely because they were capable of creative and vicious infighting that they were not some wooden ideology that was deployed against a predominant ethos. Any glance at today’s self-professed Conservative media reveals a bankrupt imaginary. Hollyweird may be mostly culturally exhausted, along with much of the center-left establishment, but it remains unchallenged. It is unsurprising that transgression comes not from leftists “takin’ it to the streets,” but from “fashy” memes online. The soul of Puritanism is not in theological repristination, dredging up particular forms of experimental divinity or scholastic Calvinism (though the moral shock of predestination is a useful rhetorical move). Rather, it was an understanding that a minoritarian godly stood as the vanguard to lead, with the Bible as a map in hand.

There is no reason that the Spirit that animated these fanatical biblicists cannot animate a renewal of Evangelical culture and political culture. There is no reason that American Evangelicals will be damned to languish in the ghetto as the world dies. There is already a pen dipped in flame that has signaled the end of decrepit tyrannies. If Christianity is to have a future, especially an Evangelical Christianity, it will be in this way.

The decline of the West, according to any Postliberal theorist, can be traced through an intellectual genealogy. Beginning with Nominalism (with roots in the thought of Scotus), the West rejected the holism of the Great Chain of Being, of hierarchy and tradition, which had integrated the spiritual and material, the ecclesiastical and the political. The Middle Ages had produced a wholly integrated society, where peace and law reigned, grafting Hellenism (be it Platonic or Aristotelian) into the Christian under the aegis of Roman law. Thus, the prince and priest and thrall were bound together as one body, the medieval corpus christianorum. Thomism had introduced a quasi-empirical epistemology, which had allowed the sciences to flourish. Kings had limited, but divine, power, submissive to the Church yet able to act for his people. But then Willam of Occam sowed doubt about the basis of this society, questioning reality and nature. Then, through a cast of villains ranging from Luther to Lenin, who empowered statism and capitalism and other revolutionary -isms, Europe was destroyed. The goal of the postliberal is to undo this spell and escape the Witch’s grasp.

So what is the solution? Against the threat of totalitarian statism, be it Soviet Communism or German Nazism (or, in truth, the old American order of nativism, protectionism, and isolationism), the way out was through a return. Legally and metaphysically, this return included especially Natural Law. Against the statists and their impotent liberal useful idiots, legal positivism offered no guards against the wicked imagination of men. The idea that a paper-pope constitution could preserve Human flourishing was a delusion. An American Founder like John Adams, who whiggishly believed that law should govern men, had set the stage to liberal globalism. This disposition was a part of Protestantism, with its emphasis on the Bible as perspicacious and self-interpreting.

Some traditional Protestants might balk, appealing to the scholastic use of Natural Law and Aristotle. Nevertheless, biblicism and positivism were two of the same, producing Fascist or Socialist regimes that destroyed Humanity. These proceeded from the rigid Baroque confessional states of the seventeenth century, that produced both authoritarian princes and liberal parliamentarianism that would birth the modern world. Both of these categories depended on Nominalism’s emphasis on the Will, that God could indeed make a rock so heavy he could not lift it, could have procured atonement through a lightning bolt splitting a rock, or make rape moral. The secret will of God, of the Deus Absconditus, terrified Luther, and would remain a terrifying source of agnostic nihilism that laid at the foundations of the modern world. Only Natural Law could, theologically, justify limits on the state and a means of scientific knowledge. Only Natural Law could restrain the socialists who would destroy everything.

It was this schema that influenced both Christian Democracy in Europe and Conservatism in America. Even today, there are some who advocate Natural Law against the biblicists who have become the useful idiots of liberal globalists. The average self-professed Theonomist considers the Market to be a theanthropic hypostasis and open borders as what the Bible teaches. His “solo scriptura” (a fake neologism to distinguish proper Protestant teaching from the Evangelical punching bag) was doomed to incoherence and impotence. Natural Law alone could provide the means to establish a Christian politics in a Christian society, one that was not allergic to non-biblical thought.

This account may seem convincing so far. However, to proceed, it will be helpful to analyze some key advocates for Natural Law that formed European Christian Democracy and American Conservatism. Heinrich Rommen, a renowned German Catholic postwar jurist, offers a fair working definition of what Natural Law is and how it is to be used:

Good is to be done: such is the supreme commandment of the natural moral law. The highest and basic norm of the natural law in the narrow sense, then, may be stated thus: Justice is to be done.Yet this principle is altogether general. It needs still to be determined to what extent the object striven for by means of a concrete action is a true good. This is done more or less with the aid of a syllogism (which, of course, is not worked out in every case by concrete reasoning): Good is to be done; this action is good, it strives after a good; it is therefore to be performed. Good is that which corresponds to the essential nature. The being of a thing also reveals its purpose in the order of creation, and in its perfect fulfillment it is likewise the end or goal of its growth and development. The essential nature is thus the measure. What corresponds to it is good; what is contrary to it is bad. (The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, 43)

This definition is purely formal and, for good measure, includes a syllogism. This juridical theory is parallel to proper theology, where God’s essence determines his will, which is never at variance with his intellect (an ignorant accusation lobbed against Nominalism). Therefore, God can only do what pertains to God, and not what pertains to not-God. God cannot ungod himself, he cannot cease to exist or make himself contingent. However, this definition of Natural Law, like theology, is insufficient on its own. God is not simply God as he is in himself to us, he creates an “economy” to govern. Natural Law is not sufficient in itself for men, who are not living in nature proper, but in societies. Natural Law theory draws from the Stoic distinction between primitive innocency and political society. Natural formal law must be accompanied by positive statute. “Thou shalt not steal” may be a natural law, inviolable and constant, but positive statute must define particular cases of theft, what constitutes private property, and clarify degrees of criminality. “Thou shalt not steal” does not have a universal form, it has different positive definition in a feudal polity than in an industrial capitalist one. The particularity of a people and a community define the application of the Universal, balancing the relative needs of individuals against the needs of the collective. Thus, Rommen could claim:

In view of all this, it is impossible to speak purely and simply either of a primacy of the individual person or of a primacy of the community. For none of these societies is absolute, however much it may have its own end-values in the order of ends and its autonomy in the social process. None of them is in an absolute sense an end-community in which the individual person would be merged and would become a mere means. His eternal goal, the salvation of his soul, imparts to the person an ultimate transcendence. Thence result certain natural rights for the individual person in relation to the state. (ibid., 215)

To put it in a colloquialism: do not make an idol out of either the individual or the state. Both must be restrained according to ultimate ends, which do not reside in the natural order itself. Heaven always can stand to criticize Earth. Legal positivism had made collectivism into an end in itself, as Liberalism had made the individual as an end in himself. Therefore, for Rommen, the crime of heresy in the Middle Ages was not so much a superstition about divine punishment, but an attack on the community. The secular magistrate had a right to pursue those considered malignants by the Church, individuals who had threatened to dissolve the bonds of society. All rights were relative to one another to pursue the ultimate goal for which Nature ordered men.

But how do you figure this relativity out? Natural Law provides a framework that is something of a red-herring. No state has ever legalized theft as theft, it was always something else in pursuit of some good. How to judge? That was the point that the revolutionary right jurist, Carl Schmitt, made in his articulation of political theology. Schmitt was no enemy of the rechtsstaat with its constitutionalism, only the idea that this legal system was self-defending (a straw man caricature of Hans Kelsen’s legal theory). There was always a sovereign that determined application, or even its suspension. There was always a will outside the order, that stood with its feet within. It was President Hindenberg, in Schmitt’s day, that alone had the power to suspend the Weimar constitution to purge enemies of the republic, be they National Socialists or Communists. This authoritarian theory did away with the weakened and inept Conservatives (in the European and traditional sense of the term) who were being dragged by Liberals and Socialists through electoral compromises and parliamentary procedure.

But before continuing with a Schmittian critique (or, really, a constitutionalist critique), it is important to understand the circularity of Natural Law in its fundamentally conservative disposition. It is not simply a case of states determining for themselves whether this or that positive statute supports “Thou shalt not steal” or violates it. This process is not performed with a pen stroke, but works itself out through history. Tradition and custom are how applications of Natural Law are to be pursued within a given polity of a particular people in a particular time and place. Rommen even counseled that a seemingly unjust positive statute should be obeyed. Conscience required respect for authorities, even if the authorities seemingly erred (that was something for the courts, especially courts trained in an understanding of Natural Law, to rectify). One can slap on the Fifth Commandment for good measure.

It should be no wonder that the great Christian Democrat and Thomist theologian, Etienne Gilson, considered G.K. Chesterton’s booklet biography on Thomas to be the best ever written. According to Chesterton, Thomas was the true advocate of all the good that existed in England’s parliamentary system and scientific advances. Burkean Conservatism, the self-deification of whiggery, was the perfection of Natural Law. It is a great irony that the the evil fount of liberalism was actually the cure all along, and how fin-de-siecle English Catholics defined an aspect of the twentieth century. The Actonian platitude that power corrupts flows from a theological assessment of sinful man. The separation of powers, a liberal common place, was now a reflection of Natural Law, respecting the First Commandment perhaps, as well as recognizing the Imago Dei that every Human being, as such, possessed. James Madison has become a good Thomist in the blink of an eye.

How could this turn happen so imperceptibly? How did the great revolutionaries of England’s constitutional settlement turn into perennial conservatives? Natural Law theory derives from a philosophy of history, one that Jacques Maritain, another core Christian Democrat and Thomistic theologian, pioneered. The clock cannot be turned back to 1215 (which was what Fascist corporatists, as Christian Democrats denounced, had falsely pursued) because the Holy Spirit had sanctified man beyond that age. Natural Law was manifest in various peoples and places providentially, leading to greater holiness, a great expression of Christian truth. No Christian can shy away from “progress” as a concept for God is continuing to work in the hearts of men. While there was never going to be an apocalyptic millennial kingdom, there was still an Augustinian hope that, against the pride of men, Human civilization was continuing to prosper and advance. Therefore, despite the liberal origins (which Maritain recognizes) of Christian Democracy, Natural Law was reflected in this new order as truly more Christian:

Everything that happens in the history of the world serves in one way or another the progress of the kingdom of grace and (sometimes at the price of a greater evil) some kind of progress in the world. Voltaire, while setting out to run down the Church and make fun of religious faith, was nevertheless in Christendom and in the history of Christendom as he was in the created universe and in the order of Providence. He served them in spite of himself. He fought for an error in his campaign for tolerance, since he thought of "dogmatic" tolerance, as if freedom of thought were an absolute end without any law higher than subjective opinion; error, namely the modern error, which has found expression in the formula "Cujus regio ejus religio," that the force of the State and social pressure have of their own nature a right to control conscience. In this respect, Voltaire was striving without knowing it for Article 1351 of the Code of Canon Law -- "No one shall be compelled to embrace the Catholic faith against his will." He was instrumental in making modern societies recognize the principle of civil tolerance. (Maritain, On the Philosophy of History)

In an odd twist, retrospectively, Voltaire was a better Catholic in his advocacy for toleration than the Catholics he warred against. To justify this crooked providence, Maritain appealed to Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which revealed that, in the end, both the detectives and anarchists worked for the same guy (the godlike Sunday). This process was visible in history, inevitable and unstoppable, peaceful when accepted and violent when repressed. Thus, Maritain lamented that nineteenth century Europe could have avoided godless Communism and Fascism if there had been a Christian Gandhi, a saintly social reformer that could have brought greater toleration and care for the poor against the viciousness of capitalism. Instead, for failing to respond adequately, God raised up Marx who forced a violent revolution that brought Christians to their senses, to build a more humane society that fosters respect for the community, especially the poor, against the untrammeled individualism of liberal Capitalists. Revolutions were evil for Maritain, but not because they brought reform and change. Instead, they were evil because they were violent and driven by the idolatry of utopia. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit is still at work to build this more perfect society, balanced and ordered like the Trinity itself, a community of persons, perfectly equitable even in its hierarchy.

Natural Law, therefore, is the universal ideal to which contingent historical events work towards. The unchanging moral law becomes more and more visible in the civilized world as it shines through increasingly purer prisms. Thus, Maritain can justify why Christian ethics so radically departs from some aspects of the Bible:

Abraham was a great saint, a saint of incomparable stature. But he did not know that certain actions which we condemn today were prohibited by natural law. Hence we must conclude that mankind's state of nature was not a state in which natural moral laws were perfectly known and practised. As a matter of fact, the precise knowledge of these natural moral laws — with the exception of the self-evident primary principle, good is to be done and evil to be avoided -- is acquired slowly and with more or less difficulty. I would say that the equipment necessary to know the particular precepts of natural law exists within us -- it is made up of the essential tendencies and inclinations of our nature. But a very long experience is required to have the corresponding knowledge through connaturality take actual form. In other words, our knowledge of moral laws is progressive in nature. The sense of duty and obligation was always present, but the explicit knowledge of the various norms of natural law grows with time. And certain of these norms, like the law of monogamy, were known rather late in the history of mankind, so far as it is accessible to our investigation. Also, we may think that the knowledge of the particular precepts of natural law in all of their precise aspects and requirements will continue to grow until the end of human history. (ibid.)

The circularity now takes a spiral shape. It is not simply a case of a timeless community of jurists who systematically figure out unique applications of Natural Law to particular cases. Now, for Maritain, it is a process of development, where positive statute from previous eras can be relegated to the dustbin because they are simply inferior, barbarous applications from a more barbarous time, but nevertheless still valuable as part of the history of sanctified progress. Morality pertains to the universal moral law, but man (at least Christian postwar Man) is now more moral than ever before to understand the moral law more truly. In the future, man may be even more moral in his understanding of the universal moral law, Natural Law more developed and real.

God is not a static God, but a providential God of history. It is not that God changed, but his revelation has become more clear as theology has further developed. It should not be hard to hear the voice of Cardinal Newman through this analysis. Development of doctrine also means development of morality, the Incarnation as leading to Natural Law taking flesh, an adaptation of Hebraic Law to not only the best of the Greek and Roman world, but working throughout European civilization towards a more just and equitable society. This reasoning is not crank or unusual, but what underpins the current Vatican’s denunciation of the death penalty and support for migration. It also supports religious toleration and “compassion” in sexual ethics, whether it is for the divorced-remarried or, possibly, for homosexuals. And why not if history develops this way, as some more liberal Catholics will claim.

From all the above, it should be no great shock to discover that one of Maritain’s greatest friends, his closest American ally and a man he believed to be a quasi-saint, was Saul Alinsky. Social Democracy had the same ends as Christian Democracy, and by the Holy Spirit they would lead to the same end, be it the curtailment of capitalism or the advance of civil rights. It should also be no surprise that the godfather of American Conservatism, Russell Kirk, voted for both Norman Thomas in 1944 and Eugene McCarthy in 1976. Conservatism was to take an evolutionary view of society, its law and its politics, which did not unfold violently or atheistically (per Darwinians), but guided providentially. Voluntarism was the idea that these could be altered on a whim, ignorant of how catastrophe has often shaped both Human polity and law. But this set of theories masks the rhetorical subterfuge, something Machiavelli understood in his mockery of the “mirror of princes” genre. This conservatism is simply to slam the door on future revolutions, to kick down the ladder, to preserve its own development at the expense of alternatives. Christian Democracy and Social Democracy, the center-right and center-left, conservatism and progressivism, they are the only way forward and God ordained.

Natural Law here is the conceptual bulwark for this vision. One does not even have to turn to the Schmittian concern about the decision to find fault with this notion of law-giving. It was not some slow evolutionary growth that brought about Burkean conservatism, but the sudden burst of revolution that brought about the Glorious Revolution and its Whig monopoly. It was for distinct historical reasons (such as the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic) that this radical politics was obscured, creating a new rhetorical self-conception that shaped a politician like Burke, who further contributed to distinguishing the Whiggish revolution of England (and, by extension, in America) from what occurred in France.

But even long before Burke or the Whigs, history reveals any new constitutional-law, any new nomos, as flowing from the will of the law-giver, be it Biblical Moses or Hellenic Solon. Legal positivism, the idea of sitting down and writing a constitution, was flawed because it did not understand the divinity necessary to undertake this task. It was not a committee that could write this kind of law. No, it was Robespierre dressed in robes receiving the Declaration of the Rights of Man from Reason or conquering Napoleon, the weltgeist, crowning himself emperor. Even the puritanical act of covenant-making was a distinctly Evangelical Christian mode of law-making divinity. For all the hatred heaped on Hobbes, his great crime was to expose this process, as much as Machiavelli did in his own day. Kings did not have a patriarchal right from God through Adam, they achieved their mortal theosis through the constituting power of the People. It was not because of atheism or materialism, it was a lack of sacrality. Stalin’s seminary training served him well.

It is for these reasons that I do not think Natural Law is any great step forwards, anymore than the fake concepts of statism or totalitarianism give any great political analysis. Obama’s problem was not that he was crypto-Mussolini, or, according to Jonah Goldberg, that Democrats and Nazis are basically on the same side. A whole host of empty theorizing about Common Good Conservatism went out the window with Corona virus lockdowns and vaccine mandates. The Community required conformity and venerable authorities had issued statutes. Did these policies violate Natural Law? Who decides, the courts or a man with a social media account? Appeals to the violation of “conscience” can justify everything and anything, including the belief that a man was a woman born in the wrong body. Heresy about the eucharist being just a wafer justified punishment to preserve the social bonds, as much as the death of drug-addled COVID carrier in custody required a jailed murderer to restore the community. That is what we believe because that is what is so. Maritain was obviously oblivious to the fact that the subtitle for The Man Who Was Thursday was A Nightmare.

This critique of Natural Law is not an unequivocal rejection of the category. It is also not a defense of Nominalism, let alone the French Revolution or materialism. But it is to get away from childish modes of intellectual inquiry and chasten the mind. The West is not in danger because of unfettered capitalism or modernism, let alone any kind of secular materialism. Most people who have no religious affiliation are very spiritual, and not a few of religiously affiliated theologians so-called support the political heirs of Saul Alinsky. Natural Law may be formally true, but it offers no concrete applications, especially when historical contingency has its place in metaphysics, something that Heidegger, among others, had forced the West to face. Courts, secular or religious, seem to be the only ones capable of authoritatively discerning the application of Natural Law. Yet these courts are the current jailers of the West, even if staffed by members of the Federalist Society.

This essay is not a defense of biblicism either, but deflating common criticisms. The Bible may require interpretation, but that is a call for prophets to teach and war authoritatively. At the very least, the Bible is a bounded canon that has limits to interpretive inclusivity. The discussion must move, where it must naturally go, to epistemology and hermeneutics, to questions of methods of knowing and interpretation. There may be a universal order in which all men live and move and have their being. But it is for the inspired to will it into the contemporary moment, no longer shackled to the subversive complacency of organic metaphors and slow progress that seems irreversible. There is nothing in the Bible against revolution, but, rather, electricity for the sword of the Lord, and our next Gideon.

The “postwar order” or “postwar consensus” has become an object of scrutiny, a series of symbols that have structured the world-picture of America and the larger West after 1945. The United Nations, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials, the Bomb, and then, subsequently, the Iron Curtain have deep moral resonances. The power of this order has often been ascribed to America, the source of this woe on both sides of the Atlantic. Yankee Capitalism has led to the imposition of rainbow flags and untranslated “Black Lives Matter” to defining contemporary Western Europe. The Soviet Union failed, but an Americanized variety of Socialism seems to have won out.

But this account conflates symbols with reality, the image or justification of power for its use. The postwar order, in as much as it still exists, was organized, be it militarily (NATO) or economically (Bretton Woods). And while America did participate in the conflagration of Europe during World War Two, it neither conquered Europe nor imposed a new arrangement upon it. After the interlude of Roosevelt’s idiotic Russophilia that drove his infatuation with Stalin (beloved as a Big Man Kerensky), United States Foreign Policy was concerned to preserve Western Europe against Soviet Communism and its adjuncts. Americans were outsiders to Western Europe and turned to partnership. Democratic Socialism was red-lite and often hostile to the Americans. The only coalition of partners, anti-communist and anti-fascist, was found among the Christian Democrats. It is this ideal that not only formed the constitutional organization throughout parts of Western Europe, it left a lasting impression on the development of “Conservatism” in America.

What is Christian Democracy? This question forms the title of a recent monograph from Carl Invernizzi Accetti, which this essay will draw substantially from. In contrast to claims that it was a slapdash incoherent third-way between Fascism and Communism, Christian Democracy was nascent to Western Europe, a developed and applied form of Catholic political theory. It presented as a friendly critique of liberalism and the true means to overcome the threat of “materialist” political philosophies, be they class-based or race-based socialism. Christian Democracy first took shape in fin-de-siecle France and eventually formed the constitutional settlements for postwar Italy and West Germany, among others. It was a novel reinvention of the constitution-state (rechtsstaat) along primarily Catholic lines, amended to the impact of mass democracy, a repudiation of illiberal political theories. Unlike Social Democracy (a similar defense of the rechtsstaat in the Anglozone and Scandinavia), Christian Democracy prioritized traditional hierarchy, clericalism, and the spiritual. Christian Democracy is what remains the order of much of Western Europe, a castle that has now become a cage.

The origins of Christian Democracy are found in response to the failures of reaction. Theorists like Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain saw the self-dissolving of liberalism as a product of both the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But the nineteenth century’s predilection for the Ancien Regime proved to be a failure. As conservative governments offered concessions to stem the tide of radical and nationalist politics, reactionaries were forced to compete in the mud of increasingly democratic elections. The growing power of revolutionary clubs and trade unions threatened to completely destroy both the throne and the church. Catholicism had stood against this tide, delegitimating any good faith participation in these regimes, but it risked losing the base of laity. The appeals of liberals and socialists to material conditions (higher wages, shorter hours, safer working conditions, insurance, etc) seemed to win over an increasingly radical bloc of proletariat. Conservative parties flanked liberal parties on these issues, but this turn only intensified expectations and demand. Christian Democracy became a way to salvage the traditional order of Europe against its liberal and socialist foes, but that meant abandoning the authoritarian stance of reaction.

The first theory to undergird this pivot to the rechtsstaat was Neo-Thomism, which, in generic accounts, had accepted a “pure Nature” that was self-subsisting (though incomplete) apart from special revelation and grace. A secular constitution-state was a natural good that, if properly ordered, could serve the spiritual mission of the Catholic Church. What the liberals had done was, contrary to their own intentions, providentially useful. Against this turn towards development, Christian Democrats faced off new forms of illiberal authoritarians. Syndicalism, also emerging from milieu of France, offered a quasi-mythic foundation for a new state, one where the people (through a general strike or some other kind of confrontation with the bourgeoisie) brought about a new and powerful state. This political theory formed the basis of Fascism and other reactionary regimes, which were not all incompatible with Catholicism. The reactionary military government of Francisco Franco in Spain, as one example, was in part to protect the rights of the Church. Many illiberal authoritarians made room for the “spiritual” in their state formations. Nevertheless, the myth of the “materialism” inherent to Fascism and National Socialism became crucial to the Christian Democratic self-conception.

Therefore, the concepts “totalitarianism” and “statism” became useful to demarcate this third-way. Giving justification to the seemingly schizophrenic Allied foreign policy of working with the Soviets before turning on them, “totalitarianism” was the materialist idea of an all-powerful state that controlled all aspects of Human life. It was a label that could be applied to Fascist governments and Communist governments, both of which reduced all of men to their bodies. This schema depended on the myth that National Socialism and Fascism were materialist (they were not, or at least not exclusively) or that they sought control over every aspect of Human life (also not true). Nevertheless, it poised Christian Democracy as the defensive shield to protect true European values from these corruptions.

The philosophy of this self-limited rechtsstaat derived from Augustinian political theology. Unlike the political theology of Eusebius of Caesarea, who had witnessed the rise of Constantine and the end of persecution, the aged Bishop of Hippo saw his Roman world crumble. Barbarians sacked the capital and were in the process of conquering Roman Africa when Augustine died. History was a constant battle between two cities, one of God and the other of Man, that cut through every polity. The Kingdom of God was charity, located primarily in the institutional church, and the Kingdom of Man was selfish pride. The Roman Empire, like the church, was a mixed body, containing both the godly and ungodly. Under the guidance of the church, the Empire could be made to serve Christian supernatural ends, but it could also fall into the lust for power that drove wicked regimes. For Christian Democracy, this division set them apart from both the Fascists and Communists. Christian Democracy was simply the latest form of faithful Catholic politics, of using the rechtsstaat towards the supernatural ends of grace. It was anti-utopian and anti-revolutionary. The Church had already made great strides towards this end through Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which had recognized the dignity of Catholic trade unions and workers’ movements. Christian Democracy was to harness these towards the bodily well-being and spiritual salvation of citizens.

This movement was primarily Roman Catholic, but many Protestants flocked to its banner as well. Higher Criticism and theological modernism had decimated most European state churches, and the desire for ecumenical union drove many Protestants to seek a common ground. As one example, the shift to ancient liturgies and more priestly vestment was a move to ground the faith in worship, as opposed to dogma. There may be disagreements between Protestants over the infallibility of Scripture or the incarnation, but they could unite through shared prayer and ritual. Christian Democracy seemed to be an opening to these ecumenical Protestants, sharing a state that prioritized the law over men, separation of powers, private property, and toleration. A Christian rechtstaat would preserve inalienable rights of its citizens.

But these rights did not come from Nature or some naked Humanity, as liberals of the past had argued. Rather, these rights came from God, fixed, part of the Imago Dei that every man possessed in his creation. The metaphysical dogma of Personalism emphasized the importance of individual right without dissolving into an atomized individual body. The rights of man were found in God creating the Human race as his image and part of a community (the most supreme being the Trinity himself). The emphasis on the plurality of persons at an ontological level (what has been called “Rahner’s Rule”) then justified a political vision where individual and community equally possessed priority without dissolving one into the other. Therefore, both liberal individualism and collectivism, be it communist or fascist, were out.

But how could this position be considered Catholic, when the history of the Catholic church involved the persecuting intolerance of the Crusades and the Inquisition? Providential development. This era saw the adoption of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Development of Doctrine idea, which had previously been eyed with suspicion as modernist. The Holy Spirit was still at work in the Catholic church, leading it to greater revelation of itself and its mission, a more perfect form. Therefore, the problem was not in abandoning the past, but in recognizing the present and the present’s future. Dogma could not be changed with a penstroke, an error that marked both the Protestant Reformers and political revolutionaries. The Spirit of God was perfecting Human society, making it more civilized and humane, a fuller expression of the gospel that had, until this point, lay dormant and underdeveloped. Therefore, when properly subordinated to the supernatural ends of the Church, the rechtsstaat was now a fully Catholic conception, a political order that brought the fresh work of the Holy Spirit to God’s people. It was now fully Catholic to promote democracy, state welfare, limited government, and religious toleration.

It should be no wonder, then, that many Christian Democrats looked fondly on the United States of America. It had installed these goods, seemingly, without the utopic anarchy of either the French or Russian revolutions. More importantly, America was demographically becoming more of a Catholic nation, with a wide array of explicitly Catholic organizations to help the laity and improve society. This appeal opened a two-way exchange: European Christian Democrats became advocates for American involvement in European affairs, as some Catholic Americans (e.g. Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley) began to reimagine a new “conservative” politics for America.

In terms of political economy, Christian Democrats believed they offered not only a third-way between liberalism and totalitarianism, they also offered a third-way between capitalism and socialism. Private property was a core doctrine throughout most of Christian history, but it did not absolve social responsibility or the state’s involvement. One of the earliest uses of the term “neo-liberal” was to describe how state intervention and a partial command economy could be placed in service to free-markets. The state could guarantee safety nets for wage-earners, undercutting the appeal for leftwing socialist parties, as part of a defense of traditional and hierarchical European life. These rights and requirements were not simply abstractions, but written into the very constitutions of the new states. Christian Democracy was, therefore, not a leftwing or a rightwing movement as much as a centrist movement. It was defined as a simultaneously antifascist and anticommunist shield. It stood for preserving the new order, utilizing a variety of leftist or rightist policies to preserve its ultimate vision - a political society, with a servile state, that provided for the body and prepared for the soul.

But this emphasis on democracy was, in part, deceptive. Christian Democracy did not believe in the unrestricted will of the people, an idea that had brought both Mussolini and Hitler to power. The people were to be tutored, they did not always know what was best for them. Therefore, Christian Democracy placed a heavy emphasis on the judiciary. Courts could toss out bad election results, scrutinizing government coalitions that had invited in malignant parties. While this process was to preserve the center, it often targeted the right, which was more often than not considered a greater threat. This limitation on democracy was part of what a liberal rechtsstaat was designed to do. Its original form was in service to the bourgeoisie through property requirements, but the move towards universal suffrage meant other means of restricting popular outbursts were necessary. The judiciary curtailed the exercise of the government, a constant vigilant eye to prevent the state from unshackling itself. This separation of powers was in service to the Augustinian awareness of man’s ignorance and sinfulness, making the political process more convoluted to secure justice. The courts provided a check against the oppression either of individuals or of the wider community.

Under the independent judiciary, the state and society achieved a kind of equilibrium. The separation of powers in a Christian Democratic state flowed along with the principle of subsidiary, which was practically quite similar to federalism. Society was hierarchical and made up of many different communities. Smaller jurisdictions sat in larger ones, as smaller families adhered to larger kin networks. There were betters and lessers, the wealthy and the poor. The goal was to integrate this whole, a reimaging of the Medieval republica Christianorum. However, this vision was not simply returning to the past, an aim of corporatism that Christian Democracy rejected. Instead of ecclesiastical direct oversight or the system of guilds, Christian Democrats relied on the technical expertise of bureaucrats and civil servants. They would provide the joints to integrate the various communities without absorbing them. The state was simply one member of society, and society was made up of many different societies. The goal of a permanent bureaucracy was to insure harmony without dissolution. Equality was rejected, but responsibility was placed upon the shoulders of the best, enforced by the state to, again, create justice and charity in both this life and for the next.

But this internal harmonization was not for its own sake, but oriented towards wider external unity. In this sense, the first stirrings of the European Union were distinctly Christian Democratic. In the 1940s, it was the leftist Social Democrats in West Germany that sought reunification (even if it meant Soviet influence), whereas it was the Christian Democrats that pursued separation. German unification meant the Reich, whereas West German separatism meant greater integration with France, Belgium and Italy. European Union, not a German Empire, would bring about a restoration of the idea of Christendom, a supranational unity that would subordinate individual states to a supranational bureaucracy. The modern Brussels’ regime is, in part, a reflection of Christian Democratic aims, bureaucrats and technicians that integrate all levels of society, with independent institutions that can check the “abuses” of democratic ferment. There was no going back to medieval Christendom, but the idea of a United States of Europe could realize an even better future.

Even as Christian Democrats suffered serious electoral defeats over the twentieth century, dissolving in many countries (with Germany being a clear exception), the political idea remains the constitutional order. Christian Democracy became the right version of Social Democracy, which prioritized social equality and secularity. Nevertheless, they are two wings on the same bird, rivals but not enemies, that agree on the importance of separated powers, judicial review, religious tolerance, and balancing the needs of individuals against the needs of communities. As part of their dogmatic understanding of development, that flowed through the Second Vatican Council, Christian Democrats continued to persist through selective adaptation and compromise. Human rights have become more multiform and individual needs have become deeper. For some Christian Democrats, the God-given dignity of man now includes homosexual marriage, drug legalization, and abortion. These may retain the sting of mortal sin, but that’s a spiritual matter that’s distinct from civil stability and toleration. Sodomy may send someone to Hell (though many European Catholics, and almost all European Protestants, believe otherwise), but that does not justify a law against it. Religious toleration has expanded to a variety of faith traditions, including not only Jews and other Christians, but Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and even atheists. These all serve an increasingly incoherent defense of European-Christian society, that is increasingly hollow, all form and almost zero substance.

These same ideas have appeared in America’s “Conservative” movement, something distinct from the old right of the Republican Party. It is not hard to see how these ideas entered the mainstream of American politics. Decimated by popular acclaim for the New Deal, the Republican Party struggled to adapt. Catholic theorists, opening the potential to marshal the white ethnics throughout America’ cities, began to reimagine a new kind of criticism. Allied to the “cowboy” capitalists of the Southwest, free-trade was a means to an end. Anticommunism was to be vigorously pursued against the godless Soviets. The increasing attack on American public expressions of faith and traditional morals, spiking in the sixties and seventies, mortified many Americans. However, unlike Europe, many of America’s Evangelicals had a living and vibrant “fundamentalist” faith. Nevertheless, they too could line up behind a new “Conservative” movement that defended Christianity, the family, tradition, while attacking weakness on communism, the sexual revolution, drug legalization, and abortion. It was part of what produced the intellectual, and demographic, fire behind the Reagan Revolution.

But, as recent times have shown, this import ideology has serious constraints. The embrace of free-trade and high levels of immigration reflected this pivot to belong to a larger world-order. The goal of Christian Democracy was not simply a United States of Europe, but ultimately a peaceful and united globe. This globalism justified American involvement not only in Europe, but dealing with rule-breaker regimes. This approach sat awkwardly with the millions of American Evangelicals who could not articulate why their politicians, funded and molded by these quasi-Christian Democratic think-tanks, always seemed to betray them. The desire for conservative values and the drive towards global integration did not make sense to many of them, but that became the status quo of the Republican Party with and after Reagan.

Additionally, the aversion to the strong use of the state (even if in service to breaking down bureaucracy) has become political poison. Americans vote for a lower deficit, but doctrinaire conservatives panic when they see it being done. Reagan had denounced welfare queens, but had, instead, built an elaborate case-officer class to examine who was, or was not, fit for a handout. Clinton called it Workfare, but it has a distinctly Christian Democratic ring to it. The courts have remained a bulwark against liberal Congresses passing socially radical legislation, but these same courts have guaranteed a means to impose new social values. The Supreme Court that legalized abortion did so in a social climate that was, in the majority, hostile to the idea. The fixation with judicial activism, even now, hamstrings President Trump’s efforts to enact his agenda, who stands as an American repudiation of the Christian Democratic “Conservative” agenda. It was no surprise that not a few in Western Europe turned away from America’s Trump to Germany’s Merkel as the new leader of the West. America had, to the disgust of what was left of the Christian Democratic center, abandoned its providential role as the Catholic rechtsstaat.

America was not the only western nation to slip away from the Christian Democratic castle. France was the progenitor of Christian Democracy and it had a strong political presence in the democratic rechtsstaat of the Fourth Republic. But Charles de Gaulle put an end to it, both as a political movement and as a constitution (abolishing it for the Fifth Republic). Gallism became a rallying cry for France’s right, with a leader of impeccable antifascist credentials who offered a modestly illiberal alternative. An elected executive monarchy, supported by a subordinate bicameral parliament, became the alternative. It also is a uniquely American alternative. There is no reason to remain under the delusion that Americans live under Madison’s republic, or that Madison’s understanding of the Constitution was the only (or dominant) interpretation. It is more true than not that Madison’s liberalism comports well with a certain variety of neo-Thomist Catholicism, but that is even more reason to vigorously reject it.

A different political tradition, that goes through Washington to Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Nixon, offers a very different understanding of America’s Constitutional order. Rather than lame duck Congresses and the sludge of executive bureaucracy, the President has a right to cut and slash, legislating through executive orders and with legitimacy to act from the very fact of its election (no matter what court says). The fear of authoritarianism and the fear of illiberalism should dissipate as shadow in the sun. There is no reason why rightwingers have to live under a regime that has no reason to exist but for the fact that it exists, hollow and empty posturing for rules that serve no one but the rule-enforcers. Europeans struggle to break out from this castle, but there is no reason for Americans to continue pretending that they live under such.

Let the legacy of Christian Democracy die, let Conservatism die, and let a new future bloom.