Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Pontius Pilate, Ora Pro Nobis

To the leaders of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960’s, self-censorship—once known as civility and decorum—was as dangerous as the social enforcement of civility by private organizations and by public educational institutions, and those social norms were, in turn, just as destructive as attempts by government to limit the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.  Yet the chief aim of the Free Speech Movement was not the same as the aim of the authors and ratifiers of the First Amendment.  The provision that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” was intended to prevent a legal stifling of political debate that would allow a dominant faction in the federal government to concentrate power at the expense of the states and the people.  (We can see how well that worked.)  That freedom of speech would eventually be invoked to defend the word f--k, the depraved imagination of Larry Flynt, and even the promotion of murder would have boggled James Madison’s mind.

The ultimate aim of the Free Speech Movement, on the other hand, was to make a decisive break with the institutions and practices that had emerged from, and sustained, what we once called Christendom.  Those who rallied behind the banner of free speech recognized that words had power—both the power to build up and (more importantly for their purposes) the power to tear down.  Those who want to create and sustain civilization and those who wish to destroy it have the same tool at their disposal.

Back then, as free speech progressed from tittering over the seven dirty words to campus sit-ins to throwing firebombs both figurative and literal, some conservatives (more of the Kirkian variety than of the Nixonian one) recognized the Free Speech Movement for what it was: less of a political threat than a civilizational one.  The importance of civility and decorum is no more self-evident to those who have never exercised them than the need for a knife and a fork is to the barbarian who is used to eating with his hands.  Restraint in speech, like table manners, is a learned behavior, and a mark of civilization.

While table manners speak to man’s sense of his own dignity, a man can remain dignified if forced, by circumstance, to grab a turkey drumstick or to cup his hand in a running stream.  Civility and decorum in speech, however, reflect something even deeper: the recognition that speech is a moral act and, therefore, that the choice of one’s words matters.  Language can reveal the truth, or it can deceive; and the chief reason we choose words that reveal the truth is to communicate that truth to others.  And we attempt to communicate truth to others not to do damage to them, but because we know that the truth is something they need to know.

The constructive use of language, then, is tied very closely to tradition—not tradition as a collection of things that are passed down but, as Josef Pieper saw it, an action that conveys truth from person to person and from generation to generation.  Indeed, language is the chief vessel of tradition, properly understood.  And for Christians, all truth has both its root and its end in the Truth that created and sustains us, and that gave Himself to save mankind because we chose to believe, and then to imitate, the Father of Lies.  It is no mere coincidence that John calls that Truth the Word.

A funny thing happened, though, over the last 50 years, reaching its apotheosis in the past few.  An increasing number of those who declare themselves the defenders of civilization and of Christianity have come to regard civility and decorum not as aids in communicating the truth but as shackles preventing “us” from triumphing over “them.”  And so they have embraced the idol of free speech, for the same reason as those activists of the 1960’s whom they would never acknowledge as their forebears: They are more interested today in destruction than they are in preservation, much less in the construction of a truly Christian civilization.  They attack not only their putative enemies (whom they resemble more than they will ever admit), but also those they would once have embraced as their allies, when the latter dare to suggest that words have meaning, that language is properly used to convey truth, and that the ends can never justify the means because all lies have their source in the Father of Lies, just as all truth belongs to the Word Who said, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.”

With Pontius Pilate, they dismiss truth as “fake news,” standing between them and political power, the modern equivalent of the friendship of Caesar.  But Pilate, seeing the Man he had condemned to death hanging upon the Cross, wrote words of truth and defended them: “What I have written, I have written.”  Early traditions claim that he was baptized and may even have suffered a martyr’s death.  If so, we could use his intercession today.

First published in the January 2019 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Our Corner of the Vineyard

Nolite confidere in principibus.

The voice of the Psalmist speaks to us down through the ages: “Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.”  We can be forgiven if we find those words more relevant than usual in this particular election year.  But it would be a mistake to think that the challenge we face today is merely one of personalities, the result of voters in the primaries picking two intensely dislikable candidates for the highest office in the land.

Our problems run much deeper, and they will not be solved by selecting different presidential candidates, or even simply by refocusing our political efforts from the national level to the state and local ones.  While those are both worthwhile strategies, they are essentially palliative.  They may relieve our symptoms, but they cannot cure the underlying disease, the roots of which run much deeper and much further back in history than we tend to think.

While modern politics, especially at the national level here in the United States, has proved to be a very efficient vehicle for the destruction of society and community, of culture and morality, even the best and most well-meaning of modern politicians have shown little ability to use the political process to shore up the most important institutions, to foster community, to uphold the moral order whose truth is testified to us by natural law and revelation.  Is there something in the very structure of modern democratic politics that makes it an efficient engine for destruction, but hardly useful for preserving what is good and true and beautiful, much less for building an humane society and economy, and a Christian culture?

The father of all modern democratic political theorists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was the father of something else, which is often overlooked in discussions of his legacy: nationalism, and the modern unitary nation-state.  The architects and leaders of the French Revolution were deeply inspired by Rousseau, and it is no contradiction that they adopted as their motto the democratic invocation of liberté, egalité, fraternité, while restricting the freedom of the Church, reducing Christian clergy to noncitizen status, and watering the soil of the Vendeé with the blood of martyrs.  For the liberty that they longed for was the freedom of an abstract national or general will to be expressed without the restraints of custom and tradition, including the most important of all traditions, Christianity; the equality they desired was not the natural equality of organic (and thus naturally small) communities, but the artificial equality of all Frenchmen as participants in the general or national will; and the fraternity they hoped to foster was not the natural brotherhood of families and neighbors and parishes, but the abstract brotherhood of all those who see the nation, and not their own families and the Church and the land on which they live, as their father and mother.

To foster democracy on the national level—that is, to extend democracy to a breadth unseen before in all of human history—the revolutionary leaders had to wipe out everything that stood between the nation and each man or woman, including the Church, the family, organic communities, and cultural diversity between different regions of the country.  In other words, they had to strip everyone of everything that makes each of us a person, so that they could create individuals who would have no choice but to relate to one another only through the political life of the nation-state.

The history of the past 225 years has been the playing out of the French Revolution, again and again, in country after country, around the globe.  Sometimes the attempts to give birth to the General Will have been similarly bloody—in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany, in communist China and Cambodia—but throughout much of Western Europe and here in the United States, they have often been more subtle, like cooking the proverbial frog in a pot.  What no one ever stops to think about that proverb, though, is that there must come an inflection point: If that poor frog is not already cooked by the time the bubbles start to rise from the bottom of the pot, he’s bound to take notice.  Because once those bubbles start to rise, they increase in size and number and frequency and intensity.  Even from inside the pot, you cannot mistake a rolling boil for still water.

For decades, the heat has been climbing in this melting pot that we call the United States.  We have now reached a rolling boil.  The attacks on the traditional social order have escalated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.  They have been launched not just against the family and the Church and the natural differences between the sexes but more recently even against the very concepts of man and woman.  And the frustration that so many Americans today feel—both those who support one of the two major presidential candidates and those who are repelled by both of them—stems from the awareness that the waters around us are roiling and boiling.  We have to do something! is the common refrain; and for many, perhaps even most, Americans, that means the President (or at least the political elite in Washington, D.C.) should do something.  After all, problems that are nationwide must call for national solutions, right?  And yet . . . 

Nolite confidere in principibus.  “Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.”

The headlong rush toward mass democracy, toward Rousseauian nationalism, has obscured for many a truth that can still be seen clearly by those who have studied history, and especially modern history: There are no political solutions to cultural problems.  A wrecking ball is an extremely efficient tool to use in destroying a magnificent Gothic cathedral.  But just as it would seem absurd to suggest that the same wrecking ball might have a role to play in rebuilding a new church out of the rubble of that cathedral, contemporary politics—especially at the national level—presents far greater potential for harm than for good.  The modern inversion of social life, the placing of politics before culture and morality, could work for a little while—a few hundred years in the broad sweep of human history—so long as a healthy culture continued to pass down what was worthwhile in a way that kept tradition alive for the rising generation.  The new order could draw upon a rich cultural and moral patrimony even as it attacked that same patrimony—at first subtly, and now openly.  But now that modern politics has undermined its own foundations, the entire structure is in danger of collapse.  Remodeling a house whose foundations have been eaten away by termites is a fool’s errand; renewing the foundation itself must be the first step in rebuilding an humane society and economy.

Renewing the foundation requires a return to the principle of subsidiarity, and specifically to the original understanding of the term.  Subsidiarity is often reduced to a sort of Catholic version of political federalism—dividing up responsibilities at different levels of government.  But strictly speaking, subsidiarity is something much greater.  Subsidiarity is concerned with the proper limits of authority—all authority, not simply political authority.  In fact, while political authority is in many ways the most encompassing of all human authority in the modern age, it has traditionally been regarded as the most limited, because it is derivative.  The source of all authority, of course, is God, Who is Himself the highest authority; but on the human level, authority flows outward from the family, not downward from government.  And the authority of what we often refer to as “higher levels” of government is circumscribed by the authority of those governmental institutions that are closer to those whom they govern, institutions that have arisen organically from the community, which is the natural extension of the family.

When we speak about the structure of government in the United States, we usually represent it as a hierarchy that starts with the federal government—or, to name it more accurately, the national government—on top, with state government in the middle, and local government at the very bottom.  But politically speaking, the principle of subsidiarity sees authority from the opposite direction—local government has the strongest claim, and the authority of state government is circumscribed by that; state government should not usurp the legitimate authority of local government.  The authority of national government is restricted even further; it has no legitimate claim over the areas of authority that belong to either state or local government.  The national government does not delegate authority to the state, which in turn delegates it to the local government; rather, every level of government beyond the local is necessary only insofar as it fulfills functions that are desirable for the common good but which can only be provided by organic communities coming together voluntarily into a larger political association.  All of this is summed up precisely in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The “People of the United States” referenced in the Preamble is not an undifferentiated mass like the French revolutionaries’ understanding of the people of France, but the people of each state coming together as states—as preexisting entities—to create a new level of government to do things that all of the states found desirable but that none of the states could do for itself (and that the first federal government established under the Articles of Confederation had failed to do).  The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, so neglected today, makes this perfectly clear: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

So: Authority flows outward, from the most organic levels of government to the more artificial.  But now we need to take one further step back, and recall that even the most organic levels of government—all the things, for instance, that we lump under the label of “local government”—receive their authority not by some sort of divine right but from a social institution that preexists all political institutions: the family.

It is no mere coincidence that, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the discussion of society at large, and of the political community, is placed in the section on the Fourth Commandment.  And the structure of the discussion moves from family to society to the political community, establishing a clear priority of institutions.  All human institutions flow from the simple injunction to “Honor your father and your mother.”  As the Catechism notes,

The family is the original cell of social life. It is the natural society in which husband and wife are called to give themselves in love and in the gift of life. Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society.

It is a sign of the destruction wrought by modern politics that it seems necessary to note that the Catechism is very specific about what constitutes a family (and, by omission, what does not): “A man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family.”  Because the family is the foundation on which everything else rests, the widespread confusion that has been deliberately created over the terms marriage and family is an attack not only on those institutions but on all of human society and political life.

By now it should have become clear why subsidiarity is not a mere political principle but an all-encompassing social and cultural principle that, far from empowering government, always points back to the source of government’s authority, and therefore acts as a limit on its authority, especially as that authority becomes further removed from the actual people affected by government.

To take a concrete example: The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares, without reservation, that “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children.”  That responsibility rests on their God-given authority within the family.  Parents can exercise that authority by delegating it to others, coming together to create communal educational institutions; but those institutions, even if they are run by local governments, cannot legitimately override the authority of the parents.  In other words, the principle of subsidiarity means that government cannot step in simply because of a perceived inability or unwillingness of the parents to exercise their authority as government sees fit.  To put it in the words of the Catechism, “Following the principle of subsidiarity, larger communities should take care not to usurp the family’s prerogatives or interfere in its life.”  That principle applies by analogy to the state usurping the authority of local governments, or the national government usurping the authority of states and localities.

Once we start to see authority as something that extends beyond politics and that in fact circumscribes political life, we can begin to see how subsidiarity is not simply another political system but an alternative vision to the entire modern understanding of political life.  Subsidiarity builds upon our understanding of human nature and authority that we derive from natural law and revelation.  It points to a culture that will lead to a proper understanding of political life, but which is also prior to politics—prior both in the sense of existing before politics and in the sense of being more important thanpolitics.

And this culture is more important than politics precisely because it is animated not by the human will but by divine truth.  To put it another way, drawing upon the work of Joseph Pieper, that culture is at the heart of what we mean by tradition.  Like marriage and the family, tradition has suffered sustained assaults, to the point where the very word has become synonymous for most people with some set of dry-as-dust, abstract principles that are blindly handed on from one generation to the next, for no particular reason other than that they have always been believed and must therefore always be followed.

But that is not what tradition means, as Pieper shows.  Rather, it is the handing down of all that is essential, the unchanging truth to which we need to conform ourselves in order to live as man was meant to live.  Pieper contrasts this living tradition with what he calls “dogmatic conservatism,” which corresponds more with the current caricature of tradition.  Rather than being a collection of things that are revered simply for being old, tradition is the living reality of universal truth revealed through the circumstances of the day, changing as necessary in the accidents, in the “historical forms,” in order to preserve what is essential.  In other words, tradition is a living reality that animates society from within, as opposed to ideology, the normal mode of modern politics, which is a static blueprint imposed on society from above—and which does great damage to the extent that it diverges from reality.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church draws into stark relief this distinction between a culture built on sacred tradition that preexists political life and the ideological mode of politics that dominates the modern world:

Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain preeminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer.

The Catechism then turns to John Paul II’s social encyclical Centesimus annus:

Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows.

When Centesimus annus was released in 1991, in the final days of the Cold War, it was easy to read such lines as an epitaph for communism, or more broadly for all of the destructive totalitarianisms of the 20th century.  Twenty-five years later, John Paul appears as a prophet, his words speaking to us of the increasingly explicit totalitarianism that was implicitly there in our own national political life at the very moment when we were celebrating the triumph of freedom and democracy over tyranny and communism.

Nolite confidere in principibus.  “Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.”  As another presidential election draws to a close, we need to remind ourselves that, whichever candidate wins, there are concrete ways in which we can refocus our efforts from the national level, where we can make little or no difference, to the local level, where we can restore the foundations and begin to rebuild—to use another phrase from John Paul II—the “culture of life.”  In doing so, we should act not out of mere frustration with national politics but out of a recognition of the limitations of all human endeavors that, in the words of John Paul, “seek their criteria and goal in themselves or . . . borrow them from some ideology.”  There is no future in the merely human; as the Psalmist reminds us, “His spirit shall go forth, and he shall return into his earth: in that day all their thoughts shall perish.”  In returning to subsidiarity, in elevating the family and the local community, in recognizing that the ultimate source of authority is not government but God Himself, we can begin to undo the social and cultural damage that modern politics has wrought, and start restoring our corner of the vineyard.        

First published in the November 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.