Pierre Manent: The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times. Paul Seaton, editor and translator. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022.
In his introduction to this judiciously ordered thematic selection of Manent’s writings, Paul Seaton distills the philosopher’s central thought: “The Imago Dei is also the zōon politikón.” One might initially respond, How can this be? Upon reflection, aided by the arguments Manent frames, one might equally ask, How could it be otherwise? If human beings are made in the Image of God, and if God is a person who rules not only His creation but Himself—in no fewer than three Persons, as the Gospels teach—then human beings must be political by nature. By contrast, the “Religion of Humanity” which animates so much of European and American politics rejects God and denigrates self-government. Insofar as we adhere to this novel faith, the identity of the Image of God and the political animal will be lost on us. At the same time, precisely because it is true, we will fail to understand ourselves, with all the attendant moral and political derangements that lack of self-knowledge must engender.
Seaton has Manent open his argument with an account of the political history of Christianity, the story of “a succession of theological-political arrangements, of solutions to the theologico-political problem,” wherein “each solution ends by revealing itself to be as unsatisfactory as the one that it succeeded”—precisely because the “problem” can only be truly solved by the rule of God on earth, an event which has yet to occur. The first solution, which posited God’s Assembly or Church as “the true republic, the perfect society,” in contrast to which all merely human associations held “an ontologically inferior rank,” led to the doctrine of the plenitude of power or authority in the Catholic Church. But because this Church lacked the physical power to rule human beings directly and in all respects—Jesus Himself recognized this in telling His disciples to leave the things of Caesar to Caesar (who didn’t need Christians to tell him how to raise and spend taxes, and did not wield his sword in vain)— this led to an uncomfortable dual citizenship, an allegiance to God’s regime and to whatever worldly regime a Christian lived in—”a permanent division and uncertainty, since two loyalties necessarily share the heart of each Christian.”
In an attempt to overcome this dualism, European rulers founded a new state form, the form of absolute national (and some might say ‘statist’) monarchy. In these countries, “religion remains a command, but this command is essentially administered by the temporal sovereign,” as exemplified by the Tudor dynasty in England and, most strikingly, the Bourbons in France. “The national monarchy was intended to overcome the medieval duality of the priesthood and the emperor, ‘to reunite the two heads of the eagle,’ to bring it about that Christian subjects ceased ‘to see double,'” as certain modern political philosophers put it. The Christian or apparently Christian modern state (“apparently” because, after all, the philosophers quoted followed Machiavelli and his hints about the benefits of a purely ‘civil’ religion) might have one of several regimes: the English monarchy heading the ‘English’ or Anglican Church, attempting to adapt such an institution to English common law, thereby satisfying neither Catholics nor the more ardent Protestants; the democratic-republican regime of American Puritans, who fled the English regime only to establish a sort of absolutism of ‘the many’ instead of ‘the one’; and European nationalism, first instantiated as monarchic and then, in France, very much in opposition to the Church and to the God of the Bible, as republican.
It is the European form that concerns Manent, first and foremost. Whether under a monarchic, republican, or oligarchic regime, nationalism without God, the elevation of each nation to quasi-divine status, has ended badly. The ‘secularized’ nationalisms that advanced throughout Europe after the French revolution culminated in the debacle of nationalism in the world wars. Those wars “have worn away the charm of the sacredness of the nation.” The victory of republican regimes over the others has ameliorated the problem but at the cost of the exhaustion of the nationalist sentiments that animated them. Ambitious and fearful men alike began to call for, then to implement, a “supranational” Europe; among other things, supranationalists imagine that political borders are at best meaningless, at worst harmful to trade and dangerous to defend. The resulting “massive immigration of non-Christian populations,” populations whose supranationalism often consists not in the dream of the European Union but in the dream of the ummah, not the Religion of Humanity but the religion of Allah, contradicts the very principle it was intended to demonstrate.
Having first separated Church and Caesar on Christian terms, then fusing them on terms that might have been sincerely Christian or covertly Machiavellian, European liberalism separated them. Manent observes that separation is one thing, separate but equal another. “When one considers the question of government, or of command…one sees how much separation—far from being a stable situation that leaves the two protagonists intact—is an endless process that implies the ever growing and indefinite domestication of the Church” because the Church relinquishes coercive power to the State. “This gives a decisive advantage of the public institution over the private one.” The Church can and does attempt to rule within “civil society,” beneath the ruling apparatus of the State, ruling by consent rather than coercion. “However, to govern is to govern. To govern in civil society is not so different from governing in the State.” Under any genuine liberal regime, I can exercise my right to liberty by leaving the nation ruled by the State or by leaving the church that I have joined, but it’s much more difficult to leave my country than it is to leave my church. I can exercise religious liberty simply by attending the church across the street, or by staying home. And even the ‘liberal’ attempt to make exercising political liberty by leaving my country almost that easy, by making borders porous throughout Europe depends upon a shared sense of belonging that transcends one’s sense of national language and way of life—no simple effort, one animated by the rather casual expectation of a sense of ‘Europeanness’ as strong as Englishness, Frenchness, Germanness, and so on.
This being so, the Church might pretend that religion entails no form of government at all. It then becomes “the collective ‘beautiful soul'” of the German Romantics, a “bearer of ideals and values”—entities which, “in contrast to law, cannot be commanded.” European churches today “propose ‘Christian values.'” Unlike laws, such entities “cannot be commanded”; “unlike the old Decalogue and also unlike democratic law,” they “are impossible either to obey or to disobey.” This leads Christianity away from itself and towards the Religion of Humanity because “under the rubric of ‘values’ it is hopeless to make ‘the Gospel message’ listened to, or at least heard, except by engaging in humanitarian and egalitarian overbidding.” ‘More compassionate and democratic than thou’ replaces ‘holier than thou.’ But ‘holier than thou’ always remained in principle governed by the admission that only God really was. Humanitarian and egalitarian sentiment come with self-righteousness built in, with no real authority above it.
The same goes for the standard of natural, as distinguished from ‘human,’ rights. The natural rights of the original liberal republicanism were said to inhere in every human being as such, thus serving as a criterion for human conduct. But ‘human’ rights as conceived by the Religion of Humanity cannot have recourse to nature because “modern humanity…desires to be the sovereign over nature, creator of its own nature,” right down to ‘gender assignment’ by oneself rather than by birth or (as in Eden) by God. The Church has long posed the question, What is man? or (what amounts to the same thing) What is Adam? But modern democracy “neither can nor wants to respond to this question in any manner or form”. Modern democracy rules, but it cannot say in the name of what, other than in accordance with certain sentiments, coming from it knows not where. The Church no longer rules, but it does attempt to “overbid” the democratic State in terms of the State’s own self-legitimizing sentiments. This gives the Church a sort of “dialectical advantage” over the State—or would, if the Church could shake off its own confusion. The Enlightenment had hoped to wrest not only political sovereignty but dialectical advantage from the Church by philosophizing its way out of Christian doctrines; today, the democratic state, in its moral and intellectual egalitarianism or relativism, can no longer command itself, although it does not hesitate to command others. “No one knows what will happen when democracy and the Church become aware of this reversal.”
Seaton next causes Manent to get down to the particulars. NATO’s 1999 war on Serbia, which had attempted to quash an independence movement in what had been the Serbian province of Kosovo. NATO characterized its military action as a “humanitarian intervention”—a novel concept at the time. While “the notion of humanity conceived as universal” dates to the Roman Empire, an empire presupposes an emperor; “it therefore was a universal that remained political.” It also was not universal in fact, making it necessarily political in its foreign relations. As for the Catholic or universal Church, it remained universal in principle but, being spiritual, not as a political fact. Indeed, it soon “produced divisions and separations in the world,” between believers and unbelievers and between the several denominations of those who thought of themselves as Christians. What makes Christian charity realistic, however, is that centers on the love of God and of God’s image in one’s neighbor, who is as intrinsically unlovable as oneself. When, in anticipation of the Religion of Humanity, Rousseau’s notion of compassion replaced the Christian principle of caritas, the ground was tilled for the field of humanitarianism. Unlike charity, which is so difficult for human beings that it requires God’s grace to aid us in feeling it, humanitarianism comes naturally to most, easily to many. This also distinguishes it from humanism, which requires arduous self-development whereby the soul aims at becoming fully human. [1] Unlike Christianity, which retains the Biblical sense of politics, of friends and enemies, those in the Church or Assembly of God and those outside it, humanitarianism pretends that nothing human is foreign to me.
Being at once sentimental and active, humanitarianism “habituate[s] people to disdain political reflection, politics themselves and their concrete conditions of existence, as if the affirmation of humanity sufficed itself.” While NATO was right to intervene (“it was dangerous and dishonorable for Europe to allow a regime that institutionalized the oppression of a minority to continue to act”), in “refus[ing] to call ‘war’ the massive bombardment of a country, week after week,” the NATO countries lied to themselves and to the world, including the Serbs, who were not dignified with the title, ‘enemy.’ Consistent with this inhumane humanitarianism, NATO also adopted a policy of ‘zero fatalities’ for itself, obviating the idea of self-sacrifice, whereby “war “in a certain way ‘redeems’ itself own immorality” by risking the lives of the warriors. Finally, NATO evaded the political question of what Winston Churchill called the aftermath of war: What to do with Kosovo, after victory.
To think of the aftermath of war, to think politically, requires more than mere sentiment, however pure. It requires prudential reasoning. And even Rousseau, the founder of the demi-politics of compassion, sees that “human beings are not capable of a disinterested sentiment,” a morally pure sentiment, but “only natural sentiments, that is to say, they necessarily seek their interest and their pleasure,” experiencing compassion because “the visible suffering of another person tells me that I too could experience it, that I am as venerable as the other.” “There is nothing in pity that is heroic or impossible, since its wellspring is the selfishness of each person,” yielding “the society of the Goodwill soup kitchen.” The soup kitchen attends to the needs of the body, its organizers feeling compassion for nothing specifically human. This “tends to weaken the consciousness and sentiment of what is specifically human,” of reason, albeit in the name of humanitarianism. This is why animals too are now said to have a ‘right’ not to suffer physical pain, as per the morality of Peter Singer, who defends abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia so long as they cause no pain.
The apolitical character of the humanitarian military intervention obviates the sovereignty of states. Humanitarian action is indeed a Christian and humanistic duty, but it isn’t the same as humanitarian military intervention. The aim of military action is victory; victory entails responsibility for ruling the defeated. That is, “to modify the political circumstances of a humanitarian crisis”—to bomb Serbia—results in “political consequences,” and “the one who takes the initiative thus immediately assumes new political responsibilities.” If prompted to intervene solely by sentiment, the humanitarian statesman will likely “engage in a political and military action in conditions that he does not know well, with inappropriate instruments, and for vague political objectives.” To so “falsify the conditions of political judgment” has “a profoundly demoralizing effect, “plac[ing] political life under an exigency that is impossible to honor and which contributes to the delegitimation of the normal political life of democratic nations.” To be genuinely political, the Religion of Humanity would need to animate some political institution that rules humanity as a whole. But “humanity as such does not have a political existence.” How, then, can national governments pretend to be agents of humanity, especially since the sentiment of humanitarianism isn’t shared by non-Western nations? In so pretending, and by doing so without reference to a standard outside themselves, beyond their own sentiments, they confuse themselves with God. This does not mean, Manent pertinently insists, that to make moral judgments and act on them amounts to ‘playing God.’ On the contrary, it is to be human. But to be human, guidance must come from that inside us that is distinctively human, which is thoughtful, and operation of logos, the distinctive feature of human nature that, in Christian terms, bespeaks the Image of God.
Manent elaborates on this new religion, the Religion of Humanity, beginning by citing Tocqueville on ‘democracy’ or social equality and its intellectual and moral effects. Tocqueville observes that aristocratic societies have a weak sense of “humanity in general.” The idea of the human species is strongly present in the minds of the very few, the philosophers. Democratic societies, however, consist of individuals who readily see other individuals as their semblables, their ‘similars,’ their fellows. This seeing is at least as much a feeling as it is an insight, and so finds its highest expression in poetry. Victor Hugo was the poet of the nineteenth century—the ‘democratizing’ century—the writer “who expressed most amply and insistently, almost systematically, the idea and sentiment of Humanity.” Although “Hugo’s poetic style no longer suits our taste,” we still “share the poet’s religious or quasi-religious sentiment.” The sentiment is so powerful that it governs even rationalists, even an Auguste Comte, whose positivism complements his humanitarianism—so much so, that he invents a sort of social (if not truly civic) religion of humanitarianism, complete with rituals and symbols imitating those of the French Catholic Church.
Why does Manent object to this kinder, gentler historicism, surely a thing preferable to the harsh practices of Marxism and Social Darwinists? Because even if, per impossibile, “the principal evils of society will have been healed by altruism,” will human beings find some new object for their striving or will they rather cease to strive at all? Manent predicts that humanity living under ‘Comteian’ conditions “will be a humanity closed in on itself, one that is prey to an immense, or sublime, selfishness,” home to the contemptible being Nietzsche derides as the Last Man. “The religion of Humanity is Christianity and specifically Catholicism, with all the vices Nietzsche sees in it, but without the grandeur that a belief in God entails, that is, in a Being greater than humanity.” Christianity becomes Christianism, an ideology. Depending on how one translates Nietzsche’s German, the Last Man either blinks, toadlike and uncomprehendingly, at “the Roman roads, the medieval cathedrals, the Renaissance palaces,” “strangers to the motives that produced these works,” or he winks at them, feeling himself superior to the supposedly benighted folk who made them, superstitious ignoramuses who lacked the “historical perspective” of modern man. But this perspective, Nietzsche complains, “produces the flattest disposition of the soul, that of the tourist”; “the effectual truth of the modern religion of Human is tourism,” seen today in the public television programs ‘hosted’ by that cheerful bland twit, Rick Steves. “Just when present-day humanity aims to include and congratulate itself on excluding nothing that is currently human, it excludes its entire past, all past generations, from itself”—as remarked by the aristocratic Mr. Burke. “It is at the moment when it embraces itself wholly that it ceases to understand itself,” ceases to exercise its distinctively human capacity to know itself.
Unlike human self-understanding in terms of the Image of God and of human nature, both of which respect the political character of human persons and thus the limits of human sentiments and actions, the complacent universalism fostered by the Religion of Humanity rejects “all mediation and concretization” of the human ways of life—such political institutions as nation-states and their attendant borders, with provinces and cities within those borders, and with the political responsibilities which human self-government possible. Contemporary Europeans have been able to imagine themselves “natural citizens of humanity” because the United States has taken responsibility for their military defense. Writing in 2010, a decade before Russian soldiers rolled into Ukraine, Manent warns that “this does not constitute a vigorous political order, or one likely to last.” “Sooner or later, Europeans will have to remember the political conditions of humanity.” This realization won’t come readily, as the Religion of Humanity invites us to enjoy “the certainty of doing good as well as the feeling of being good, all the more so because in the world of fellow-feeling, most of the doing lies in the feeling,” consisting primarily if not exclusively of “acknowledging and appreciating the similitude of the ‘other.'” “This way of thinking entails the inglorious death of civic virtue, as well as of serious attention to the Christian proposition.”
The central section of the book as Seaton has carefully designed it consists of a sequence of considerations on the Christian proposition. Like Jesus, the Son who mediates between the Father and Man, the Church mediates, or should mediate, between “real humanity and a dreamed-of ‘Humanity,'” between human beings as they are and human beings as they should be, at least as envisioned by the secular prophets and priests of the Religion of Humanity. Since the founding of the Church, pseudo-religions have arisen, religions that distort “this-or-that aspect of Christianity” and attempt to impose it upon men—Communism yesterday, Nazism the day before yesterday. The Religion of Humanity shares in their attempt to fuse theory and practice in “a powerful enterprise of great extent to regulate the human world by means of international rules and institutions, so that nations, losing their character as sovereign political bodies, would henceforth be nothing but ‘regions’ of a world en route to globalization, i.e., unification.” Although the Church has always been distrustful, even critical, of sovereign states, often regarding them as loci of the libido dominandi, such states also “prevented imperial stagnation” and, in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, often protected small nations from the big ones. States are not simply fields of ‘power’; they also serve as fields of politics rightly understood, there being “no more powerful source of the moral development of each person than concern for the common good or the ‘common thing,’ the res publica.” “The formation and then the deployment of the human virtues require the participation in a collective ‘unit of action’ before the members of which we feel ourselves responsible, and whose praise and blame we experience.” ‘Humanity’ constitutes no such field of action. “There is, to be sure, a human race, but it is only actualized in the plurality of human communities” in which the political nature of human beings can flourish, a nature which is the Image of God. The Catholic Church would be better advised to treat with friendship the other real communities, the nations, which, whether Christian or not, at least form a cadre of education and action in which human beings can truly engage in a search for the common good.”
There are those who argue that multinational corporations can replace nation-states as intermediaries, ultimately providing the institutional structures for world government. But commerce alone hasn’t prevented wars; commercial republican regimes have prevented wars amongst themselves, but corporations are oligarchies, not republics. And as commercial and industrial enterprises, corporations lack a full understanding of human nature. Corporations undertake exchange, an activity that “only needs very limited agreements that bear upon the characteristics of the object in question and its price”; corporate agents need not even know one another personally, as “commerce demands but little of ‘the common’ and therefore only produces a little of ‘the common.'” Commerce is a res without a publica. As such, corporations can distribute goods and services without thinking much about the distribution of honors, which requires knowledge of persons, not things. Corporations have done very poorly in managing their relations with China and with the more seriously religious elements among Muslims, even as they often blundered their way through relations with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. “China, Islam, the Jewish people, the Christian world, these are not the different colors of a rainbow humanity, these are ‘grandeurs,’ they are ‘political and spiritual quantities,’ which come to sight as proposals and affirmations of humanity and which need to be made compatible.” Manent regards the Catholic Church as likely more capable of serving as a mediator among these grandeurs than corporations will ever be, as “the only completely established real universal community, the sole ‘perfect spiritual republic.'” Its spirituality makes it a physical threat to no one; its republican character registers its political dimension, beyond mere economics.
In doing so, it can uphold the distinction between charity and compassion. [2] Com-passion is “indeed a passion,” prompting us to aid those who suffer or are in danger. “If we didn’t have this sentiment, human life would be much crueler than it is, and it would lose a good deal of its sweetness.” As a passion, however, compassion shares the weaknesses of all passions: “it is weak,” often fleeting, and “it is largely blind,” lacking the guidance of reason. “One cannot found or govern any community by means of compassion alone” since communities require virtues to sustain them—courage, justice, moderation, prudence—not passions, or at least not passion alone.
So, for example, the migration of suffering populations inspires compassion but “does not include the duty to make fellow citizens of those whom we aid.” It provides a spur to action but does not tell us what to do. By contrast, “charity is clearly a virtue, and even the culminating virtue, of the human being and the Christian,” directing us to love with the prudence of serpents and the innocence of doves. Agapic love “characterizes not certain acts, but the tenor of a life.”
This is why Seaton places Manent’s article, “Who Is ‘The Good Samaritan’?” in the center of the book, tenth among nineteen chapters. [3] Manent wrote the article in answer to Pope Francis’s encyclical, Fratelli tutti, in which the pope deploys the Gospel parable to illustrate “fraternity and social friendship.” Fraternity and social friendship are admirable, yet human-all-too-human. To interpret the parable in such terms is to ignore its centering in the things of God, not of Man. Even the Jewish priest and the Levite, who see the injured man and pass him by are thinking of God—more specifically, of His law, which bars men who are ritually clean from touching what appears to them to be a corpse. The Samaritan is under no such legal restriction. More, and supremely, “the amplitude to his deeds,” the “liberty of his conduct,” the “competence in his care for all wounds,” the “competence in his care for all wounds,” the “authority to his word,” and the “ability to make promises worthy of belief,” all point to his more than human character. “The Church Fathers were right: the Samaritan is none other than Jesus himself.” We humans lack God’s charity, strength, “reparative virtue,” patience, hope or faith “to be like the Samaritan.” “There is no Christianity outside of Jesus Christ,” and we humans need to recognize that.
God needs no boundaries. We humans do. Among those boundaries are national borders. The migrations which have given the question of charity and compassion an inescapably political dimension in our time “oblige all citizens to take a clear and precise view of the political community that they wish to form, and they force Christians to define the meaning and significance of the virtue of charity that is the center of the Christian life.” Traditionally, the Catholic Church “put the social and political nature of man at the fore, or on the first plane,” recognizing that “the development of a person’s humanity passes by the mediation of his or her civic and social association.” To speak of the rights of migrants is to define rights in exclusively ‘individual’ terms, but whatever rights inhere in individuals as such do not translate simply into citizen rights. Manent here goes too far, denying that rights “can be attached to the isolated human individual” at all. This confuses human being as potential with human being as more fully actualized within a political community. Human being as potential, seen in individuals born and unborn, in and of itself implies no civil right, although the political nature of human beings implies a right to civility, to the membership in a regime that both protects individuals from harm and assists in their development as mature citizens. [4]
Be this as it may, “borders are the condition of existence of a political association capable of assisting” migrants.” And political borders make human approximation of Christ’s charity possible in reality. Love God and neighbor, not neighbor alone, recognizing that while God is limitless neighborliness implies the limit of propinquity, the limit that human persons must respect when they consider their own nature as undivine beings defined by the Image of God but not by godliness itself. “No one can claim to know to what point a political body can accept a growing heterogeneity without falling apart,” thereby becoming a ‘failed state’ of the sort the migrants themselves have fled. Respect for immigration laws expresses “concern for the stability and viability of the civic body of which we are a part,” of “preserving and, if possible, of improving the conditions of a ‘good way of life’ or a ‘good life'”—a good regime. And as to the Church, its charity, centering on God, identifies the good way of life as God’s way of life, expressing agapic love by tending to the souls of those who suffer primarily, their bodily needs and even their moral rights secondarily. Humanitarian care “is precious but is spiritually empty because it does not bring the Word and does not show the Way.” Meeting the displaced person who is a Muslim, can a Christian not care first and foremost for the conversion of the Muslim’s soul to that Way, by means of that Word? [5]
Political and Christian prudence alike call republican citizens and members of the City of God alike to understand their obligations to migrants as conditional, not all-encompassing. Migrants “impose themselves on us by the strength of their numbers and their aggression,” having been “encouraged, even directed, by foreign states who have unfriendly, even hostile aims toward us.” Acts of war are not limited to bombings and tank sorties. In us, in ‘We Europeans,’ “It is a major political and moral fault to yield to force hiding itself behind misery.” Further, in agreeing to accept a measured quantity of migrants, we “cannot agree to abandon the principles of our political regime.” In the republics, “we are the sole judges of this possibility, as is fitting for political bodies that govern themselves democratically.” The same goes for the Church, which consists of discrete churches, none of which has unlimited physical resources, even if their members could command unlimited spiritual resources—which, being human, they cannot do, either, although they can pray for as many of them as God chooses to grant. It therefore makes no sense, politically or Christianly, to renounce our sovereignty in our own communities or to “weaken what remains of Christian dispositions and Catholic habits, for the sake of a religion of Humanity that delivers us over to the strongest.” Under that religion, “‘Christianity’ now only presented the general idea of humanity under the form of a particular opinion,” an ‘ideal’ in the Hegelian sense, an instantiation of a particular moment in the history of the Absolute Spirit, an entity very far from the Holy Spirit. Even as modern political philosophers from Machiavelli on denigrated Christianity as unrealistic, a belief in an “imaginary principality,” even such sympathetic observers as Chateaubriand inclined to accept that categorization, albeit with friendly feelings, an ideal which inspires noble sentiments.
Why do so few persons today recognize this transformation? Manent suggests that the reconfiguration of Christianity as an ‘ideal’ forms part of a much larger moral and intellectual framework. As a result of modern philosophy, we no longer think politically. This seems paradoxical, because Machiavelli and his followers called for the construction of the modern state, a vast political task. But the size of the modern state establishes a distinction between ‘the state’ understood as a government apparatus and ‘civil society’ located inside the territory ruled by the state. (Christianity anticipated some of this, in its separation of the things of God from the things of Caesar, thereby “having broken apart the ‘beautiful whole’ of the pagan city.”) This, along with the ‘state of nature’ doctrine, has inclined many thinkers to locate the fundamental elements of politics in pre-political and sub-political places, which are said to have generated the state. To think so is to think that sociology deserves intellectual primacy over political science. Moreover, sociology partakes of the aspirations of modern science, especially its tendency to abstract ’causes’ from the phenomena in the form of mathematical formulae, in order to propound ‘theories’ of society. “While Aristotle’s point of view” in his political science “is a practical perspective, the point of view of the sociologist is a theoretical point of view.” Theory so conceives ‘objectifies’ the phenomena it studies; “it is difficult to know what the sociologist shares with the human beings he studies,” separated as he is “from his object by his scientific instruments themselves.” Europeans now think of religion ‘sociologically.’ If they think scientifically, they regard it as objectively empty, except as a social fact, more or (increasingly) less prevalent. If they think religiously, they assume there is “nothing objective and shareable to say about it to those who are outside of it.”
Manent resists. It is true that the ancient city no longer exists, that the historical context of classical political science has been discarded. But politics remains, even in the modern state. “I propose preserving and affirming the ‘architectonic’ character of political science among the social sciences,” which Aristotle affirmed. True, modern states have brought on an attenuated civil life, leaving the intimacy of self-government in the small poleis far behind, at least on the level of nations. But can anyone doubt that modern states actually do rule? Or that tyrannical regimes of modern states have aped the compactness of the poleis in pursuing ‘totalitarianism,’ always with a malignant form of personalism rightly derided as a ‘personality cult.’
“I therefore propose to study religion first of all politically—as a human association and as a government.” After all (one might add), every religion consists of a regime, a way of ruling. Given that European democrats “define ourselves by two ideals,” the “practical ideal of sincerity and the theoretical ideal of objectivity,” we handicap ourselves when we think about religion by consigning it to the realm of subjectivity in practice and scientific, even mathematical criteria when we consider it theoretically. That is, when we ask, “How is one to talk politically about religion?” “The way the question is posed renders it even more opaque and practically insoluble.” Muslims don’t think that way. In their opinion, “the divine Law is immediately positive and manifestly rational,” and “obedience to it constitutes the umma,” the Muslim religio-political community, a community that occupies territory. On that territory, Muslims are objectively at war with non-Muslims—spiritually at all times, physically when that is advantageous. Since the best political regime existed only under Muhammad’s monarchy, “no one regime characterizes Islam” in other times; Muslims ready themselves to make war within them all. They tend to be disadvantaged by democratic republicanism, whose way of life that consists of give and take, ruling and being ruled, scarcely comports with strict obedience to Islamic law.
Empire is “the political form,” as distinguished from the political regime, “closest to Islam.” Islam’s last empire was the Ottoman caliphate, gone now for more than a century, replaced by Mustafa Kemal’s nation-state, Turkey. This abrupt transition contrasts with the decades it took to replace the Holy Roman Empire and the Christendom it embodied with the modern state. “We therefore find ourselves in the presence of an immense empire, or at least an immense imperial imprint, without an emperor”—religiously powerful but politically weak, its subjects indignant at their own weakness. When they go so far as to call Europeans and Americans ‘crusaders,” we think the charge an absurd anachronism. The language may be antique but were we to understand our own regimes better we might see the point. In our regimes, states guarantee equal rights, “especially freedom of conscience, to everyone, believer and unbeliever alike. This can only be so in a regime founded upon no one established religion. For that to happen, a people must derive their rights either from nature or nationhood, or both. If it is from nationhood, then the nation becomes a new form of the sacred community. Nationality replaces Christianity without necessarily abandon crusading or imperialism. This is what Muslims are talking about. In contemporary Europe, elites want nationality to go the way of Christianity, but the elites have their own religion, the Religion of Humanity. That religion commands ‘openness to the other,” but if the ‘other’ is Islam, a religion that prohibits openness, how will the Religion of Humanity deal with it and remain openness? Without Christianity or the nation-state, it cannot. “Let us, therefore, return to and ‘reenter’ the real Europe that we are trying in vain to leave.”
As a preliminary to this return, Manent commends the writings of Charles Péguy, “one of the most penetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modem consciousness.” In Péguy’s lifetime, the preeminent event that raised the religio-political question was the Dreyfus Affair, the twelve-year-long ordeal that wracked French politics, beginning in 1894 with the false accusation and wrongful conviction of the Jewish French Army captain Albert Dreyfus on charges of treason. The Affair brought out the worst of French anti-Semitism, implicating the Army and involving the French Catholic Church hierarchy, while reviving antagonism against the republican regime. A fervent Catholic himself, Péguy sided with Dreyfus against the ultra-nationalist monarchist Right, but also came to oppose the Dreyfusard socialists, whom he charged with “wanting to control thought and word” every bit as much as the Catholic Church and the Old Regime had done in previous centuries.
Crucially for and in anticipation of Manent’s own argument, Péguy “saw the Dreyfus Affair as the event par excellence, the event which is unforeseeable, which neither historians nor sociologists could understand, because they try to find general laws of history, because they make and deal in general categories.” The affair wasn’t ‘historical’ in that sense (the sense most doggedly pursued in France by the ‘historicist’ historian, Hippolyte Taine) but personal, first of all concerning a person, Alfred Dreyfus, and his identity as a Jew, his status as a French army officer, the relations of his Jewishness and his membership in the Army to the republican regime and, more broadly of both Jews as such and republicans as such to the Catholic Church. This unpredictable coincidence of ’causes,’ all centering on a person, raised “what was to become the central mediation of [Péguy’s] life: what is a people? What is a city? And indissolubly linked to these two: what is Christianity?”
In his meditations, Péguy came to see the “radical conflict” not merely between those who believed Dreyfus guilty and those who understood him to be innocent—there were anti-Dreyfusards and Dreyfusards among republicans, monarchists, army men, civilians, Catholics and non-Catholics—but between the ancients and the moderns. Among the Dreyfusards, the socialists were resolute ‘moderns,’ not genuine republicans at all but statist, would-be oligarchs, ready to suppress their opponents and to rule without dissent. They shared this tendency with the modern or Hobbesian-Bodinian, monarchists, seeking to level civil society while centralizing political power in their own hands. The true republicans (contra their Catholic accusers, remembering Jacobin depredations of a century back) shared with the ancient world the sense of politics as ruling and being ruled, in turn. We Dreyfusards, Péguy wrote, “demand that science, art, and philosophy be left unsocialized”—free, personal, not reduced to matter. “What struck him most was that this materialism, this atheism, lived only on what they rejected, that is, on the Christian, or perhaps the ancient, idea of the world.” the secularist Dreyfusards admired the after-shine of Christian charity and Roman civic virtue while perverting both. “History is not socialist,” Péguy wrote. “It is historical. Philosophy is not socialist. It is philosophical.” Philosophers love wisdom; the socialists claimed to have achieved it, parodying God. But for a human being to take on the role of God is to become incapable of “achieving consciousness of himself,” the self-knowledge Socrates prized. And the familiar trope invoking ‘the judgment of History’ in an attempt to end political debate amounts to “a parody of the Last judgment.” It divinizes ‘History’ or the course of events, dismissing the original meaning of history as inquiry, not humanly-conceived revelation. As a result, “freedom and the risk inseparable from genuine human action…are hunted down by modern intellectualism.”
Risk implies a sort of wager, which in turn reminds one of Pascal. It was here that Péguy began to see the worth of the Christianity that he had previously rejected. He saw that “humanity as implied by Christianity is also that which is revealed in the precise observation of human nature.” Christians were on to something. Even the terrifying Christian teaching on eternal damnation began to make sense. As Péguy writes, if men must choose, “there must be a total risk,” and Christianity extended the Roman virtue of gravitas, of seriousness, ‘all the way down’—quite literally! It is true that Hell is inhumane. But that is the point.
Where does Christianity leave citizenship in the earthly city, and specifically in France? To be a citizen or rather subject in the Kingdom of God, loving its Ruler, in no way precludes citizenship in France, loving one’s neighbor as “a citizen of a given city.” For this reason, Péguy departed from Pascal’s inclination to denigrate ‘the World,’ although this surely did not imply indulgence of the flesh and the Devil. Rather, “the eternal is the dwelling place of the temporal.” Where Manent in his turn departs from Péguy is seen in his refusal to follow Péguy’s hope of reuniting the pagan sense of civic holiness with Christian holiness, “the city of nature with the city of grace.” No: creation and Creator remain distinct, even if intimately related in love. Manent rejects “some absurd sentence in which [Péguy] suggested that a ‘French’ saint and a ‘French’ sinner would form a community from which a ‘German’ saint would by his essence be excluded.” Saintliness is a category within Christianity, and its claims remain universal. Every country is ‘God’s country.’ Sinners abound and saints are martyred in all of them, even as Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards could be found among all social, political, and religious groupings in France. It is likely that there were saints and sinners among both Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, too.
With this book, Pierre Manent’s considerations on the greatness of political and Christian life have been introduced to Americans by an expert arranger and translator of these writings, Paul Seaton, and by Daniel J. Mahoney, author of an introduction that gets readers right on track.
Notes
- This is true of the Renaissance humanists and also of later figures—for example, André Malraux, whose “tragic humanism” clearly implies struggle and indeed sacrifice.
- For the reader of the Bible in English, this distinction is often obscured by the translation of the word for Christian love, agape, as ‘compassion’; for example, the King James Bible does this, perhaps to avoid the Latin-based (and therefore Roman Catholic) translation, ‘charity.’
- Nineteen is also the number of chapters in Machiavelli’s The Prince, the book in which Machiavelli proposes to replace a prince of war with the Prince of Peace. Aristotle, however, considers peace the object of war, and in Christ Christians fight spiritual warfare for the sake of spiritual peace; both understand politics in a way Machiavellians cannot.
- This is the answer to Manent’s question, “How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of right presupposes an already instituted community or society?” That is, contra Manent, individual natural rights need not assume the ‘state of nature’ propounded by modern political philosophers, as he argues in his 1988 article, “Some Remarks on the Notion of ‘Secularization,'” reprinted in this volume.
- In Europe, the question of non-Christians living within civil societies must always recall the ‘Jewish question.’ That question differs from the ‘Muslim question’ in several ways, one of them being the sheer size of the Muslim population; Jewish Europeans hardly threaten, and have never threatened, to overwhelm European Christians by their sheer numbers. The radical depopulation of European Jewry, first by the Holocaust and then by emigration to Israel, has caused a very different problem. “The destruction of Europe’s Jews put the Shoah at the center of Jewish consciousness, but also of European consciousness, or of Western consciousness in general,” but “this center cannot suffice to provide the spiritual coordinates we need to orient themselves,” as it is a ‘negative’ bond, sure to weaken as memories of the Shoah recede. The relations between Jews and Europeans require “a positive principle, a principle of friendship.” There is indeed such a common bond: “To express the meaning of Jerusalem in the language of Athens, since man is by nature a political animal, God can only make himself known to human beings by forming in their midst, or out of their midst, a people that can be His people.” To recall this, both political Europe and Catholic Europe should understand that while nation and Church have their important roles to play, neither role requires the assumption “that Israel is only left with blindness and hardness of heart,” as the Church wrongly taught for centuries and as some nations taught not only to the peril of Jews but ultimately to the peril of themselves.
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