Justifications
for the modern, individualistic, social compact theory of the [u.] S. come in
many forms. Here is one by Vito
Mussomeli based on his view of God and man:
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind
free:
Beginning of Jefferson’s Statue for Religious Freedom, passed by the Virginia Legislature in 1786
Beginning of Jefferson’s Statue for Religious Freedom, passed by the Virginia Legislature in 1786
I
With
one intro line Jefferson explains the core of human liberty. Our minds, a
composite of intellect and heart that defines us as human, are forever free to
choose what to believe, where to inquire, who to love and who to turn from,
including the Ineffable God who created us. If you wish to bootcamp humanity
into armies of belief or regiments of affection, first you must remove our
Creator. Both our Infinite God and our own minds recoil at the militarization
of our lives. If we need not bow to our Creator, we never need bow to anyone or
anything.
Here
is the core of free will. Hebrew/Christian scriptures explain we are created in
the image of our Creator. It is our minds, the seamless Being of our hearts and
our intellects that are created in the image of our God. If our minds were not
free, we would not be like our Creator. It is in our freedom that we are like
God and, therefore, we must neither be enslaved nor enslave others.
Jefferson
added something perhaps to explain the Ineffable to a strictly intellectual
mind –
That
(because) all attempts to influence it
(our mind) by temporal
punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits
of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore, are a departure from the plan of the
holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose
not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do;(emphasis
added)
But
can that be true? That our Creator can create a Being that is not free?
Such a Being would not be “like unto God”. The question is its own answer: any
mind that God creates can only be ‘enslaved’ if it is not “like unto God”. We
are not God but our Creator’s Life flows through us as the waters flow through
the gills of fish.
The
power of free will is quintessentially the power of sovereignty. Such power
only makes sense when choices are individually made. Free will does not enforce
a groupthink modality.
In
our Founding, America accepted Jefferson’s view that personal sovereignty
underlies our personal creation by Nature’s God. Personal sovereignty is the
personal power to decide, to craft beliefs and loves and life and living. This
means our Creator expects all people to self-govern themselves. It is our core
duty. Yet not only may we differ, person to person, in fundamental beliefs of
Life and Death and Transcendence, but in the mere earthly beliefs of how best
to govern ourselves.
Our
Founders believed in the ability and inevitability of human nature and
existence to change. If systems of law are made, they must reflect this
changeable world by providing a capability to adapt. Our inalienable powers of
self-reflection, self-will and self-inquiry are parcel to our power to change.
There is no Public or Governmental Natural Law, therefore, no Public or
Governmental sovereignty over us. For our Creator has created neither. The
public square and public government are our creations.
When
individuals gather into a polity, they share their personal sovereignty with
one another through compact or covenant to create a structure for their
governance. But this sharing does not produce a separate sovereignty in their
governmental structure because sovereignty is only and always personal.
Sovereignty is seamless and cannot be divided in the same way you cannot axe a
human mind into two minds and have the person continue to exist. What our
Creator has not forced on us, our Creator has not provided to any of our
artifacts.
Therefore,
the powers of any government are wholly rooted in the personal sovereignty of
every citizen. We are free to join or leave, to believe in this way or that
way, in one God or another God or no God, in this government or that or none.
Our God has forgone unconditional loyalty and we must also. For what Almighty
God has decided not to do, no human person may decide to do … there lies the
world of Cain. And there is the vanity of vanities.
. . .
Source: https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/american-sovereignty-and-unconditional-loyalty/, opened 13 Jan. 2018
This
needs to be corrected on a number of levels.
First,
the definitions of terms need some rewriting.
The Glossary of the Philokalia,
one of the greatest Orthodox manuals on the spiritual life, defines heart,
reason/mind, and nous/intellect as follows:
HEART
(καρδία - kardia): not simply the physical organ but the spiritual centre of man's
being, man as made in the image of God, his deepest and truest self, or the
inner shrine, to be entered only through sacrifice and death, in which the
mystery of the union between the divine and the human is consummated. ' "I
called with my whole heart", says the psalmist - that is, with body, soul
and spirit' (John Klimakos, The
Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 28,
translated by Archimandrite Lazarus [London, 1959], pp. 257-8).
'Heart'
has thus an all-embracing significance: 'prayer of the heart' means prayer not
just of the emotions and affections, but of the whole person, including the
body.
REASON,
mind (διάνοια - dianoia): the
discursive, conceptualizing and logical faculty in man, the function of which
is to draw conclusions or formulate concepts deriving from data provided either
by revelation or spiritual knowledge (q.v.) or by sense-observation. The
knowledge of the reason is consequently of a lower order than spiritual
knowledge (q.v.) and does not imply any direct appre- hension or perception of
the inner essences or principles (q.v.) of created beings, still less of divine
truth itself. Indeed, such apprehension or perception, which is the function of
the intellect (q.v.), is beyond the scope of the reason.
INTELLECT (νοϋς
- nous): the highest faculty in man, through
which - provided it is purified - he knows God or the inner essences or
principles (q.v.) of created things by means of direct apprehension or
spiritual perception. Unlike the dianoia
or reason (q.v.), from which it must be
carefully distinguished, the intellect does not function by formulating
abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached
through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth by means of
immediate experience, intuition or 'simple cognition' (the term used by St
Isaac the Syrian). The intellect dwells in the 'depths of the soul'; it
constitutes the innermost aspect of the heart (St Diadochos, §§ 79, 88: in our
translation, vol. i, pp. 280, 287). The intellect is the organ of contemplation
(q.v.), the 'eye of the heart' (Makarian
Homilies).
From
this, we see that the mind/reason is not what makes us particularly made in the
image of God, but the nous. Nor is the
mind the seat of man’s being, but the heart, where the nous is found. Since this is so, we must go on to note, then,
that the exercise of the mind, of choice, of free will, is not the greatest
good, but rather union with God. This in
turn requires humility, the cutting off of our own will for the sake of loving,
trusting, and obeying God and man.
These
two differing ideas of the good lead to two very different political
orders: the first to the constitutional
republic/democracy so popular today, which arises from the conflict created by
the theory that each man is a sovereign who MUST exercise his personal
sovereignty in the face of others in order to show that he is truly a creation
of a vaguely defined ‘God’ and in order to affirm his unique, individual
existence (a theory that is the product of unlove and distrust); the second to a hierarchy, which
arises when men imitate the harmony of the self-emptying of the Three Persons
of the One God, the Holy Trinity, confirming their unique, individual existences
by making themselves the servants of all.
This is shone to us in an outstanding way in Christ’s death on the Cross
for sinful man, by which His divinity and lordship are affirmed (Phil. 2:5-11).
Mr
Mussomeli is also drifting into Gnosticism by equating the image of God with
only the immaterial aspects of man. But
the whole man - soul, nous, and body; material and immaterial - is made in the
image of God, which is clearly shown in the icon of man’s creation. The body is not extraneous in the work of
salvation/deification; it too has value:
All
of this foregoing is important, but the point we wish to emphasize is this
one: The mind is not free. It is
in the worst sort of thralldom to the devil and the demons and to the fallen
passions because of the Fall of Adam and Eve.
St Macarius the Great in Homily XLV directly confronts the false,
shallow, Enlightenment optimism of Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers
that just government and a good national life can be obtained by balancing the
powers of a few outward departments:
2. There have been also
divers kinds of wise men according to the world; of whom some have displayed
excellence by means of philosophy; others have been admired for their
expertness in sophistry, others have dis- played oratorical skill; others have
been men of letters and poets, and have composed histories according to the
con- ventional plan. There have also been different kinds of artificers, who
have practised the arts according to the world. Some have carved in wood all
kinds of birds and fishes, and figures of men, and in those have endeavoured to
display their excellence. Some have taken in hand to fashion portraits, statues
in bronze and the like; others have erected great and beautiful buildings;
others, mining the earth, bring up the silver and gold that perishes, others
precious stones. Others, possessing personal beauties, were elated by the
comeliness of their countenances and were the more enticed by Satan, and fell
into sin. And all these artificers of whom I have spoken, being held by the
serpent who dwells within, and not knowing the sin that abode with them, have
been captives and slaves to the evil power, gaining no advantage from their
science and their art.
Source: https://archive.org/stream/fiftyspiritualho00pseuuoft/fiftyspiritualho00pseuuoft_djvu.txt, opened 15 Jan. 2018
Just
before this, St Macarius expanded upon this idea of being in bondage to the
devil, saying that no man
. . . had the power to discern the evil which
had invaded the soul in consequence of the first man's transgression, and had
darkened it, that it knew not the change which had passed over it that the mind
at first was pure and saw its Master, being in honour, and now, because of its
banishment, is clothed with shame, the eyes of the heart being blinded, that it
may not behold that glory, which our father Adam before his disobedience
beheld.
Source: Ibid, chapter 1.
Until
the body, soul, and nous have been purified by much repentance, ascetic effort,
and the sacraments of the Orthodox Church, the mind sits in a dark prison, and
none of the lofty philosophizing about the sovereign individual can be true.
The
Russian, Orthodox philosopher Ivan Kireevsky has more to say on this idea of purity
being necessary to grasp the truth. His
ideas, which summarize much of what the Church Fathers have to say about this
matter, are beworded briefly below:
. . .
1. Reason that is
uncultivated and for a long time unpurified is an unreasonable reason, an
iniquitous and untrue reason. There are
distinctions in reason, as in all other external things. There is a perfect, spiritual reason, there
is an average reason of the soul, and there is a rather coarse carnal reason.
2. The one who will not
care to personally follow the narrow Evangelical path, and will neglect to
purify his mind, is blind of soul, even if he has mastered all external wisdom;
he keeps only to the letter that kills, without accepting the spirit that gives
life.
3. Right and true reason
cannot penetrate deeply into the soul without great and prolonged effort and
labor; for to the degree that man’s lusts are mortified, to that degree does
true reason grow and flourish. But this
ascetic labor must be of a particular kind; it must consist of external effort
and mental activity. The one is not
effected without the other.
4. All those who have
complied with the instructions pertaining to external labor while neglecting
inward spiritual activity – the enlightenment and purification of reason – have
lost their senses, have become corrupted by various passions, or have fallen
into pernicious heresies. And even as they did not like to retain God
in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things
which are not convenient (Rom. 1:28).
5. The mind that is
purified and enlightened can understand everything external and internal,
because the person is spiritual and judgeth
all things, yet he himself is judged of no man (I Cor. 2:15).
. . .
Source: Unnamed author, https://web.archive.org/web/20050907021120/http://strannik.com:80/watchful_gate/Kirievsky.pdf, downloaded 16 Nov. 2017
(thanks to C for the link)
The
Fathers of the Orthodox Church are unanimous:
Only those who have been healed of the fallen passions are free (i.e.,
the saints); all others are slaves to some sin or another, their thinking is
darkened, and all talk of personal ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’ is
deceptive. But if we try to put those
ideas into practice despite this, as has been done in the after-Schism West, we
put ourselves and those involved in the republican/democratic ‘experiment’ in
great danger, earthly and ghostly, as well as those around us.
Since
the body, soul, and nous have thus been darkened by the Fall, it is vital for
us to remain in the God-given hierarchy to which we all belong (and which has
been given to us for our good), and not strike out on our own as self-ruling
sovereigns. We hope to say more about
hierarchy in the next post.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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