Dialectics
(the idea that a thing and its opposite are reconciled by some mediating agent:
i.e., thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis) is at the heart of Western
Christianity after the Great Schism of 1054 (whether Roman Catholic or
Protestant, for both still hold to the same Filioque,
Augustinian theology of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the Holy Ghost proceeds from
the Father and the Son, not the Father alone, and that God exists as an
absolutely simple essence, and not as unknowable essence and knowable energies),
so it makes sense that it would be so in the West’s political life as well.
Orestes
Brownson illustrates:
God is the author and type of all created things;
and all creatures, each in its order, imitates or copies the Divine Being, who
is intrinsically Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end. The Son or Word is the medium, which unites
the two extremes, whence God is living God . . . . In the Holy Trinity is the principle and
prototype of all society . . . .
Now human society, when it copies the divine
essence and nature either in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity
alone, is sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and reality. It sins against God, and must fail of its end
(The American Republic, ISI Books,
2003, p. 252).
As
does H. F. Browson (‘Lay Action in the Church’, p. 29):
Our American constitution is the only
philosophical, or dialectic, constitution the world has ever known. All life is based on unity in diversity; on
extremes, with a medium of reconciliation.
. . . Our constitution, . . . by the division of the powers between the
general and the state governments, each acting in its own sphere, is founded in
truth and in reality, has in it the principle of life, and so long as it is
preserved in its essential character, cannot die (quoted in Michael Novak, On Two Wings, Encounter Books, 2002, p.
195, note 30).
This
is the reason that so many in the West had such high hopes for the [u]nited
States: They thought they saw in the
State governments the synthesis, the mediating agent, that had been lacking in
past democratic projects. Alexis de
Tocqueville is a typical voice:
What
then is the cause of this strange contrast, and why are the most able citizens
to be found in one assembly rather than in the other? Why is the former body
remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent, whilst the latter seems
to enjoy a monopoly of intelligence and of sound judgment? Both of these
assemblies emanate from the people; both of them are chosen by universal
suffrage; and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert in America that
the Senate is hostile to the interests of the people. From what cause, then,
does so startling a difference arise? The only reason which appears to me
adequately to account for it is, that the House of Representatives is elected
by the populace directly, and that the Senate is elected by elected bodies. The
whole body of the citizens names the legislature of each State, and the Federal
Constitution converts these legislatures into so many electoral bodies, which
return the members of the Senate. The senators are elected by an indirect
application of universal suffrage; for the legislatures which name them are not
aristocratic or privileged bodies which exercise the electoral franchise in
their own right; but they are chosen by the totality of the citizens; they are
generally elected every year, and new members may constantly be chosen who will
employ their electoral rights in conformity with the wishes of the public. But
this transmission of the popular authority through an assembly of chosen men
operates an important change in it, by refining its discretion and improving
the forms which it adopts. Men who are chosen in this manner accurately
represent the majority of the nation which governs them; but they represent the
elevated thoughts which are current in the community, the propensities which
prompt its nobler actions, rather than the petty passions which disturb or the
vices which disgrace it.
The
time may be already anticipated at which the American Republics
will be obliged to introduce the plan of election by an elected body more
frequently into their system of representation, or they will incur no small
risk of perishing miserably amongst the shoals of democracy.
And
here I have no scruple in confessing that I look upon this peculiar system of
election as the only means of bringing the exercise of political power to the
level of all classes of the people (Democracy
in America, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm,
opened 21 Feb. 2017).
Lord
Acton in his letter to General Lee of November 4th, 1866, is
another:
I saw in States' rights the only availing check
upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope,
not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of
your Republic [i.e., the Confederate Constitution] have not exercised on the
old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to
them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate
Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the
example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by
establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of
Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our
liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which
was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice
over that which was saved at Waterloo.
But
as we saw in the quote from Dr Farrell last time, this structure is really no
structure at all: It collapses back into
a simple essence eventually, into the will of the people (whether expressed
through a dictator like Napoleon or a disordered anarchy). Even those parts of a people’s life that are
long rooted in their history are dissolved when the attempt is made to base
political life solely on the will of the people.
What
is needed are new metaphysical principles to give stability to the social
order, those principles being the distinction within God between His unknowable
essence and His intimately knowable energies (His attributes, His actions in
the world by which He is known, the rays of divinity that shine forth from the
essence that mankind and all creation participate in), and the right
understanding of the Three Persons of the All-Holy Trinity. Since essence and energies were mentioned in
the last post, we will focus more on the relations between the Persons today.
As
was alluded to above, the Persons of the Western/Augustinian Trinity are
defined by their dialectical opposition to one another:
So strong
an influence is the definition of simplicity for Saint Augustine that he says, “to God it is
not one thing to be, another to be a person, but it is absolutely the same
thing
. . . It is the same thing to Him to be as to be a
person.”44 “God” for Saint
Augustine, thus, “did not mean directly” the means to
attempt to distinguish the persons from each other. Having assumed an
absolute simplicity, the persons can no longer be absolute hypostases, but are
merely relative terms to each other, thus occurring on an even lower plane than
the attributes proper. “The terms (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) are used
reciprocally and in relation to each other.”51 There is a subtle
but, nevertheless, real play of the dialectic of oppositions here. One no
longer begins with the three persons and then moves to consider their
relations, but begins with their relative quality, the relation between the
persons, itself. In other words, there is an artificial opposition of one
person to the other two. It is at this point that the flexibility of
Augustine’s Neoplatonic commitment begins to surface in a more acute form.
But
this is not how the Persons of the Holy Trinity relate to one another, not in
pre-determined, outward relationships, not as isolated objects set in
opposition to one another in dialectical tension, but in a life in which each
One becomes transparent to the other Two out of love:
In God it is not possible for an “I” to assert himself
over against another “I”; instead he continually considers the other as a
substitute for himself. . . . Each
person discloses not his own “I,” but two together reveal the other; not does
each pair of persons disclose their own “I’s” in an exclusive way, but they
place the other “I” in the forefront, making themselves transparent for that
one or hiding themselves (as it were) beneath him. Thus in each hypostasis the other two are
also visible. . . .
Source: Fr
Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God,
Volume I, Holy Cross Orthodox Books, 1998, p. 264
Life
lived in a communion of love, emptying one’s self so that the other may abide
in him, is the only foundation for personhood and existence, and the Holy
Trinity as known in the Orthodox Church is the supreme ensample of both of
these. An impersonal divine essence, and
the system of dialectics that arises from it, cannot manifest love or
communion, and so they cannot be the source of reality, but only of darkness
and confusion whenever and wherever these ideas creep into the life of a people,
as we are seeing in the West.
Love in the world presupposes as its origin and
purpose the eternal perfect love between a number of divine persons. This love does not produce the divine
persons, as Catholic theology affirms, but presupposes them. Otherwise it would be possible to conceive of
an impersonal love that produced and dissolved human beings. . . . Love, however, presupposes a common
being in three persons, as Christian teaching tells us.
Source:
Ibid, p. 245
In
Orthodox countries, East or West (for the West was once Orthodox, before the
Great Schism), and particularly where the natural hierarchical order of monarchy
has existed, one sees the reflection of this Trinitarian life in their
politics. The impersonal will of the
people and its resultant Newtonian physics of government was not the ruling
principle, but rather the transparency of the Persons of the Trinity.
(By
Newtonian physics of government, we mean that the parts of the governments
across the [u.] S. or most any Western nation today, vertically or horizontally
(i.e., whether local, State/province, and general; or legislative, executive,
and judicial) exist generally as something like discreet, solid bodies with
only outward relations; no two can occupy the same space (i.e., exercise the
same powers); the action/force of one branch may be offset by the action/force
of another.)
In
its essential features, a basic threeness in the Orthodox governmental
structure still remains, and is manifested as Church, king, and people
(following Father Andrew Phillips’s lead).
And whenever one looks at one of these, he sees the other two; or at
two, he sees the other one. They are
servants one of another; thus they do not relate to one another like objects in
opposition to one another but like the Persons of the Trinity.
In this self-forgetting of each person for the
other perfect love is manifested and only this makes possible that unity which
is opposed to individualism. The sin of
individualism hinders us from understanding that fullness of love and unity
which is characteristic of the holy Trinity and is at the same time compatible
with the preservation of personal identity.
Source:
Ibid, p. 264.
Here
is what we mean by this principle of transparency:
The
king is consecrated by the bishop of the Church, and owes the blessings of his
reign to the continual prayers of his Christian subjects: monks, nuns, clergy, laymen.
The
Church is protected by the king and makes the presence of the Kingdom of God,
of Paradise, a reality in the nation by the
support and sanctification of the clergy and people.
The
people are united to their king and their bishop through the anointing of the
latter two with the holy chrism, who thenceforward act as the fathers and
shepherds of the people, without which there would be disorder in the land.
And
so forth.
It
is interesting to note that this principle of through-showing was present in
the South before the War. Not in its
purity and fulness, but present nonetheless - a testimony to her closeness to
right belief over against the other sections of the [u.] S. In describing the idea of representation in
Southern politics shortly before the War (1854), Henry Hughes wrote in his Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and
Practical,
. . . In
republics, all are represented. The
representatives, or orderers, represent and are responsible to their
constituents, the sovereign people. But
these are not constituents only; they likewise represent the class of subsovereign
people [those who did not meet the qualifications to be representatives or
voters: ‘women, minors, criminals, lunatics and idiots, aliens, and all others
disqualified or unqualified’--W.G.]; these are the constituents of those. A man represents his family. This is special; he also represents the
interests of other subsovereigns; this, his general duty.
The representation of all is thus actualized.
Source:
Negro Universities Press, 1968, pgs. 237-8
So
we see that when someone looked at a man in the Old South, he did not see a
single, opaque, isolated person (as in the ‘one person, one vote’ egalitarian
ideology that was taking hold in New England at that time and which is now so
common today), but, through that one person, he saw a host of others whom that
one had taken into his bosom to care for.
Returning
for a moment to essence and energies before closing, we must note that whenever
some disorder breaks out in after-Schism Western countries, the cure most of
the time is something outward: a treaty, a constitutional amendment, and so forth. Everything is a rigid outer order of estates,
who are playing a zero-sum game for worldly power, showing again that they are
bereft of the idea of God’s outgoing energies (i.e., His Grace), of His
nearness in the world, and how this can influence things.
Because
man cannot know God’s essence, when God is thought to be only an unknowable
essence Whom we can only know from a distance by analogies, nothing is left to
man for his consolation but the creation.
The work of all the people of a þeod (nation) as individuals and as a
whole to acquire the Grace of God, to be united with the knowable radiance of
God (which is God Himself), no longer makes any sense. Self-denial becomes pointless, religion
becomes a private affair - a matter of personal preference, and the
satisfaction of man’s various desires for money, power, etc. become the chief
end of life. This is why politics has
become so important in Western life after the Great Schism rather than religion
(and why it has in many cases become a substitute for religion).
In
Orthodox countries on the other hand, though they are far from neglecting the
normal workings of government: laws, courts, etc. (one only has to consider
rulers like Alfred the Great of England or Justinian the Great of
Constantinople/New Rome) - nevertheless, how often do we see as well troubles
ended and reconciliation brought about by God’s Grace, and not some rationally
contrived, man-made mechanism or device?
The appearance of a holy icon (the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God
during the Time of Troubles in Russia), the blessing of a holy elder (St
Sergius of Radonezh blessing Dmitry Donskoy before his battle with the
Mongols), or holy relics (the protection of Paris by the relics of St Genevieve;
the arrival in Serbia of St Sava with the relics of his father St Symeon, which
ended the feud between St Sava’s brothers for political power), and so on.
The
West will now only accept a rational, scientific solution in politics (though
once this was not the case, and can be again if she will only bend her proud
neck), but the Orthodox world understands that mystery and antinomy are very
much a part of life. For God and his
relations with the world transcend all the concepts reason alone gives us about
these things. There must be room in
political life for the inbreaking of God’s Grace.
Everything
that we want to last must be made to partake of the life of the All-Holy
Trinity. That includes the good
traditions of the South. But what one
accepts as the truth about the Trinity is the key. For the South to survive, she must ground
herself in the right teaching of God as Trinity. Anything else will be disastrous in the end,
politically and in every other way:
In the tradition of the Eastern Church [i.e., the
Orthodox Church--W.G.] there is no place for a theology, and even less for a
mysticism, of the divine essence. The
goal of Orthodox spirituality, the blessedness of the Kingdom of Heaven,
is not the vision of the essence, but, above all, a participation in the divine
life of the Holy Trinity . . . .
The Holy Trinity is, for the Orthodox Church, the
unshakeable foundation of all religious thought, of all piety, of all spiritual
life, of all experience. It is the
Trinity that we seek in seeking after God, when we search for the fullness of
being, for the end and meaning of existence.
. . . If we reject the Trinity as the sole ground of all reality and of
all thought, we are committed to a road that leads nowhere; we end in an
aporia, in folly, in the disintegration of our being, in spiritual death. Between the Trinity and hell there lies no
other choice. . . .
Source:
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical
Theology of the Eastern Church, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976, pgs.
65-6
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the
Souð!
Anathema
to the Union!
