Something strange, and potentially very revealing, is going on at First Things. The latest issue contains a hidden, yet striking contradiction only a few pages apart between its new editor, Jody Bottum, and its editor emeritus, Fr. Richard Neuhaus.
First, Bottum answers a slew of angry letters responding to his earlier essay against the death penalty. In his response (not yet available online), Bottum clarifies his earlier unique argument in important ways. Bottum had made a distinction between “cosmic” or “high” or “historical” justice and what he calls “normal” justice. Cosmic justice is what we might call “natural justice.” Its function is to restore society to order under the law of nature. Cosmic justice presupposes the existence of a narrative, historical arc from the introduction into society of a disordering pressure—a serial killer in this case—all the way through to the capture, conviction, and execution of the killer. This dramatic arc, according to Bottum, “gives the feeling of rightness and a sort of balance restored to a universe gone wrong with the taking of innocent human life. It aims, as satisfying stories must, at what we used to call poetic justice: the killer killed, the blood-debt repaid with blood, death satisfied with death.” High justice balances the “cosmic books” and stabilizes “a shaken universe.”
The only problem, says Bottum, is that the dramatic arc which tells the story of man seeking order under the law of nature has been trumped, reversed, and demythologized by the Christian story. Therefore, capital punishment and indeed all imposition of cosmic justice must take place in a specifically pagan story. The effect, through time, of the Christian reversal of the pagan story has been, according to Bottum, the gradual “demythologiz[ing] of the state” resulting in modern liberal democracy. Lacking a dramatic cosmic political narrative of order and disorder, the modern state can no longer afford to impose any form of high justice, such as capital punishment, which, lacking any anchor in myth, can only be seen as the exercise of raw power and perversion of the “normal” justice supplied by modern states.
In his response to the many letters he received, Bottum clarifies his central argument in important respects. First, he clarifies what he means by the demythologizing effect of modernity: “[W]e lack in ordinary discourse these days the vocabulary to speak of a morally interconnected universe in which great events and great disturbances are echoed even across the stars.” Second, Bottum clarifies exactly what happens to justice in a demythologized state: “When, in the great movement of modern liberalism, we demythologized the state and rejected most of the metaphysical foundations of politics, we gained much—but we also lost something, and one of the things we lost is any coherent theory about the nation’s continuing authority to enact such metaphysically fitting punishments as the death penalty.” Finally, Bottum backs away from his earlier implication that the “Christian story” requires the advent of modern democracies incapable of rightly imposing cosmic justice. Instead, Bottum takes the more modest tack that though there may have once existed a Christian political theology capable of sustaining cosmic justice—he cites the divine right of kings specifically—such is no longer the case and honesty demands that we acknowledge this reality. What we are left with is a demythologized arrangement which possesses authority only through the social contract of its citizens. The state is therefore limited to “normal social justice” which can only vindicate the prosaic order of the social contract rather than the more vast metaphysical order of the cosmos. As such, Bottum urges Christian theology to both recognize this situation and acquiesce to the limitations of the modern political form. Modern contractual liberalism has given up any right to partake in the cosmic drama of history, which includes the drama of order and disorder under nature.
Bottum’s point about liberal forms forsaking history in favor of the dead letters of the social contract is quite good and right. What is startling is his blithe acceptance of this as the necessary result of Christianity. Bottum is certainly right that the narrative of order arising out of mankind’s experience of life under nature—i.e., “natural law”—is of pagan origin. This basic cosmic narrative arises out of the reality of nature as it is in bare human experience—amoral, disordered, and terrifyingly open. Origin tales settle how the cosmic order came into existence and how it became disordered. The codification of natural law finds order, understood as law, in the given reality of man’s experience of nature and sets out to develop this order (law) within the artificial cocoon of human culture as a project undertaken in partnership between God, man, and nature. As a theory, natural law was most clearly differentiated and set forth by the Roman Stoics.
The key point to understand is that Bottum’s argument is not aimed at the death penalty per se, but rather at the very heart of the possibility of imposing natural law in the modern state. When, in the wake of religious wars, old Christendom attempted to do away with political theology altogether by demythologizing history (and the state along with it) and by rationalizing all order as nothing more than a social contract, it made the conscious decision to rely on positive law—law established by man according to procedural rules previously agreed to by social contract—alone. In this context any attempt to impose historic justice can never be more than the exercise of raw power which erodes the procedural foundation of positive law and justice. The exercise of substantive power requires a political theology or myth within which the social experience of power can be placed and understood as an ordering rather than disordering pressure. Absent the myth, all openly acknowledged power must be capable of tracing its genealogy back to the positive contractarian law. If this demythologized state can be said to have any political theology at all, it is that procedure is its God, and state functionaries are its priests. The faithful may present their petitions and grievances only through the functionary by acts of obeisance at the altars and temples of procedure.
Bottum is honest enough to say that a political order which claims to have no political theology really must not attempt to sneak one in the back door. But in his honesty Bottum reveals a hopeless naiveté about the reality of temporal order and the possibility of sustaining it without natural, cosmic justice. Still, Bottum can’t quite get away with this naiveté, even in his own eyes, for he concedes that under nature, sometimes “capital punishment may occasionally be necessary in a modern democracy,” however, “it is never right.” Unfortunately, the theoretical structure of Bottum”s argument leaves no room for this insight, and it stands accusingly on the outside, looking in. Better for Bottum to ring down the curtain on it and forget he ever said it, which he appears to manage with aplomb.
In fact, as Bottum’s slip in nodding to necessity will attest, cosmic justice cannot long be denied in a healthy society. Even after Christ—especially after Christ and his dismantling of the Israelite system of political life under the direct revelation of God—we remain men under nature, and as such owe a debt to nature. Cosmic justice will either be brought in the back door by masterless men who hide what they are doing behind what Eric Voegelin called the “immoral swindle of consent” or they will more honestly bring it in through the front door and theorize on the basis of naked power and particular interests.
Putting Bottum’s absolute rejection of political theology in modern democracies in stark relief is the essay “Our American Babylon” by editor emeritus Richard John Neuhaus a few pages later (not yet available online). In this essay, Neuhaus makes the argument, contra Bottum, for re-mythologizing the American state by a renewed concentration on developing a specifically American political theology embedded in history.
Neuhaus helpfully defines a political theology as that narrative, or myth, which situates a political people in the cosmos, within the “story of the world.” According to Neuhaus, “we have largely lost our story and our place in the story of the world.” This cosmic situatedness is necessary for political order because it provides a dramatic arc within which a people can deliberate on “how we ought to order our life together.” Neuhaus does a nice job of tracing the Protestant narratives of cosmic situatedness which draw on Hebraic/Christian symbols of a New Jerusalem and a City on a Hill. He explains clearly how such a political theology, absent a strong ecclesiology, collapses into a demythologized civil religion of abstract ideas detached from any specific people or place.
Neuhaus here doesn’t make Bottum’s point explicitly, but the shadow still hovers: a civil religion which pretends to exist within the drama of history creates a false consciousness detrimental to order when it is imposed on a political form which is entirely demythologized. The result of this, according to Neuhaus, is the devolution of politics as shared deliberation into politics as tribal warfare: “There are only subcultures. Choose your subculture, take up its grievances, contentions, and slogans, and prepare to do battle against the enemy. … [W]e are urged to recognize the futility of being locked in civil argument and accept the fact that there is no substitute for partisan victory.”
Neuhaus prescribes two things: a return to the incarnate community of Christ, that is the Catholic Church, and a return in public life to a focus on the natural law. These are good suggestions, but Neuhaus fails to account for Bottum’s insight that the modern state forecloses the possibility of any real political theology and therefore of imposing natural law.
To understand more completely the dynamics at work, it is necessary to take a short detour into the order of history and the history of order. Neuhaus opens by citing theologian Robert Jenson to the effect that: “The story of Israel and the Church … is nothing less that the story of the world.” Eric Voegelin put it this way: “Israelite historiography … is world history in the pregnant sense of a report on the emergence of divinely willed order in world and society through the creative and covenanting acts of God.” In other words, history itself, as a form of being in the world, emerged from the Israelite experience. The existence of history as the “story of the world” and of “our place in the story of the world” is constituted by a particular political theology which narrates in general the drama of mankind’s adherence to or betrayal of the will of God and narrates specifically the particular story of how one group of people fit into the overarching drama.
It follows that one of the principle experiences of man living under the historical form is the existential tension between mankind as a whole and the particular tribe of one’s belonging: between “the story of the world” and “our place in the story of the world” as Neuhaus has it. The chief concern of political theology in the historical form is to differentiate between the idea of mankind under the natural will of God and the idea of a remnant people within mankind living under his special revelation. This concern reaches the height of critical clarification in the Israelite experience which developed the symbols of “exodus” and “exile” to communicate it. With Israel, untangling the thorny problem of both mankind and a remnant within mankind becomes the central problem of order. On the one hand there is mankind ordered under the will and judgment of God and on the other hand there is a chosen remnant ordered under a specific covenantal revelation of God’s presence. In Israel, these areas are clearly distinct and kept so by guarding strictly the boundaries of race, geography, and ritual. In this way the problem of order is simplified. When Israel permits the boundaries to blur, disordering pressures are introduced. This is the situation Christianity and the Church took over from an exhausted Israelite order and radically transformed through the introduction of the symbol of the Incarnation–the immanent presence of God in the world revealed universally.
The chosen remnant is no longer easily identifiable by blood heritage or geography or even, thanks to St. Paul, by adherence to covenantal forms such as circumcision or dietary laws. Rather the remnant is set apart by the invisible binding of individual hearts to the universal revelation of God in the blood of the new covenant–that is, in Christ. This, as Bottum recognizes, has a demythologizing effect on all pre-Christian political theologies. The problem of order in history can no longer be understood simply as a distinction between mankind under nature and a covenantal remnant, for now the covenant is universal and man must live under both the old law of nature and the new law of the spirit. Put another way, achieving a functional political theology which will successfully clarify the relationship between the church and the world is made exceedingly difficult by the existence of a universal chosen community not contained within any temporal boundaries. This problem of pouring new wine into old wineskins becomes central in teachings of Jesus, Paul, and in the struggles of the early church.
In practical terms this becomes a problem of the conflict between worldly political powers subservient to the law of nature on the one hand, and the covenant of grace made between God and his universal people through the incarnation on the other. How ought the incarnational revelation of right order under the will of God be brought to bear on the instruments of power and those who wield such instruments? The resolution of this problem is first proposed by St. Augustine and went something like this:
The City of God, his chosen people (the church), live scattered and intermingled within the City of Man (mankind as a whole). As such, they are exiles in a world which takes on the Hebraic symbol of a new Babylon. It is of vital importance to understand and keep in mind that Babylon is not a symbol of disorder–rather it is the symbol of mankind in the drama of life under the will of God absent the special revelation of the covenant. The City of God shares in and has a special role to fulfill in this drama–it participates in the natural drama of life ordered under the will of God within the City of Man. Neuhaus draws on the Augustinian imagery for his project by citing Augustine’s exhortation to the church (quoting Jeremiah quoting God exhorting the exilic Jews): “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace you will find your peace.”
The City of God must pay its debt to nature, but it tempers its participation with the covenantal experience of knowing that this mixing of the cities will not last forever and that there remains a higher law of the spirit; it places hope for its full historical satisfaction beyond the eschatological horizon. While the covenantal representative can participate with the city of man in the struggle for order under the law of nature, he does so knowing that the process involves him in compromise and disorder when measured against the covenantal revelation of grace in the Incarnation. By necessity, the covenantal representative can pursue cosmic justice under nature’s laws but never without generating the experience of tragedy by which the natural law is leavened with Christian guilt, responsibility, confession, penance, mercy, and the symbolic drama of participation in the sacramental overcoming of evil with good which represents the final reality of that conquest which is yet to come. Augustine writes, “How much more mature reflection it shows, how much more worthy of a human being it is when a man acknowledges this necessity [such as war and torture made necessary by life under the law of nature] as a mark of human wretchedness, when he hates that necessity in his own actions and when, if he has the wisdom of devotion, he cries out to God, ‘Deliver me from my necessities!’”
Yet difficulties persist. Because the City of God is ordered by a revelatory and divine choosing, and is not subject to the law of nature, when it moves into the world of Babylon it is forced to adopt the symbols developed by mankind as it has struggled for order under nature–i.e., natural law. In other words, as the church pays its debt to nature it must do so by adopting symbols (the symbols of cosmic justice, for example) generated by the experience of all of mankind outside the church. This makes it awkward, at the least, for the Christian church to act, as Neuhaus asserts, as the guardian of “the truths of nature and nature’s God.” This resulting confusion over the source and function of the natural law is, I would suggest, the cause of the disconnect inherent in the Bottum/Neuhaus impasse.
By recognizing and articulating clearly the source, location, and function of both the natural law and the Christian law, and by understanding them as mixed in an age that was passing away but which contained “loved things held in common,” Augustine made a key breakthrough in the development of political theology which in its fundamental form remains valid today–a penitent, tragic political theology bound to pay an ongoing debt to nature yet cemented by a love that is both universal and particular: it transcends the City of God and orders all mankind; it is also concerned with the things of this world–“the things which are passing away”–and not with the things to come. However, this Augustinian balance has always been precarious. When the tension between the natural law and the Christian law collapses, the result is a disordering pressure either towards a rolling back of the protective shadow of the Christian law and engagement in the world wholly under the stark glare of nature which rewards only power and results in open tribal and political conflict, or towards a Gnostic denial of the reality of the law of nature and ideological attempts to remake the present age into the age to come.
So what’s going on at First Things? In sum, Bottum contends that accepting the modern state requires the abandonment of any political theology and the concurrent abandonment of natural law in favor of the positive law. Bottum does accept the modern state and therefore is compelled, by intellectual honesty, to abandon man’s experience under nature and within a cosmic narrative, at least in its political form. Neuhaus, on the other hand, contends that to abandon political theology altogether is social suicide, resulting in politics as naked power grabs and constant warfare by other means, and he prescribes as a remedy a renewed attention to natural law.
If it is true that a demythologized modern state has no room for political theology or natural law as Bottum says, and if it is true that a state without a political theology will devolve into raw power politics, either in the open or more likely hidden behind lip service paid to positive law, as Neuhaus says, then the sheer circularity of their contradictory conclusions is dizzying. The fact that Bottum and Neuhaus are so hung up in this intellectual feedback loop is useful for what it reveals: namely, that despite all the valiant efforts of the First Things crew over the years, the modern public square really is naked–which is to say, shorn of any real political theology or mythology–and will always remain so. Better to abandon the liberal project altogether, at which point a penitent, Christian, political theology will again be possible.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.3.