In the first part of his book, Hancock addresses the serious deficiencies of modern “theory” or philosophy and modern theology, which have culminated in a hyper-egalitarianism that makes moral and political claims dependent upon establishing one’s status as a victim of some oppressive hierarchy. Since ruling itself presupposes hierarchy, these theoretical and theological systems may culminate in a call for no government at all—radical egalitarianism and freedom at once or, as in Marx, an initially powerful statism that will then put an end to itself, ‘wither away.’ Or it may culminate in an incoherent belief that some new hierarchy will itself be equalizing and liberating—a ‘welfare state’ in which apolitical administrators, supposedly apolitical, do not so much rule us but serve us, thereby relieving us of our victimhood. This amounts to an ‘aristocracy’ that, unlike the older aristocracies, justifies itself in term of egalitarianism from which it must obviously exempt itself. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Leo Strauss vindicate ‘aristocracy,’ by which they mean the need for persons who are capable of acting and of thinking beyond the limits of ‘democracy’ or social egalitarianism, precisely in order to defend democracy against its own ‘totalizing’ inclinations, especially against its tendency to curtail liberty of thought and action in favor of equality, of thinking, feeling, and acting ‘in lockstep’ with increasingly uncivil majorities in civil society. Majoritarianism implies a certain sheer weightiness, a sort of materiality imposed upon the mind. Modern ‘idealism’ is really a pantheism that cloaks materialism in highfalutin talk. Its adepts are a bit like that fast-talking ‘Music Man’ in the movies, a music man who doesn’t know much about the muses but, unlike the movie sophist/rhetorician, often fails to know that they doesn’t know.

In Part 2, Hancock turns from theory and theology to practice, but especially to the relation of practice to theory and theology. Following Tocqueville, he sees that “the contemporary idea of the equal dignity of every unique human individual derives historically from Christian teaching but now must be regarded as an irresistible datum of human experience.” That the idea is irresistible does not make it true, however, nor does any and all definitions of equal dignity faithful derivations from Christian doctrine. “How,” then, “can we articulate some solid middle ground between the complicit extremes of idealism and materialism, the vaulting ambition of cosmic god,” would-be masters of nature, “and the debased realism of needy beasts,” whose mastery, insofar as they achieve it, serves their bodily appetites? Human beings do indeed exercise a degree of “spiritual freedom”; we are not ‘determined’ by matter. But that freedom depends upon sustaining a “natural order of the soul and of the city,” the rule of reason, that is “exquisitely fragile and subject to disruption” by that very freedom, which can choose fine and wonderful things or coarse and disgusting ones—longings and notions “very difficult to reconcile with a  stable moral and political order,” and indeed rejecting stability and order for perpetual change assumed (but only assumed) to be progress.

The Hebrew Bible teaches that “human beings were created in the image of God.” The New Testament promises that Christians can become godlike by the process of theosis. [1]. That is, the Bible finds human individuality, not merely our ‘species-being,’ a thing of infinite value. (Hancock quotes C. S. Lewis: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.”) Strauss added an important caveat, however: the spirit of individuality, which is the spirit of modernity, can easily be turned to decidedly unspiritual and unphilosophic purposes, resulting in “the ravages of modern individualism and of the liberationist and identitarian delusions it prepares.” And while Hancock does not simply endorse Strauss’s stated preference for a return to “the spirit of ‘sound antiquity,'” with its ‘aristocratic’ valorization of virtuous civic life against modern individuality, he does acknowledge and endorse Strauss’s point. “There is nothing automatic in the coupling of Christian individualism or personalism with the sense of elevation and noble resignation inherent in classical virtue,” and, beyond the universally shared dignity of creation in the image of God, the worth of a human soul does depend upon the exercise of human virtues, here and now. That is, the “unquestioned authority of the idea of the dignity of every individual is far from simply good news,” even if it is indeed part of the Good News of the Gospels. In early Christianity, “the affirmation of the individual was given ritual structure and moral meaning by authoritative sacraments and commandments and by membership in a visible community of shared vocation,” the ecclesia or Church, the regime founded by Jesus Himself. And with that, Jesus also ensured that Christians would face some version of the same crisis He faced: martyrdom. His regime, the City of God, remains captive and stranger—a foreigner—so long as the earthly city, the City of Man, survives. “Membership in a heavenly city that somehow transcends the hierarchies of this world,” needs to be coordinated “with the practical imperatives of a particular human city,” as Jesus in fact said when he advised His disciples to be prudent as serpents. Under the conditions of ‘this world,’ it is as foolish (in a bad way) to live as if those conditions mean nothing as it is foolish (in a good way) to accept one’s status as a fool in the eyes of the world. Machiavelli will always suppose the Christian a fool, simply; an imprudent Christian will simply ignore him, a prudent one won’t, while knowing that Machiavelli doesn’t see the whole truth.

“Societies need competence” and indeed excellence if they are “to produce the physical and symbolic goods that sustain them,” and individuals need “concrete, more or less determinate standards by which to judge their own and their fellows’ contributions and deficiencies, and no amount of abstract talk about infinite personal worth will supply such needs or such goods.” Strauss (and Tocqueville) are right, too: “Christian love cannot dispense with classical virtue.” There is need for ‘aristocracy,’ and especially for the characteristic aristocratic/classical virtue of prudence, the virtue that mediates between the City of God and the City of Man, as the supreme Mediator, Jesus Christ, insisted.

Hancock astutely calls attention to Tocqueville’s phrase, “the laws of moral analogy,” in this regard. By this, Tocqueville means the connection between moral ideas and moral sentiments, “the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs,” the bond between theory and practice, which most emphatically does not mean the erasure of the distinction between theory and practice, the consequence of pantheism. Tocqueville’s example of the rupture of moral analogy is “the extremism of the French Revolution.” Under ordinary circumstances, under circumstances when the laws of moral analogy prevail, revolutionaries would not behead (for example) Marie Antoinette. They would not kill a helpless person. “When our conceptual universe falls out of alignment or loses attunement to what we know ‘in our bones’ as practical agents in the world, then we lose touch with our humanity”; “in imagining ourselves to be theoretical gods”—rigorous and incorruptible enforcers of the Rights of Man—we “become practical (ideological and revolutionary) beasts,” murderers in the name of justice. “Our idealistic abstractions do not remove us from the world of action but commit us to perpetual violence against our natural moral-political condition,” the only limit to that violence being exhaustion or defeat at the hands of some greater force. This “internal contradiction…lies at the heart of the modern democratic or rationalistic,” not rational, “project,” inaugurating an “addictive commitment to revolutionary transformation” incapable of limiting itself. 

Hancock is quick to observe that the laws of moral analogy are not laws in any formal sense, part of some “explicit and universal philosophical or theological system.” Rather, they are a reasonable sensibility that inclines human beings in their actions to “look up to, to defer to, or be aware of the superiority of something above” action, above practice. “Practice must find some realizable guide and compass in theory,” but without thinking of theory or of theology as programmatic, our actions as somehow similar to computer ‘printouts.’ That is, for its part “theory must never betray its practical touchstone,” leading us to imagine that the purpose of action is “some ineffably transcendent ‘ideal'” or “an ever-elusive, ultimately incoherent, and therefore self-undermining idea of ‘progress.'” Theory needs a practical “touchstone” because, first, theory consists of a set of generalizations about human nature as seen not only in human biology and human thought but in human practice and, second, because such generalizations, such theoretical ideas as we derive from such observations must be ‘brought down to earth,’ made consistent with the limits imposed existing circumstances. The worst enemy of practical reasoning is wishful thinking. “As Aristotle and Pierre Manent (one should add Jesus) remind us, the end we seek is always in an important sense in some way always present within the practical means by which we seek it—that is, in the practical habitual dispositions, the virtues, that, for the most part implicitly, shape our understanding of a good life and of a good society.” As Hancock emphasizes, “in an important sense, theory must rule practice, while at the same time practice must rule theory.“

It is important to recall another Aristotelian theme, here. Aristotle locates the origin of political life in the family in the sense that all three forms of ruling, of governance, can be seen there: the two forms of ‘command-and-obey’ rule—parents over children, rule for the sake of the good of those ruled, and masters over slaves, rule for the sake of the good of those who rule—and the one form of what he calls “political” rule—the reciprocal ruling and being-ruled of husband and wife. What Hancock thus suggests is the reciprocal or political rule of theory and practice, both in individuals and cities, the City of Man. He leaves the ruling conditions of the City of God, the mysterious monarchy of a triune God, to the theologians.

Tocqueville agrees with Hegel (whose disciples he otherwise detested) in claiming that “the best minds of classical antiquity were blinded, by the aristocratic conditions of their own societies, to the manifest injustice of slavery, and so were at pains to prove that slavery was somehow authorized by nature”—a “fundamental linkage between Christianity,” which both philosophers take to be opposed to slavery, “and the modern movement of generalizing equality.” In Tocqueville’s own words, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” or, as Hancock elaborates, “beneath the democratic revolution lies the Christian revolution.” Several qualifications to this might be advanced: Aristotle’s idea of “natural slavery” would strictly limit actual slavery; as the Apostle Paul makes clear, Christian slaves are not encouraged to rebel. More important in terms of the discussion at hand, however, is the point that democracy or natural equality, eventually leading to social equality, comes to earth via the teachings and example of a monarch, indeed the supreme Monarch, the King of kings, albeit one who acts ‘aristocratically’ in the role of a mediator between His Father and the human beings formed out of clay and animated with His breath, His spirit, thereby fashioning them in His “image” as beings capable of exercising logos, speech and reason. This divine making is the foundation of human equality and of human inequality, inasmuch as all men are not created equal in physical beauty or intellectual capacity. But in emphasizing the equality of human beings in their ‘humanness,’ Christianity acts monarchically, not aristocratically, monarchy, the rule of the one, and democracy, the rule of the many, being natural allies against the rule of the few. The danger in this is that “democratic ontology is thus fundamentally at odds” with moral analogy, “with the tempering of the abstract idea by the concrete experience, as well as the informing of the concrete experience by the idea that aims to transcend particular experience.” The command to be innocent or harmless as doves and prudent as serpents could counteract this tension, were it more generally heeded. But virtue is difficult, else it would not be virtue, as Strauss’s beloved ‘classics’ knew and taught. Hancock writes, “Christians must find a way to give due support to the pride that is inseparable from the nature of human agency or moral analogy and thus to restore confidence in the natural, mediated goods of practical virtues and bordered political communities.” Put Thomistically, divine grace perfects nature; it does not replace it.

Genuinely moral and political action cannot be determined either from ‘above’ or from ‘below,’ whether ‘above’ means a theory, a god, or the ‘end of History,’ and whether ‘below’ means the earth, the body, or the passions. Genuinely moral and political action presupposes choice, freedom. Such freedom “is an intrinsic good” or “at least somehow points to a good that is good in itself.” This means that freedom is “elevated,” ‘aristocratic,’ not ignoble or slavish. “Freedom is spirited and spiritual; it is associated with human pride and self-assertion” while “at the same time” aspiring “toward an undefined elevation, toward something beyond the all-too-human.” Acting “is central to freedom.” And “this free action is bound up with speaking, reasoning, deliberating,” which is why the document that constitutes the American federal government (for example) guarantees freedom of speech as a sine qua non of political freedom. Finally, political and rational freedom presuppose freedom to “breathe,” to live. “Even the simple and universal gift of life must be defended against those who would act even against the freedom to breathe—that is, against our very survival” as individuals and as political communities. Being rational and political, freedom has limits; it “is not altogether limitless, boundless, or undefined.” It “expresses itself within a meaningful horizon in which there is commerce,” or in Aristotelian terms a political relationship, “between the most elevated and the most common.” “Both voluntarist and lawful,” freedom “is ordered by virtue, and virtue is free.” It is lawful in the sense that it obeys the natural laws of moral analogy. In the Bible, God sets down the laws, enacts his commands; He is a Person (indeed, the Person of all person, the One who endows the many with personhood) who commands laws, which are impersonal but purposive rulers of the many human persons, who are nonetheless free to violate those laws, at least up to a point. To obey the Ruler and His rules, the supremely personal and the impersonal, is to live “a life that is right and good.” “This duality within the highest possibilities of meaningful existence corresponds broadly to the two great sources of the Western tradition, Jerusalem and Athens,” the Creator-God and the laws of nature and of nature’s God. The Creator-God is both eternal (“I am that I am”) and free (“I shall be as I shall be”). The laws He has built into His creation are necessary, unfree. A fully human life will choose to live in terms of both, not one or the other. “The divine must be understood in a way that supports both the lawful quality and the freedom or independence of human action; Providence, the ultimate guarantor of a truth whose face is not turned away from humanity, must be a friend of freedom.”

Two “difficulties” arise respecting such an appeal to an objective moral order. There is the “epistemic” difficulty of knowing that it is and what it is; there is the “substantive” difficulty of how to obey it, how it could be consistent with human freedom, the human capacity to reason. Hancock suggests that while “the moral law must indeed be understood as ‘objective’ in the sense” of existing “somehow above us,” authoritative, ‘better than we are,’ “it must not be understood as simply outside us, as absolutely ‘other’ with respect to our rational and spiritually self-aware humanity.” That is, “the appeal to a higher law is not alien to, but in fact, deeply continuous with, the full, responsible exercise of human agency.” As Daniel J. Mahoney argues, Christianity must “encourage citizens and believers alike to take seriously the full range of one’s political and civic responsibilities,” responsibilities seen in our membership in political communities, organizations with territorial boundaries that need to be defended against assaults aimed at violating the self-government, the freely set limitations citizens impose upon themselves within those boundaries. [2]  Mahoney “reconciles the word of God and moral law with the spiritual needs of humanity precisely because human spirituality is understood to embrace human liberty or the nobility of responsible choice and action” while “divine providence is understood as holding open the space of human prudence,” the guidance “of one’s own natural reason,” self-government. One may hold oneself responsible to, and be held responsible by, the Holy Spirit and His promptings.

Pierre Manent elaborates upon these themes, correcting the “hypertrophy of theory” with the “grammar of action.” That is, he counters what he understands to be the excessively abstract, impractical, utopian approach to politics in contemporary life not with a ‘pragmatism’ that seeks the most efficient path to satisfying self-defined self-interest but with moral and political action infused with prudential reasoning that recognizes the good that is, so to speak, built into human action itself, “the unsurpassable good inherent in action itself.” Such action will also be “holding open space in eternity for this good.” 

What does that mean? Hancock would have helped his reader had he followed Aristotle’s practice of providing examples of such action. Nonetheless, he circles around his meaning sufficiently to afford some glimpses of what he has in mind. This involves a political relationship between the “pride” of prudential reasoning in action and the Christian humility that acknowledges the impossibility of any rational solution to the political problem, absent divine intervention. Following Manent, who follows Aquinas, he eschews the Aristotelian philosophic standard, itself derived from Plato: the founding of “the best city” in speech and the description of “the best soul.” For Christians, the best person cannot be human, even if human beings were not afflicted with ‘original sin.’ What Christians can look to as a standard is the natural law. Very well then, what is the natural law?

The natural law begins with “universal motives” discernible in human beings: the pleasant, the useful, and the upright (the honnête). None of these motives is an idea. Each is actually present in our souls. This includes the upright, which orients itself ‘upward,’ toward nobility, toward ‘aristocracy,’ without itself being outside of ourselves. “Manent sees reason, in our present circumstances of theoretical hypertrophy, as investing too much in speculations on goods, beyond those we actually experience in some way in the practice of moral agency and practical deliberation.” All of these motives take us outside of ourselves; even the experience of pleasure frequently requires us to seek external things that give us pleasure—food, water, even air, which we seek in order to survive but not only in order to survive. Human motives bring human individuals to extend themselves, go beyond themselves. This going-beyond includes (as Aristotle and Aquinas insist) in “enhancing the ‘sweetness’ of social bonds and our interest”—themselves potentially pleasant, useful, and upright—in “our hope for a higher and more complete good.” Prudential and even theoretical reasoning can take us some distance in discerning the object of this hope, but only so far. “At some point, our quest for such a good exceeds the limits of reason, and so we must choose whether or not to let the divine truth come toward us,” to “allow God’s grace to supervene upon our natural practice of moral and political agency.” That is, at some point, having reasoned as assiduously as is possible for me to do, why would I not ask the God whose existence I cannot discover by a rigorously logical proof to show Himself? After all, if He does not exist, what harm in the exercise? I will remain within the bounds of Socrates’ humane zeteticism, carefully rejecting the inordinate pride of modern rationalism. 

Manent holds (in Hancock’s words) that “the divine truth can come toward us only as we assume practical responsibility for the common goods of the real communities of which we are a part.” Christian love (agape, caritas) inheres in the act of taking such responsibility for ourselves but especially for those around us—the sober, unsentimental love of neighbor. “Neither (1) modern rational mastery for the sake of humanity nor (2) the humble Protestant or postmodern abnegation of responsibility for human goods nor (3) classical or medieval speculation on a highest good altogether beyond practice can relieve us of our responsibility as rational, moral, and political beings for the only goods available to us by nature, and thus the only goods of which we can coherently speak—that is, the good inherent in our moral and political agency and inseparable from the very practice of that agency.” Human experience entails action, and action entails an aim, a purpose, “some substantial, actionable understanding of what is good.” That goes for action guided by theology as much as action guided by philosophy. As Hancock ingeniously puts it, “Theology, no less than philosophy, must be respectfully attentive to a certain necessary ‘grammar of action'”; Christians “must humble themselves in order to enter into what might be called the essential pride of human action, the active human contribution to the good.” That contribution, which is the natural law inherent in action, “consists of human participation in eternal law; indeed, the natural law consists of human participation in the active and productive realization of eternal law.” Although there are passages in the New Testament that seem to claim that human souls are little more than rocky battlegrounds for conflicts between far more powerful spiritual persons, demonic and divine, our souls are more than that because our souls think and will, desiring the good, however we may misconceive the good or simply fail fully to apprehend it.

Political life illustrates and ineluctably involves this natural human quest. Life in a ‘city’ or political community centers on the regime of the city—who rules it, what its ruling offices or institutions are, and most pertinently for the purposes of this argument, its purpose and its way of life, all of which incline citizens or subjects to form a certain character, an ethos, both individually and as a community. Inevitably, political life or activity fosters disagreements about specific actions the city might take or indeed about the regime itself. This debate about “the meaning of justice” “constitutes the city.” As Aristotle teaches, the underlying parties in the debate are the few who are rich, the oligarchs, and the many who are poor, the democrats. But the debate cannot be reduced to that conflict, as it involves many claims to rule, including birth, liberty, wealth, virtue, and military valor. Try sorting out all those claims in a coherent theoretical system and you will fail, becoming not a person of wisdom but a terrible simplificateur, an ideologue. What happens in a real city is rather a practical solution, sometimes long-lasting, imposed by politicians or ‘statesmen.’ If the politicians are statesmen in the valorizing sense of the term, the practical solution they arrive at will take account of the reasonable claims of all groups within the citizenry before arriving at their authoritative decision and issuing their authoritative commands. “The judgment or decision that resolves this problem is seen”—seen by the citizens themselves—as neither “derivable from some theoretical principle…nor as an arbitrary act of the will.” In Manent’s words, this “complexity” “holds out the promise of the good” which is “inescapably bound up with the mind’s and soul’s engagement with the plurality of substantive claims that emerge from our natural political existence,” the “practical commensuration of theoretically incommensurable goods,” giving each good its due as ‘its due’ is defined within the unifying regime of the city. “The highest human good, the good actualized in the statesman’s responsibility for the political community, appears thus to consist in reflective or rational responsibility for the practical viability and cohesion and consistency of the irreducible plurality of human goods.” Hancock characterizes the “implicit understanding that graces the practical operation of a good that is common” finds in that commonality a good that is “higher” than (apparently) the particular goods advanced by the citizens. This is the highest practicable good, the highest humanly possible, because there is no theoretical way to make the various particular goods commensurate with one another on the level of theory.

How does this comport with Christianity, which most assuredly does assert a highest good for individuals, namely, the salvation of individual souls? No regime that interferes with the achievement of that good could itself be as good as it might be, although it may provide other substantial ‘this-worldly’ goods. More specifically, how can Christianity ‘play out’ within the modern state, and indeed in the liberal-democratic state, given the origins of the modern state in the political philosophy of anti-Christian Machiavelli? Manent suggests that pre-Machiavellian, Christian Thomas Aquinas would find in “the collaboration of human prudence and divine Providence” a much more solid spiritual and intellectual foundation for the limitations on state action that liberalism insists upon, even as the democratic dimension of liberal democracy inclines toward limitless expansion of state power. Those limitations are enforced, especially in modern republicanism, by enabling citizens to stand up for themselves, to exercise their virtues against statist encroachment. In so doing, the exercise of the classical ‘cardinal virtues’—courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice—point human beings toward a good beyond the Aristotelian telos or purpose—the free exercise of those virtues, bringing human happiness—and toward the good that transcends humanness, the good bestowed by divine grace and seen in ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity. “Faith as an act of partnership with a universal personal God achieves an eminent expression in the great politics of the providential nation-state, a task that compels the Christian statesman to attend to the partial truths asserted by the major claimants in today’s contest for the soul of civilization.” In effect, such Christian statesmanship would wrest the nation-state from the grip of its inventor, Machiavelli, and his progeny. In this, “the excessive or overflowing meaning of the practical on the one hand”—the “logic of action”—and “of the divine on the other”—the overflowing grace of God—meet in reciprocal action, politically, and “color each other.” Whereas there has been a conflict between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, “the good that is at work in both” might enable their coordination against their common enemies—coordination, not synthesis, inasmuch as each endeavor has its own integrity. Thus does Manent invite his readers “to recognize the spiritual good that beckons beyond the visible arena of practical liberalism.”

The common enemy is the conception of nature posited by modern philosophers, notably Machiavelli’s follower, Thomas Hobbes, who defines nature, including human nature, as “radically individuated biological being,” a materialism that somewhat dubiously (as David Hume saw) “reduces to the individual’s boundless assertion of ‘rights.” Since the ‘is’ of a nonteleological and strictly materialist nature cannot really issue in an ‘ought’ of rights, “the governing law of modern liberalism is lawlessness; modern liberalism is a flight from law—a perpetual, obsessive, ever-self-radicalizing flight from law as the essential structure of human action.” But this cannot be true because by nature human action is “archic”—commanding, initiating, ruling, and “always assert[ing] a reason for its rule.” Reasons are debatable, therefore at least open to reasonable discussion, and although only an extraordinarily naive person would expect rational deliberation to predominate in most political debates, the openness to such debate is there and the adjustment of competing demands, many of them irrational and unjust, at least requires some sort of attempt at justifying each claim in terms of the public good, usually as that is defined by the prevailing regime. The honnête has a chance; otherwise, it would have a much slimmer chance. Pleasure, utility, and uprightness are, as Manent writes, “objective components of human nature,” so they will have their say in a liberal democracy. This is the nature that connects the ‘is’ with the ‘ought.’

With respect to uprightness, the noble, its “stability and universality” are “grounded in a dynamic triangular structure of the city, the soul, and the divine.” In the city, nobility makes the virtue of justice possible; the noble and the just are “the two essential dimensions of the “honnête.” Pleasure and utility are likely to be brought to the bar of the honnête, at least some of the time, as seen in the way the spirited guardians enforce the rational judgments of the philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic. The reverse is also at least partly true, as “no person is noble who does not act with some reasonable regard for the plain utility or reasonable interests of his neighbor or fellow citizen.” In the soul, nobility must stand up for itself, become part of the habitual life of the soul, if it is to maintain itself, “preserve the conditions” of the “noble action” it craves—virtue being “the principle as well as the end of virtuous action.” To fortify itself with support from lower and solid ground, “the noble is grounded by the useful, and the useful is ennobled by the noble”—reciprocal ruling and being-ruled. More, “it is because man is capable of elevating himself above the goods of the body and of scorning even life—of which beasts do not have any idea—that he knows how to multiply these same goods to a degree that they cannot conceive of.” And with respect to the divine, “the instrumentality of the noble to justice or the common good…holds the noble open to a higher good beyond the self-satisfaction of the soul as well as the necessities of the city.” Manent follows Aquinas in going “beyond Aristotle in tracing the natural passage from the noble to the supernatural,” in “humbling…the classical, aristocratic pretension to achieve a philosophic transcendence that escapes the gaps and circles of the practical (moral and political) good.” As a philosopher, Aristotle inclines “to identify this ultimate end with purely theoretical activity.” For Christians, however, the ultimate end of practice is to meet a Person, although one’s success in that effort does not depend primarily upon oneself.

Notes

1. See “Theosis,” a review of Archimandrite George Kapsanis: Theosis: The True Purpose of Life, on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. See “The Humanitarian Temptation,” a review of Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, reviewed on this website under the category Bible Notes.

Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève: On Tyranny. “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero.” Originally published in 1954.Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 

Leo Strauss: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. E. M. Sinclair translation. Preface to the English Translation. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.

In considering Strauss, Hancock initially structures his account in accordance with the philosopher’s dichotomy between ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem,’ reason or philosophy and revelation or religion. He offers interpretations of Strauss’s “Restatement” of his argument against his Hegelian contemporary, Alexandre Kojève, and of the “Preface” to his book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.

Hancock begins with philosophy. “Following Hegel,” Hancock writes, “Kojève understands modern secular rationalism as a transformation and fulfillment of Christian universality and subjectivity.” In Kojève’s view, both Christianity and especially its secular rationalist progeny “released the energy of human labor for the service of human needs” by their egalitarian undermining and eventual demolition of aristocracy, of the few who prided themselves on not-working. The mediation of the few between the one and the many disappeared—in this, Christianity might be said to have followed from late-Roman monarchy—and “a universal society of equal recognition”—the first, of all human beings under God, the second, of all human beings in mutually dependent commercial societies—came forward. Hancock finds Kojève to be more sober than Badiou (no high bar, there) and more realistic than Siedentop (ditto) because the egalitarian revolution has and will continue to be ‘low,’ a matter of satisfying “the most ordinary desires of the most ordinary human beings,” and, in the future, there will be no communism but a universal and homogenous state, a “coercive apparatus” that will never ‘wither away.’ Humanity’s “collective life” will be “supported by total technological mastery, the absolute victory of a final, rational tyranny, a prosaic life in which all poetic projections have been banished along with the cruelty of history.” Nietzsche had already decried the ‘last man’ and called for resistance by holding up the possibility of the ‘super-man,’ the rule of a ‘planetary aristocracy,’ universal but radically undemocratic. By Kojève and Strauss’s time, after two of the world wars Nietzsche had predicted and the rule of the leveling tyrant, Stalin, in the Soviet Union and the rule of the leveling administrative state in the United States, the prospects for a Nietzschean aristocracy seemed very poor, indeed. “Resistance to this pincer movement of the one and the all against the natural and limited space of human existence was, I propose, the central purpose of Leo Strauss’s philosophical career.” 

Strauss concurs with Hegel, Siedentop, Baliou (and Tocqueville) in tracing modern egalitarianism to Christianity although, unlike the first three, he does not celebrate it. The Christian promise of freedom (from sin, in God’s regime on a new heaven and a new earth) has become an “all-too-human project [that] has necessarily degenerated into a rational and technological tyranny”; the apparent freedom of universality, of no-limits, can only be countered by recovering “an appreciation of the permanent contours and, therefore, the permanent limits of the human condition,” by recovering the contours of “necessity”—the necessary limits of human wisdom and the necessary limits of politics, of reciprocal ruling and being ruled in small political communities. Both of these limitations are eschewed by the advocates of “absolute transcendence” (the metaphysics of historicism, with its promise of human conquest of natural necessity) and of “formal universality” (the universal and homogenous state, produce and final agent of that conquest). This is the sense in which Strauss valorizes the “realm of necessity.” Hancock claims that this “idea of an eternal realm of pure, impersonal necessity untouched by human concerns is the projection of a very human claim to rule, the mostly implicit horizon of an essentially aristocratic assertion of human meaning.” But is Strauss actually making an assertion, pure and simple? Is his call to a return to nature and to natural right, as against the illusory freedom of worldwide rule, evidence of a sort of ‘will to power’?

Hancock argues that Strauss “tips his hand more than once to reveal the human and political springs of the philosophic idea of a ‘realm of necessity” while encouraging “the pride of philosophers who would not wish to be reminded of their dependence on common moral and political sources of meaning,” appealing to “the pride of philosophers even as he defines philosophy as beyond human pride,” resorting “shamelessly to argument by high-minded presumption or by peremptory definition,” as when he claims that “we must assume that philosophers do not desire to rule” and that they have no concern for the Hegelian-Kojèvian struggle for “recognition.” And while he concedes that a transhistorical conception of philosophy “depends upon the thesis of eternal, immutable being”—above and beyond history defined as the ever-changing course of events—Strauss finally admits that this conception is “altogether questionable.” Moreover, Strauss also concedes that reasoning cannot achieve “subjective certainty,” that “all knowledge is embedded in a social-political context.” He only disagrees with Kojève in upholding “the superiority of an aristocratic over a democratic-universalist social and political frame” for this embeddedness. The aristocratic character of Straussian philosophy makes honor, the aristocratic passion, its engine, while the modern philosopher is “conditioned by an original motive of ‘love’ for human beings,” an egalitarian passion derivative of Christianity.

At this point, it may be helpful to pause and reexamine how Strauss himself presents his argument. In both of these essays, he begins with a specific circumstance in which he lives or has lived. In the Kojève essay, he begins by alluding to the condition of social science in contemporary universities located in the liberal-democratic regimes of the Cold War of the 1950s. That condition is poor. Social scientists cannot distinguish between, for example, kingships and tyrannies because social science is supposed to be ‘value-free,’ entirely descriptive. The rule of the one is the rule of the one; ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are scientifically meaningless terms. Social science is quantitative, not ‘qualitative.’ More, contemporary social science partakes not only of moral but also of historical relativism. Its proponents claim that classical political science, centered on the polis, cannot comprehend the regimes that have arisen since Christianity and modern science appeared; in particular, they cannot understand the modern state.

Strauss demurs. The classical framework may well enable a political scientist to understand present-day tyranny, and not only that it is tyranny, not kingship. Caesarism can be just if it is a punishment for corruption or misdeeds; tyranny is always unjust. It is true that the modern “notion” of philosophy or science, aspiring to the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, is not the classical understanding, but that doesn’t mean that the classics knew nothing of such a notion. They knew of it and rejected it as unnatural. Nature sets limits on human endeavor. It is the realm of necessity, a constraint on human action. This means that “there is no adequate solution to the problem of virtue or happiness on the political or social plane”—not the modern state governed in accordance with the science of administration or a world state that prevents international wars. Regimes may be good or bad, but their goodness often depends on their legitimacy, the presence of the rule of law; law is imperfect, so the best real states will be imperfectly good.

The distinction between naturally good and unnaturally bad regimes declined under the influence of Machiavelli’s thought. “Machiavelli separates wisdom from moderation,” lauding virtuosity, adjuring the prince to learn how not to be good. Kojève follows in the Machiavellian line. Like Machiavelli, he is a philosopher; he knows how to think and he loves to think. But this begs the questions, ‘What does he think?’ In political science, in political philosophy, virtuosity and love may not suffice. The existence of Stalin in the contemporary world, a tyrant who claimed supreme authority founded on an assertion of scientific knowledge, means that a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, must love Stalin—or else. Tyrants generally view philosophers with suspicion, regarding a philosopher as “a most dangerous competitor for tyrannical rule,” a person too smart for the tyrant’s own good. If classical political science can understand tyrants as such, not only the tyrants they saw in their own time, then a consideration of Xenophon’s dialogue between the Syracusan tyrant Hiero and Simonides, called one of the seven wise men of the classical world, might illuminate the condition of the modern world, in which tyranny hasn’t disappeared but social scientists have prevented themselves from understanding it, blocking themselves from full knowledge, handicapping their quest for wisdom. 

“A wise man does not attempt futile things.” Any attempt by Simonides to moderate Hiero’s regime by transferring his support from the mercenary soldiers to the citizens would be futile, as mercenaries are too dangerous to be demoted. Kojève sees Simonides’ caution as unnecessary because while the wise man understands the honor-loving Master, and might understand the citizens, he does not understand the morality of the slaves, the workers. Masters have their morality; slaves have theirs. Kojève follows Hegel, and to some extent Marx, by maintaining that an alliance between the one and the many can be effected if a wise man brings about a ‘synthesis’ of the two moralities subsequent to their dialectical clash. To this, Strauss replies that Simonides himself is no honor-loving Master who cannot see beyond his own morality but a wise man, the “highest human type.” The philosopher Socrates, for example, is just, not “manly,” honor-loving, ultimately tyrannical, blind to the good of the political community and even to the good of his own soul. And philosophic Socrates is not the only just human type: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.” This affirms Hancock’s notice of the underlying homology between reason and revelation while it disputes the Hegelian synthesis of Socrates and Machiavelli, the claim that a Machiavellian tyrant can be truly wise. Hegel, following Machiavelli and his English disciple, Thomas Hobbes, “construct[s] human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire of recognition.” For his part, Kojève “apparently thinks” that force or terror, the threat of imprisonment and death (the king of terrors), “are indispensable in every regime,” including aristocracies, defined by the classics as the rule of the best, the genuinely virtuous; to him, only the “universal and homogenous state” can be just because it alone can minimize (if not eliminate) rule by force by eliminating war among peoples. This regime claim is based, Strauss writes, on an assumption that is untrue. By contrast, the “assumption” that Hancock flags, that “the wise do not desire to rule,” is not necessarily false. Those who are wise do not aspire to rule because that would mean they were ruling the unwise, who will not consent to be ruled by the wise, and the wise do not attempt the impossible. “What pretends to be the absolute rule of the wise will in fact be absolute rule of unwise men”—members of the Communist Party, armed with Marxian pseudoscience, for example. Further, the universal and homogenous state at least seems impossible because it would require “universal agreement regarding the fundamentals,” an implausible condition. Faiths that make universalist claims provoke counter-faiths that make the same claim, leading not to universal rule over a homogenous population but to continued wars. The classical political philosophers deemed it is better, wiser, to limit the rule of the unwise by the unwise with the rule of law as interpreted by “equitable” men, the gentlemen who derived their incomes from landed estates but lived in cities—urbane lives in urban settings.

As for the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, his “only demand on the political men is that they leave him alone.” But, as Kojève sees, “the philosopher cannot lead an absolutely solitary life” because isolation in the quest for wisdom, the quest for “subjective certainty,” might be indistinguishable from madness. Kojève insists that “genuine certainty must be ‘intersubjective.'” Strauss replies that “the classics were fully aware of the essential weakness of the mind of the individual.” Philosophers need friends, but not just any friends. “The friends must be competent men: they must themselves be actual or potential philosophers,” of whom there are few. This is something along the lines of what Thomas Jefferson, no enemy of democracy, called the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent. Since “friendship presupposes a measure of conscious agreement,” and “the things regarding which the philosophic friends must agree cannot be known or evident truths” (philosophy being “not wisdom but the quest for wisdom”), a variety of philosophic ‘schools’ or ‘sects’ will arise, given the diversity of opinions among philosophers. Therefore, even philosophic friendship does not suffice for the philosopher. Like Socrates, “he must go out to the market place,” where “the conflict with the political men cannot be avoided.” He must be a political philosopher, not simply a gazer at the cosmos. This is what has come to be called the ‘Socratic turn’ from previous philosophy. “The whole history of philosophy testifies that the danger eloquently described by Kojève is inevitable.” Inevitability is a form of necessity. 

Kojève is mistaken, however, in his secular-Christian, Machiavellian/Hobbesian/Cartesian/Hegelian expectation of subjective certainty, of a ‘science of wisdom.’ On the contrary, “philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance”; that is the one “objective truth” of which everyone, even a philosopher, can be subjectively certain. “What Pascal said with anti-philosophic intent about the impotence of both dogmatism and skepticism, is the only possible justification of philosophy which as such is neither dogmatic nor skeptic, and still less ‘decisionist,’ but zetetic” or “skeptic in the original sense of the term.” Philosophy “as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” The philosopher who persuades himself of having comprehended some certain truth about the fundamental and comprehensive problems is no longer a philosopher but a sectarian. Socrates “never belonged to a sect and never founded one.” He is not depicted in Leonardo’s “School of Athens.” 

Hancock acknowledges the zetetic character of philosophy as described by Strauss while relegating it to the status of an exoteric teaching. Zeteticism, Hancock argues, is “addressed precisely to the pride of philosophers who aspire to transcend pride.” He is addressing modern philosophers, the Kojèves, who claim to have overcome the “fundamental alternatives” with a “powerful synthesis of the radicalized alternatives, aristocratic and democratic, Greek and biblical, the absolute and the universal, the one and the all,” a synthesis originally proposed by the Christian Paul, who averred that for him there was no longer Greek or Jew but Christ crucified. Why, then, attach resistance to such a grand but now ‘secularized’ and dangerous synthesis to an appeal to ‘aristocratic’ prejudice? Because the distinction between the few and the many, the wise or at least questers for wisdom and the unwise slaves to prevailing opinion goes deeper than all the other now (supposedly) synthesized antimonies. To reestablish that distinction is indispensable, fundamental, indeed a necessity if human beings, who by nature are the thinking animals, may continue to exhibit their humanity. 

Hancock argues that Strauss’s defense of an aristocratic quest, the quest of the few who love wisdom and seek it, “seems to culminate in the metaphysical idea of an ‘eternal order’ but finally acknowledges, for the attentive reader, that the taste for such an order is rooted in a practical hierarchy,” in what Strauss calls “the immediate pleasure which we observe when we observe signs of human nobility.” Such an order “anchor[s] his aristocratic pride” in the cosmos itself and requires a defense of that order by philosophers against the conquest of nature, the supposed “realm of freedom,” and especially against that conquest as formulated in the historicist doctrine (indeed dogma) that imagines the universal and homogenous state as the framework of the realm of freedom. On the contrary, all evidence from regimes animated by historicist doctrines point away from freedom, whether political, philosophic, or religious. “In the absence” of the “vertical orientation,” the aristocratic orientation, “the activity of reason cannot avoid being drawn into the horizontal field of universalization and technology,” the realm not really of freedom but of comprehensive unwisdom, of ideological tyranny.

Returning to Strauss, one notices that cites Xenophon as “indicat[ing]” that the philosopher does indeed want honor but only from a small minority or even only from himself. This is aristocratic, to a moderate degree. The difference between the philosopher and the political man is that the political man wants honor from everyone. Kojève claims that the philosopher is no different, motivated by the desire for recognition, honor, not love of wisdom. Xenophon instead observes that the universal desire is not recognition but satisfaction, happiness. The philosopher, however, finds satisfaction only in “the desire for truth, i.e., for knowledge of the eternal order, or the order of the whole.” That makes the philosopher, not the political man, not even the tyrant, the only truly ambitious man. “The political man must reject this way altogether.” He cannot depreciate other men because he seeks their recognition; he therefore must care for human beings as such; to rule them is to serve them. The ruler loves and desires to be loved, by the many, regardless of the quality of the many. Strauss leaves unspoken the obvious fact that the Christian God is precisely a ruler, a lover of men who commands them to love Him. 

Strauss then catches Kojève in an act of rhetorical overreach. Kojève had compared the supposed love of the ruler of the universal and homogenous state for his subjects to the love of a philosopher for truth. A mother “loves her son in spite of all his faults,” and the universal tyrants loves his subjects and the truth that he embodies in spite of all the faults of his subjects and all the unloveliness of many truths. But a mother’s love for her children, Strauss ripostes, is no universal love; it is the love of her own. “The philosopher on the other hand is concerned with what can never become private or exclusive property.” At the same time, “the philosopher cannot help living as a human being who as such cannot be dead to human concerns, although his soul will not be in those concerns”; he has a body and his body has needs, including the need of services of others. But the needs of the body are limited by nature, by necessity. Accordingly, the philosopher will not hurt anyone, nor does he “expect salvation or satisfaction from the establishment of the simply best social order.” Unlike the would-be tyrant, he seeks no revolution. He will offer advice to his city or indeed to foreign rulers (as Simonides does) as a political philosopher, but he does not expect and will hardly demand that his advice be followed. 

In entering the marketplace, the philosopher especially seeks the company of those who exhibit “well-ordered souls.” They resemble the “eternal order” that he seeks to understand, and may someday assist in his quest for understanding that order, unlike “the chaotic souls.” The philosopher seeks those souls not because they serve him but “simply because they are what they are,” unlike the mother, whose love Kojève confuses with mother-love. “The good order of the soul is philosophizing,” and the philosopher would “educate potential philosophers simply because he cannot help loving well-ordered souls,” not because he craves recognition. The ruler, by contrast, is not motivated by the Socratic eros “because he does not know what a well-ordered soul is,” craving recognition indiscriminately, ‘democratically,’ from all his subjects out of “an unqualified attachment to human things as such.” The philosopher does not want to associate with disorderly souls; if he did, he would be a sophist, pretendedly wise. That is, the ‘aristocratic’ character of the philosopher is not simply an appeal to pride. It is based upon a true perception of human nature, which features human beings of varying kinds and degrees of competence and of incompetence, of virtue and of vice. The order of nature is not merely ‘diverse’ in the egalitarian, ‘woke’ sense, but differentiated in the ‘aristocratic’ sense, and every university professor, including Professor Hancock, has seen that, time and again. This means, as Strauss says, that a philosopher’s self-admiration or self-recognition is akin if not identical to “good conscience”—inner ‘science’ or self-knowledge.

Jesus invites the fishermen to become fishers of men. So, too, does the philosopher “go to the market place to fish for potential philosophers,” individuals of well-ordered souls, which he loves. He “must” do so out of philosophic necessity, cognizant not of a need for social recognition but a need for understanding the nature of men. He does not need the best regime in order to philosophize, only the relative freedom of the marketplace, where talk is cheap, even if nothing else is. The rulers, and many of their subjects, regard such talk not only as cheap but as dangerous, at best a distraction from serious business and at worst subversive of what the regime regards as right conduct and belief. “In what then does philosophic politics consist? In satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens.” This “defense of philosophy…was required always and everywhere, whatever the regime might have been.” Notable successes were achieved by Plato, Cicero, Fārābi, and Maimonides. (Strauss does not here name a notable success by a philosopher among Christians.) But Kojève “fails to distinguish between philosophic politics and that political action which the philosopher might undertake with a view to establishing the best regime or to the improvement of the actual order,” instead describing the philosopher as one fighting “a tragic conflict” between his desire to rule and his reluctance to rule. But “for the classics, the conflict between philosophy and city is as little tragic as the death of Socrates.” 

Kojève looks not to the dialectics of discussion but to “the higher dialectics of History” for the solution to the tragic dilemma he thinks he sees. The end of History will be the universal and homogenous state wherein all are recognized, all satisfied. Strauss doubts that the subjects of the universal and homogenous state will be equally recognized or equally satisfied. “Does Kojève not underestimate the power of the passions?” That is, there are two kinds of inevitability at play in the dialogue between Strauss and Kojève. For Kojève, as for Hegel, the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, culminating in the universal and homogenous state is inevitable, and will end the tension between the philosopher and the city. For Strauss, the tension itself is inevitable because there are necessary natural limits, including the limits of human nature. This is why he parodies the language of the Communist Manifesto, the historicist call to action par excellence: “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of ‘the realm of freedom.’ Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, ‘the realm of necessity'”—that is, nature, the limits nature necessitates, limits that militate against attempts to institute a universal and homogenous state. It is the observation of nature which suggests that “perhaps it is not war nor work but thinking that constitutes of the humanity of man”—thinking, whose purpose is wisdom, not the ‘end of History.’ To instantiate the universal and homogeneous state, everyone will need to become wise. But given the observable limits of human nature, that won’t happen. Even Kojève more or less acknowledges that, as the state that rules at the end of History will, he admits, be a state, a coercive institution, not a seamless ‘classless society’ that remains after the state has ‘withered away.’ 

Seeing “the weakness or dependence of human nature,” the classics thought “universal happiness” impossible. The “best regime” might be established, somewhere, but that would be a long shot, although good regimes were possible; Aristotle considered the ‘mixed’ regime, combining elements of oligarchy and democracy, the best practicable regime if not the best regime simply. In order to make the establishment of the ‘ideal’ regime possible, the moderns had “to lower the goal of man.” This meant that the best regime needed no standard of excellence ‘above’ it; it embodied the moderns’ lowered order of excellence, capable of being ruled by an unwise man, “the Universal and Final Tyrant” who (as if to prove his unwisdom) “presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy.” (To put the matter in Christian terms, for Kojève, the Universal and Final Tyrant is the philosophic equivalent of the Christ, but for Strauss he is the Anti-Christ.) In “former ages,” when “claims of this kind” were advanced (Strauss is thinking of Christian and Muslim rulers), “philosophy went underground,” accommodating itself “in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believe they knew things which they did not know,” in contrast with real philosophers, who best know that they do not know. Also, in former ages and even in the contemporary world, a philosopher could still “escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant’s dominions”—as Strauss himself had done, prudently keeping one step ahead of Nazi attacks, moving from Germany to France to Britain and finally to America (and indeed then from New York, along the Atlantic coast, to Chicago, in the middle of the continent). 

Human nature depends upon nature as a whole. “Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things,” presupposing “an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History,” that “any ‘realm of freedom’ is no more than a dependent province within ‘the realm of necessity.'” “Being” does not “create itself in the course of History,” as Kojève would have it. If that were true, then the historicists claim that “social change or fate affects being, if it is not identical with Being, and hence affects truth.” (A Marxist once titled his book, Let History Judge.) Strauss is not satisfied that History really judges anything. Human beings can judge, within the limits nature sets on even the most powerful human minds. If, Heidegger-like, we “lack the courage to face the issue of Tyranny,” if we pretend that Nazism had an “inner truth and greatness” despite Hitler’s genocidal depredations, we will be “forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because, like Heidegger, we “did nothing but talk of Being.” In this final observation, Strauss returns to the theme of the beginning of his essay, when he criticized contemporary social science for failing to understand tyranny. What they did, trivially, Heidegger did, grandly, and neither did adequately. Strauss undertook something along the lines of the Socratic turn away from philosophy as ‘natural science,’ urging philosophers and potential philosophers to join with him.

So, Athens. What of Jerusalem? As Hancock rightly observes, “the fundamentally moral-political bearing of Leo Strauss’s defense of classical philosophy indeed lies deeper than his formal openness to the perennial questions of the Western tradition.” In his preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss again situates himself in contemporary life, this time even more ‘personally’ than he did when alluding to the failings of the social ‘scientists’ who surrounded him at the University of Chicago. In Germany in the years 1925-28, when he wrote this book, Strauss, by his own account was “a young Jew living born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grips of the theologico-political predicament.” The regime of liberal democracy in Germany was new and weak. It had been founded after the failure of the monarchic regime established after Bismarck had united the 37 German states under one Reich. The Weimar Republic took its bearings from an unsteady compromise between “the principles of 1789” and “the highest German tradition,” the medieval tradition stemming from the long-lost Holy Roman Empire, which had been dominated by Germans. The weakness of the Weimar Republic was easily seen: it was “unable to use the sword,” it could not defend justice against the rival gangs of Nazis and Communists that attacked one another in the streets. Liberal democracy itself was discredited when the liberal democracies betrayed their own principles by imposing the Treaty of Versailles, with its punitive measures that struck the German people themselves, not only the monarchy. In the struggle with the Communists, the Nazis won for the same reason Lenin’s Bolsheviks had taken Russia: their leader was stronger-willed, more ruthless and daring, and exerted more power over his followers than his enemies. 

There is a broader explanation for all this, and Strauss avails himself of it on the grounds that “it is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low” because to understand the high in the light of the low,” to engage in ‘reductionism,’ “necessarily distorts the high,” whereas to understand the low in the light of the high “does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is.” The name ‘Weimar’ “refers one to the greatest epoch of German thought and letters, to the epoch extending from the last third of the eighteenth century to the first third of the nineteenth century”—the epoch whose most distinguished man was Goethe. This epoch had been initiated by Germans’ enthusiasm for Rousseau. As “the first modern critic of the fundamental modern project,” the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, Rousseau “laid the foundation for the distinction, so fateful for German thought, between civilization”—the realm of Enlightenment rationalism, modern science—and “culture”—the realm of moral and esthetic sentiments. “The radicalization and deepening of Rousseau’s thought by classical German philosophy culminating in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” legitimated under German circumstances not Rousseauian republicanism but a constitutional monarchy “in the hands of highly educated civil servants appointed by a hereditary king.” Elsewhere, Strauss remarks that Rousseau’s claim that human nature is malleable tends to undermine his affirmation of natural right, to make it open to thoroughgoing revision, indeed to the abandonment of natural right for ‘historical right.’ Here, however, he is content to point to another effect of Rousseau’s thought, which issued “prepared not only the French Revolution and classical German philosophy but also that extreme reaction to the French Revolution which is German romanticism” (as seen in young Goethe’s “Young Werther,” later deplored by the mature Goethe). German Romanticism fostered a “longing for the Middle Ages” that “began in Germany in the same moment in which the actual Middle Ages—the Holy Roman Empire ruled by a German—ended, in what was then thought to be the moment of Germany’s deepest humiliation.” The stubbornness of this political nostalgia not only militated against modern, natural-rights republicanism, it “explains why the situation of the indigenous Jews” like Strauss and his family “was more precarious in Germany than in any other Western country.” Medieval Europe was a place where Jews suffered sporadic assaults, pogroms, in the name of theologico-political sentiments fostered by the Catholic Church. “According to liberal democracy, the bond of society is universal human morality, whereas religion (positive religion) is a private affair; in the Middle Ages religion, that is, Catholic Christianity, was the bond of society.” Romanticism held out not Catholic Christianity but nationalism as the social bond; nationalism comports with statism, Bismarck’s project of political unification. German Jews “owed their emancipation” not to the Church but “to the French Revolution or to its effects” in Germany. And it was not until the Weimar Republic that Jews were “given full political rights” there. The Nazi regime founded upon a backlash against German liberal democracy was also “the only regime that ever was anywhere which had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews”—not, to be sure, in the name of Catholic Christianity but in the name of biological pseudoscience pretending to prove that certain ‘races,’ first and foremost ‘the Jews,’ were by nature not only unequal, inferior, but evil, worthy only of eradication.

Crucially, German Jews themselves had made themselves vulnerable at the time of their emancipation by “becom[ing] open to the influx of German thought,” which was not universalist (whether rationalist or Catholic) but “German essentially.” This made German Jews politically and even spiritually dependent upon Germans who were, however, still unfavorable to Jews, now on nationalist instead of religious grounds. “The German-Jewish problem was never solved,” not even by liberalism. The turn to political Zionism, a Jewish nationalism mirroring German nationalism in its secular/humanist orientation, continued to make assimilation impossible. The subsequent compromise, cultural Zionism, emphasized not the quest for a Jewish homeland but respect for the “Jewish heritage”; it “fell between the sternness of nationalism and the sternness of divine revelation,” in a way paralleling the eventual weakness of the Weimar Republic. 

Admittedly, “human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions,” whatever historicists may say. “To realize that the Jewish problem is insoluble means never to forget the truth proclaimed by Zionism regarding the limitations of liberalism.” Liberalism distinguishes between the state and society, recognizing a legally protected “private sphere” into which it places religion. But religions distinguish sharply between insiders and outsiders, the faithful and the heretical. If the state cannot intervene powerfully in the private sphere, it cannot protect society from religious antagonisms; yet insofar as the state curtails privacy it curtails liberalism. In reaction to this dilemma, Jewish thinkers, most prominently Franz Rosenzweig, attempted a return to Judaism, not on the basis of tradition, which modern rationalism had so seriously wounded, but on the basis of a “present experience” of God which “every human being can have if he does not refuse himself to it,” the experience of the ‘Thou’ by the ‘I,’ as Martin Buber put it, following Rosenzweig. 

But this too led to a problem. The ‘I-Thou’ experience presents itself as beyond reason. But so does late-modern philosophy, also beginning with Rousseau but intensifying with Nietzsche and culminating in Heidegger. Heidegger rejects the God of the Bible, more or less on Nietzschean grounds. The God of the Bible is a providential god, promising security to His people. In the Bible, God’s grace redeems and perfects nature, including human nature. Heidegger denies that we have any such security. Human life is ‘existential’ precisely because the human soul is “essentially historical,” always changing, without any “unchangeable essence or limits.” For Nietzsche, this can only be answered by the coming not of Christ but of the Superman, the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ, the synthesis of Rome, which subsumed Athens politically by means of military conquest, and Jerusalem, which subsumed Judaism by means of Christianity. The philosophy of the future is “the outcome of a will,” a superhuman will that is not the God of the Christian Bible. Heidegger urges a similar notion, but with a more decidedly Christian spin: his ‘existentialism’ emphasizes not triumphalism but anguish, guilt, even as it continues to uphold what Heidegger supposed “the inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, namely, its rejection of modern rationalism.

The seduction of German Jews by German thought did not in the end make them seem more German to the Germans but instead made them hesitant to return to Judaism either by the path of Tradition or the path of direct, present experience of God. This is where Spinoza comes in. “Orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.” As a Jew, Spinoza defended not Judaism but modern philosophy and its “new understanding of ‘nature'” as an object to be conquered. That is, he “restored the dignity of speculation” against revelation but on the new, Machiavellian/Baconian/Hobbesian foundation. With the Bible, “he understands all things as proceeding from, not made or created by, a single being or origin,” but entirely unlike the Bible, he “no longer regards this process as a descent or decay, but as an ascent or unfolding: the end is higher than the origin.” ‘God’ is no longer the Creator-God of the Bible but an immanent energy in all things, the god of pantheism. Therefore, the “highest form of knowledge” is not knowledge of the originating One but of the resulting Many. In the central passage of Strauss’s “Preface,” he writes that Spinoza at least “appears to originate the kind of philosophic system which views the fundamental processus as progress,” thereby preparing the ground for German ‘idealism.’ “God’s might is his right, and therefore the power of every being is as such its right; Spinoza lifts Machiavellianism to theological heights,” beyond good and evil.

And this metaphysical stance, Spinoza’s contention that the Many are superior to the One, also favors liberal democracy; “he was the philosopher who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime,” influencing in turn Rousseau and in Germany Kant. He is still a natural-rights thinker of a sort, but one who has abandoned the “strictness and austerity which classical political philosophy shares with ancient law,” including Jewish law, a thinker “free from the classical aversion to commercialism” and from the “traditional demand for sumptuary laws,” giving “the passions much greater freedom” and counting “much less on the power of reason than the polity of the classics” did. This flows from his pantheism. “For whereas for the classics the life of passion is a life against nature, for Spinoza everything that is, is natural.” If nature is to be conquered, then freedom from it consists of the adoption of the new science, the new sort of reason, which will rule against nature. “He thus decisively prepares the modern notion of the ‘ideal’ as a work of the human mind or as a human project, as distinguished from an end imposed on man by nature”—the triumph of ‘freedom’ so conceived, overcoming the limits of necessity. 

Without the Biblical God, there is no need for Biblically-inspired priests. Philosophers and artists can take their place; in this, one sees the origin of ‘cultural’ Zionism and before it, German Kultur. With the pantheistic god and the philosophers and artists who align themselves with It (no longer a ‘Him,’ a Person), “the millennial antagonism between Judaism and Christianity was about to disappear,” as “the new Church would transform Jews and Christians into human beings,” into “cultured human beings” who, “because they possessed science and art, did not need religion in addition.” Freedom, emancipation of Jews could follow from this in a “secular redemption” of mutual assimilation. The new Church requires a new catechism, which Spinoza provides in the form of “seven dogmas which are the indispensable fundamentals of the faith.” These dogmas “do not contain anything specifically Christian nor anything specifically Jewish,” instead undergirding “a society of which Jews and Christians can be equally members, of which Jews and Christians can be equal members.” 

Spinozism differs from the Hegelianism which eventually prevailed, after the several iterations and alterations that philosophers effected prior to Hegel. The constructivist, ‘synthesizing’ dialectical logic of change Hegel introduced was not Spinoza’s logic, which remained rooted in the classical understanding of the principle of non-contradiction, a principle that maintains natural limits to things and does not fire an ambition to manipulate them in accordance with human will or ‘freedom’ as conceived by the moderns. In terms of Judaism as distinct from philosophy, Orthodox Judaism cannot contest Spinozism on its own grounds, which preclude miracles and divine revelation as the Bible presents them. “But the case is entirely different if orthodoxy limits itself to the assertion that it believes the aforementioned things” but does not know them. “For all the assertions of orthodoxy rest on the irrefutable premise that the omnipotent God, whose will is unfathomable, whose ways are not our ways, who has decided to dwell in the thick darkness, may exist.” To believe that he does is to open one’s mind to the possibility of miracles and of the necessity of divine revelation of truths which our intellect cannot reach high enough to grasp. On that foundation, “the orthodox premise cannot be refuted by experience nor by recourse to the principle of contradiction.” This is why Spinoza and the Enlightenment writers who followed him attacked orthodoxy with “laughter and mockery.” But mockery isn’t refutation. “The genuine refutation of orthodoxy would require the proof that the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” Such a refutation would require the establishment of a comprehensive “philosophic system” whereby man “show[s] himself theoretically and practically as the master of the world and the master of his life,” replacing “the merely given world” with a “world created by man theoretically and practically”—a new heaven and a new earth, to borrow a phrase from the New Testament. Neither Spinoza, nor Hegel, nor Marx, nor anyone else has succeeded in producing such a system, much less in substantiating it in practice. This means that “philosophy, the quest for evident and necessary knowledge, rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of the will, just as faith.” The “antagonism between Spinoza and Judaism, between unbelief and belief, is ultimately not theoretical but moral.”

In Jewish terms, this moral antagonism fundamentally involves a choice between the austere commands of God and the lax materialism of Epicureanism, an Epicureanism not necessarily made more plausible by investing matter with divinity, by invoking pantheism, by making Epicureanism “bold and active” with commerce, secular republicanism, and the scientific conquest of nature, with modern ‘idealism.’ For himself, in terms of morality, Strauss points not to metaphysics, to speculative origins of Being, but to the real, practical results of the modern project. “In proportion as the systematic effort to liberate man completely from all nonhuman bonds seems to succeed, the doubt increases of whether the goal is not fantastic—whether man has not become smaller and more miserable in proportion as the systematic civilization progresses.” The “belief that by pushing even farther back the ‘natural limits’ man will advance to ever greater freedom, that he can subjugate nature and prescribe to it his laws, begins to wither away,” more surely than the modern state withers away, as Marx and Lenin had promised in their attempts to further the project of freeing man from nature. So far, the philosophic response has been ‘existentialism’—Heideggerianism. But the practical result of Heideggerianism was Nazism, the attempt to destroy Jews (and not only Jews). Mass murder by Nazis and Communists aimed at liberating humanity from the shackles imposed by ‘inferior races’ or ‘class enemies,’ respectively, did not succeed even in their own terms, let alone the terms of any other morality, religious or philosophic. The will to power “was said to be a fact,” beyond good and evil. But that alleged fact led to consequences confirming for Strauss “that it would be unwise to say farewell to reason.” Accordingly, “I began to wonder”—wonder being the initial impetus to philosophizing—whether “the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and it classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation.” And as for revelation, the command to obey God’s laws and judgments, the initial impetus to such obedience being not wonder but fear of God, this had been seen as the Israelites’ “wisdom and understanding” by the Gentiles themselves, who called the Israelites “a wise and understanding people.” 

In considering Strauss’s “Preface,” Hancock gets right to the heart of the argument. Strauss intends to recover “the primordial unity of Athens and Jerusalem, that he often leaves all but unspoken,” a unity that “now depends upon respecting their difference, even their incommensurability.” Judaism’s “honorable pretensions” to “rationalism,” to the work of classical philosophy, “led it to throw in its lot with modern rationalism, which turns out to be fundamentally irrational because it has tried to provide its own ground and thus has flouted the limits of human nature.” In retreating from the mistaken venture of “modern irrational rationalism,” Judaism has fallen into modern irrationalism, leaving it vulnerable to Heidegger, “who reveals the dark depths of the rejection of the philosophical tradition, the fall into an abyss of death and nothingness,” existentialism. Strauss draws back from all of this. In its stead, he “directs us…to a ground common to the Bible and to classical philosophy,” returning to classical political philosophy and to “the alternative Athens/Jerusalem.” That alternative is indeed a real alternative. Reason is not revelation; wonder is not fear. But the two approaches to wisdom can be seen to be congruent in Thomas Aquinas’ insight: “Grace perfects nature, it does not destroy nature.” That is, “the Bible and the classics agree…on the natural authority of nobility and justice: every noble person is concerned with finding transcendent support for justice.” “Biblical law and classical reason spring from a common root in the orientation toward an eternity that limits and defines humanity; he sees this natural, finite horizon as opposed to the Christian and modern destruction of a finite moral order in favor of the ‘spiritual’ teaching of a ‘transcendent’ or fully open possibility, whether Christian or ‘rationalist.'” His more obvious insistence on the sharp distinction between reason and revelation is “a staged showdown” in which he puts the rationalism of the earlier moderns against the irrationalism of the later moderns (as they prefer to call themselves) ‘postmoderns.’ For Strauss, Hancock remarks, ‘modern’ includes ‘Christian’; the Bible conveying God’s revelation is the ‘Old’ Testament. Christianity radicalized “Platonic transcendence” and thereby inaugurated modernity not only politically (with the seeds of ‘democracy’ or egalitarianism, as Tocqueville maintains) but philosophically, by severing the link between the Creator-God and the human beings he created, which was the Law, placing that link instead in faith in Christ, the new intermediary. But faith is a less firm bond than law. “Christian spirituality” desires “a synthesis of Greek philosophical transcendence with the mysterious God who gave law to the Jews,” and the results have never been good for Jews. Nor have they been good, long-term, for Gentiles, except in the material sense of prosperity, the pleasures of neo-Epicureanism, for those who have avoided ruin in modernity’s wars. Hancock considers “Strauss’s discreet but powerful critique of Christianity” as pertinent to this day, “as the residues of Christian ‘love’ are exploited in a movement of universalization with no content but liberation from law and virtue.”

Strauss’s own choice for the philosophic way, natural right in the classical rather than the modern sense, derives from his judgment that Orthodoxy is a less likely path for moderns seeking a rediscovery of “the rudimentary distinction between good and bad.” That rediscovery is urgent, given the enormities of the previous half-century and the persistence of historicist thought in its Communist form. Without the “horizon of eternity and its inherent recognition of the limits of human action, tyranny can claim the excuse of the highest ideals for the lowest deeds; humans can be tempted to do obviously bad things in the name of universal, transformative ends.” Practically speaking, this means liberal education, where the (very rough) counterparts of the gentlemen still taught the young, and the defense of “liberal democratic constitutionalism as the best possible approximation of a classical mixed regime.” 

Hancock deems this a “fragile strategy,” as indeed Strauss may well have done. Strauss nonetheless “offers the most perspicacious of all critiques of modern rationalism because he never loses sight of the question of the good of thinking and, therefore, of the problem of the relation between the goods of theory and practical goods.” “Serious Christians” should take note of the potential, and indeed long-realized dangers of their faith. But if a Christian “hold[s] on to the promise of a salvation beyond worldly limits while acknowledging the inescapability in this world of both pagan pride and coercive law,” of what Jacques Maritain calls “a tough mind”—one that is “firm and clear”—and “a tender heart”—one that is “soft and open” the beckoning of the Holy Spirit—then our “wrestling with this problem, both in theory and in practice, is not only a moral necessity but somehow an apprenticeship in our eternal freedom”—the spiritual warfare that prepares souls for a place in the regime of God.

“I suffer, therefore I am. I am a victim. I am that I am a victim. This is the implicit fundamental creed of late Western humanity,” a claim to know, a claim of identity, and a claim of unchallengeable, godlike (“I am that I am”) authority. So begins Ralph Hancock’s profound meditation on ‘postmodern’ moral and political sentiment. Politically, the ‘I’ becomes ‘We’: Those who suffer, and they alone, wield a rightful claim not merely to receive assistance but to rule. Victims of oppression not only have the right to overthrow their oppressors but the right to rule them until they have mended their moral, political, and spiritual ways, as determined by the erstwhile victims. 

Hancock refuses the temptation to mock or trivialize these claims. “Until we can confidently answer the self-described victim’s claim to a privileged moral status, we cannot articulate a defense of our civilization.” The “ideology of victimhood…challenges our very understanding of our humanity” and, crucially, draws upon the foundations of that understanding and of that civilization to do so. It bespeaks two impulses. The first derives from philosophy, specifically from Rousseau; it longs for a return to a pre-civilized, innocent ‘state of nature’ in which all of us are equal, without the conventional hierarchies inherent in civilization. The second derives from but is surely not the same as a Christian command; it demands an emptying of the ‘self,’ an absolute openness to the claims of ‘the other,’ the victim, “voiding whatever moral feelings or convictions we may hold to embrace another’s standpoint.” It is as if Christ on the Cross emptied Himself of His human-all-too-human character not make of Himself a sacrifice, not to suffer the punishment for the sins of all past, present, and future human beings in obedience to His Father’s command, but to empty Himself of His own “standpoint” as the Creator and supreme Judge of those sins and of those sinners. 

Victimology’s double impulse thus “demands the same“—demands respect for own supposed underlying and shared identities as (injured) innocents—while also demanding “a kind of absolute transcendence, a repudiation of one’s own good in favor not of some other understanding of the good but for the sake of ‘the other,’ pure and simple,” affirming his/her/their/its own identity, self-defined. I, morally, and we, politically, must empty ourselves of our conception of the good for the sake of the ‘other’ on the basis of the claim that we are both radically equal as sufferers of civilizational inequalities. “The apparently opposite claims of the self and the other, absolute self-identity and absolute self-emptying for the other, are strict practical correlates.” We must therefore reject “the actual goods“—plural—inscribed “in the concrete institutions and ways of life of any real society, any actual moral and political order,” all goods “mediated by particular, finite, and imperfect institutions.” But this rejection of goods “in fact reject[s] the good, precisely because we have no access to any intrinsic goodness that is not in any way or to any degree contaminated by human mediation, moral, political, and religious.” Those mediations are all tokens of civilized—unequal, immoral—human beings. “For the victim, mediation is oppression”; it is rather “my common victimhood, my participation in victimhood, my communion with the oppressed,” that “is my very humanity, my essential being.” To translate such claims into politics (since despisers of civilization must somehow also say that everything is political), postmodern egalitarians must engage in the paradoxical practices of “aggressive victimhood” and “predatory humility.” Hancock urges that if we do not relearn “how to stand in, and therefore to stand up for, our humanity, even while confessing a God who descended below all things (Ephesians 4) to offer himself as the victim, we will not have supplied an alternative to the cult of victimhood.” A philosophic answer alone won’t do, because we are dealing not only with a Rousseauian but a spiritual demand. And just as Christianity is not a theory but a way of life —a practice guided not by a principle but by a Person—so too Hancock proposes an ethics not of theory but of practice, one “reconciled to the necessity of the mediation of tradition and politics as a kind of first philosophy and theology,” suggesting that “philosophy and theology, reason and faith, are insuperably bound up together for the most rigorous and self-aware thinker.”

Hancock therefore offers a critique of ‘critique,’ a critique of today’s dominant theory, which is “a secularized and purely horizontal humanitarianism,” an egalitarianism that finally requires what Tocqueville predicted egalitarianism must require, namely, pantheism—the rejection of an absolutely holy or separate and unequal, unqualifiedly superior God for a ‘god’ which (not ‘who’) pervades all things as energy pervades and is convertible to matter (and vice-versa). The answer to egalitarian humanitarianism, the morality and politics of victimhood, is “virtue-religion,” a reasonable faith “in which transcendence does not exclude the real goodness of practical virtue, or, in Thomas Aquinas’s terms, in which grace does not destroy but perfects nature.”

“To act is to aim at some good,” a good that “always has a public dimension,” inasmuch as we all live in communities and would not exist if a male human being and a female human being had not joined in producing us, and if some human being or beings had not protected, nourished, and taught us, shaping our ethos, our character, in relation to the character of themselves and of the political society composed of other human beings beyond our family. If those things had not occurred, we would have no “minimal experience in the good,” no standard of action, however imperfectly we may live up to it. Victimhood, however, “adopts a purely negative standpoint,” claiming “to name an oppressor without taking responsibility for defining what a common existence without ‘oppression’ would look like.” In this, it resembles those forms of communitarianism that beckon us to revolutionary action without specifying what things will look like after the revolution has been effected, what regime will replace the old regime—or perhaps telling us that there will be no regimes at all, any more, only human beings (whatever they will turn out to be) living in unlimited freedom and complete equality. The logos of victimo-logy, combining or ‘synthesizing’ “pure Sameness” and “pure Otherness,” exempts itself “from the practical problem of constructive action in the world, action for a practical good.” In so doing, victimology has appropriated the language if not the ethos of Christianity, the language of love. “Love wins.” “Love Has No Labels.” Indeed, and in a way indisputably, “Love is Love.” The Beatles put it to music: “All you need is love.” Question authority but “do not even think about questioning ‘love,’ understood as absolute acceptance and nonjudgmental empathy, as the sole standard of human goodness.” Hancock calls this notion of love, a sort of transcendent self-reflection, “the mirrored dome that arcs over our heads.” Under this dome, “all true individualism must be laid low; there must be no permanent, authoritative pillars of order, no mediating representations between the all-too-human and the divine.” Pantheism rejects mediation, since God and humanity are as interchangeable as energy and matter. 

Hancock cites the important work of Daniel J. Mahoney, who calls this “humanitarian pantheism,” with its “endless project of humanitarian equalization” the “idol of our age.” All “vertical aspirations to nobility or virtue” must be sacrificed to the horizontal-humanitarian god, a god to whom no one need look up since “divinity has no meaning other than humanity,” a humanity that “can mean nothing but the complex of (1) material necessity, (2) trivialized, empty freedom, and (3) spirituality converted into warfare serving (1) and (2)—that is, warfare for a ‘justice’ that is pervasively, exclusively, ‘social.'” The problem is that “the ideal form of universality can never be fully reconciled with the givenness and particularity of actual humanity.” This fact may well animate increasing demands for the ‘trans-human,’ beyond but encompassing the ‘trans-sexual’ in morality and the ‘trans-national’ therapeutics-without-borders in politics. “How can universal truth (whether understood to be rational or revealed) accommodate human nature as inevitably inflected by particular loyalties and beliefs?” Why, because “love is love,” and “love knows no barrier of race or nationality.” Love “must prevail over all particular creeds and loyalties.” But love must have some object, someone or something deemed loveable, and that is said to be the victim, the sufferers of all forms of inequality, which is now defined as oppression. 

This ideology derives from Christianity. Christianity is indeed a form of universalism. It overcomes “the particularism of the Jews,” the first receivers of God’s “rigorous, revealed law.” Christianity also overcomes “the natural particularism of our political condition, authoritatively described by Aristotle,” The Philosopher, as many Christians once called him, who argued that while “the natural virtues have a universal aspect,” they “are always bound up with the common good of particular cities or political communities,” each with its “ruling ethos” resulting from its ruling order, its regime. “Christian universalism thus necessarily confronts the particular claims of both revealed law and natural virtues, prior revelation and proud reason, Jerusalem and Athens.” Christians sometimes confront these claims very resolutely, indeed, as when Marcion rejected Judaism entirely in a non-secular form of ‘Love Wins,” and when Augustine called the pagan virtues “splendid vices,” additionally deeming philosophy too elitist-aristocratic, too much a rejection of the fact that we are all equal under God. We are all equally in need of His grace, Augustine taught, if we are to be saved from the consequences of our sin, which we all equally have, if not necessarily in equal quantities, kinds, and intensities. Hancock regards this Christian universalism not as true but deadly but as true but risky, always hovering close to “hollowing itself out, evacuating its own substance” by denying human particularity. By rejecting Christianity, modern secularism does not guard against this risk. On the contrary, it succumbs to it.

“Modern secularism is founded on a kind of mutually eroding interaction between Christian faith and pagan reason: Christian humility debunks the ‘virtuous’ pride of Greek reason, and Greek reason questions the supernatural claims of Christianity.” In Hancock’s assessment, this was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation, “a movement based on a reading of Paul and on a radicalization of Augustine,” a radical “separation of grace from nature” which “tended to deprive biblical commands of any rational support but a purely utilitarian understanding” (emphasis added). Modern philosophy, preceding and then following up on this Protestant tendency, more or less explicitly “deploy[s] Christian motives (along with others, of course) to undo Christianity” altogether. Descartes, for example, “appeals explicitly to a secularized law of humanitarian love” in order to replace Christian love—agape, caritas. Hancock distinguishes “the counterfeit from authentic Christianity,” the “holy love of a neighbor” from “the ideological project of the universal mastery of material need and inequality.” He wants to understand how we can “discern the radical Christian virtue of humility in such a way that we do not renounce the classical virtue of magnanimity and thus sacrifice our souls along with our pagan pride.” There is a sense in which, indeed, all you need is love, but personal salvation and genuine politics or civilization require loves that are quite distinct from love victimological. Christian love according to Aquinas holds, as Aquinas writes, that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it”; and since human beings “are by nature familial, social, and political beings—and, for Christian, created as such by God—the human inclination to form families and political communities and to defend our particular families and political communities”—families and communities as they actually are—was “also a legitimate given.” Having dismissed such particularity in favor of, so to speak, universal universality, Christians have given in to the universalism of secularizing modern philosophic universalism. “The universality of our Christianity has outlived the Christianity of our universalism.” 

Is it, then, “possible for nature—including our familial and political nature—to be God’s transcendentally free creation and yet for us to affirm it rationally as intrinsically, eternally, essentially good?” “This book is an essay”—in the original sense of an attempt—in “vindicating this possibility.” 

In the first of the four parts of his book, Hancock addresses the theoretical dimensions of the matter. Some time ago, I submitted a book manuscript to a publisher; it consisted of what were once called ‘close readings’ of books by André Malraux. A reader’s report came back, deploring the lack of “theory” in the manuscript, which in those days meant literary theory, which in those days meant Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism.’ My own references to Plato, Aristotle, and other such folk evidently didn’t amount to the presence of theory, despite Derrida’s own frequent recourse to them. In tune with the academic temper of the time, the editor rejected the manuscript. The reader’s complaint was an early example of what Pierre Manent calls the “hypertrophy of theory,” the inclination to use abstract notions as a substitute for looking carefully at what is in front of you. Hancock notes that in moral deliberation this practice “obscures the essential goods of practical human existence,” an existence which is indeed not only right in front but all around us and in us, too. In us, it is conscience. “Manent shows that Christian conscience can be interpreted either as the consummation of classical confidence in the inherent good, of morality or, in the form of sheer consciousness of sin, as a tipping point tending to the subversion of morality.” The postmodern moral theory that confuses Christian charity with compassion, “this flattening, secular universalization” of moral and political thought, can be countered by recourse to “the virtue of practical wisdom or prudence.” But virtues are strengths, and strength requires difficult exercise. This may be one reason why easy and lazy sentiment so often prevails over prudence.

“Can rigorous thinking support meaningful living?” While Nietzsche despised all easy ways out of the moral labyrinth, ridiculing the passive, shallow ‘Last Man,’ he also doubted the power of reason, famously preferring the ‘will to power.’ Manent traces such irrationalism to what he calls the “irreparable, unpardonable error” of modern natural right, which sought to derive moral commands from the ‘state of nature,’ the supposed condition of human life when there were no commands. This does indeed put morality under the command of the wills of those who agree to a moral code, effectively (in Hancock’s words) “render[ing] us ever more subject to the abstract and impersonal machinery of the modern state,” as is already explicit in Hobbes’s Leviathan. “Hobbes’s project truly foreshadows modern existence as the illusion of absolute freedom under the reality of absolute and inhuman sovereignty.” Hobbes in turn derives his theory from Machiavelli, who defines a “new world” to be “defined not by our human subordination to certain intrinsically moral ends but by our amoral knowledge of the circumstances or obstacles” to what we want, which is to place those circumstances or obstacles under our control, not the control of ‘Fortuna’ or, sotto voce, God. That is, he replaces both classical and Christian virtue with virtù, virtuosity, the savvy triumph of the will. 

In this, Manent argues, Machiavellianism was oddly, and inadvertently, supplemented by Martin Luther, who assuredly did not intend to conquer God and vigorously denied that he was a ‘theorist’ or philosopher. By claiming that the salvation of human souls depends solely on faith in God, Luther brought Christians to deprecate human action. The Christian believer replaces the Christian agent. And all believers are more or less equal, as believing cops and cobblers are “no less priests” than priests, equally charged with evangelizing the word of God. “This leveling is possible only because the dignity of such functions has been severed from any humanly accessible evaluation of lower and higher necessities and purposes, such as those that have framed the classical tradition of political reflection.” The spirit of leveling then begins to replace the spirit of, well, spirituality: the hierarchy of a secular realm obliged to obey “the superior, spiritual realm.” In order to undermine the priestly rule of Roman Catholicism, Luther “liberat[es] the secular from the spiritual,” making spirituality entirely “a matter of conscience,” a matter of the inner man, while making this world “wholly external,” the realm of “mortal life and property.” The inner life, Luther insists, “is immune from external force”; this contrasts with Aquinas, who “taught that political authority was essential to our humanity, even our uncorrupted humanity prior to the fall,” when human life was not mortal and there was no property. For Luther, insofar as life in ‘this world’ is lived by Christians, it registers the love of neighbor; politics ministers exclusively to the secular needs of neighbors. “Secular needs become authoritative for Christians as someone else’s needs.” If Machiavelli inaugurates the modernity of atheist ‘selfishness,’ Luther inaugurates the modernity of theist ‘otherness,’ a doctrine encompassing “the Christian duty of love.” Once Machiavelli’s atheism overtakes Christian theism, love becomes a sentiment, politics a Leninism pervaded by Lennonism. As Luther puts it, with characteristic forthrightness, “it is a Christian act and an act of love confidently to kill, rob, and pillage the enemy, and to do everything that can injure him until one has conquered him according to the methods of war.” Alternatively, such militancy can ‘go soft,’ as it does in a Beatles tune.

Philosophically, postmodernism owes a supreme debt to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s early writings clearly indicate that “Martin Luther’s idea of faith and sin played a decisive role” in his “conversion from a staunch Catholic philosopher working within an Aristotelian-Scholastic framework to an atheist philosopher who embraced temporality or historicity as the insuperable horizon of human existence.” With Luther, Heidegger insisted that human corruption “can never be grasped radically enough,” that “hope comes not from works but from suffering.” Consistent with the overall tendency of Lutheranism, Heidegger regards “all human action” as “presumptuous and sinful.” As with Luther, nothing in humanity is not ruined by sin. Human nature is in no way naturally inclined toward God; “the being of man as such is itself sin,” the “real core” of humanness. Hancock comments, “We might say that Heidegger uses Luther to deconstruct Aristotle,” then “uses Aristotle to deconstruct Luther” by avoiding any belief in “a transcendent personal divinity.” Thus, while “an Aristotelian method strips Luther of God Luther strips Aristotle of the Good,” in a “mutual erosion of faith and reason” characteristic of postmodernity—existentialism in place of essentialism. “Rebellion and flight are the human condition, and authentic human existence is nothing but the lucid and resolute embrace of this condition.” In sum, “the absolute denial of a natural orientation toward the good,” whether in its modern, atheistic Machiavellian form or in its Lutheran form—with Heideggerianism as a sort of synthesis of the two—”entails a wholesale repudiation of the practical standpoint of the insuperable ‘gap’ of action,” that is, the gap between creator-God and created Man, philosophic theory and political practice, wisdom as sophia and wisdom as phronēsis. 

Hancock follows his account of Manent’s dissection of postmodernism with an account of Manent’s remedy for healing. In his turn, Manent follows Aquinas, who writes that to know God is to “join with one unknown.” That is, knowledge of the Creator will always be partial knowledge. In this, Aquinas follows the pattern less of Aristotle, ‘the master of all who know,’ but of Socrates, who turned from speculation about the heavens, from what we call the ‘philosophy of science,’ the attempt to know the enormous cosmos, to the surer knowledge of human beings, those political animals he sought out in the Athenian marketplace. Practical knowledge is more certain than theoretical knowledge. For the Thomistic Manent, this means that “practical life guided by the hope of eternal salvation is life ‘directed and judged by my conscience,” a conscience “not absolute and purely individual but a matter of ‘more or less’ and decisively mediated by the institutional church.” That is, just as the “gap” between God and man requires the Son to mediate between the Father and those who offend Him with their inveterate sinfulness, so too the gap between our conscience and our sinful impulses must be mediated by the regime of God on earth, the ecclesia or assembly of God, His Church. But although Manent affirms much of the Thomistic view, he clearly sees what Hancock calls “the limitations of the medieval understanding.” There is indeed a “continuity between the natural condition (as articulated, notably, by Aristotle) and the Christian condition,” but there is also “a fundamental discontinuity” between them. 

Manent takes Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity seriously and, it might be added, Luther’s critique of human nature seriously. There is something to Machiavelli’s cynical insistence on the contrast between what we say and what we do, “between the end [people] imagine and the actual motives of action.” Christianity, as he charges, can indeed lend itself to a “pretentious passivity.” This occurs when conscience is misconceived as merely the recipient of God’s grace and not as “the emblem of the continuity between nature and Christianity, the culmination of Aristotelian reflective choice and, therefore, of the true, practical condition of humanity,” a condition that requires prudential or practical reasoning if it is to make its way in the world on a path towards God. Reasoning is necessary because the path is narrow and winding, given the discontinuity between human nature and grace. That is, there is something to Luther’s claim that “the invisible and radically internal domain of the Christian soul is essentially incommunicable with respect to the visible realm in which the citizen acts.” “To recover a true and natural perspective of action—to recover natural law within the perspective of an openness to a divinity that infinitely transcends our humanity—must then require honoring the moral truth of Christianity while knowing how to avoid its overreach and, therefore, its collapse, a collapse that brings with it the loss of the classical-Christian truth of moral agency.” Manent regards Christianity both to fulfill nature and to risk undermining it. Christianity fulfills human nature by teaching that human beings can and should be more than the social and political conventions with which they live, which they have instituted for themselves. Christianity does this because conscience “crystallizes the moment of individual responsibility, the deeply personal and individual character of moral agency” under the regime of God and not only the regime of Man. In this sense, Christianity “Christian conscience is the supernatural fulfillment of the classical, natural understanding of reflective moral choice,” inasmuch as it is highly imprudent to ignore the laws of God, both natural and revealed. This notwithstanding, “the individualizing and transcending claims of conscience risk destroy confidence in all concrete norms,” which are “always connected in some way with the natural goods of particular human individuals and communities.” Speaking for himself, Hancock proposes that the good found only in the regime or ‘city’ of God, being “utterly beyond attainment by man’s natural powers,” can beckon human beings toward “hypertrophy,” as indeed can a misconceived Platonism, which without irony, that shield of prudence, holds up the standard of the best regime in a way that denigrates the ways of life human beings must consider on this mortal coil. The quest for “a unified and comprehensive system,” “a single rational standard” for human life—namely, “the contemplation of eternal, self-sufficient truth, as the highest good and lodestar of human action”—will not suffice for the conduct of real life. This is why Manent “declines to follow the ancient Greeks,” preferring an understanding of the cardinal virtues as, to be sure, “quite stable and universal in their manifestations in various regimes and cultures,” but “actualized not as independent ends-in-themselves to be grasped by theory but in practical, political deliberations relative to a particular regime and thus as means to further ends.” The good does indeed have a “structure,” but that structure can only be seen in practice, with “Christian humility and even…modern skepticism” (e.g., Hume). That is, modern and postmodern life needs a “humbling of theory in order to release the inherent good of practice.” 

Having repudiated, each in its own way, “the evidence of practice” and “the claims of natural virtue,” modern philosophy and Protestantism have prepared the way for “a new, awakened secular spirituality for which the rivalry between reason and revelation,” still very much alive in previous centuries, “has been forgotten.” “Leftism has become a religion.” “Wokeness” parallels—some might say parodies—the philosophers’ ‘enlightenment’ and ‘consciousness’ as well as Christian’s receiving of the Holy Spirit. And while “woke religion violates common sense,” common sense “needs help defending against this violation.” Common sense receives little help in this from the modern state, since the attempt to manage Church-state relations by separating Church from state has in practice elevated the state over religion, whether in the monarchist France of the late Bourbons or in democratic America. Nor do the churches help, as Christianity for the most part forsakes the goal of salvation for the cultivation of humanitarian sentiment.

To say ‘humanitarian,’ however, raises questions: What is it? What is its purpose—what is good for it? Since Rousseau, we moderns have tended to say that the good inheres in the body, and the beginning of remedying the body’s health is pity. But, as Manent sees, when “the notion of evil tends to merge with physical suffering” it is impossible to distinguish between the rights of human beings and the rights of animals. If that is humanitarianism, then we are left with a morality of “weak and self-interested sentiment,” unable to make war or to defend the peace. This impotence of practice mirrors the omnipotence of imagination. Indeed, “Imagine” is another John Lennon tune, inviting us to worship humankind “as the Grand-Être that determines our horizon: imagine there’s no Heaven, and the world will live as one. Fat chance, common sense responds, but what chance has common sense to intervene when we ‘motivate’ ourselves with (to borrow from a song the Beatles didn’t write) feelings, nothing more than feelings. Pity isn’t Christian charity; for starters, charity isn’t easy. It is a virtue, and its aim, “otherworldly salvation” is so hard to achieve that human beings need divine help to obtain it. It is “an active disposition of the will,” activated not by human powers but by God’s power of providential grace. 

With regard to the state, which rules Christians and non-Christians, the Church has “a public role.” It mediates, connecting self-government, which human beings can practice regardless of their religious convictions, with “a confidence in the primacy of the good.” Such confidence is natural to human beings; André Malraux—no Christian—titled his novel set in the Spanish Civil War L’Espoir. “Human action at its best—that is, action according to the enduring cardinal virtues—naturally opens upon a hope for and in something ‘bigger than us, too big for us.'” As Christian citizens, Manent writes, “we address the Most High from the site of our action and for the common good of the city of which we are citizens.” And non-Christian citizens still want the good for something bigger than themselves, namely, their political community. If the human good was put into man by God at creation, leaving him “in the hands of his own counsel, then the nation takes part in creation’s goodness” and, in Hancock’s words, “rational, virtuous deliberation in the production of a political common good has divine significance,” being part of God’s intention for his creations. And even atheists and agnostics reject such deliberation at their peril if they put their trust in their own sentiments, reeds that are either too weak or too blindly powerful for their own good. Love in sentimental sense is not all you need.

God’s charity or love, as distinguished from all-too-human humanitarianism “guides and perfects the natural virtues,” “activat[ing] and extend[ing] our natural propensity to virtue. Hancock again cites Mahoney, who writes that “charity must be interpreted in the light of prudence.” In so saying, however, Mahoney’s elevation of “the mediating virtue of prudence,” which Hancock rightly calls an “urgent truth,” was urged by Jesus Himself, who commanded His followers to be innocent or harmless as doves but also prudent as serpents (Matthew 10:16). The passage is often translated “wise as serpents,” but the Greek word is a derivative of phronēsis, not of sophia. God evidently didn’t even need to read Aristotle to recognize the need for practical wisdom.

The modern philosophers, from Machiavelli to Heidegger, all draw upon Christian themes, typically in an attempt to substitute their own principles, whether natural or historical, for Christian charity, claiming that they can more effectually bring humanity to the goods it wants than the Church can. This, of course, can only be plausible if God and the human need for spiritual rather than bodily salvation remains well in the background. To do this, the moderns appeal the charm of equality that Christianity fosters, although in the moderns’ case this isn’t equality under God for the purpose of calling into question the eternal value of human hierarchies. Hancock finds more recent examples of this modern project in the writings of the United States, Britain, and France, respectively: from the philosophy professors John Rawls, Larry Siedentop, and Alain Badiou.

As “the most authoritative author of late progressive liberalism,” Rawls presents us with a perfect example of Manent’s “hypertrophy of theory.” A neo-Kantian, he repudiates “the practical point of view” and human nature altogether as sources of moral guidance. His well-known and doggedly egalitarian concepts—the “original position,” the “veil of ignorance,” and the “two principles of justice”—all depend upon “Rawls’s deep commitment to an obviously post-Protestant ‘purity of heart.'” Human beings are indeed “naturally moral,” he allows, but only “in the sense that they naturally receive the stamp of whatever morality, whatever conception of justice, a society authorizes.” He rejects such relativism while also rejecting the available universal principle of hedonism. “The only way to achieve true freedom, rationality, and humanity,” he supposes, “is to be prepared absolutely to sacrifice any concept of what is good, including emphatically any allegedly ‘higher’ good, to a system of justice based on a pure conception of right,” there being “no right or natural or divinely ordained ‘order of the soul,’ but only  ‘unity of the self’ defined by a purely social, purely horizontal reciprocity of rights, and thus by the conviction that ‘we participate in one another’s nature,'” realizing our selves “in the activity of many selves”—social existence being “the absolute horizon of human existence.” “The heart of Rawls’s Theory of Justice is the sacrifice of natural and unequal virtue to a spiritualized project of material equality”—welfare-state liberalism. However, such a moral theory, unbounded by any nature beyond purity of heart (which isn’t all that natural among humans), and therefore unbounded by prudence, is “inherently self-radicalizing,” not long to be confined to the modest measures of ‘progressive’ liberalism once upheld within the confines of Harvard Yard. Victimology has overcome it.

In his Inventing the Individual, Siedentop takes a more historicizing stance, claiming that “Christian belief is the wellspring of the moral idea of a community of equal and free individuals that we associate with modern ‘secularism.'” On that basis, he hopes to effect a marriage between Christians and secular liberals. In Siedentop’s reading of the New Testament, Paul invents individuality, if not its heir, modern individuality. Paul overthrows “the hierarchical political, spiritual, and intellectual framework of pagan civilization.” Even or even especially the ancient philosophers instantiate this hierarchy, as seen in Plato’s rigorously aristocratic dialogue, The Republic—more literally, Regime, Politeia. Paul “blasted this aristocratic framework, igniting a transformation with revolutionary social and intellectual consequences that are still unfolding in our times.” The social consequence of Pauline Christianity is of course ‘democracy’ in Tocqueville’s sense: social equality’s gradual but sure conquest of aristocracies everywhere. The intellectual consequence is “a new view of reason” that “prepares modern rationalism because it abandons the hierarchical claims of reason’s rule and instead bases reason on an egalitarian and universalist faith,” an “imperative of universal freedom and equality.” As early as Judaism, Siedentop writes, “Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will” (emphasis added)— obedience not to a god who is Logos but a Being who avers, “I will be who I will be.” To this, Paul adds a “vision of a mystical union with Christ,” one that “introduces a revised notion of rationality,” which seems foolish to the philosophers. According to Siedentop, the ancient philosophers, imprisoned by the aristocratic regime of the polis, could only conceive of inequality as natural. Natural equality made no sense to them. But in Paul’s formulation, “Judaism’s favoring of law and command over logos or reason, its preoccupation with ‘conformity to a higher or divine will,’ is miraculously combined with the maximal extension of reason’s empire, with ‘the abstracting potential of later Hellenistic philosophy.'” Hancock finds this reminiscent of the distinction made by Manent in his Metamorphoses of the City—the distinction between the few and the many that animated “the natural life of the city,” the polis, disappears into “the one-all pair” of the Roman Empire, which the Hellenistic philosophers reflect. This “finds theological expression in Christianity, and continues to haunt modern secular humanism.” For Manent, “the one and the all, radical transcendence and reductive equality, are two sides of the same spiritual coin. The difference between Manent and Sidentop is not so much in their analyses but in their reactions to what they describe. Siedentop finds the “joint reign” of “the absolute one and the formless egalitarian” as “altogether unproblematic.” Manent still finds virtue in some aspects of the limits seen in the polis. And he also sees the God, the Christ, not simply of Paul but of John: the God Who is Logos, not simply a Being of will and therefore of ever-changing mind or logos, a God approached only by “a leap of faith.” As is so often the case on the ‘Left,’ the supposedly fluid character of the ultimate Reality always flows in the same direction: egalitarianism. This is how Siedentop can call for a marriage of Christianity and secularism. In his eyes, they both aim at the same thing.

Alain Badiou also centers his argument on Paul. In his version of the Gospels, Paul is the founder of secularism, a “Christian secularism” that “does not culminate in Siedentop’s [or Rawls’s] rather complacent liberalism but rather in an extremely vague but unmistakable invocation of collective, indeed ‘communist’ revolutionary action.” Here, Christ’s Resurrection bespeaks “the submission of reason to the ‘folly of our preaching,'” which in turn “liberates human action from all ‘rational’ limits.” Utopianism is possible and, since Christianity is at heart secular, it is possible without divine intervention. As for philosophy, it “is not transformed but is simply abolished. In Badiou’s modern version of Origenism (as distinguished and indeed sharply opposed to ‘originalism’), “Jesus” means an absolute moment in History, a “purely formal and revolutionary ‘Event.'” The Event inaugurates a Trotskyish permanent revolution, “a negation of law and reason without any stable content but only the form of revolutionary subjectivity and universality and universality, radical individuality opening up upon radical collectivity” whereby “love converts thought into sheer power, ‘the real materiality of militant universalism.'” “As a good communist, Badiou projects mankind’s universal material redemption—the overcoming by and for humanity of the realm of material necessity—as the horizon and implicit telos of his passion for the radical destruction of all given horizons.”

Readers familiar with the correspondence between the Hegelian Alexandre Kojève and the Platonist Leo Strauss will hear resonances of these themes in some of Kojève’s claims. Though a rationalist, Hegelian reason reaches a limit only very late in human history, indeed in the thought of Hegel himself. Strauss “considers Alexandre Kojève’s philosophy as exemplary of the interpretation of secular rationalism as the real fulfillment of Christian rationalism,” but much more rigorously so than anything that Rawls, Siedentop, or Badiou can offer. In his version of Hegelian grand ‘synthesis,’ Kojève “combines Siedentop’s prosaic liberal and democratic sympathies with Badiou’s revolutionary resolution.” It is to Strauss’s reply to Kojève in the name of classical, ‘pre-modern’ philosophy that Hancock now turns. Hancock will go part of the way with Strauss, rather as Aquinas goes part of the way with Aristotle. His account of Strauss, and his response to ‘Straussian’ thought, which concludes his final chapter on theory and begins first chapter on practice, deserves careful attention.

As a declaration, the Declaration of Independence argues a claim before the international ‘court of public opinion,’ showing respect for “the opinions of mankind.” To do so effectively, it must appeal to some human capacity that transcends borders, languages, customs, even religions. Only the natural human capacity to reason can meet that requirement. That is why the independence the Declaration declares is a logical syllogism.

A logical syllogism consists of one or more ‘major’ premises–for example, “All men are mortal.” A ‘minor’ premise or set of premises—typically more specific than a major premise, such as ‘Socrates is a man’—comes next. To be reasonable, the conclusion of the syllogism must ‘follow from’ the premises: ‘Therefore, Socrates is mortal.’ No part of the syllogism may contradict any other part. The syllogism can be falsified not only if it is self-contradictory but if one or more of the premises are false. If, in this case, ‘Socrates’ is the name of my cat, the syllogism fails.

The Declaration is a more complicated syllogism than that one, but a syllogism it is, with several major premises, including the self-evident truths of equal, natural, unalienable rights and fifteen minor premises, with numerous subdivisions, all leading to the conclusion that the United Colonies are now “Free and Independent” United States.

One of the major premises that has most puzzled readers is the claim that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. If it is self-evident that one’s rights are unalienable, Creator-given, and governments that are rightly designed secure them, then what has consent to do with it? Why can’t a government simply serve our rights without asking our permission to exist in the first place?

The answer is that, first, if liberty is among those rights, the formation of any government must rest on the consent of those ruled by it, initially and continually. But more broadly, consent must mean assent under the rule of reason. It must follow from the overall logic of the syllogism. As a political declaration, not a philosophic treatise, the Declaration does not elaborate on this point. For the Founders, John Locke had already provided that elaboration.

Just as the rights asserted in the Declaration follow the account of natural rights Locke gives in his Essay on Civil Government, often called the “Second Treatise,” so too it is there that Locke defines a free action as one taken “within the bounds of the law of nature,” distinguishing liberty from licentiousness, which he defines as the condition in which “men’s opinions are not the product of judgment, or the consequence of reason…but the effects of chance and hazards as a mind floating at all adventures, without choice and without direction.”

That last sentence comes from Locke’s most philosophically rigorous book, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There, he identifies reason’s purposes: to enlarge our knowledge and to “regulate our assent” by finding the logical connections between and among our perceptions. For this, “sense and intuition reach but a little way.” We need to make logical deductions and inferences to reach certainty and to establish probability in our opinions. This is a four-step process of, first, discerning truths by our immediate, “self-evident” perceptions; making regular and methodical disposition of these perceptions in a clear and fit order; perceiving their connection; and finally, coming to the right conclusion. (See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chapter xvii).

That is exactly what the Declaration of Independence does. The Law of Nature, Locke writes in the “Second Treatise,” is reason, which “teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life (or Limb), Health, Liberty, or Possessions”—a principle, if followed, that will conduce to “the Peace and Preservation of Mankind.” Human beings are equal in the sense that we are all “of the same species and rank” within the natural order, unless God ordains otherwise by a “manifest Declaration of his Will.” As such, we have the right to punish those who transgress upon our equal rights. Such predators, very much including predatory humans, are “dangerous to Mankind” and must be stopped. However, given the human tendency to mistake innocent actions for offenses against us, and worse, our tendency to persuade ourselves that dealing out injury and committing acts of seizure are simple acts of justice, we need “a common Judge” to settle our disputes. Such a judge isn’t easy to find, since early human societies were family-based, divided into small clans that inclined to define right as the advantage of ‘one’s own,’ the good of one’s kin. In that “State of Nature,” individuals and families wield “political power” in pursuing their own interests, often securing their own natural rights at the expense of others.

To remedy this condition effectively, Locke contends, men may join in a “Compact” with one another, “and make one Body Politick.” To do so, they must give up the right to self-enforce their natural rights. This requires consent, reasoned assent, since anyone who forms a political regime without the consent of those included in it “put[s] himself into a State of him” who is so included; if I have such “Absolute Power” over you, I have enslaved you, and having enslaved you, I can kill you whenever I want. Nothing could be more contrary to reason, contrary to the Law of Nature. Indeed, “the Freedom of Man and Liberty of Action according to his own Will, is grounded on his having Reason, which is able to instruct him in that Law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the Freedom of his Will.” Recourse to a tyrannical, ‘strong man’ regime to secure our rights is itself a violation of our natural right to liberty and is likely to fail to secure our rights to life and property, as well.

This is why, “the end,” the purpose, “of Law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge Freedom.” “Where there is no Law, there is no Freedom” from “slavery and violence.” Both the Law of Nature and the law of the political Compact depend upon the human person’s rational “capacity of knowing [the] Law.” Just as “we are born free,” we are “born rational” or, more precisely born with the capacity to reason after suitable parental governance and education.

Thus, “Politick Societies all began with voluntary Union”—from consent, whether formal or “tacit,” and so they are maintained, inasmuch as any person “is at liberty to go and incorporate himself into another Commonwealth” or to form another “in any part of the World, they can find free and unpossessed.” North America comes to mind, as it did in fact come to Locke’s mind when writing the “Second Treatise” in the 1680s: when human populations all around the world there were sparse and scattered, “all the World was America.

In any such Commonwealth, legislative power “can never have a right to destroy, enslave or designedly impoverish its subjects”—compromise their lives, liberty, or pursuit of happiness—since “the Law of Nature stands as an Eternal Rule of all Men.”

Locke emphasizes two features of “Bodies Politick” that need to be established in a manner consistent with the Law of Nature, of reason. They are property and majority rule. Both are justified and ruled by reason.

Property, which enables human beings to sustain their lives and to protect their liberty is “for use of the Industrious and Rational,” not for “the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious. Industrious: human labor substantially adds to the value of nature, fashioning building materials out of stones and trees, clothing out of plants and animal skins. Security of property encourages such labor; if the products of our labor can be arbitrarily taken away, why work? The wealth of the Commonwealth, especially if it is held not in common but by individuals and families, will strengthen the regime that protects property. “That Prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and narrowness of party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours”—too hard for them to conquer. It is, again, by “common consent” that his citizens agree to the establishment and protection of private property and money, as well, so as better to exchange the products of their labor with one another. By contrast, an “absolute” monarch, one bound by no Compact securing this and other rights, heads a regime “inconsistent with civil society,” hurling his subjects back into a state of war, crushing liberty and, with his absolute power, making himself “licentious by Impunity.”

In governing themselves after establishing the social and political Compact, a people needs a practical way of legislating. Laws must be enacted by the consent of the majority of citizens. Majority rule must be a part of the Compact itself. Since it is hardly imaginable that any law will find unanimous favor with the people, this is the only reasonable way. Otherwise, the Compact “would signifie nothing, and be no Compact.” Such a regime would be effectively no different from “the State of Nature,” quickly dissolving. It “cannot be suppos’d that Rational Creatures should desire and constitute Societies only to be dissolved.” 

Bringing the right to property and majority rule together, and upholding a principle the American Founders would restate and fight for, no government can take a man’s property “without his own consent.” Since no government can survive without revenues for such purposes as securing a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the blessings of Liberty, government will need to collect revenues with the consent of Constitutional majorities. There, too, the consent of the elective representatives and the tacit consent of those whom they represent exemplify the Lockean way, and the American way.

This review written in remembrance of my late colleague, Dr. Mickey Craig, who loved this book.

Founded in 1786, the Society of St. Tammany began as a social club with Jeffersonian-republican leanings. ‘Tammany’ was a saint in no church, but he seems to have been a man of good will. As chief of the Lenni-Lenape Indians, he enabled William Penn’s Quakers to establish their peaceful colony along the Delaware River, eventually earning the title “Patron Saint of America.” The Manhattan Tammanyites played along with the story, giving Indian titles to their officers, calling their chief the “Grand Sachem.” As the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties coalesced, Tammany became increasingly organized, recruiting immigrants, especially the Irish, into its ranks, lured by city jobs and happy with the social services Tammany provided. In 1828, President Jackson promised to give Tammany Hall control of federal patronage in Manhattan. Tammany’s candidate for mayor, Fernando Wood, was elected in 1854, and this began Tammany’s 100-year dominance of city politics. A few years later, William M. Tweed took control of the organization.

Tweed quickly won notoriety as one of the biggest crooks ever to enter New York politics. Manhattan was an independent city throughout his reign, as the five boroughs didn’t consolidate until 1898. Stacking the county with his fellow thieves, he embezzled millions and built a real estate empire. It wasn’t until the 1870s that New Yorkers decided that enough was enough; he died in prison. Tweed and his ‘ring,’ as it was called by its critics, consisted of (nominal) Protestants; the fall of Grand Sachem “Boss” Tweed enabled Catholics to take over the organization, which remained corrupt but on a less gargantuan scale. By 1902, Tammany’s boss was Charles Francis Murphy, who worked to clean up the organization’s image without necessarily eliminating some of its sharp business practices, such as ballot-stuffing and patronage. Patronage was the key to Tammany’s success, with the promise of jobs keeping the boys well organized and disciplined. Civil service reformers, Tammany’s worst enemies, claimed that staffing government offices with tenured, professional administrators would eliminate or at least minimize corruption, saving the taxpayers millions wasted on graft. Even less plausibly, reformers also claimed that such a professional bureaucracy would be more democratic because any qualified person could win a job by scoring well on a civil service test, rather than depending upon the favor of the rough-edged Tammany oligarchs. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but that is another story. 

Born in 1842, George Washington Plunkitt flourished as Tammany’s leader of the 15th Assembly District before and especially during Murphy’s tenure. In his long career, he served New York, Tammany, and himself as a state senator, a state assemblyman, a New York County Supervisor and Alderman, and as a Police Magistrate. He chaired Tammany’s Elections Committee, always trusted to produce votes for the candidates. By the time he was interviewed by New York Evening Post reporter William L. Riordan, he held no formal office, having eased into the role of Murphy’s trusted advisor; Murphy supplied the book with a brief “tribute” to his ally, whom he lauded as “a straight organization man,” always “faithful and reliable,” a speaker of plain, home truths. In their own way, both men were reformers, if not (Heaven forfend) civil service reformers. They were men who recognized that the old-style political organization needed to sober up a bit in order to survive. 

To prove that he has done so, Plunkitt makes a careful distinction. There is “dishonest” graft: blackmail, outright thievery of public funds as practiced by Tweed and his gang. But there is also “honest graft,” adroitly summarized in Plunkitt’s mot, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em”—a thought he wanted to be engraved on his tombstone. The opportunities he saw were, for the most part, real estate investments based on what we now call ‘inside information,’ as when he knew that the city intended to establish a park or to build a road and would need a certain parcel of land to make the project viable. He would purchase said property from the unwitting owner, then sell it to the city at a fine profit. “Shouldn’t I enjoy the profit of my foresight?” he asks, rhetorically. All the auditors “can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft”—a practice “that’s never goin’ to hurt Tammany with the people” because “every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular.” Surely, Tammany leaders never need to sully themselves with dishonest graft “when there is so much honest graft lyin’ around when they are in power.” No, indeed: “I don’t own a dishonest dollar.” If the reformers want to deprecate this as “the spoils system,” well, “all right, Tammany is for the spoils system.” Manhattan under the Tammany spoils system really is, as the song would later put it, an Isle of Joy, “a sort of Garden of Eden, from a political point of view,” an “orchard full of beautiful apple trees,” their fruits read to be plucked by an honest and attentive soul. Just don’t touch that “Penal Code Tree.” It is “Poison.” 

Having established that fundamental principle, Plunkitt explains how a young man may become a true statesman, not a meddlesome reformer. “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot.” Such “book-worms” may “do some good in a certain way, but they don’t count in politics.” On the contrary, a college education handicaps them. Nor will the study of oratory do them much good. “We’ve got some orators in Tammany Hall, but they’re chiefly ornamental.” We trot them out for ceremonial occasions, but otherwise “they don’t count when business is doin’ at Tammany Hall,” since “the men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them.”

The problem is, “You can’t study human nature in books.” You’ll need to unlearn whatever you learned, or thought you learned, in those things, “and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time.” “To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen,” find out “what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in.” Then and only then will you be able “by approachin’ at the right side.” If I hear of “a young feller that’s proud of his voice,” I ask him to join the Tammany Glee Club.” When “he comes and sings…he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life.” Same thing with some kid who can play baseball; we have a spot on our baseball club roster just waiting for him. “You’ll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next election day.” They see their opportunities and they take them, courtesy of Mr. Plunkitt and Tammany Hall. What’s not to like? As for “the high-toned fellers, the fellers that go through college,” such a young man is “the daintiest morsel of the lot, and he don’t often escape me.” I just let him take that fool Civil Service exam and, once he flunks it, he finds his way back to Tammany Hall and joins up.

No, real politics is a business, and to go into business you need “marketable commodities.” In the politics business, votes are the commodities you need. “Do as I did”: “Get a followin’.” If you have even one man who will vote the way you do, “through thick and thin,” then you can go to your district leader and say let him know that. Be assured, he will welcome you warmly into the organization. But if you tell him “I took first prize at college in Aristotle; I can recite all Shakespeare forwards and backwards”; I know science; “I’m the real thing in the way of silver-tongued orators,” well, “he’ll probably say: ‘I guess you are not to blame for your misfortunes, but we have no use for you here.'” You’ve got nothing marketable to sell. As for me, I started in politics at the age of twelve, making “myself useful around the district headquarters” and working “at all the polls on election day.” “Show me a boy that hustles for the organization on election day, and I’ll show you a comin’ statesman.” 

Once in the organization, once a proven vote-getter for the organization, your best marketable commodities are charity for the poor and jobs for everyone else. If there’s a fire, I’m there, along with my election district captains, “as soon as the fire engines.” “If a family is burned out, I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.” I just go ahead and find them a place to stay, buy clothes for them, and generally “fix them up till they get things runnin’ again.” When you know human nature, you know that “the poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.” One might say that Tammany embodied a branch of the Democratic Party that had adapted itself to a democratic regime, the one wherein the majority rules.

Speaking of gratitude, “There’s no crime so mean”—none so much contra naturum, if you will—than “ingratitude in politics.” Sorry to say, “but every great statesman from the beginning of the world” has been up against it: “Caesar had his Brutus; that king of Shakespeare’s—Leary, I think you call him” (probably Irish, then)—suffered grievously when he saw “his own daughters go back on him.” I myself, Plunkitt, have endured such betrayals. “It’s a real proof that a man is great when he meets with political ingratitude”; “great men have a tender, trustin’ nature,” and “so have I”—well, “outside the contractin’ and real estate business.” Nonetheless, the natural order prevails in the end. “The ingrate in politics never lasts long.” He takes without giving, and that breeds distrust. As one Tammany boss, Richard Croker, was fond of saying, “Tellin’ the truth and stickin’ to his friends [is] the political leader’s stock in trade,” and he lived according to that precept. As a result, “every man in the organization trusted him.” The same is true of today’s boss, Charles F. Murphy, who “has always stood by his friends even when it looked like he would be downed for doin’ so.” Now, fortunately, Irish Catholics now run Tammany, not those Protestant Tweedites. “The Irish, above all people in the world, hates a traitor,” having had the experience of those Irish Protestant Orangemen back on the Auld Sod, conniving with the English to rule their Catholic brethren. “The Irish was born to rule, and they’re the honestest people in the world.” No Irishman would steal the roof off an almshouse. Not at all, although “he might get the city authorities to put on a new one and get the contract for it himself, and buy the old roof at a bargain—but that’s honest graft,” that’s “goin’ about the thing like a gentleman,” and there’s “more money in it than in tearin’ down an old roof and cartin’ it to the junkman’s—more money and no penal code.” This is why the Irishman “is grateful to the country and the city that gave him protection and prosperity when he was driven by oppression from the Emerald Isle.” And as for their benefactor, George Washington Plunkitt, “I made my pile in politics, but, at the same time, I served the organization and got more big improvements for New York City than any other livin’ man,” all while avoiding arrest by doing nothing illegal. 

But the prime marketable commodity a Tammany leader has on offer is jobs with the city. As long as “the leader hustles around and gets all the jobs possible for his constituents,” no ingratitude is likely, and none deserved. He has “a sort of contract” with his constituents, a social contract, to use that high-toned language you need to unlearn from college. His constituents put him into office; now he is morally obligated to make sure “that this district gets all the jobs that comm’ to it.” If he does that, “he shows himself in all ways a true statesman,” and “his followers are bound in honor to uphold him, just as they’re bound to uphold the Constitution of the United States.” On the other hand, if he only works for himself or “shows no talent for scenting out jobs or ain’t got the nerve to demand and get his share of the good things that are going,” then his followers “may be absolved from their allegiance and they may up and swat him without bein’ put down as political ingrates,” as surely as the American colonists whacked their English oppressors back in the day, just the way the poor Irish wished they could have done and fled to America, where we do things right.

Sometimes you hear of inter-party strife, Democrats versus Republicans. Not in little old New York City, at least when it counts. Sure, “we differ on tariffs and currencies and all them things, but we agree on the main proposition that when a man works in politics, he should get something out of it.” And so, if Tammany loses an election, not to worry. It simply turns to the Republicans, who know they can get jobs from Tammany when the electoral results turn against them. “When we win I won’t let any deservin’ Republican in my neighborhood suffer from hunger or thirst, although, of course, I look out for my own people first.” You might say that’s right out of Aristotle: politics is ruling and being ruled, in turn. To which Mr. Plunkitt adds, ‘and get something in return.’

There’s no question, a true statesman needs, as Aristotle recommends in the Nicomachean Ethics, to adapt himself to circumstances. “Tammany Hall is a great big machine, with every part adjusted delicate to do its own particular work,” with leaders chosen to fit each voting district. In his own district, Mr. Plunkitt “don’t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated than they are,” although, by his own testimony, he has at least heard of Aristotle and Shakespeare and King Leary or whatever his name was. “Shakespeare was all right in his way, but he didn’t know anything about Fifteenth District politics.” On the other hand, when Mr. Plunkitt “get[s] into the silk-stockin’ part of the district, I can talk grammar and all that with the best of them,” having gone to school “three winters when I was a boy,” learning “a lot of fancy stuff that I keep for occasions.” Yes, “I’ve got to be several sorts of a man in a single day,” but always “one sort of man” in “one respect: I stick to my friends high and low, do them a good turn whenever I get a chance, and hunt up all the jobs going for my constituents,” there being no “man in New York who’s got such a scent for political jobs as I have.” To those who heed his hard-won prudential wisdom, he advises, “Puttin’ on style don’t pay in politics. The people won’t stand for it.” So, “be simple.” “Live like your neighbors even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is you equal, or even a bit superior to you.” 

Having established the virtues of Tammany Hall politics and politicians, Mr. Plunkitt shares his animadversions against those who would interfere with them: those undemocratic, ignorant underminers of true patriotism, the civil service reformers. Now, as he has shown, Tammany has already reformed itself since the unfortunate days of the dishonest grafter, William M. Tweed. But there is such a thing as going too far.

“Civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age,” the “curse of the nation.” To wrest from elected officials the power of appointing men to administrative offices in the city government violates the principle of “representative government.” “Is it all a fake that this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people?” And “if it isn’t a fake, then why isn’t the people’s voice obeyed and Tammany men put in all the offices?” To place men in office based on their scores on standardized civil service tests causes “the people’s voice” to be “smothered”; “it is the root of all evil in our government.” The menace is clear: “The civil service humbug is underminin’ our institutions and if a halt ain’t called our great republic will tumble down like a Park Avenue house when they were buildin’ the subway, and on its ruins will arise another Russian government.” And if not czarism, then the return of English-like or maybe Frenchified kings, much to the horror of every decent Irishman. Civil service may “gobble up everything, politicians would be on the bum, the republic would fall and soon there would be the cry of ‘Veyey le roi!'” And as for the allegedly democratic reform of primary elections, designed to take the political parties’ nomination power from the Tammany bosses, “it would mean chaos.” Civil service reform would put nominations in the hands of “cart-tail orators and college graduates,” which would be like “takin’ a lot of dry-goods clerks and settin’ them to run express trains on the New York Central Railroad.” “It makes my heart bleed to think of it” especially considering the “magnificent men” (John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charles F. Murphy) who have controlled Democratic Party nominations in New York in recent years. “What names in American history compares with them, except Washington and Lincoln?” Mr. Plunkitt would like to know. “They built up the grand Tammany organization, and the organization built up New York,” with none of the grandstanding seen in primary elections. “The men who put through the primary law are the same crowd that stand for the civil service blight and they have the same objects in view—the destruction of governments by party, the downfall of the constitution and hell generally.” 

Where is their patriotism? The true American patriot wants some quid for his quo. Patriots are made, not born. “How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party?” There’s no use “of workin’ for your country” if “there’s nothin’ in the game.” “But, when a man has a good fat salary, he finds himself hummin’ ‘Hail Columbia,’ all unconscious, and fancies, when he’s ridin’ in a trolley car, that the wheels are always sayin’: ‘Yankee Doodle Came to Town.'” Take me, for example, “When I got my first good job from the city, I bought up all the firecrackers in my district to salute this glorious country” because “I felt proud of bein’ an American.” But when the Fourth of July comes around, what do the reformers do? They “run off to Newport or the Adirondacks to get out of the way of the noise an everything that reminds them of the glorious day.” Not so, Tammany; its constitution requires that members “assemble at the wigwam on the Fourth.” “You ought to attend one of these meetin’s. They’re a liberal education in patriotism.” For “four solid hours,” Tammany Democrats listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence, speeches by “long-winded orators,” and patriotic songs from the glee club, all the while knowing that champagne and beer awaits them when it’s over. That isn’t just patriotism. It’s heroic asceticism, “the highest kind of patriotism, the patriotism of long sufferin’ and endurance.” Doesn’t that civil service reformer who fought in Spain, Theodore Roosevelt, concern himself when a young man who was blocked from a city job because he couldn’t pass the civil service exam turned around and fought for Spain in Cuba? And then there was the other “young man” who “worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist.”

A syllogism is in order, here. “First, this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be hell to pay.” “The republic will go to pieces,” and “then a czar or a sultan will turn up.” 

Therefore, the reformers “are underminin’ the manhood of the nation and makin’ the Declaration of Independence a farce. We need a new Declaration of Independence, independence of the whole fool civil service business.” And maybe independence of New York City from New York State, the latter being run by hayseeds—farmers who want nothing more than to enact civil service laws and to plunder the riches of industrious City residents. They object to New Yorkers, especially corporations headquartered in the city, who contribute to political campaigns for Tammany candidates. “They might as well howl about givin’ contributions to churches. A political organization has to have money for its business as well as a church, and who has more right to put up than the men who get the good things that are goin’?” Tammany “does missionary work like a church,” giving charity to the poor, and those “big expenses” need “to be supported by the faithful.” (And by the way, Tammany leaders are as much teetotalers as any reform-minded Prohibitionist. “I honestly believe that drink is the greatest curse of the day, except of course, civil service.” Those “great leaders of Tammany Hall” above mentioned had not a regular drinker among them. “A drinkin’ man wouldn’t last two weeks as leader of Tammany Hall. Nor can a man manage an assembly district long if he drinks. He’s got to have a clear head all the time.” Mind you, that didn’t prevent Big Tim Sullivan and Little Tim Sullivan from running saloons down in the Bowery. They made money out of liquor by “sellin’ it to other people,” which is “the only way to get good out of liquor”—if not wine out of water, then profits out of beer.

Tammany Hall has reformed itself but to save Americans from the civil service tyranny the whole Democratic Party needs to get back on the straight and narrow. “The trouble is that the party’s been chasin’ after theories and stayin’ up nights readin’ books instead of studyin’ human nature and actin’ accordin’.” These issues about money—the gold standard versus the silver standard—have no practical value because, as Boss Croker aphorized back in 1900, “What’s the use in discussin’ what’s the best kind of money? I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.” Same thing with imperialism. “You can’t get people excited about the Philippines.” You need something “that will wake the people up, somethin’ that will make it worth while to work for the party.” And that is nothing less than abolitionism—the “abolition of the iniquitous and villainous civil service laws which are destroyin’ all patriotism, ruinin’ the country and takin’ away good jobs from them that earn them.” Solons of democratic republicanism, repeal those laws and “put every civil service reformer in jail”—that’s the right platform plank to stand on. If such reforms were carried through, “we would have government of the people by the people who were elected to govern them,” “the kind of government Lincoln meant.”

“I see a vision. I see the civil service monster lyin’ flat on the ground. I see the Democratic party standin’ over it with foot on its neck and wearin’ the crown of victory. I see Thomas Jefferson,” American Founder and founder of the Democratic Republicans, “looking out from a cloud and sayin’: ‘Give him another sockdologer: finish him.’ And I see millions of men wavin’ their hats and singin’ ‘Glory Hallelujah!'”

Russia’s long borders, most without natural barriers to protect its cities, requires military planning that is not only careful but well integrated into whatever regime prevails in the state. For this reason, “the Russian view of strategy is broader and more encompassing than recognized in the West,” whose rulers tend to ‘compartmentalize’ military strategy, political strategy, and economic strategy. Indeed, “an inclination to holism is characteristic throughout the Russian intellectual tradition in literature, religious philosophy and the sciences.” Persson wisely attempts to understand Russian thinkers as they have understood themselves, never imposing analytical ‘frameworks’ alien to Russia. 

Modern Russian military thought originated in the eighteenth century with Czar Peter the Great, Petr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev, and Alexandrovich Suvorov. Even before that, however, “when Russia consisted of little but Muscovy, the army was an integral part of the state and the ruling elites.” The flat steppes of that region lent themselves to raids and counterraids, many of them defensive responses to intruders. To expand, the regime needed to enforce strict loyalty, made possible by the close association of civilian and military officers, all drawn from the aristocracy. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Russia confronted the principal political/military powers of northern and central Europe: Sweden (‘The Hammer of Europe,’ as it was then known) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Muscovy was successful, doubling its size in the seventeenth century. By the time Peter declared his country an empire, he had transformed Russia into a modern, centralized state featuring an efficient standing army and navy coordinated with its diplomatic corps. As an enthusiast of the Enlightenment, Peter established military councils that met sometimes as often as twenty times a year to debate strategy; Czar Peter adjudicated, and his decision became Russia’s authoritative military doctrine. Previously, education in Russia was the exclusive domain of Orthodox Christian priests; Peter founded a system of military school teaching mathematics, navigation, artillery and engineering. His formidable successor, Catherine the Great, founded a comprehensive system of primary and secondary education which could prepare Russian youth for careers in these technical fields. During her eighteenth century, “Russia was almost constantly in a state of war,” fighting Sweden, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Tatars of Crimea (a country it incorporated into the empire in 1783), Poland, and revolutionary France. It was under Catherine that Rumiantsev wrote Customs of Military Service, setting down organizational practices, and Thought, a memorandum successfully arguing for increased military funding, “given the territorial expansion of the empire.” He was careful to emphasize that Russia’s unique geopolitical characteristics (including its “wicked neighborhood”) meant that its military officers could learn from foreign strategists but implement only those practices fit for Russia. Conversely, Russian strategists needed to understand their many enemies not by Russian standards but “by working out what we might do if we were in his place” (emphasis added). 

Responding to Russia’s geographic vulnerability within the armature of a modern state, these strategists emphasized offensive military operations, departing from Muscovy’s defensive stance. Whether predominantly offensive or defensive, Russia’s wars have been numerous. In the centuries between 1500 and 1900, it was at war for 353 years. At the end of this period, the head of the General Staff Academy pointed to Russia’s defeat of Napoleon, saving not only itself but Prussia and Austria, as the army’s premier achievement, while observing that “war was always and throughout all times been, spontaneously and consciously, a sacred, great, an important act in the life of the state,” fought under the principles, “Faith, Czar, and Fatherland”—religion, regime, and state, fully coordinated. Rumiantsev’s contemporary, General Suzorov, emphasized “speed, assessment, attack.” Given the vast Russian peasantry and its small aristocratic officer corps, both of these classes needed to be well understood in order for their command-and-obey relationship to succeed. To do so, he appealed to the shared sentiment of patriotic pride, formulating the chant: “Subordination, Exercise, Obedience, Education, Discipline, Military Order, Cleanliness, Health, Neatness, Sobriety, Courage, Bravery, Victory! Glory! Glory! Glory!” His relentlessly offensive strategy (retreat, he thought, was equal to weakness) comported well with his spiritedness.

The following century found its major strategist in Nikolai V. Medem, the first professor of strategy at the Imperial Military Academy. In his An Overview of the Most Famous Rules and Systems of Strategy, he described the thought of such important Western strategic thinkers as Jomini, Frederick II, and Clausewitz. Against Jomini and with Clausewitz, he insisted that there can be no “immutable laws in strategy that can guide the actions of the commander in war,” but that ever-changing circumstances must be observed and respected. In chess, learning the rules doesn’t make you much of a chess player. A strategist, he wrote, must have “the knowledge of the characteristics of all strategic elements and means,” perform “the assessment of their mutual influence.” and study “the importance of each individual element in relation to the actual military actions.” Persson cites this as a characteristic example of the “holistic view of strategy” that “has remained one of the constants of Russian strategic thought” to this day.

The Crimean War (1852-1856) ended or at least interrupted the peaceful decades following the Napoleonic Wars. After Crimea, Europeans followed Prussia’s policy of universal military conscription; Russia took its time, finally introducing it in 1874. The democratization of war was complemented with important technological innovations in weapons, which could be mass-produced for mass armies as industrial economies replaced agrarian ones. Historicism and positivism dominated philosophic thought. As a result, “the study of military science became more systematic and professionalized.” The need to coordinate such technologies as steam railways, telegraphs, and the rifled muskets and cannons that enabled militaries to strike one another at greater distances, coupled with the further need to coordinate technology with the training of mass armies and with building up industrial production, made military planning more complex than ever. A better-educated, professionalized officer class was now indispensable. All of this required substantial increases in funding, which meant that economic prosperity more than ever became a precondition of military survival and victory.

The geopolitical event of the century was German unification under Prussian auspices. This ruined French hegemony on the continent, as seen in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), which closely followed Prussia’s defeat of Austria, its sole possible competitor for dominance among the German states. Prussia’s king was proclaimed emperor of Germany as William I. Excluded from Germany, Austria sought to counterbalance its neighbor by forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dual monarchy. Italy finally realized Machiavelli’s envisioned structure, its several states uniting in one nation-state in 1870. 

In Russia, Czar Alexander II foresaw the need for much larger armies, which is why he emancipated the serfs in 1861, thereby more closely attaching them to what they could now think of as their country. That was also the year that Dmitri Alekseevich Miliutin assumed the duties of War Minister. As Tocqueville had observed some two decades earlier, ‘democracy’ understood as civil-social equality could flourish as readily under a monarchic regime as under a republic. Miliutin affirmed “the unity and integrity of the state” and the “equality of all its members” under the czar. For Russia to thrive, he continued, it must “cast away all outdated, outlived privileges” and “take leave, once and for all, of the rights of one social group over another”; again as per Tocqueville, no aristocracy or oligarchy must stand between the monarch and his people. With respect to educating the officers, Miliutin followed with schools that reward talent, not ‘birth.’ And he instituted mandatory literacy classes in literacy for the common soldiers, who would read books and listen to speeches extolling Russian nationality. 

Largely blocked from expansion in Europe, whose statesmen had advanced more rapidly into modernity, Russians instead sought territory in Central Asia, seizing Turkistan, Chimkent, Tashkent, and Samarkand in the 1860s, adding several khanates in the following decade. Perssons ascribes these moves to a desire for “defensible borders,” not the quest for raw materials or imperial ambition as such. One important War Ministry document identified a Western Europe full of enemies, Prussia-ruled Germany being the most dangerous. Russian strategists worried three possible hostile coalitions: Austria and Germany; Austria, Germany, Turkey, and Sweden; Austria, Turkey, France, Italy, England. Russia, they feared, had no reliable allies.

The head of the Military-Scientific Committee of the Russian army, Nikolai Obruchev, authored Considerations on the Defense of Russia, which Perssons describes as “the basis for all of the war plans up to 1909.” Obruchev understood that regime differences among states may lead to war; no longer would wars be based on “personal quarrels among the European sovereigns,” as they had been when rival monarchist dynasts faced one another, hungering for territory or eager to avenge some perceived slight. Further, “the transition from war to peace had become instantaneous,” given modern technologies. At the time, Russia ruled Poland, and Obruchev wanted that substantial territory as a geopolitical buffer in the west; in his judgment, “the position on the Vistula was the only really good one from which to mount an offensive.” (Having stayed in a hotel overlooking that river on the outskirts of Krakow, a hotel occupied by Nazi officers during the Second World War, I can attest that the view is indeed good, and not only in an esthetic sense. One enjoys what’s called a ‘commanding’ view of things.) Obruchev foresaw that a future European war “would take place on Polish territory,” and he planned preemptive attacks on Austria and Germany from there, if war seemed imminent. This strategy in turn made Russian strategists particularly concerned about rising nationalist and therefore anti-imperialist sentiments among European nations, very much including Poland. The unification of the Germanies was the most alarming example. For its part, Russia might be unified around its army.

Professor of strategy at the General Staff Academy Genrikh Leer, who eventually served as commandant of the Academy in the 1890s, also advocated a tight ‘fit’ between the regime and the armed forces, calling the military system “a reflection of the political system.” Again, Prussia and the new Germany it had organized and now dominated was the example. War, Leer wrote, is “the political bayonet” which “finally determines the most important political issues.” Complementarily, the regime is likely to influence or even determine “the kinds of war” a state will conduct. In this, Leer adopted Montesquieu’s tripartite classification of regimes. He observed that despotic (as distinguished from constitutional) monarchies will likely prosecute offensive wars, whereas democracies (he was thinking of ancient Athens) incline toward defensive wars. Monarchies—centralized states with monarchic regimes animated by the rule of law—can and will conduct both offensive and defensive wars. The overall civil-social democratization of modernity, now common to all three regimes, as Tocqueville had observed, meant that militaries could no longer rely on small professional armies; mass armies in which officers enjoyed the trust of their soldiers beneath them and the civilian authorities above them were not the order of the day, and of course the General Staff Academy was exactly the kind of educational institution designed to improve both the technical competence and the morale of the military.

With these strategic elements in hand, Russia could continue to keep its West European rivals at bay while serving as Europe’s defender against incursions from Asia. Leer pointed to Peter I as the founder of this policy, emphasizing military history as a principal component of his educational curriculum. “Leer is described as the founder of the ‘critical-historical’ school in Russian military thought,” a school which searched “for eternal rules of warfare by choosing appropriate examples from military history.” Among these “laws” were the claim that war is natural, “a part of human life”; that war is obviously destructive but also civilizing (as seen, for example, in Rome’s conquests); and that military strategy has moral, material, and political elements, which must be coordinated in order for a military campaign to succeed. 

Leer found a critic among his colleagues in Mikhail Dragomirov, who denied that military science could really exist. Such a science, he wrote, “is as unthinkable as a science of poetry, art, and music.” Students of military history should look at past battles not as phenomena that can be reduced to a science but rather “just as a painter or a composer studies masterpieces—not to copy them, but to be inspired by them.” Theory is too general for actual use, and the events chronicled by historians can be mined for ‘proofs’ of any theory: which example “to pick is the choice of the one picking.” Chance played too great a part in any battle, let alone any war, to enable a commander to rely on some scientific theory. This notwithstanding, Dragomirov did concur with Leer’s judgment that war is natural, “arguing against Tolstoy’s pacifist views on war”. For Russia, given its geopolitical circumstance, it must seem so. Therefore, Dragomirov advocated a policy whereby common soldiers would be trained only in those skills they need to fight effectively; at the same time, in a nod to civil-social democratization, he insisted that officers treat the men with respect. Consistent with these points, he recommended training in the use of the bayonet, “not because firing is not important but because the bayonet attack require more psychological strength, which is more difficult to train and take longer to acquire.” His geopolitical stance, resembled Leer’s: that Russia should guard against incursions from Asia while disagreeing with Czar Nicholas II’s push into the Far East, which led to the collision with Japan. The 1905 Japanese defeat of Russian forces, “a blow to Russia’s international prestige,” confirmed the prudence of his worries about military overextension. 

World War I saw not only the defeat of Russia’s military but the collapse of the monarchic regime, resulting in a civil war won by the Bolsheviks, who established the Red Army in January 1918 under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. That army supported the regime, “not only on the battlefield” but with “agitation, propaganda, and literacy campaigns”—Trotsky being something of a littérateur, himself. Trotsky went so far as to assert that “our state orientation has long been formed by Marxist methodology and there is no need to form it again in the bosom of them military administration.” Among the important Soviet military strategist in this first decade of the regime was Andrei Snesarev. Snesarev understood the dictatorship of the proletariat as ‘totalitarian’—to take the word coined by Communism’s enemy-twin, Benito Mussolini, who used it to describe Italian Fascism. “Wars in the future, according to Snesarev, would become increasingly large-scale and ever more complex, requiring the entire effort of the state”; this would require the state “to prepare for war in peacetime, involving not only the army and soldier but also the entire population.” A reader of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, Snesarev brought some philosophic heft to ‘totalitarian’ military strategy. 

A non-Marxist, Aleksandr Svechin, was permitted to publish his thoughts on strategy up until 1938, when Stalin decided to have him executed. Svechin regarded political and military defense as “the most prudent for Russia,” writing that “war is not a cure for the internal diseases of the state but the most serious exam on the health of internal politics,” an exam he evidently was not entirely sure that Soviet Russia could pass. Nor could Russia’ geographic vastness protect it, as it had when Napoleon took Moscow, only to be beaten back by ‘General Winter.’ Modern technology “had rendered distances less significant.” “We are not wearing any geographic armor,” he warned; “our chests are open to blows” and “the enemy is not asleep.” This ran afoul of Stalin’s hopes, based upon the notion that a war against the USSR would be “a struggle against the proletarian revolution” first and foremost, a war whose outcome would be “determined by the real balance of international class forces,” not so much “territorial successes.” Those class forces were assumed to favor the great homeland of socialism, and so, instead of strengthening the military, Stalin conduced several purges against Red Army officers, beginning in the late 1920s and continuing into the late Thirties. “Almost the entire military intelligentsia was obliterated” for having failed to regard Communist Party operatives as the supremely sagacious strategists of the coming world revolution.

Hitler, tyrannical heir to Bismarck’s unified Germany, made the Communists pay for their ideologically inspired folly before the Nazis themselves were driven back by forces led by some of the few survivors of the Stalinist depredations. After the Man of Steel’s welcome death, such strategists as Marshall Vasily Danielovich Sokolovsky and Admiral Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov attempted to reconcile Marxism-Leninism with military reality. War with the ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ Western regimes was inevitable. “Therefore,” as Persson nicely summarizes, “the ‘peace-loving’ Soviet Union was forced to take action in order to defend itself.” Such defense required preparation for the inevitable war, a defense that in turn would like require the innocent Communist regime to strike first—offense being the best defense, in accordance with longstanding Russian, not only Soviet, strategy. Nuclear weapons, though obviously devastating, didn’t change this mindset. According to Sokolovksy’s Soviet Military Strategy, published in 1962, Soviet policy aimed at a first strike aiming at the annihilation of both the enemy’s military forces and the ruin of his civil society. This world war between “two opposing social world systems” would inevitably (as per the Marxist-Leninist ‘laws of history’) end in victory for Communism, a victory guaranteed by the coming superiority of socialist economies over capitalist economies. Meanwhile, propaganda must be intensified at home and abroad, unifying Communists worldwide and disunifying the capitalist enemy. As Stalin had intoned, “It is impossible to defeat the foe without learning to hate him with all the forces of one’ soul,” and the post-Stalinist strategists continued his legacy in this regard; this was quite consistent with the regime’s aim at forming the ‘new Soviet man,’ animated by an ethos that comported with the regime of socialist collectivism. As a complement to this, “clearly, by the early 1960s Russia’s war planners were planning to destroy cities and bomb civilians using nuclear weapons in a future war” in an initial phase that would be followed by a ground invasion of Europe resulting in a swift military sweep through Europe that would “reach the English Channel within days.”

Gorshkov’s naval strategy followed from these principles. “Soviet strategy considered submarines armed with nuclear missiles to be the main fighting weapon of the navy and vastly more effective than surface vessels.” It should be remarked that submarine-based missiles, necessarily smaller than most types of land-based missiles, are useful not so much against hardened military targets as they are against ‘soft’ targets: cities and their civilians. The ‘totalitarian’ regime prefers ‘total’ war. Gorshkov regarded his navy as one element supporting an overall military and political strategy. “Gorshkov’s naval principle for Soviet strategy would be ‘specific in form, socialist in content.'” With his fleet’s most important function (as he put it) “being actions against [enemy] land,” the Soviet navy “played a significant role in the local wars conducted by the imperialists,” making it “the state’s political weapon” against them. Gorshkov’s “vision was of an oceangoing fleet with the strategic task of conducting actions against enemy territory,” a vision that “has not always been understood in the West.”

This comprehensive, Marxist-Leninist strategy may be seen in the writings of Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1977 to 1984. Two decades earlier, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev had introduced his policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the Western democratic republics, a supposed “pause from the Marxist-Leninist dogma of the inevitability of a war between the socialist and capitalist camps.” As Persson knows, Lenin had first formulated the notion, a complement to his New Economic Policy on the domestic front. As in more or less all Communist policy, peaceful coexistence, eventually followed by “detente,” wasn’t quite what it seemed. “It did not mean peace.” Economic, political, and ideological warfare would continue, and as for the military substance of it, Ogarkov ascribed war to (of course) “the emergence of private property.” With “the spread of socialism in the world,” the “real and objective conditions to abolish war from social life” might well prevail, were it not for malignant Western imperialism. Warfare, and not only nonviolent warfare, could still be pursued, especially by supporting ‘anti-imperialist’ proxy wars in the impoverished ‘Third World.’ Nuclear war was the kind of war to be avoided, if possible. Ogarkov’s grand strategy consisted, in his words, of an assessment of “the degree of probability of future war and against which enemy; the character of that war and the way it would take the country and its armed forces; the goals and missions that could be assigned to the armed forces and what kind of armed forces are necessary to meet these goals”; and, finally, “the military programs that should be accomplished and the preparations needed by the army and the country for war” along with “the means with which the war should be conducted if it breaks out.” According to this Communist variant of “the Great Russian perspective,” “Russia had never attacked anyone” but “was forced by others to react, in spite of abundant historical evidence to the contrary.”

“It was not until the mid- to late 1980s that Russian strategists drew on the lessons of World War II and seriously challenged the offensive strategy,” recently dressed up as defensive. After all, Soviet Russia had lost about 27 million lives during the war, roughly half of them soldiers. Nuclear war quite obviously would be worse, unless (somehow) the Soviets could contrive a first strike on U.S. missiles that would wipe out America’s second-strike arsenal—highly improbable, inasmuch as Americans had submarine-launched missiles, too. Accordingly, Ogarkov adjusted Soviet doctrine. As late as 1979, he had insisted that nuclear war “was winnable for the entire socialist camp, due to the “just missions of the war, the superior character of these societies, and their political systems,” but after the Reagan Administration jettisoned detente and began to augment its nuclear deterrent, he started writing about ‘no first use,’ suddenly deeming prevention of nuclear war both possible and necessary. 

This avenue closed, Defense Minister Dmitri Federovich Ustinov pushed for more military spending, focusing on ground forces arrayed against NATO and against Afghanistan. His policy contributed to the financial crisis of the central state, which Premier Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to overcome by reducing the number of men under arms, signing a treaty limiting intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and rearranging troops in Europe in a defensive configuration. As is well known, this proved too little, too late; the empire collapsed and the regime changed—sort of. 

Marxism-Leninism eschewed, Russian territory reduced by twenty-five percent, their borders well away from the coveted ports on the Baltic and Black seas, “the civilian and military leadership” nonetheless “maintained a continued consensus on relying on military power as “the basis for Russia’s status in the international arena.” By the 2010s, under the premiership of Vladimir Putin, “the offensive force posture had returned.” The no-first-use policy had been quietly dropped in the mid-1990s. With conventional forces, Putin seized Crimea under the pretext, as he put it, of “correcting historical injustices.” There were many more to correct: Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov, Odessa, Kherson, and others were all the “historical territories” of Russia, deserving of retrieval by force. Russian policymakers gave up their line about American imperialism but substituted “NATO eastern expansion” and the “unipolar world” dominated by the United States. Expansion threatened regime change in Russia, a thought not to be countenanced. Foreign Minister Evgenii Primakov averred that “the use of force is the most efficient problem-solver if applied decisively and massively,” with negotiations useful only “as a cover for military action.” Although written in 2000, his doctrine anticipated the invasion of Ukraine, two decades later. 

To get to that, however, military reform was necessary, as the campaign to wrest South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, though successful, exposed an unimpressive land invasion force. Russia undertook a transformation “from a conventional mobilization army to a permanently combat-ready force,” a transformation involving improvements to the command-and-control system, force structure, military education, and an arms buildup. But while Andrei Kokoshin, who has served in numerous high-level position in the Russian government and academia, emphasized the importance of “the assessment of oneself and of the most likely enemy” as the foundation of strategy, such assessments evidently had not been properly undertaken by February 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine, citing itself as “the legal successor of the Soviet Union” and the protector of “historical truth.” “Russia is perceived as being under attack from a hostile West, and the Russian Armed Forces are tasked with defending Russia’s historical and spiritual traditions”—the latter embodied by the Russian Orthodox Church, still firmly under control of the central state, as it has been for a very long time. Under such circumstances and with such authority, Putin declared in 2021, Ukraine had no right to independence from its rightful mother country, especially as it was being used as the thin end of the Westernizing wedge, “alien to the Russian people” and coated with immoralist poisons, including “violence, egotism, permissiveness, immorality, and nonpatriotism,” and “objective threat to Russia’s national interests,” bound up as they are with the ideal of “Holy Russia,” with its capital of Moscow as “the Third Rome.” Defending this mythologized version of Russian history forms part of Russia’s official military doctrine. Thus does Russia “prepar[e] itself for a long-term conflict with the West, whose “destructive influence” on innocent Russian youths must be stopped.

What went wrong for the Russians in Ukraine? They sent in far too few troops—only 200,000 against a country of more than forty million. This assumed that the Ukrainians believed Russian claims that they were really Russian, that they would welcome the invading troops as liberators. But there was no “mass surrender” and on their own side, the Russian soldiers weren’t adequately informed about the purpose of the war or given any strong motive to fight it. Whatever the outcome, it evidently will have come at a brutally high cost for Russia.

Persson concludes his study by identifying several constant themes in Russian military strategy. Because the state has been so thoroughly militarized for so many centuries, whatever regime rules it features military force as an integral part of the whole. As a consequence, military strategy shapes the regime fundamentally, even as the regime guides the strategy according to its own principles; Western analysts often overlook “the primacy of policy over strategy” in Russia. Those regimes have never taken natural rights as their foundation, looking instead to history, although ‘history’ might range from Russian Orthodox providentialism to Marxist-Leninist dialectic. Whatever the history, it typically casts the West—Roman Catholicism, democratic republicanism, capitalism—as the enemy of Russia. Given the geographic insecurity of its borders, the enemy must be attacked, not merely defended against; territorial expansion makes it less likely that Russia’s center will be overrun. This leads to fits of overexpansion, followed by humiliating retrenchment. The difficulties in maintaining Russian strategic policies derives from its centralization. The policies are designed to strengthen the centralized state, which attempts to rule some 150 ethnic minorities over a vast territory, but over-centralization weakens the state. For example, the various sorts of Russian monarchs, whether czars, commissars, or presidents, have inclined to rule by fear, and to kill or fire the most prominent military thinkers. This leads to “institutional loss of memory” and, more profoundly, a moral atmosphere of distrust in regimes of despotism. 

Max Boot counts 180 landings U.S. Marine landings between 1800 and 1934, with “the army and navy add[ing] a few small-scale engagements of their own.” In victory or defeat, “most of these campaigns were fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers pursuing limited objectives with limited means,” sometimes punitive, sometimes protective, sometimes pacifying, sometimes profiteering, and at times a combination of two or more of these objectives. In America’s first century, in its overseas conflicts the United States often worked as “a junior constable” for Britain, “the world’s policeman,” defending “freedom of the seas and open markets in China, Japan, and elsewhere,” occasionally targeting the slave trade. In the next half-century, up to the Second World War, America began to rival Britain for its dominance of the seas, remaining active in Asia but also “establish[ing] itself as a hegemon” in Latin America—as effectively announced by President Theodore Roosevelt, when he issued his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting a right to foreclose any European intervention in the New World if a country proved delinquent in its debt payments to Old World governments or banks. America made that policy credible in the Spanish-American War, in which it acquired Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines, and the Virgin Islands and turned Cuba into an American protectorate. This policy included regime change in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during the Wilson Administration. During and after the Second World War, America’s status as the world’s preeminent military power gave it responsibilities throughout the world, typically in opposition to the predominant tyrannies of the time—first, the Axis Powers, then the several Communist regimes, including the members of the Warsaw Pact. The World War was of course no small one, the Cold War no short one, but most of the wars during that time were short and, except for the war in Vietnam, not prolonged.

The first hundred years after the Constitution was ratified saw small overseas wars aimed, typically, at protecting the commercial interests of the new commercial republic. That is, these wars derived primarily from the character of the regime. Boot begins with the Barbary Wars, fought between 1801 and 1805, then again in 1815. The enemies were Morocco, ruled by the Alawite Dynasty, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, which were largely self-governing entities within the Ottoman Empire. These governments preferred not to tax their merchants, seeking revenues by capturing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, taking the cargo and selling the captives into slavery or ransoming them. Initially, the United States preferred to bribe the Barbary states into leaving its ships alone (John Adams calculated that this was cheaper than building a navy, inasmuch as “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever”). Congress inclined to agree with Adams, but “this policy of appeasement, far from sating the demands of the North African rulers, only whetted their appetite for more.” Thomas Jefferson took the bellicose view, asserting “that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical and more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing the insolencies.” Although Congress refused to declare war, it did authorize the president to “use all necessary force to protect American shipping overseas.” 

Army officer and Consul General to Tunis William Eaton had come to the same conclusion. The pasha had come to power by murdering his predecessor, his older brother; Eaton met with a younger brother of the despot, planning a coup d’état. This made Eaton unwelcome to the Tunisian government, but upon his return to Washington the Jefferson Administration backed his strategy—the “first of many times that an American president would plot to overthrow a foreign government.” As Jefferson explained to his Secretary of State, James Madison, “although it does not accord with the general sentiments of views of the United States to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries, it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to turn to their advantage, the enmity and pretensions of others against a common foe.”

Eaton set up a joint base of operations in Egypt, from which he led an expeditionary force of about 600. They took the city of Derna, only to learn that Jefferson’s special envoy, Tobias Lear, had negotiated a peace treaty with the regnant pasha, who had been alarmed at American battlefield success. “Eaton boiled over with anger at what he viewed as a sellout of his men and America’s allies,” but could do nothing. 

Hostilities resumed in 1815, as Algiers sided with Britain in the War of 1812. This time, Commodore Stephen Decatur won favorable terms from the Barbary states after several successful naval skirmishes. “The naval operations had established an important principle—freedom of the seas—and helped end for all time the threat to commercial shipping from the [Barbary] corsairs,” although the decisive act occurred when France finally took control of Algiers, adding it to its empire in 1830. “Tripoli would not become a threat to international order again until the 1970s,” when it was ruled by the notorious and now late Muammar Gadhafi.

In subsequent decades, “even if the U.S. eschewed overseas colonialism” during the Europeans’ ‘scramble for empire,’ “that hardly means the country was isolationist, as the popular myth has it”; “where commercial interests advanced, armed forces were seldom far behind,” as “the flag usually follows trade, not the other way around.” Indeed, “throughout the nineteenth century, American influence kept expanding abroad, especially in the Pacific and Caribbean.” While the army fought the Indians in North America, the navy and the very small Marine Corps defended the commercial shipping. The composition of the navy was sharply divided between the officers, culled from the gentry class—many of them “imperious, hot-blooded, quick to take offense, and above all brave, sometimes suicidally so”—and the enlisted men—for the most part uneducated and impoverished, “the dregs of the waterfront,” usually foreign-born and non-citizens, fighting alongside black freemen. The enlisted men “would not be missed overmuch if a few died in action.” The Marines acted as guards to protect the aristocrats on the upper deck from an incursion from “the lower deck rabble.” 

Their missions included chasing pirates in the Caribbean in the 1820s and off Sumatra in the early 1830s. Under orders from the Jackson Administration, the navy also bombarded Argentinian forces on the Falkland Islands, where American seal-hunting vessels had been seized. After Congress outlawed slave importation in 1807, the navy played a relatively minor role in assisting the British Royal Navy in its interception of slavers who operated out of west Africa, although the Southerners who often ran the Department of the Navy kept such activities to a minimum. The navy also gave minor assistance to Britain in its successful opening of Chinese ports to trade. “No matter how tiny, the navy had little trouble overawing various pirates and tribesmen with its vastly superior technology and training.” As a result, U. S. exports multiplied more than sixteen-fold between 1789 and 1860. This “empire of the seas,” as Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward called it, was not the overseas empire of Britain, and so could be maintained at vastly smaller cost.

Americans rolled back that empire after the Civil War, preferring to have their manufactures and farm produce shipped under foreign flags. The second half of the century saw a small and futile action intended to open Korea to American trade and nearly twenty expeditions in Central and South America, usually as a response to a revolution that threatened U.S. diplomats and merchants. The year 1885 saw a more serious conflict, when President Cleveland sent troops to Panama in order to defend the Panama Railroad from a local strongman. In general, by the 1880s, the U.S. navy was “a joke” compared to the Europeans, ranking twelfth in the world in number of ships—behind the likes of Turkey (the ‘Sick Man of Europe’) and Sweden. But in 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “a work that would define the age.” Mahan urged his fellow countrymen to build a real navy, one that could match the European powers. Theodore Roosevelt built his career in national politics on that, and he had no shortage of allies in Congress. “The result was the first major peacetime arms buildup in the nation’s history, a buildup that gave America a navy capable of sinking the Spanish fleet in 1898.” And, given the steam-powered ships’ need for fuel, America needed to acquire not an overseas empire but secure overseas coaling stations. Many attempts to purchase land for that purpose failed, but the mid-1890s Hawaii had been taken, after American residents overthrew the native ruler, and by 1899 the United States had secured a portion of Samoa in an agreement reached with Britain and Germany. 

Boot marks America’s ascendency to “great power” status by its response to the 1900 Boxer Uprising in China. The so-called Boxers (called that in recognition of their knowledge of martial arts), more properly called the I-ho ch’üan or “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” detested the incursions of modernizing Western influences, which included Christian missionaries. They made the mistake of threatening foreign embassies, attracting the military attention of Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan. For their part, the invading forces behaved badly, looting Beijing extensively and, in some cases raping and murdering Chinese women. The Germans were especially ruthless, having been ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm II to act “just as the Huns a thousand years ago” had done. By 1912, the monarchic regime collapsed and China became a republic. America had had cooperated in an important overseas land operation with other major powers for the first time. 

Simultaneously, America fought against guerrillas in the Philippines, where the people were no more delighted with American rule than they had been under the rule of Spain. Americans didn’t actually want to rule the country, preferring to establish a naval base at Manila as a counterpart to the British base at Hong Kong. A base at Manila would deter German and Japanese ambitions there. This policy was opposed by a distinguished group of American anti-imperialists which included former president Cleveland, frequent presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor union leader Samuel Gompers, the philosopher William James, the social worker Jane Addams, and Mark Twain. In the war itself, the disorganized and poorly-armed Filipinos were no match for American troops, but disease and heat exhaustion often overmatched the Americans. If Napoleon’s army had foundered against Russia’s ‘General Winter,’ Americans faced ‘General Tropics.’ Nonetheless, Americans rallied behind the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the Insular Cases, holding that the United States need not grant citizenship to conquered peoples reassured those who feared economic competition from low-wage workers. Colonial governor William Howard Taft and General Arthur McArthur oversaw the construction of schools, vaccination programs, sanitation, and worked to stand Filipinos up for eventual self-government by establishing courts with Filipino judges, and introducing municipal elections. Along with these policies of “attraction,” McArthur did not neglect to pursue military action, called “chastisement,” against the insurgents, some of them harsh—notably, the concentration camps in southern Luzon, where 11,000 Filipinos died of disease and malnutrition. By July 1902, President Roosevelt could declare victory, although the Muslim Moros on the islands of Mindanao and Jolo held out and indeed continue to menace foreigners and non-Muslim Filipinos alike, to this day. In 1907, Filipinos established the first national legislature in Asia; in 1935, the Philippines achieved full control of its domestic policies, and in 1946 it was granted full independence. “Among the institutions bequeathed to the Filipinos by the Americans were public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state. Unlike the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation; Congress was so concerned about protecting the Filipinos that it barred large landholdings by American individuals or corporations.” Pacification at the turn of the century had come at the expense of more than 4,200 Americans and 16,000 Filipinos killed, along with 200,000 civilian dead, “victims of disease and famine and the cruelties of both sides.” But the policy of attraction and chastisement worked, the Philippines eventually achieved independence, and America retained its naval base at Manila Bay. One key element of strategy, forgotten by the time America intervened in the war against the Vietnamese Communists, was the practice of placing army garrisons in the countryside, where they could live among the people, reduce civilian assistance to the guerrillas, and become fully familiar with the lay of the land. Boot observes that “the army’s success may be ascribed in some degree to the invaluable experience its top commanders had gained in fighting Indians” in the American West—the “finest irregular warriors in the world.” Twenty-six of the thirty American generals who sought in the Philippines from 1898 to 1902 had previous fought in the Indian Wars. And finally, the U. S. Navy blockaded the Philippines, preventing the insurgents from receiving foreign assistance and from moving men and supplies easily along the extensive coastline. And, it might be added, there was no equivalent of North Vietnam, backed by the equivalent of the Soviet Union.

In the years between the Spanish-American War and World War One, the United States established a true Pax Americana in the New World. “No longer would U.S. sailors and marines land for a few days at a tie to quell a riot” that threatened American lives and property; “now they would stay longer to manage the internal politics of nations.” In Cuba, the American military occupation was brief, with the stipulation that Americans would enjoy long-term leases on naval bases and cede to Americans the right “to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property.” “Havana went along because it had no choice” in becoming an American protectorate. In Panama, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama, which regime it had helped Panamanian revolutionaries to install; in return, the new regime granted America sovereignty over the Panama Canal, then under construction, and lands surrounding it. The Canal Zone was potentially vulnerable to foreign attack, but only potentially, since “by 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard”—second only to Britain, which by now was itself a commercial republic moving into alignment with America against Wilhelmine Germany. Such power was indeed necessary, as German naval officers, commanding a fleet as big as America’s had war plans for “seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States.” And of course, during the world war German submarines attacked American shipping in the Atlantic and schemed to ally with Mexico. When the Panamanian tyrant José Santos Zelaya allied with Germany and Japan, hoping to get support for the construction of a rival Central American canal, and schemed to bring the five Central American republics under his rule (he succeeded in overthrowing the government of Honduras), the United States pressured him out of the country in 1909, having found a friendlier replacement. 

During and after the First World War, Haiti became a problem for Washington. Between 1843 and 1915, the island had seen 102 civil wars, coups d’état, and other revolts. Haiti was ruled by a small, educated minority of mulattos; Catholic and French-speaking, “they regarded themselves as a race apart from, and superior to, the Creole-speaking, voodoo-practicing, darker-skinned Haitian masses.” If this ruling class split, one side would select a presidential candidate, give him a payroll supplied by resident German merchants (who controlled 80% of foreign trade), who would then watch as their man recruited soldiers of fortune and bandits, who would march to the capital and seize control, driving the sitting president into exile. Everyone profited: the merchants would be repaid, with interest; the soldiers would be paid for their trouble, in part with the loot they seized on the way to Port-au-Prince; the exiled president would “tak[e] a portion of the treasury with him,” easing the indignity of his ouster. That is, coups served more or less the same function as elections do in less tumultuous regimes. None of this worried Americans.

What made the revolution of July 1915 different was the sitting president’s refusal to leave quietly, as per custom, the subsequent bloodletting (200 members of the mulatto elite were arrested, most of them murdered by the police chief), and the concern that Germany might intervene and establish a naval base from which they could prosecute their war aims and interfere with ship traffic to and from the Panama Canal. The Wilson Administration’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, wrote that the Marines were ordered to seize control of the island “to terminate the appalling conditions of anarchy, savagery, and oppression which had been prevalent in Haiti for decades” and “to forestall any attempt by a foreign power to obtain a foothold on the territory of an American nation.” The policy had nothing to do with ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ as Leftist writers often allege, because the minor U.S. business interests in Haiti were never threatened. No general rebellion followed the American occupation because American rule was better for Haitians than mulatto rule had been. Boot notes that Napoleon had failed in his attempt to quell the Haitian revolt of 1802 because he “had been trying to reimpose slavery and had fought a campaign of extermination, whereas, by Haitian standards at least, U.S. tactics were restrained and U.S. rule quite mild” and also because the French had not understood how to counter yellow fever, which “decimated” their troops. The Marines withdrew nine years later, with an elected government in place; the Roosevelt Administration ended U.S. political control ten years after that. The occupation had succeeded: it prevented German military occupation, and U.S. administrators oversaw the construction of 1,000 miles of roads, 210 major bridges, nine major airfields, 82 miles of irrigation canals, a substantial telephone network and a network of medical care. Americans did not succeed in “plant[ing] constitutional government” there, finding that “it would not take root.” FDR nonetheless listened to hand-wringing complaints about American ‘imperialism” and began his “Good Neighbor” policy of refusing to intervene, which meant that Haiti was misruled by tyrants for the next thirty years. “The only thing more unsavory than U.S. intervention, it turned out, was U.S. nonintervention.” In 1994, the Clinton Administration ended the FDR policy by sending in the Marines to reinstall a duly elected Haitian president who had been ousted by a coup that that had imposed a tyranny. Since then, Haiti has seen constitutional government.

Also during the First World War, the Wilson Administration undertook an invasion of Mexico. The wealthy Francisco Madero had organized revolutionary forces against the tyrant Porfirio Diaz in 1910; a Durango bandit, whose nom de guerre was Pancho Villa, was recruited to lead his forces. Three years later, Madero was in turn overthrown, replaced by General Victoriano Huerta; U.S. President William Howard Taft backed Huerta but his successor, Woodrow Wilson, did not, deeming it “a government of butchers.” Huerta fled to Spain in 1914. Boot identifies three major forces who rebelled against Huerta: “dispossessed peasants in southern Mexico led by Emiliano Zapata”; middle- and upper-class “progressives,” moderates who wanted to end oligarchic rule and to establish a constitutional republic; and Villa’s forces in northern Mexico, which consisted of “poor farmers, miners, cowboys, and Indians” who wanted land reform. Pancho allied with a “new leader of the revolution, Venustiano Carranza, governor of a northern state, Coahuila and founder of the Constitutionalist Party. Villa defeated the Huerta forces in the state of Chihuahua and ran it himself, expropriating big landowners and giving the proceeds to his followers. He left middle-class property owners unmolested. After Huerta departed, “the revolutionaries fell out among themselves setting the stage for the greatest bloodletting of the entire civil war, with Zapata and Villa allying against Carranza. Villa’s side was crushed. During the struggle, Wilson had ordered an American military intervention on the Constitutionalist side, occupying Veracruz. Wilson, who wanted stability in the country, embargoed arms shipments to the anti-Carrancista forces and “extended de facto recognition to the Carranza government” in October 1915. In response, Villa ordered a series of cross-border raids, most of them in Texas. This provoked Wilson to launch the Punitive Expedition in northern Mexico, with strict orders to the soldiers to refrain from looting; officers paid Mexicans for provisions, much to the amazement of the Mexicans. The Americans failed to capture Villa, succeeding only in temporarily scattering his forces. Eventually, it was the Constitutionalist forces that defeated him, in 1920; he was assassinated by government operatives in 1923. In ten years of civil war, some one million Mexicans had died. General John Pershing’s expeditionary force had gain military experience that proved valuable when the United States fought in the First World War, but while the Veracruz seizure had helped the Constitutionalists, the later Punitive Expedition had accomplished nothing lasting.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Wilson joined with allies Britain and France to intervene against the newly formed Soviet Union. Wilson had been buoyed by reports of the March 1917 Russian Revolution against the czarist regime (Russia has “always been in fact democratic at heart,” he exulted, without evidence), then dismayed by the Bolshevik Revolution of November. The Allies were incensed with the separate peace the Bolsheviks signed with Germany, ceding the Baltics, Ukraine, and southern Russia to Germany, enabling the enemy to “transfer a million soldiers to throw against their exhausted amies on the Western Front.” This prompted the British to intervene, sending a small group of Royal Marines to the port city of Murmansk. Wilson hesitated to comply with the British request for reinforcements but finally agreed in order to protect the Czechoslovak Legion, some 70,000 defectors from Austria-Hungary who had volunteered to fight with the Allies when the czarist regime was still in power. Now that the Soviets had taken Russia out of the war, the legionnaires intended to get over to the Western Front; they couldn’t use any of the blockaded western ports, so they began to march across Siberia to Vladivostok on the Pacific, from which port they would sail for France. The Bolsheviks initially approved this mission but, fearing an alliance between the legionnaires and the pro-czarist elements in the Russian army, demanded that they disarm. When the Czechs refused to do so, fighting broke out and “the Allies, including the U.S., felt a moral responsibility to safeguard the legion.” 

The American forces were led by Major General William S. Graves, who “interpreted his vague orders to mean that his men should remain neutral in the Russian Civil War” and “refused to engage in an offensive against the Bolsheviks, or event to confiscate weapons from suspected Communists.” Disgusted by atrocities committed by the anti-Communist “Whites,” he evidently knew nothing of worse atrocities committed by the “Reds.” Meanwhile, another segment of the U.S. Army did fight the Communists, although its efforts were soon curtailed by the characteristically brutal Russian winter. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, President Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George agreed to withdraw the troops, as “they did not think foreigners could suppress a revolution, even though Britain and American had successfully suppressed revolutions from India to the Philippines.” They assumed, without much warrant, that the Bolsheviks must be enjoying the support of the Russian people. “It did not occur to them that the Communists’ success might be due, as it largely was, to purely military factors—the Reds had better and more unified leadership, more materiel and men, and greater willingness to brutalize the population into acquiescence than the Whites did,” and that, moreover, “although many of the White leaders were hardly democrats, the Reds were imposing upon the Russian people a regime that would make Ivan the Terrible’s look almost benign by comparison.” Despite Winston Churchill’s vehement protestations to the contrary, Lloyd George imagined that “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed was fundamentally anti-militarist.” In the United States, the Senate nearly passed a resolution to recall the troops; the Wilson Administration finally gave in, in the early weeks of 1920. Boot estimates that with two or three divisions (i.e., 24,000 to 36,000 troops), the Allies would have tipped the scales against the Bolsheviks, likely saving the millions of lives lost to Communist in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century.

A few years later, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations fought a small war closer to home. Nicaragua was still occupied by a 100-man contingent of Marines. In 1924, a coalition government of Liberal and Conservative party members was elected, only to be overthrown by the Conservative Emiliano Chamorro. The United States didn’t recognize the new regime, and civil war broke out in May 1926. Mexico backed the rebels, while the United States successfully supported the election of Adolfo Diaz, that November. As a U.S.-brokered peace treaty between the new government and the Liberal Party rebels was not accepted by one Liberal commander: Augusto Sandinò, an anti-American nationalist backed by Mexico and the Soviet Union. Sandinò demanded a new election; Washington demurred. Although he accepted Communist support, he was not himself a Communist; he knew what he wanted—American withdrawal from Nicaragua and from Latin America generally—but “he lacked a well-thought-out political agenda” beyond that. The war ended when newly-elected President Roosevelt withdrew American troops in 1933; Sandinò was arrested and executed and the Sandinistas crushed in the following year. Although Communists and their dupes ever after charged the Roosevelt Administration with complicity in these actions, Boot reports that “the evidence does not support this contention.” The coup organized by a former war minister, Anastasio Somoza, who established a tyranny, found his opportunity only after the Marines left. “Dictatorship was indigenous; democracy was a foreign transplant that did not take, in part because America would not stick around long enough to cultivate it.”

Prior to the Second World War, the Marines issued The Small Wars Manual, summarizing lessons learned in such conflicts. The Manual defined the American understanding of small wars as “operations undertaken under executive authority”—that it, without a declaration of war by Congress [1]—wherein “military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.” The army is better adapted to fighting big wars, the Marines for small wars. Big wars aim at “the defeat and destruction of the hostile forces,” but American military forces in small wars aim “to establish and maintain law and order by supporting or replacing the civil government in countries or areas in which the interests of the United States have been placed in jeopardy.” For that reason, “hatred of the enemy,” encouraged during the Great War and soon to be revived during World War II, should be eschewed; “sympathy and kindness should be the keynote to our relationship with the mass of the population,” since the enemy is a much smaller group: either revolutionary insurgents or a bad regime. When undertaking such a war, the military must understand that “in small wars no defined battle front exists and the theater of operations may be the whole length and breadth of the land,” in which soldiers will face enemies who “will suddenly become innocent peasant workers when it suits their fancy and convenience.” They will know the countryside better than Americans do. “It will be difficult and hazardous to wage war successfully under such circumstances”; consequently, the war may be long and the outcome unclear. Perhaps in recognition of these difficulties, in the 1950s President Eisenhower downplayed the use of small wars in countering Communist military threats, preferring to follow a policy of escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, “an area,” Boot remarks, “in which the U.S. then had a preponderance of power.”

But this policy of escalation simply did not fit all military circumstances, as American strategists failed to see when they planned the war in Vietnam. From 1959 to 1963, American forces helped to defend non-Communist South Vietnam from the Communist regime in the north. These forces were called “advisers,” a term left over from American policy in the aftermath of previous small wars, when the Marines trained and reinforced police forces, emphasizing “internal defense.” “In Vietnam, by contrast, U.S. advisers organized a miniature version of their own armed forces complete with heavy armor, artillery, air force, navy, marines, rangers” in preparation for an invasion from the north, as had been seen in Korea. But instead of fighting such a conventional war, the North Vietnamese supported a guerrilla war. “American advisers did not prepare the South Vietnamese soldiers for this challenge.” Moreover, unlike Korea, the South Vietnamese military was not under the command of American officers. And again unlike Korea, the Johnson Administration refused to attack targets in North Vietnam, notably the capital city of Hanoi, the major harbor of Haiphong, supply routes from China, and the Red River dikes; “U.S. warplanes in the Korean War had destroyed North Korea’s dike system, with devastating results.” The Communists “rightly” regarded the frequent pauses in the limited bombing campaign as “a sign of the Johnson administration’s weakness and irresolution.” Johnson wanted no escalation of the war because he feared Chinese intervention (again, as in Korea), preferring to invest in his domestic ‘War on Poverty.’ And so, the problem was that Americans stuck themselves in between a big-war strategy and a small-war strategy. “Thus the really hard, vital work of keeping the Vietcong out of the South’s population centers was left for the most part to the ill-equipped, ill-trained South Vietnamese militia, who did not even have access to modern rifles.”

No better strategy could have been conceived to hand the advantage to the enemy. Rather than meet American military strength, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap took up Chairman Mao’s strategy of a “people’s war”; propagandize the peasants in order to establish “a protective belt of sympathizers willing to supply food, recruits, and information”; fight “a protracted guerrilla struggle” aiming in part to kill not just the foreigners but as many pro-American, anti-Communist Vietnamese as possible; and finally, having weakened the enemy, form conventional armies “that, in conjunction with a general popular uprising, will finish off the enemy” and change the regime into a ‘people’s republic.’ The Vietcong—the South Vietnamese Communist guerrillas—needed only minimal supplies from the North, simply taking supplies and manpower from the peasants, whether the peasants were collaborators or not. Although North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating South Vietnam in the mid-1960s, they did not become the preponderant force there until 1968, and even then, they engaged in guerrilla-style “hit-and-run tactics.” 

One Marine commander, Major General Victor H. Krulak, advocated a strategy based on the small-war lessons he had learned from his commanding officers as a young Marine in the 1930s. What he called a “spreading inkblot” strategy would have “expand[ed] American control slowly from the seacoast by pacifying one hamlet after another, as the U.S. had done in the Philippines six decades earlier.” Since eighty percent of South Vietnamese lived in ten percent of the country, the aim would have been to prevent the Vietcong from infiltrating the population centers by providing security for the villagers. There was no point in attempting to search for enemy forces in the jungles, where they could hide successfully, “but if the U.S. could cut them off from the civilian population, they would wither away,” separated from their sources of supply and recruitment. Krulak’s recommendation did not prevail, and while “U.S. soldiers never lost a battle…neither did they manage to pin down enough of the enemy so that a victory meant something.” They were reacting to enemy attacks, attacks launched when the enemy chose to attack. And the American soldiers had no training in counterinsurgency; once ‘in country,’ they learned soon enough, but in the conscript army of that time they were quickly rotated out and replaced by new and inexperienced men. Meanwhile, the famous “hearts and minds” campaign by a variety of nonmilitary American agencies lacked a serious military component. The military side of American operations—called “search-and-destroy”—and the civilian side—called “pacification”—were disjunct. The main exception to this policy was the Combined Action Program, in which Marine rifle squads were paired with South Vietnam Popular Forces militia (“about 30 men from the local community”) who successfully took and held villages, with much lower casualties than the search-and-destroy missions. But at its peak, fewer than 2,500 Marines participated in the program.

In terms of politics, General William Westmoreland did not understand the character of the Communist regime. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China had proved themselves capable of absorbing enormous losses, both in war and in peacetime ‘purges.’ Similarly, “North Vietnam was ruled by a dictatorship impervious to the pressure of popular opinion,” its leaders “tolerat[ing] staggering causalities with equanimity”: 1.1. million dead, 300,000 missing from a population of 20 million. That is, the Vietnamese civil war saw many more times the number of casualties than the Union did in the American civil war. And in Vietnam, American casualties of 58,000—comparable, Boot observes, to the annual number of traffic deaths, at that time—turned Americans against the war. By 1968, North Vietnam’s New Year offensive, violating a truce arranged for the holiday, resulted in 50,000 Communist dead against 2,000 Americans, was reported as a serious American setback in the American news media. President Johnson quickly announced that he would not seek re-election.

At this, the Army generals finally changed toward a pacification strategy, Operation Phoenix, which was highly effective. On the civilian side, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu ordained land reform, giving farmers legal title to the fields they worked—a powerful incentive against Communist propaganda and a reason to defend local territories against would-be expropriators. After one last failed offensive in March 1972, the Communists came to the bargaining table with the Nixon administration. After the agreement, South Vietnam couldn’t defend itself any more than West Germany could have done after the Second World War or South Korea could have done after that war. In the latter two cases, however, American troops stayed in place. In 1975, Congress cut aid to South Vietnam. The North took that as a signal to strike, this time successfully. 

The lessons American politicians learned from the Vietnam War were, first, to replace conscripts with professional soldiers and, second, to prefer “sanitized, high-tech warfare” to the commitment of ground troops. This tends to miss the point: while Americans of course want no casualties of any kind, their main concern is victory—that soldiers “not die ‘in vain.'” The later interventions in Lebanon and Somalia confirm this. As to regime change, “the American track record of imposing liberal, democratic regimes by force is mixed”: successful in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, and Italy, not so in Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, or (later) Afghanistan. Boot does not overlook the costs of non-intervention and short-term intervention, notably in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He hopes that the United Nations might sanction international efforts to restore governance in failed states—typically, a wan hope. This notwithstanding, “American should not be afraid to fight ‘the savage wars of peace’ if necessary to enlarge the ’empire of liberty.’ It has done it before.”

Note

1. “Declarations of war—voted against Britain in 1812, Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, the Central Powers in 1917, the Axis in 1941—were the exception, not the norm” throughout American history.

The translator defies theosis as “personal communication with God ‘face to face.'” Such communication can only come with godliness, perfection, righteousness, since no merely human being can look upon the Lord and live. A human being can attain such spiritual elevation through membership in the Christian Church, the New Israel, the spiritual Israel, a Church in which “all humanity” can and should find welcome. “The Orthodox Church has retained this original message of Christ unchanged.” Against the sola Scriptura claim of Protestantism, the Orthodox Church maintains that “Christ’s teachings could not be arrived at from the Holy Bible alone; we would simply project our modern concepts onto the early Church” if we struggled to understand Scripture without the interpretive guidance of the early Fathers of the Church as faithfully transmitted from those centuries to our own. “Theosis stems from this tradition in which the early Church, Traditional Christianity, and Orthodoxy are identical.” The early Church Synods, notably “the seven Oecumenical Synods, the Synod of S. Photios of 867 and the Palamite Synods of the fourteenth century,” expressed doctrines already “fully present within the Church from the day of Pentecost” and, crucially, determined which books now recognized by Christians as the New Testament. Thus, “the dual task of Orthodox Theology is to define and also to protect from human distortion the teachings of Jesus Christ,” teaching not merely ‘academic,’ a matter of intellectual apprehension, but of whole-souled “living faith,” a way of life. The translator denies that Western Christianity fully believes and practices original Christianity because “over one thousand years separate it from this tradition”—the centuries since the Great Schism.

Theosis is central to Orthodox Christian doctrine; it is the telos, the purpose, of human life. “Theosis is the Pearl of Great Price alluded to by Christ” and it “can become a present reality for those who are willing to tread the path, and so it is not exclusively an after-death experience.” The Apostle Paul expresses this experience in saying “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” victory over death.

In his book, Theosis, George Kapsanis, Archimandrite of the Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorious at Mount Athos, provides a succinct explanation of this overarching purpose that God has set down for His human creatures. Archon means ruler; mandra means enclosure: an archimandrite rules a large monastery or group of monasteries; the human ruler thus writes of the ruling purpose of human life. Archimandrite George lists seven purposes in writing his book: to identify “the highest and ultimate purpose of our life; that for which we were created”; to uphold is conviction that “the only truly Orthodox form of pastoral guidance is that which is intended to lead to Theosis,” to “quench the depth of the psyche’s thirst for the Absolute, the Triune God” [1]; to prompt readers to “overflow with gratitude toward our Maker and Creator for His great gift to us, Theosis by Grace”; to have us “realize the irreplaceability of our Holy Church as the only community of Theosis on earth”; to reveal “the magnificence and truth of our Orthodox Faith…as the only faith that teaches and provides Theosis to its members”; and finally, to console our psyches, “for regardless of the degree to which they have been poisoned and darkened by sin, they yearn for the light of Christ’s face.”

Theosis is the purpose for which we were “placed on earth.” In the words of St Gregory the Theologian, a human being is an animal “in the process of Theosis.” Man is the “only one which can become a god” because he is the only animal created “in His image.” God’s image means “the gifts which God gave only to man in order to complete him as an icon of God,” namely, nous, conscience, and “individual sovereignty” (“freedom, creativity, eros, and the yearning for the absolute and for God”); self-awareness—in sum “everything that makes man a person.” The Archimandrite defines nous as “man’s highest faculty,” both the “eye” and the “energy” of the psyche, both what enables the psyche to perceive God’s teachings and commands (it is “cognitive, visionary, and intuitive,” capable of “perceiv[ing] God and the spiritual principles that underlie creation”) and to act in obedience to them. Man’s “fall,” resulting from his first sinful act, fragmented his psyche, causing the nous to “identify itself with the mind, the imagination, the senses, or even the body,” preventing man from achieving “a personal union with his Creator.” Philosophies and “psychological systems” thus fail to “correspond to man’s great yearning for something very great and true in his life.” 

What is this psyche, which yearns for God while no longer knowing how to reach him? The Archimandrite calls it “the most important and least understood of all Biblical words.” Orthodox Christians define it as “a pure unalloyed essence which animates the body and gives it life; it is our immaterial nature, created yet eternal, comprising our cognitive, conative, and affective aspects, including both the conscious and the unconscious.” This implies that “psychic health precedes salvation”; theosis requires continual and victorious spiritual warfare, not mere conversion and baptism. Psyche encompasses “the meanings of five English words: ‘soul,’ ‘life,’ ‘breath,’ ‘psyche’ (“as in modern psychology”), and ‘mind.'” In the West, soul, life, and breath have become estranged from psyche and mind, as in such locutions as the ‘mind/body problem’ in philosophy. “This dislocation is indicative of a deep spiritual malady in Western man” or, more precisely, in Western man following Greek antiquity. The Archimandrite asserts, implausibly, that the ancient Greek philosophers were “very pious and god-fearing people,” that the “Tradition of the Greeks” is a tradition “of piety and respect for God.” In making this claim, he refers to the Greek “yearning for the unknown God,” the temple noted by the Apostle Paul; one may rather suspect that Paul has alertly turned a Greek inscription to his evangelical purposes. The Archimandrite concurrently demotes the Old Testament, admitting that one “find[s] many jut and virtuous people” there, but no “full union with God.” This could only become possible and could only be achieved “with the incarnation of the Divine Logos” described in the New Testament in the mediating Person of Jesus. 

By logos, ancient Greek philosophers meant a variety of things, including order, reason, and knowledge. The Archimandrite transforms these nouns into related verbs: think, reckon, speak, perhaps to make them consonant with a Creator-God, a God of action as well as of words. The Apostle John “completes the philosophical truths of the Ancient Greeks by connecting them to the Hebrew Tradition of his day,” in the striking first sentence of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God”—Jesus Christ. “It is in the Logos that creation finds its reason, cause, and purpose.” While “the human race could have been taught to become morally better by the philosophers, by the righteous men and teachers, or by the prophets,” moral virtue does not suffice for salvation. That is especially true since Adam and Eve “desired to become gods not through humility, obedience, or love but through their own power, their own willfulness—egotistically and autonomously.” This led to knowledge of Good and Evil, to the foundation of moral thought, but not to God. On the contrary, the first humans separated themselves from God, suffering not only physical death but “spiritual death.” There was now “a need for a new root for humanity,” for “a new man, who will be healthy and able to redirect the freedom of man towards God.” Jesus met that need as the embodied Logos. “The God-Man Christ, the Son and Logos of God the Father, has two perfect natures: divine and human,” joined, in the words of the Fourth Holy Ecumenical Synod at Chalcedon, “without change, without confusion, without separation, and without division.” “This definition forms the whole theological armory of our Orthodox Church against Christological heresies of all kinds throughout all ages.” With Jesus, “human nature is irrevocably unified with the divine nature because Christ is eternally God-Man”; “human nature is now enthroned in the bosom of the Holy Trinity,” where nothing can “cut human nature off from God.” Individual human beings can “unite again with God” if the repent of the sins that separate them from Him. Sin is “estrangement from Life,” from the Creator-God. Repentance is a “change of nous aiming at “clearing the nous and the heart from sin.” Because sin is so stubborn, now engrained in our nature, repentance and redirection must be continual. The prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” is no one-time-spoken thing. As Lord, as supreme ruler or King of Kings, Jesus can grant mercy not only because He is omnipotent but because He sacrificed Himself for human beings, taking on their sins and dying on their account for us. 

Jesus enables theosis without being the only person enabling it. He could not be fully human without being born of a woman, “the new Eve, the Panagia” or All-Holy One, “who put right the wrong done by the old Eve by becoming the Theotokos or God-birthgiver,” a person “necessary and irreplaceable” to human salvation. Jesus “would not have been able to incarnate if there had not been such a pure, all-holy, immaculate psyche as the Theotokos, who would offer her freedom, her will, all of herself totally to God so as to draw Him towards herself and towards us.” In an Orthodox Christian Church, the picture of the Theotokos is placed in the apse of the altar “to show that God comes to earth and to men through her” as “the bridge by which God descended” and the one “who conducts those of earth to Heaven.” Similarly, although not so exalted, the depictions of Christian saints placed around Jesus the Pantocrator, the All-Ruler, show congregants “the results of God’s incarnation,” namely, “deified men.” The Church is “the place of man’s theosis,” the “body of Christ,” a union not with the divine essence—God’s essence (ousia) is His own, alone, as the one God, “inaccessible and unknowable to us,” an eternal mystery—but “with the deified human nature of Christ.” What we can know, what Christians mean when they say the ‘know God,” are “His energies,” the energies of a Person with whom we can “achieve intimate and personal communion.”

As members of Christ’s body, His Church, through baptism, through being ‘born again,’ “we are not followers of Christ in the way that one might perhaps follow of philosopher or teacher.” This is much more than being “followers of a code of morality,” although it is also that. As a Christian, your spiritual condition determines whether you are a living or a dead member of Christ’s body; “even as dead members, we still do not cease to be members of Christ’s body.” To revive, one needs to do what one did in becoming a member: to repent. “We could not be deified if Christ did not make us members of His body; we could not be saved if the Holy Mysteries of the Church did not exist.” And “if man did not have the image of God in himself, he would not be able to seek its prototype.” This makes the Church different from other organizations. True, like them it has a regime, a ruling order—a Ruler, a set of ruling institutions, a way of life, a telos or purpose. But no other order can bring us to theosis. “Only within the Church can man become a god, and nowhere else.” Of course, as a regime consisting of human beings not yet fully cleansed of sin, “it is possible for scandals to happen in the bosom of the Church.” “We are becoming gods, but not yet.” Scandal is evil but does not excuse any Christian from remaining a member of the Church. God being both essence and energy, and the Church being the living, ‘energetic’ Body of Christ, it is there that human beings can partake of eternal life, preliminarily. If, per impossibile, a human being could see God’s essence, he would die, just as he would die if he touched a bare electric wire, “but if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated”; “let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God.” We will never become gods in essence, only through Christ’s energies in His Church. Pantheistic religions claim the opposite, that God pervades the world not as its Creator, essentially separate from the beings created by Him, but as immanent in all things. And complementarily, if God had only essence and not energies, “He would remain a self-sufficient God, closed within himself and unable to communicate with his creatures.” “God comes out of Himself and seeks to unite” with His human creatures via His uncreated energies; his grace is among those uncreated energies. By those energies he has created and preserved the cosmos, illuminates, sanctifies, and finally deifies man in the limited way described. Because God “has the divine energies, and unites with us by these energies, we are able to commune with Him and to unite with His Grace without becoming identical with God, as would happen if we united with His essence.” “This is the mystery of our Orthodox faith and life.” The Archimandrite insists that the “Western heretics” reject the distinction between God’s essence and His energies and thus “cannot speak about man’s Theosis.” That this is not the case may be seen in the writings of (for example) Pascal. But again, a reader might not come to the Archimandrite when seeking understanding of the teachings of the ‘Western’ churches.

And so, “a Christian is not a Christian simply because he is able to talk about God. He is a Christian because he is able to have experience of God.” This requires desire, struggle, preparation, which make us “worthy, capable, and receptive enough to accept and guard this great gift from God, since God does not wish to do anything to us without our freedom.” The Archimandrite lists three qualities that Christians must cooperate with God in order to enhance their spirituality, to bring them farther along the path to theosis. The first is humility. “Without humility, how will you acknowledge that the purpose of your life is outside yourself, that it is in God?” For some reason, he claims that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are man-centered, not God-centered, a charge that might correctly be leveled at Aristotle, who considers eudaimonia or happiness of a well-ordered psyche in a well-ordered polis as the purpose of human life. For Christians, however, God must be central because only His grace enables us to continue on the right path, the right regime, the way of life of the Kingdom of God.

The second needed quality is asceticism. “You cannot receive the Holy Spirit if you do not give the blood of your heart in the struggle to cleanse yourself from the passions,” to repent fully, “acquir[ing] the virtues” by giving up your passions. What, then, is the “heart”? It is not, or not simply, “an emotional center,” much less a physical organ of the body. It is “a receptacle for all good and evil,” man’s “psychosomatic center, the deepest and most profound part of our being,” our “inner man,” closely related to but distinct from the nous and the psyche. The heart motivates the man, serving as the battleground of the spiritual warfare between God and Satan, angels and demons. The psyche, in closely related contrast, consists of reasoning powers, the passions, and the appetites—rather as in Plato’s logos, thumos, and epithumia. To walk the path towards theosis, we must will to cleanse our reason by watchfulness, “the continuous guarding of the nous from evil thoughts, cleanse our passionate part by love, cleanse the appetitive part by “self-control,” by moderation.

The third and final needed quality is the willingness to partake of Christ’s “Holy Mysteries,” which are “Holy Baptism, Chrismation, Holy Confession, and the Divine Eucharist.” All of these are necessary because “the passions cover Divine Grace as ashes bury a spark,” and the Mysteries brush the ashes away. So does prayer. The Jesus Prayer, for example, “helps us to concentrate our nous more easily,” enabling the Christian to get a taste of “the sweetness of communion with God,” who is “not an idea, something that we think about, that we discuss or read about” only “but a Person with Whom we come into living and personal communion.” In walking along the way of life of the Christian regime, with the Person who is Christ, we “receive experience” from Him, rather than from those we might otherwise walk with—typically, the wrong crowd. The religions of the Far East—Hinduism, Buddhism, and the like, with their practices of meditation and yoga—can undoubtedly lead the nous away from “the various considerations of the material world,” but they do not lead us to “a dialogue with God.” Without that dialogue, the soul remains trapped in its anthropocentrism, even as it imagines itself to be freed from it.

“Experiences of theosis are proportioned to the purity of man.” This can be achieved gradually, by stages. After tears of repentance for sins, the nous is illuminated by God, now “see[ing] things, the world, and man with another grace.” Tears of love for God result in “theoria,” “in the course of which [stage] man, having already been cleansed from the passions, is illumined by the Holy Spirit,” resulting in theosis, “the vision of the uncreated light of God.” “Those who are very advanced in Theosis see this light, very few in each generation”; such persons are depicted iconographically by halos. “The Grace of Theosis preserves the bodies of the Saints incorruptible, and these are the holy relics which exude myrrh and work miracles,” relics and also icons, graves, and the Churches of the Saints which Orthodox Christians venerated (but do not worship) because they “have something of the Grace of God which the Saint had in his psyche because of his union with God.” 

Such experiences obviously must never be confused with demonic or merely psychological ones, by which “many people have been deluded.” Orthodox Christians should consult their Spiritual Father, who “will discern whether these experiences are genuine or not, and…give appropriate direction to the psyche who is confessing.” Indeed, “our obedience to the Spiritual Father is one of the most basic points of our spiritual path,” the path along which “we acquire an ecclesiastical spirit of discipleship.” “Within the Church we are not isolated members but a unity, a brotherhood, a fraternal community—not only among ourselves, but also with the Saints of God, those who are living on earth today and those who have passed away.” And of course “the head of this body is Christ Himself.”

“Our holy God molded us for Theosis, so if we are not deified, our whole life is a failure.” Causes of such failure include attachment to “the basic cares of life,” including too much time “learning, studying, reading,” working, and socializing, with no time to “pray, to go to Church, or to confess and take Holy Communion.” Such activities “have real and substantial value when undertaken with the Grace of God,” aiming at His glory. “Only when we continue to desire Theosis as well” do “all these find their real meaning in an eternal perspective” and prove “of benefit to us.” Moralism is another snare. “Guidance that only aims for moral improvement is anthropocentric,” making it seem “as if it is our own morality that saves us, and not the Grace of God.” But even an atheist can be moral. Speaking of which, some are blocked from theosis by adopting false doctrines such as anthropocentric humanism, “a socio-philosophical system which is separated from and made independent of God,” leading “contemporary man to a civilization based on selfishness.” Not egocentricity, not ‘class consciousness’ or ‘race-consciousness’ or ‘gender-consciousness,’ not nationalism or even humanitarianism but only ‘theocentrism’ can bring human persons to theosis. It “brings great joy into our life when we know what a great destiny we have, and what blessedness awaits us.” More, “as long as we are closed within ourselves—within our ego—we are individuals but not persons.” “That is to say that when our ego encounters the Thou of God, and the ‘you’ of our brother, ten we begin to find our lost self.” The Divine Liturgy within the Orthodox Christian Church teaches human beings “to overcome the narrow, atomistic interest in which the devil, our sins, and our passions compel us, and instead learn to open up to a communion of sacrifice and love in Christ.” The Archimandrite deplores “the tolerance of the state,” earthly regimes, wherein demi-citizens “squander the precious time of their lives, as well as the powers which God gave them for the purpose of achieving Theosis, in hunting for pleasure and carnal worship.” Archimandrite George is no enthusiast of Church-State separation, although it must be said that Church Establishment carries its own dangers, as contemporary Russia has so tellingly demonstrated.

Note

1. Oddly, the Archimandrite claims that “Western Christianity” in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, “aimed at a moral perfection for man which does not depend on God’s Grace.” He is mistaken, but one does not read his book to gain knowledge of Western Christianity.

In contemporary life, men have pushed Christianity “to the margins of collective life,” largely “by commanding that we no longer think about it.” Yet we continue to do so, as obedience to such a command “does not suit the thinking animal,” even if he is only a weak, “thinking reed.” Jesus himself was an obscure figure in the eyes of Roman and Jewish historians—or, perhaps more accurately, they deliberately obscured him: since Jesus existed and “his religion made a great stir,” Pascal considers that they must have “concealed it on purpose,” unless their histories were altered (#746). Or perhaps they ignored Him because He was not the militant, political Messiah they would have made more of, as political historians. As Manent writes, “the only thing that was splendid in their eyes is what pertains directly or indirectly to force, because such is the human order, the order of force, the order of the flesh,” while Jesus’ splendor manifested itself, in Pascal’s words, only to the “eyes of the heart” (#308). Jesus avoided ‘carnal’ splendor so as better to concentrate men’s attention on the things of the spirit. Things of the spirit not only subordinate human opinion, they subordinate human nature in the sense that the moral virtues, discernible by human reason (as in Aristotle’s eminently sensible ‘mean between two extremes’) do not “affect what theology calls the ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity—which can always be greater, or whose measure is to be ‘without measure,'” beyond means and extremes. Nor does reason commend humility, neither a theological nor a natural virtue, but nonetheless stands as “the Christian virtue par excellence, precisely in that it is the specific virtue by which the Christian imitates Christ.” (And not only Christianity; Moses is described as the most anav, the most humble man, of his time—in Christian terms, a ‘type’ or ‘figure,’ a prefiguration, of Christ.) Christ’s glory, after death, “has been of use to us, to enable us to recognize him and he had none of it for himself” (#499).

Jesus is undoubtedly the most anav man of His time, of any time. Citing Pascal’s fragment, “The Mystery of Jesus,” Manent observes that at Gethsemane, in his “agony,” Jesus complains, for the only time in His life, “his person…turned entirely to the Father.” He wishes He could be exempted not from a physically excruciating death but from the even more crushing weight of taking on all the sins of human beings. “To see in the fear of death the wellspring of Jesus’s distress and torment in the garden of olives is to give a psychological interpretation, a human interpretation, of a trial whose meaning resides entirely in the divine mission of Jesus, in his highest activity, and not in the passivity of his human nature. It is to banalize, it is to humanize, the ‘cup’ and the ‘hour,’ which belong to him exclusively.” “This punishment is inflicted by no human, but an almighty hand, and only he that is almighty can bear it” (#919). “Jesus is in a garden, not of delight, like the first Adam, who there fell and took with him all mankind, but of agony, where he saved himself and all mankind” (#919).

This agony should not be confused with His “passion,” his suffering on the Cross, when, “far from being reduced to the final impotence of a dying person, he is capable of exercising his all-powerful goodness,” promising salvation to the believing thief and commending His spirit into His Father’s hands. Jesus died “not by natural necessity but by his own will,” having suffered the natural pain of crucifixion but “retain[ing] entire mastery over his death itself.” By giving up his human nature to the designs of men inspired by Satan and more, by allowing Satan a victory, however temporarily, and by “verify[ing] with his Father that the design of God for human beings, that the ‘divine philanthropy,’ includes or requires this ‘laissez-faire’ to sinners,” Jesus “pardons sins” by “being ‘made sin’ in order to be delivered into the hands of sinners, and thus to become a ‘ransom for many,'” as the Gospel writers and the Apostle Paul testify. “By delivering himself into the hands of sinners, he gives license to human liberty to oppose itself to redemption.” At the same time, the Ecclesia, the Assembly, the Church Jesus founds receives the ceremony of the eucharistic sacrifice, the picture of His pardoning sacrifice.  “The sacrifice of Christ allows the Christian to do what was impossible for the disciples in the garden,” who fell asleep: “to keep watch and pray with Jesus.” As a result, “the Christian lives neither in time nor in eternity; he lives in this tension and suspense when the infirmity of the human will is constantly overcome by the grace of Christ.”

Would it not take “a very narrow reason, or a quite ungenerous nature, to simply dismiss this personage as a fiction or a myth, or even a mixture of reality and legend—in short as a creation of this god always at hand which is ‘the human mind'”? As Pascal has it, “Jesus said great things so simply that he seems not to have thought about them, and yet so clearly that it is obvious what he thought about them. Such clarity together with such simplicity is wonderful.” (#309). If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom according to the Bible, wonder is the beginning of wisdom according to philosophy. Pascal invites us to wonder at the Son, not only to fear the wrath of the Father. For “all the splendor of greatness lacks luster for those engaged in pursuits of the mind,” whose greatness “is not visible to kings, rich men, captains, who are all great in a carnal sense.” At the same time, wondering at Jesus does not bring true wisdom as “the greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if it does not come from God, is not visible to carnal or intellectual people…. Jesus without wealth or any outward show of knowledge [1] has his own order of holiness. He made no discoveries; he did not reign, but he was humble, patient, thrice holy to God, terrible to devils, and without sin,” great only “in the eyes of the heart, which perceive wisdom!” (#308). The eyes of the rightly-ordered heart are the eyes of agape. “The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural.” Naturally self-centered, we do not love God or neighbor except when granted to power to do so by divine grace. And so, “the style of the Gospels is remarkable in so many ways; among others for never putting in any invective against the executioners and enemies of Christ”—not “against Judas, Pilate or any of the Jews” (#812).

Understand this about Pascal, Manent urges: “He rejected the temptation to install the mind as sovereign spectator of the natural and human world, exposing the passional roots under whose rule” we attempt to investigate, to comprehend, and finally even to rule nature. “Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” the “greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought” (#199). This means that it cannot be fully comprehended. Not only God but even His creation should humble us, since “such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight”; we are “limited in every respect.” Limitation is “our true state,” the human condition (#199). Pascal exempts geometry from this stricture, while stipulating that while it does clearly define some things it does not define everything. Qua geometry, a geometer cannot know God; he cannot know man, the being who practices geometry; one who wields geometry cannot really conquer nature. For certainty, for go to Euclid. For all the other “conditions of existence,” if we stay on the human plane, go to Montaigne, to skepticism, to Pyrrhonism, or Socratic zeteticism. “The temptation of the ‘proud’ philosopher is to seek a path, a ‘method,’ to apply the geometric order to the comprehension of the human world,” as Descartes and Hobbes essay to do. This and other “abstract sciences are not proper to man,” not a way toward understanding man (#687). “However,” Manent comments, for Pascal “there is indeed a third possibility, a third path, what I have called the Christian proposition.”

“Christianity is not a chapter in a dictionary of religions, one religion among the religions of the world; it places itself directly on the plane of universality that is that of the philosophers as well as the geometers,” while “bring[ing] entirely new elements of orientation concerning our ‘true good’ as well as our ‘true state.'” “Modern reason—philosophy or science—as it took form and force in the seventeenth century, proposes to advance methodically from certainty to certainty, from evidence to evidence, unfolding or deploying before us a fabric of continuous and homogeneous knowledge,” whereas Pascal “invites to negotiate a journey in a broken world whose heterogeneity cannot be overcome by our natural capacity for knowledge.” No ‘leap of faith,’ for him; “he proposes to us a journey of reason that leads us before a choice of the heart, of the knowing heart.” The knowledge Pascal has in mind isn’t so much knowledge of the Bible or of Church doctrine. In this sense, he is neither Protestant nor (typically) Catholic. Nor is this a knowledge of nature, an ‘argument from design,’ or an argument from human nature. He does not propose a civil religion, like the Romans, like Mohammad. [2] He argues instead from the human condition, which is “divided between greatness and misery.” Perhaps most troubling to us, especially to ‘us democrats,’ the human condition encompasses persons that God Himself has blinded to His works, deafened to His Word. 

That is because, since Eden, human beings are no longer good. They are in a condition of misery, on account of that. “The experience by which one enters into Christianity is that of an impotence of the will to make effective the capacity for good that is in it.” Nothing human beings can do eradicates our self-centeredness. [3] Self-centered but not self-knowing. “Among the most difficult questions to answer is first this one: What does he, what does she, truly will? And also, What do I truly will?” To know ourselves, we need to admit into our precious ‘selves’ the only Being who is all-knowing, yet unknown to ourselves. Divine grace does not force our will to do its bidding; we can reject it, even if it gets our attention forcefully, as it did when God knocked the future apostle, Paul, off his horse. “Grace and liberty can have no meaning unless liberty can refuse grace, or refuse itself to grace.” Desiring God, wishing for God—neither of those suffice. One must will to discover God, will to ally oneself to Him. (Did Nietzsche understand this? Is that why he rejects God by exercising a will not to God but to power?) Those who do not seek Him receive no signs of Him. The Christian’s will “is too weak, or too fragile, not to ask for aid and confirmation by the divine will. To intimately link his own will with the will of God and to pray for that is not to renounce his own will by passively delivering it to a foreign and infinitely superior will; it is to confirm and strengthen his own will at the same time that one rectifies it.” Only then will it know “truly and completely…the good it wants.”

The matter of salvation implies an answer to the question of ‘Salvation from what?’ Christians are saved from damnation, a teaching that proves a stumbling block for many: Why should the failure to ‘believe in God’ warrant an eternity in Hell? Pascal does not reject such questions out of hand. “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason” (#170). Manent suggests that for the Christian soul as understood by Pascal, Hell is not “a scandal or even, properly speaking, an obstacle, but rather…an element of orientation,” “the counterpart logically and spiritually necessary to complete the practical framework in which human choice is inscribed.” God “did not want to damn any human being in particular,” but neither did He want “to save absolutely all human beings.” In His Son, the Father offered salvation to mankind. That means there is “a predestination to salvation, but not to damnation.” This offer was not tendered to each human being separately. “One cannot enter into the understanding of the history of salvation except by seeing that its subject is mankind taken as a whole and in the succession of its states.” The first “state” or condition of mankind was Eden, and there the offer of salvation, the warning against damnation, was indeed necessarily tendered to individuals, for the simple reason that there, mankind consisted of only two persons. After Adam and Eve made the wrong choice, mankind has “live[d] under the regime of concupiscence,” and God deals with us on those terms, unreturned as we are to the condition of free will. “God no longer wants to entrust perseverance in justice to the free will of human beings.” What He does do is to choose us, taking human form and thereby “rejoin[ing] us in our slavery” and offering us “a sort of servitude” or slavery in His justice. Pascal explains, “God’s will has been to redeem men and open the way of salvation to those who seek it, but men have shown themselves so unworthy that it is right for God to refuse to some, for their hardness of heart, what he grants to others by a mercy they have not earned.” In this adventure, “there is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” #149).

Putting this in ‘American’ terms, the terms of the Declaration of Independence of human equality in the possession of unalienable natural rights, there is a difference in emphasis. “In the Christian perspective”—a perspective shared by many but not all of the Founders—the unity of the human race “does not rest solely on sharing the same nature, but even more on participating in the same adventure, that of the covenant with God, Creator, and Redeemer.” In Pascal’s view as expressed by Manent, “this humano-divine adventure presupposes and produces a human unity that is much closer than that caused by the social and political nature of man, a solidarity between human creatures that is incomprehensible to natural reason because rooted in their eventful relations with the Most High.” In this way, “the most profound determinants of the human condition escape individual choices: involuntary heirs of sin, human beings receive the promise of a filial adoption that they can neither conceive nor will by their own powers.” We are very much inclined to object that we did not, as individuals, eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that we, as individuals, deserve no divine condemnation, or at least no eternal punishment. But “our sentiment of injustice comes from a valid, but narrow, idea of justice that would reside entirely in the individual responsibility of the agent,” ignoring “the closeness of the bond that attaches each of us to all other human beings,” our condition of “being the object of the same divine purpose in which each is destined to inscribe himself consciously and willingly.” The “true human history” is “the history of salvation,” the “ever-closer covenant between God and human beings,” God’s ongoing effort” to “overcome the human reluctance to accept his benevolent purpose,” which Manent considers to be His offer of adoption into His family as “Sons of God.” Yes, God is omnipotent, “but it is his all-goodness, not his omnipotence, that is the raison d’être of his design and action.” In the sinner, “bad will does not escape from the power of God, but it flees from his goodness.” In Pascal’s words, “the man who knows what his master wants will be more heavily beaten because of what his knowledge enables him to do” (#538). Christ “made his offer as a man redeeming all those wishing to come to him. If some die on the way, that is their misfortune; for his part, he offered them redemption.” (#911).

The philosophers have mismeasured the human condition by “inspir[ing] impulses of pure greatness” and “impulses of pure abasement”; neither of these is “the state of man” Rather, “there must be impulses of abasement prompted not by nature but by penitence, not as a lasting state but as a stage towards greatness. There must be impulses of greatness, prompted not by merit but by grace, and after the state of abasement has been passed” (#398). [4] “No religion except our own has taught that man is born sinful, no philosophical sect has said so, so none has told the truth” (#421). Among the religions, only Christianity “teach[es] how to cure pride and concupiscence,” teaches us “our true good, our duties, the weaknesses which lead us astray, the cause of these weaknesses, the treatment that can cure them, and the means of obtaining such treatment.” Only the God of the Bible teaches that “it is I who have made you and I alone can teach you what you are.” (#149). While “philosophers and all the religions and sects in the world have taken natural reason for their guide, Christians alone have been obliged to take their rules from outside themselves and to acquaint themselves with those which Christ left for us with those of old, to be handed down again to the faithful” #769).Your faith in Me is the opposite of blindness.

Manent concludes with a set of reflections on the Pensées as a whole. He begins with the Christian regime, the Christian way of life: “For Pascal, the Christian life is a life—a distinctive life, with its own and exclusive principles.” A democratic way of life inclines us to toward “an affective disposition quick to recognize and assert human similarity.” Christianity recognizes our shared humanity while insisting that our shared nature does not yield shared ways of life led by similar human types. “In the case of the Christian life—it is particularly important to emphasize this today—the end at which it aims, the criteria that guide it, the motives and sentiment that move it, are absolutely distinct and even exclusive to it.” The Christian regime thus differs from all the other regimes, challenging them without intending violently to change them. “The Christian actively participates in the society of which he is a member and respects its rules, but he draws from elsewhere than this society the deepest motives of his conduct.”

Christianity does not discover God by means of reason but of revelation. This doesn’t make Christians irrational, persons who engage in a sacrifizio d’intellectio; rather, it means they understand “the limits of reason as an instrument of knowledge.” “There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason” (#182), the denial of its capacity fully to understand God or even to provide irrefutable proof of His existence. Nor do Christians rightly “interfere in the physical science based on reason and sense experience,” any more than scientists have reason to interfere with Christianity. Pascal identifies “two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason” (183). That both Christians and scientists do get in the others’ way is a fact, but not a necessary fact. It is, however, a danger. Since “reason is the instrument par excellence of man, therefore also the instrument of his self-love,” “reason does not stop trying to gain the upper hand by reducing the highest, most decisive, contents of religion to its measure.” Manent adds, astringently, that “theologians are particularly prone to this temptation.” “Our reason and our will are thick as thieves in us: as soon as one lets them take the initiative, everything is lost! Self-love the ‘I’ that prefers itself to everything gains the upper hand and will stop at nothing to keep it. One must therefore begin with God; one must really attach oneself to God.”

For example, the mystery of original sin will remain humanly unsolved, “the mystery furthest from our knowledge,” since “nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has made guilty those who, being so far removed from this source, seem incapable of participating in it” (#131). We are “slaves or prisoners of a fault that we did not commit.” How can “a child incapable of will” be eternally damned “for a sin in which he seems to have so little part that it was committed six thousand years before he existed?” (#131). “We cannot conceive Adam’s state of glory, or the nature of his sin, or the way it has been transmitted to us. These are things which took place in a state of nature quite different from our own and which pass our present understanding.” (#431). What Pascal says we can take from this teaching is not an understanding of how it could possibly be just but of how much it explains about us. “All that is important for us to know” in this life “is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God but redeemed by Christ” (#560). “The Christians’ God is a God who makes the soul aware that he is its sole good: that in him alone can it find peace; that only in loving him can it find joy: and who at the same time fills it with loathing for the obstacles which hold it back and prevent it from loving God with all its might” (#460). As Manent observes, the depth of our sickness, our sin—which we cannot understand, only experience—finds its remedy only in the height of God’s healing grace. “God heals an injustice in me of which I am ignorant, or of whose depth I am unaware, by a remedy that is beyond all justice or goodness that I can conceive.” Sin can only be cured by God by “rectif[ying] the very direction of the sinner’s being,” by “caus[ing] it to participate in the divine goodness itself.” Both our sin and our salvation stand beyond “the rules of human justice.” “Reason is entirely incapable of understanding what ‘Adam’ mean, just as it is entirely incapable of understanding what ‘Jesus Christ’ means.” As Pascal has it, “the whole of faith consists in Jesus Christ and Adam and the whole of morality is concupiscence and grace” (#226). Faith, not reason. That is, one can only begin to understand our “human condition”—as Pascal calls it, borrowing from Montaigne, who sees it without understanding it—if we first accept the noetic premises of Christianity. If we only accept the noetic premises of sense perception or of some other ‘self-evident’ natural truth, we will remain perplexed without a reliable guide.

Christianity always goes against the human grain. From age to age, it goes against some new dimension of that grain. The modern dimension of the human grain consists of, among several streaks, egalitarianism—Tocqueville’s ‘democracy.’ Neither Manent nor Pascal identifies Christianity’s origin in Christianity, as Tocqueville does. “Contrary to a widespread opinion, the lane of equality that we presuppose does not result from the ‘influence’ of Christianity, or from its ‘secularization,’ but from the work of the modern state and of modern democracy, which presuppose the prior rejection of the principes of Christianity, or in any case refuse it any role in the formation of the ‘common.’ It is to the work of the modern state and modern democracy that we owe this new being, the human being who is compassionate toward his fellow human being, the kind of human being that all of us have, more or less, become.” Compassion is indeed a passion, a sentiment, but for Christians “the love of neighbor is not a sentiment but a virtue, this virtue is the object of a command, and it is a command because the neighbor is not naturally lovable” and neither am I. Nor is either of us naturally loving in the Christian, agapic rather than erotic, way. “Pity for the unfortunate does not run counter to concupiscence,” Pascal acutely notices; “on the contrary, we are very glad to show such evidence of friendship and thus win a reputation for sympathy without giving anything in return.” And how can a human being possibly love not only his neighbor but his enemy, “someone who is hateful”? Only by “the double mediation of Adam and of Christ,” the recognition of our common sickness, sin, and of the only cure for that sickness. Contra Machiavelli and his epigoni, “this does not prevent the Christian from vigorously fighting this enemy when the common good demands…but it rues out excluding him from the possibility of salvation, excluding him from mankind as it is defined and understood by Christianity.”

Pascal shares with Orthodox Christianity the conviction that “the religious life of the soul is an activity that obeys rigorous rules and demands constant vigilance, because this activity must imperatively be continuous.” To be sure, grace comes from God, but “its reception demands the action—the cooperation—of the human will.” Manent quotes a letter from Pascal to Gilberte, Pascal’s sister: “One must continually make new efforts to acquire this continual newness of spirit, because one cannot preserve the former grace except by the acquisition of a new grace,” primarily through prayer, whose purpose is “the condition of a constant charity,” a constant agape. That condition, as it were the divine condition correcting the human condition, brings joy to Christians here and now, a prelude to the music to be heard in the coming extension of the Kingdom of God. “We must work ceaselessly to preserve this joy that tempers our fear,” he wrote to a friend, “and to preserve this fear that preserves our joy.” 

Notes

1. Not quite so. As a child, He displayed his comprehensive knowledge of Scripture in the synagogue, to the astonishment of the learned rabbis.
2. “While the religion of Muhammad conquered its empire by gratifying some of the most powerful passions of human nature, especially virile nature, the Christian religion acquired its authority by declaring itself the irreconcilable enemy of these same passions”; “the word of Christ does not allow itself to be known, like the sword of Muhammad.”
3. For example: “It is untrue that we are worthy to be loved by others. It is unfair that we should want such a thing. If we were born reasonable and impartial, with a knowledge of ourselves, and others, we should not give our wills this bias However, we are born with it and so we are born unfair.” (#421).
4. See also fragment #149: “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions.”

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer translation. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

“Montaigne’s faults are great,” Pascal writes. “Lewd words” from a man so credulous as to believe the most implausible travelers’ tales yet so skeptical as to inspire “indifference regarding salvation,” with “his completely pagan views on death” whereby he thinks only of dying a death of cowardly ease” (#680). He regards each individual man as possessing a self or “master form” which can never be reformed. The convert to Christianity, the penitent, “claims,” as Manent characterizes the argument, “to be inwardly afflicted and to punish himself for not having attained a perfection he cannot attain,” but “he cannot sincerely desire” to attain it. Better simply to admit we are merely human and leave it at that. Rousseau replies that Montaigne’s candor is false and that he, Rousseau, offers the only sincere confession. Human beings are naturally good, corrupted by society. Pascal regards Montaigne as bound up in self-love; had he lived long enough to read Rousseau, he would have regarded him as equally so bound. “The bias towards self is the beginning of all disorder, in war, politics, economics, in man’s individual body”; and this is a bias, the product of a will that is “depraved” (#421). “While Pascal points everyone, and first of all himself, toward repentance, Rousseau directs his accusation against the gaze of others.” For Montaigne, man is made miserable by religion, particularly the Christian religion; for Rousseau, he is made miserable by his life in civil society under the gaze of other men.

Pascal admits that no one can escape the self. “We want to be loved, we want to be esteemed, we want to be the object of the attention of other human beings, and we cannot not want this.” We put on a show. In saying this, Pascal “does not accuse us.” “He simply wants to help us to become aware of the strangeness of a state that lies beneath all our actions or dispositions, good as well as bad, and that consists in a hatred of the truth about ourselves,” assiduous about exactly how much of this despicable truth we reveal to the world. “What is also strange” is that even “philosophers, historians, rhetoricians, and poets of Greece and Rome,” otherwise so morally perceptive, “did not discern clearly, how to articulate this fundamental characteristic of the human condition.” Pascal emphasizes the condition of human beings more than their nature cause human nature has been corrupted: “Man does not act according to the reason which constitutes his nature” (#491). They understood vice but they did not understand sin. They could describe the ‘parts’ of the soul, the actions of ensouled human bodies; they could not conceive of self-centeredness in contrast with God-centeredness. “No religion except our own has taught that man is born sinful, no philosophical sect has said so, so none has told the truth” (#421). Yet self-love “is absolutely universal”; as a description of human beings, it has what our contemporaries call impressive ‘explanatory power.’ We do not know the origin of original sin; Pascal does not offer an explanation of this master explanation, as Rousseau does. Famously, “the heart has its reason of which reason knows nothing” (#423). “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason,” and it is God who tells us that we are sinful (#423). Knowing the origin of our sin, the reason Eve was beguiled by the Serpent, the reason Adam consumed her proffered, fatal snack, both disobeying God’s command, would “not help us to escape” its consequences. “All that it is important for us to know is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God but redeemed by Christ.” (#431). As an eminent mathematician, Pascal scarcely intends to tell his readers to abandon reason but rather to exercise it within the Christian framework. “Submission and use of reason: that is what makes true Christianity” (#163). And famously, “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed” (#200). [1]

For Rousseau, by contrast, the folly of self-love “comes from a series of accidents and circumstances, from a history that degraded the love of self, a disposition that in itself has nothing evil, into self-love.” In anticipation, of Rousseau’s stance, Pascal exclaims, “Would to God…that we never needed [reason] and knew everything by instinct and feeling!” (#110). What history has caused, Rousseau imagines, human beings can correct. Self-love “must be seen as a superficial modality of our being, because it is something that has happened to love of self and that therefore does not belong essentially to our being.” Love of self is amoral, in and of itself; “it does not pertain to the will,” to moral choice. It is a mere passion, “a passion that is innocent as long as it does not motivate an unjust action toward other human beings, an unjust action that would call for the intervention of the will.” We don’t hate each other, by nature. We are indifferent to one another, except when the equally innocent passion of sexual desire drives us to mate. But for Pascal, for Christianity, “the human will is flexible between good and evil,” free to choose, but “at the same time” a “slave of a radically unjust disposition from which it cannot be healed or delivered except by grace.” It is the heart, the will, that perceives God. The one who rejects God “can oppose reason to faith at his ease, because it is by the heart, not reason, that God is perceived, but this appeal to reason is hardly relevant or conclusive, because the love of self that he has not rejected does not come from reason” either, “but from the heart,” and therefore cannot be “especially rational.” In Rousseau’s case, “in making the love of self the sole primitive passion of man, indifferent to good and evil, anterior to the will and to reason,” he “postulates a moral or spiritual quantity that is as impossible to measure as to regulate.” The link between natural love of self and political love of country, of one’s civil society, leads to ‘totalizing’ the civil society so constituted, to giving it no limits. While “for Rousseau the center of gravity is found in the individual who identifies himself imaginatively with the whole,” for Pascal “the center of gravity is in the body animated by the spirit of the body, which makes the members live.” That spirit is the breath of God, breathed into clay fashioned in the form of a human body. Far from indifferent, that life-giving spirit was good, until Man and Woman marred it, gulled by God’s Enemy. It now can only be reoriented by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, an intervention only made possible by the intervention of the Son, who took on the sins of Man and Woman—past, present, and future—in the supreme act of graciousness. Pascal aims to “dispel the illusion of which the love of self is the author, but also the result, the illusion of only depending on oneself, when in reality, because of a lack of strength and of justice, one has renounced seeking the body of which one is a member,” the body of Christ. “In order to control the love we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for we are members of the whole) and see how each member ought to love itself” (#368). 

Rousseau “persuaded us that human reality and truth were found elsewhere than in the desires and choices of our will, a conviction that rendered the Christian proposition increasingly inaccessible to us.” Christian dogma, by contrast, “is proposed to the faith of the believer, not as an idea that it would be good to entertain in his mind or cherish in his heart, but as an imperative and urgent proposition”—objective, not subjective—that “the Christian is obliged in conscience to adhere to under penalty of excluding himself from the communion of believers.” The communion of believers has a regime of its own, with its King. “The way in which one defines the person of Jesus Christ is determinative for the meaning and content of the Christian life.” That is, the character of the ruler, rightly understood, the character of his ruling offices, the Church, the purpose of his rule, human salvation from otherwise irresistible sin, all generate a way of life, a set of actions in consonance with faithful thoughts. “Communication with God was broken through our fault and cannot be restored except by God himself.” 

And so, in response to Montaigne and (in advance) to Rousseau, Pascal finds a misery-making contradiction in “the nature of self-love and of this human self.” “It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.” To our fullness of faults, we attach the “still greater evil” of unwillingness “to recognize them,” our “deliberate self-delusion.” Indeed, “a prince can be the laughingstock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.” Man is “nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others,” unwilling “to be told the truth” about himself or to confess the truth even to one man, the confessor-priest the Church has provided. (#978). The result is indeed a sort of analogue to Hobbes’s war of all against all: “open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or the skeptics.” Scholars are not exempt; the academic is “the nastiest kind of man I know” (#432). The skeptics are right to say that “truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry.” But that is because “it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.” At the same time, “you cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Nature confounds the sceptics and Platonists, and reason confounds the dogmatists.” You are “a paradox to yourself.” Therefore, “Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature!” (#131). Instead, “listen to God,” who tells you that “man in the state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity,” while “in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and has become like the beasts. These two propositions are equally firm and certain.” If you choose to return to God, good, because if you reject God’s grace you deserve to be “treated like the beasts of the field.” (#131). “It is quite certain that there is no good without the knowledge of God; that the closer one comes, the happier one is, and that ultimate happiness is to know him with certainty; that the further away one does, the more unhappy one is.” (#432).

Reason, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “makes distinctions” and “brings together things or ideas that initially seemed quite distant.” “This double capacity feeds tendencies in the mind that can crystallize in doctrinal tendencies”; biologists who seek to classify organisms recognize that some of them are ‘splitters,’ some ‘lumpers.’ Some philosophers incline to analyze, some to synthesize. In egalitarian modernity, we want to ‘celebrate diversity’ while insisting that humankind is one, and not only with itself but with the animals, too, and even the cosmos. Pascal observes that our moralists, including our moral philosophers, encourage “impulses of pure greatness” along with “impulses of pure abasement” (#398). “It is Pascal’s conclusion that philosophy has not succeeded, and cannot succeed, in mastering the polarity characteristic of the human phenomenon,” which is “stronger than the reason of the strongest philosopher, who cannot do otherwise than allow himself to be drawn toward one pole or the other.” For example, while the Stoic Epictetus adjured his disciples to contemplate the memento mori, take on the duties of entertaining no base thoughts and desiring nothing to excess. This is well thought, but he went on to presume that by so doing human beings can perfect themselves. Lax Montaigne, a modern Epicurean, an Epicurean with a Machiavellian streak, denies that reason has the power to perfect human nature, but then falls back to commending complacency, the life of comfortable peace of mind. And there can be no synthesis of the two, as a Hegel might suppose: “each of the two cannot correct the error of the other except by ruining at the same time his part of the truth.” Philosophy “only revolves in a ‘circle.'” “Darting from one pole to the other in search of a median point, the philosopher remains incapable of giving an account of the phenomenon that prompts him to think.” His incapacity derives not from the incapacity of reason to rule the passions (with the assistance of spiritedness, Plato’s Socrates would stipulate) but because reason, as part of human nature, has itself been wounded, mortally wounded, by sin. “There must be impulses of abasement prompted not by nature but by penitence, not as a lasting state but as a stage towards greatness. There must be impulses of greatness, prompted not by merit but by grace, and after the stage of abasement has been passed.” (#398). Only God can reconcile human greatness and human misery, leading men from their misery back to their original greatness, ultimately by transforming them by His power, in accordance with His wisdom, both far beyond theirs. The only real synthesis of human greatness and human misery is “the union of wo natures in Christ” (#733). 

If I remain on the level of philosophy, taking the side of either Epictetus or Montaigne, of “a certain pride or a certain sloth,” I will become an ironist, one who looks down upon the boor benighted souls trapped in their human-all-too-human conventions. [1] And if I attempt to synthesize these opposites, “there comes a moment when, while sloth dissuades [me] from going further, pride persuades [me] that [I] have arrived at the point of repose and perspective where the human problem finds its resolution”—rather in imitation of Hegel. Pascal instead urges me indeed “to think constantly about death and what perhaps follows after it.” To this, there is a philosophic reply that differs from those of Epictetus and Montaigne, the reply of Socrates in the Phaedo. To fear death is to claim to know what one does not know, whereas I can know justice and do it. It would therefore be wrong for Socrates to evade capital punishment by a city whose laws have otherwise nurtured him and indeed allowed him to philosophize for so long. Manent suggests that Pascal would object on the grounds that God’s Bible, His revelation, has given us the way to know the truth about death. “The philosophy of the ancients does not seem to have seriously contemplated the possibility of a personal immortality,” a life after death that could be very good or very bad. “Christianity in an extraordinary way inflamed the concern for what comes after death,” Christ’s resurrection having “banished the Greeks’ Hades as well as the Sheol of the Jews.” Christianity holds out the possibility of “the divinization of the whole person by his participation in the divine life.” For his part, Pascal “wants to awaken a sleeper whom a power greater-than-human keeps asleep.” 

“All our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery…. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.” (#200). The heavens and the earth God created “are not conscious of the happiness of their existence”; God “wanted to create beings who would realize it and compose a body of thinking members.” Reasoned recognition of the happiness of existence, its order, requires not only intelligence but “the good will to fall in with that of the universal soul.” As the only creatures into whom God breathed life, animated with some part of his own spirit, human’s “delight” and “their duty consists in consenting to the guidance of the whole soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love themselves” (#360). After the entry of sin into those souls, Christ’s redeeming mission stipulated that Christianity, “which alone has reason” rightly directed, “does not admit as its true children those who believe without inspiration.” We “must open our mind to the proofs, confirm ourselves in it through habit, while offering ourselves through humiliations to inspiration, which alone produce the real and salutary effect.” (#808). None of these three steps may be omitted. “Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton,” the machine of the body, which then “leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (#821). We must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us, for it is too much trouble to have the proofs always present before us. By itself, “reason can be bent in any direction” (#820). We must acquire an easier belief, which is that of habit.” This is what “incline[s] my heart.” (#821). Reason, habit, humiliation: these constitute the way of life of the Church. Accordingly, “the history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth” (#776). 

And so, Pascal replies to the philosophers, “Let them at least learn what this religion is which they are attacking it before attacking it.” God “has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him,” if they do so “with all their heart.” “In order really to attack the truth they would have to protest that they had made every effort to seek it everywhere, even in what the Church offers by way of instruction.” They do not, and “such negligence in intolerable.” It is, after all, “our chief interest and chief duty…to seek enlightenment on this subject, on which all our conduct depends,” moreover “a matter where they themselves their eternity, their all are at stake.” (#427). But of course we prefer to distract ourselves. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (#136). We want to take our minds off what we think of when in solitude. “Gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular” not because “they really bring happiness” but because “the agitation” they afford us “takes our mind off” ourselves, our wretchedness. And men have “another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement” (#136). This is where Jesus comes in. “The truth had to appear so that man should stop living inside himself,” as the Stoics commended (#600). Truth and the happiness that accords with living within the truth, “is neither outside nor inside us; it is in God, both outside and inside us” (#407). If we know our nature in its sinfulness, if we attain natural self-knowledge, we will hate ourselves. But “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit” and will love himself because he is among the “members of Christ.” “We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members,” just as the members of the physical body love it. In Christianity, “all are one.” “One is in the other like the three persons” of the Trinity. (#372).

But why Christ, not simply God the Father? Because there is “a long way…between loving God and knowing him” (#377). One may witness a miracle, but one cannot know God through the miracle. “True conversion consists in self-annihilation before the universal being whom we have so often vexed and who is perfectly entitled to destroy us at any moment in recognizing that we can do nothing without him and that we have deserved nothing but his disfavor. It consists in knowing that there is an irreconcilable opposition between God and us, and that without a mediator there can be no exchange.” (#378). “God and man have reciprocal duties” (#840). In Aristotelian terms, this means that their relationship is political, a relationship of ruling and being ruled in turn, a covenantal relationship. Among the human duties is loving “him alone and not transitory creatures, since “becom[ing] attached to creatures…prevents us from serving God” (#618). 

Such single-minded and single-hearted attachment is not for everyone. Although “the Christian proposition” is “obviously addressed to every human being,” not all “will have ears to hear.” Christianity not only commands humility: to some extent, it presupposes some degree of it. “Such a person does not know if God exists, but senses that, if he exists, communication with him has been broken” and that he lacks the capacity to reestablish it. “He measures that, from man to God, neither reason nor nature suffices to pave the way.” That is, “the truth about God, or in the relation to God, is inseparable from the truth about self, or in the relation to self.” As Pascal states it, “I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek truth with groans” (#405).

The Torah itself teaches this. More than once, God and His prophets describe the Israelites as a stiff-necked people, stubbornly refusing to listen to Word, to obey it. And in the eyes of Jews who accepted the Gospel, to say nothing of the Gentiles who did, the fact that most Jews “did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah for whom they waited,” relations declined, despite the fact that “Jews and Christians have the same God” and it “was in the Jewish people” that “a purely spiritual religion whose content was identical to what Christians proposed” first arose. “For Pascal, Judaism is already Christianity in its entirety”; “it is by regarding itself in the mirror of Judaism that Christianity acquires the most vivid and clearest awareness of what it is.” Christianity “recognizes itself ” in Judaism. “True Jews and true Christians have the same religion,” Pascal insists (#453); they “have always awaited a Messiah who would make them love God and by this love overcome their enemies” (#287). 

How so? “It is a matter of learning to read the Jewish scriptures,” of breaking the “cipher” discernible in them. A cipher is an image or a turn of phrase which “has two meanings.” “When we come upon an important letter whose meaning is clear, but where we are told that the meaning is veiled and obscure, that it is hidden or that seeing we shall not see and hearing we shall not hear, what else are we to think but that this is a cipher with a double meaning?” (#260). “The Jewish religion…was formed on the pattern of the Messianic truth, and the Messianic truth was recognized by the Jewish religion, which prefigured it” (#826). To prove this, “we need only see whether the prophecies of the one are fulfilled in the other” (#274). And so they are. “A good portrait can only be made by reconciling all our contradictory features, and it is not enough to follow through a series of mutually compatible qualities without reconciling their opposites; to understand an author’s meaning all contradictory passages must be reconciled”—a point Pascal intends to apply not only to the Bible but to his Pensées. (#257). A careful examination of the ‘Old’ Testament shows that Israel is a “figure” of the Church—a figure being “a portrait” in which “we see the thing represented” but, unlike ordinary portraits, it “precede[s] the thing painted in time.” In Jewish law, for example, there are two meanings of circumcision: the physical or “carnal” one and the spiritual one, the “circumcision of the heart.” God planned it that way. “To strengthen the hope of his chosen people in every age he showed them an image of all this, never leaving them without assurances of his power and will for their salvation, for in the creation of man Adam was witness to this and received the promise of a savior who should be born of woman” (#392). And “how highly then should we esteem those who break the cipher for us and teach us to understand the hidden meaning, especially when the principles they derive from it are completely natural and clear? That is what Jesus and the apostles did.” (#260). And so, for example, with the Gospels we now understand that Moses was the preeminent Israelite prophet and lawgiver, but he was also a ‘figure,’ a prefiguration, a ‘type’ of Christ.

A carnal reading of the Old Testament may be seen in Machiavelli, for whom Moses was just another great ‘founder’ of a human political order, along with Romulus, “a political leader who had to make himself obeyed and who was the target of the envy of his rivals as well as of the impatience of those he led.” And indeed, Moses was the founder of a regime for a set of human beings, and he did indeed face vexing opposition in doing so. Yet the story of Israel as related in the Bible features “certain episodes [that] seem so savage, so cruel—with a cruelty of which Machiavelli himself would not have been able to find the purpose—that we are, as it were, forced to seek another meaning.” For example, God commands the Israelites to kill or enslave all the other nations living in Canaan, including the women and children. “One is, as it were, dumbfounded to read” that God not only issued such a command but that he “reproached the Hebrews not for their cruelty but, on the contrary, for a propensity to come to terms with these nations that they ought to have completely annihilated,” without even carrying off the spoils of war. “One cannot understand the conduct of the Hebrews” in such instances “by invoking the customs of the period nor by incriminating an ‘intolerance’ or a ‘cruelty’ that would be proper to ‘monotheism.'” Neither historical relativism nor humanitarian shivers will do. Rather, “it is commanded to the Hebrews to keep nothing for themselves, even, or especially, in the circumstances where their cupidity—human cupidity—is incandescent, in the enemy city that the custom of war handed over to murder and pillage.” The Israelites are told to abstain from such material benefits and even from national glory “for the sake of God,” who rightly demands all the glory for Himself, inasmuch as He alone enabled the Israelites’ conquest. “God’s action, by which he forms his people, implies a wrenching separation from the human order.” His “demands…are indeed exorbitant and inadmissible, in truth incomprehensible, if one takes them literally, but their import and their meaning change entirely if one understands that the purely spiritual command they contain, in truth their only command, is to retain nothing for oneself and give all to God”; “the treatment commanded for the accursed cities can be said to be a ‘figure’ of charity,” of the agapic love that is the opposite of erotic, acquisitive love. For agapic love, the real enemy is the passions, not the Canaanites or the Babylonians.

It is in discerning the spiritual truth of the Old Testament “cipher” that human reason and memory come in. But they can only come in if “the inner disposition” of the readers mirrors that of the authors of the Book, the disposition of humility. “When one must establish with exactness the meaning and import of the decisive words of the sacred text—that is, choose between the possible meanings—it is not reason aided by memory, but the will, according to its direction, that alone can disguise.” Notice that Moses does not say that Israelites must circumcise their mind; they must circumcise their hearts—a “test of their way of thinking” (#279). Manent is careful, as indeed he must be, to deny that this means that the directions of the will create “the meaning that it acknowledges as the true sense of the text.” Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’ is not what he has in mind. Machiavelli and his followers interpret the Bible according to the object of their love, the mastery of Fortune and of nature. Genuine Jews and Christians interpret the Bible in terms of the object of their decidedly un-erotic love, their love of God. “Each man finds” in God’s promises to His people “what lies in the depths of his own heart, either temporal or spiritual blessings, God or creatures” (#503). Manent remarks that “not so very long ago, we experienced an illustration of this truth, when so many people believed they recognized the object of their hope—the ‘classless society’—in a reality” called ‘real socialism’ “that ought to have repulsed them.” 

And so it was with Jewish people in Jesus’ time. Those who were animated by erotic and “carnal” loves rejected Jesus. How could the Messiah not be a great conqueror? How could His coming be so “poor and ignominious”? Yet “those who rejected and crucified Christ”—in the latter claim, Pascal is inexact—were “the same who hand down the books which bear witness to him and say he will be rejected and a cause of scandal,” giving proof of Jesus’ real stature to those spiritual Jews, those “righteous Jews who accepted him.” (#502). “The Jews reject him, but not all of them: the holy ones accept him and not the carnal ones, and far from telling against his glory this is the crowning touch to it,” as it demonstrates the spiritual character of Christianity as consistent with the spiritual character of Judaism (#593). As with the Jews, so with the rest of us. “The will of man is divided between two principles: cupidity and charity” (#502). “The sole object of Scripture is charity” and “the kingdom of God was not in the flesh but the spirit” (#270). It is up to each one of us to choose. In so choosing, Pascal hastens to add, we are not choosing only “a God who is the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements,” the god of “the heathen and Epicureans.” Nor are we choosing only “a God who extends his providence over the life and property of men so as to grant a happy span of hears to those who worship him,” as carnal Jews suppose. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those who he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him” (#449). That God, the God of the Bible from beginning to end, cannot be chosen by human powers alone. Human beings cannot “devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator,” as they will either fail to know Him, becoming atheists, or know Him only dimly, becoming deists (#449). “If the world existed in order to teach man about God, his divinity would shine out on every hand in a way that could not be gainsaid: but as it only exists through Christ, for Christ, and to teach men about their corruption and redemption, everything in it blazes with proofs of these two truths” (#449). The capacity to choose is God-given; the right choice is given by God’s grace. Human reason alone “cannot incline [us] towards one [religion] or another,” or indeed toward belief or unbelief in any religion (#454).

Manent observes that for Pascal “the Christian faith necessarily does without proof.” “‘Faith is a gift of God’; it is God himself who puts it in the heart.” “Do not imagine that we describe it as a gift of reason,” Pascal warns: “Other religions” may “offer nothing but reason as a way to faith…yet it does not lead there” (#588). The proofs (he lists twelve of them in fragment #482) come after that, “solely to satisfy reason in the strict sense of the term—that it is to say, to grant it enough, not to prove in a domain where proofs cannot be conclusive, but to show and even to demonstrate that Christians do not say or do anything that is not accompanied by a process of reason.” Since God is superior to His creatures to begin with, and even more superior to His ‘fallen’ or corrupted creatures, Christians’ lack of rational proof of the divinity of Christ actually “show[s] that they are not without sense” (#418). It is rather, Manent writes, “the person of self-love, the person who intends or claims to use reason, simply disdains to examine it, because it is not ‘rational,'” who exhibits an irrational incapacity to understand the limits of human reasoning, the human need not only for logos but also for the Logos. And just as Jews need Christ, so do Christians need Judaism. “As impressive as the actions and words of Christ are in themselves for every attentive reader, these action and words are first aimed at the Jewish people, at the ‘lost sheep of Israel’; they prolong and recapitulate the drama of the chosen people of God, who in its greatness and its misery, ‘acts for’ all of mankind: the Jewish people is separated from the nations only in order to make known to them the common Father.” 

Notes

1. This point applies both to the senses, ‘below’ reason, and reason. “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they are; it is above, not against them” (#185). For its part, “reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go a far as to realize that.” And “if natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things?” (#188).

      2. For Pascal’s discussion of Epictetus and Stoicism, see fragments #11, 12, 13, 147.