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- Profile: He threw It All Away, by Robert P. George
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-NEWSWEEK Obituary by George Weigel
"Even in the Babylon of the present, the New Jerusalem that "comes down from above" is anticipated. The word for this is prolepsis, an act in which a hoped for future is already present. The entirety of Christian existence and of our efforts in this world can thus be understood as proleptic.
For Christians, the supreme act of prolepsis is the Eucharist, in which we take braed and wine in obedience to the command of Jesus and "do this" in remembrance of him. Thus is the Eucharist, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, , the "source and summit" of the Church's life. It is a supremely political action in which the heavenly polis is made present in time.The eucharistic meal here and now anticipates, makes present, the New Jerusalem's eternal Feast of the Lamb. So it is that in the eucharistic liturgy Christians say that they join their song to that of "the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven" around the throne of the Lamb, meaning Christ the lamb of God who was sacraficed for our salvation. In this act, past and future are now because, as the Lamb says of himself, "I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." Christ is the A and the Z of the human alphabet construed to tell the story of the world.
In this understanding, it is not a matter of balancing the other-worldly against the this-worldly, or the this-worldly against the other-worldly. Each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the promised future. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," declares the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charged as in electrically charged; the present is given new urgency, raised to a new level of intensity, because it is riddled through and through with what is to be." (14-15)
"The earthly city of Augustine's time was the Roman Empire. The earthly city to which this book attends is chiefly, but by no means only, America. Augustine's City of God provides a conceptual framework. Literary critics speak of an "inhabitable narrative," which catches the matter nicely. For Augustine, the biblical narrative provides the drama of which we are part. City of God weaves into that narrative Augustine's penetrating insights into the possibilities and limits of the human condition. He is a master of subtlety in analyzing the desires, both rightly and wrongly ordered, of the human heart. He provides arguments, interpretations, principles, and rules, but - and this is most important - one derives from his writings what is best described as an "Augustinian sensibility". It is the sensibility of the pilgrim through time who resolutely resists the temptation to despair in the face of history's disappointments and tragedies, and just as resolutely declines the delusion of having arrived at history's end.
This sensibility builds on Peter's understanding of Christians as "aliens and exiles." It is a way of being in the world but not of the world that is finely expressed in The Letter to Diognetus. This letter was written by a Christian, possibly toward the end of the first century, to Diognetus, a pagan who was curious about the way Christians thought of their place in the world. The author explains: "Though they are residents at home in their own countries, there behavior there is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a homeland, and any homeland is a foreign country."
The author goes on to point out that Christians reject certain practices of the Roman world. For instance, they refuse to abort their children or to practice infanticide by exposing their children to the elements, as was common among the Romans. Christians recognize, says the letter writer, that they are viewed as alien and are not intimidated by that. On the contrary, they rejoice in it. As the soul is to the body, so are Christians to the world. As The Letter to Diognetus puts it, "The soul is captive to the body, yet it holds the body together. So Christians are held captive to the world, and yet they hold the world together." And that is because they are the bearers of the true story of the world, whether the world wants to know it or not." (23-4)
"Those that adhere to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus turn out to be the best citizens. Those who were once called "atheists" are now the most persuasive defenders not of the gods but of the good reasons for this regime of ordered liberty. They are that not despite the fact that their loyalty to this polis is qualified by a higher loyalty, but because of it. Among the best of the good reasons they give in defending this regime is that it makes a sharply limited claim upon the loyalty of its citizens. The ultimate allegiance of the faithful is not to the regime or to its constituting texts, but to the City of God and the sacred texts that guide our path toward that destination. We are dual citizens in a regime that, as Madison and others underscored, was designed for such duality. When the political order forgets itself and reestablishes the gods of the polis, even if it does so in the name of liberal democracy, these citizens have no choice but to run the risk of once again being called "atheists".
The American experiment in constitutional democracy was not conceived and dedicated by those who today call themselves "atheists," and it cannot be conceived and dedicated anew by these citizens. In times of testing - and every time is a time of testing for this experiment in ordered liberty - a morally convincing account must be given. One may ask, Convincing to whom? One obvious answer in a democracy, although not the only answer, is that it must be convincing to a majority of citizens. Minorities, including the minority of atheists, are assiduously to be protected in their legal right to dissent. It is the responsibility of their fellow citizens to give a moral account - an account that atheists cannot give - of why that is the case. Giving such an account in continuity with the truths by which this political order was constituted is required of good citizens, not least because those who cannot give such an account depend on others who can." (117-8)
"Respect for the dignity of others includes treating them as rational creatures capable of being persuaded by rational argument, even in the face of frequent evidence to the contrary." (197)
" ...the moral and legal question is not about when human life begins. That is a biological and medical question on which there is no serious dispute. The crucial question is: At what point in its existence ought we, and for what reasons ought we, to recognize that a human life should be protected by law?
On this issue, if no other, Peter Singer has it right. As the noted Princeton ethicist and advocate for infanticide said in a June 20, 2005 letter to the New York Times rebuking former New York Governor Mario Cuomo for his confused thinking about abortion: "The crucial moral question is not when human life begins, but when human life reaches the point at which it merits protection....Unless we separate these two questions - when does life begin and when does it merit protection? - we are unlikely to achieve any clarity about the moral status of embryos."
That moral question is also and unavoidably a political question. One might make the case that it is the most fundamental of political questions. If politics is deliberating how we ought to order our life together, there can hardly be a more basic question than this: Who belongs to the we? Although ostensibly removing it from politics, the Court's abortion decisions forced into the political arena an issue that was thought to have been settled in the centuries of civilized tradition of which our polity is part: namely, that is is morally wrong and rightly made unlawful to deliberately kill innocent human beings. If a principle is established by which some indisputably human lives do not warrant the protections traditionally associated with the dignity of the human person - because of their size, location, dependency, level of development, or burdensomeness to others - it would seem that there are numerous candidates for the application of the principle, beginning with the radically handicapped, both physically and mentally, not to mention millions of the aged and severely debilitated in our nation's nursing homes.
It may be objected that of course we as a people are not about to embark on such a program of extermination. To think we might do so is simply bizarre. And as a culturally and politically contingent fact of our present social circumstances, that is true. But under the regime of Roe, we have no "clear and unambiguous" agreed -on rule precluding such horrors. We do have in our constituting texts, notably in the Declaration of Independence, a commitment to natural rights, and we do have deeply entrenched in our culture and politics a concept of the dignity of the human person.
The question, then, is this: Who belongs to the community for which we as a community accept responsibility, including the responsibility to protect, along with other natural rights, their right to life? This is a preeminently political question. It is not a question to be decided by bioethicists. Bioethicists, by virtue of their disciplined attention to such questions, are in a position to help inform political deliberations and decisions about these matters, but these questions are - rightly and of necessity - to be decided politically. They are rightly so decided because our constitutional order vests political sovereignty in the people, who exercise that sovereignty through prescribed means of representation. They are of necessity so decided because in this society the views of moral philosophers - whether trained as such in the academy or acting as such on the bench - are not deemed to be determinative. Witness the democratic nonratification of the Supreme Court's imposition of the unlimited abortion license." (200-201)
"...politics is moral argument about how we ought to order our life together. After the June 1953 uprising in East Germany, the secretary of the Writers Union distributed leaflets declaring that the people had lost the faith of the government and it would take redoubled efforts to win it back. To which the playwright Bertolt Brecht is supposed to have responded, "Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" Not infrequently, bioethicists, moral philosophers, and judges appear to want to follow Brecht's advice and dissolve the people who have proved so recalcitrant in resisting their wisdom.
The people who are the American polis are deeply attached to the concept of the dignity of the human person. For those who are morally devoted to this constitutional order and the means it provides for addressing the res publica, that is a factor of considerable significance. Yet there are those who contend that such popular attachments are prejudices or unreflective biases that have no legitimate place in authentically public discourse. Well known is the exclusion, commonly associated with John Rawls, of "comprehensive accounts" from authentically public discourse. That exclusion is most rigorously asserted when such comprehensive accounts are perceived to be "religious" in nature.
The moral authority of those who would make the rules for what is to be admitted and what is to be excluded from public discourse is far from clear to many students of these arguments and is totally baffling to the people who are the public. The perfectly understandable suspicion is that there is a self serving dynamic in the efforts of some to appoint themselves the gatekeepers and border patrol of the public square, admitting some arguments and excluding others. The exclusion of comprehensive accounts - especially when they are religious or associated with a religious tradition - gives a monopoly on the public square to accounts that are nonreligious or anti-religious in character. Such accounts are, in fact, no less comprehensive. Conflicts that are described as being between reason and tradition are typically conflicts between different traditions of reason, each invoking its own authorities.
In the comprehensive accounts that would proscribe other comprehensive accounts, especially if they are perceived as religious in nature, the operative assumption is usually atheism. This is certainly not to say that all who support such proscriptions are atheists. It is to say that, in their moral reasoning, they are methodological atheists. Only those arguments are to be admitted to public deliberation that proceed as if God did not exist. This is a non-rational prejudice to which the great majority of Americans do not adhere. They believe that it is a great deal more rational to proceed as if God does exist. In any event, they do so proceed. The politically sovereign people are free to acknowledge, and generally do acknowledge, a sovereignty higher than their own and to give public expression to that knowledge." (202-4)
"...one might say that life feeds not on hope but on memory. Yet the return to the remembered, the restoration of the remembered, is hope. The return or restoration is in the hoped-for future. What has been will be again, or, even better, will be for the first time in a fullness of possibilities never to be lost again. Life feeds on hope." (215)
"There are very real alternatives to hope. The alternatives to hope are not just abstract possibilities but real-life options. To say they are options is to say that, in very important ways, they are subject to choice. They engage the will, the capacity to decide one way or another. They are not just psychological states or personal dispositions built into our DNA. To believe that we have no choice is to succumb to determinism, and determinism is itself a form of despair. And despair is the first real-life alternative to hope. The second is presumption. Despair and presumption may appear to be opposites, but on closer examination, they are revealed to be two sides of the decision against hope.
Despair is to resign oneself to the suspicion - a suspicion that always hovers around the margins of faith - that the exile is permanent, that the hope of homo viator is a delusion. The dreamed-of, longed-for home is "pie in the sky in the sweet by and by." Perhaps death does have the last word. Despair may take the form of whimpering surrender, of fatalistic resignation, or of a brave "facing up to the facts." In its last form, it takes the stance of Stoicism, which is not without its moral dignity. Epicurus, the philosopher of Athens four hundred years before Christ, gave classic expression to despair in the guise of unrelenting realism: "Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead."
Stoic resignation, which frequently presents itself as brave acceptance of the way things are, can also be an evasion of responsibility, a way of excusing one's complicity in the wrong of the way things are. Consider Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius. To Hamlet's grief over his fathers death, Claudius says, "You must know, your father lost a father. That father lost, lost his."
When Claudius speaks of "the first corpse," that would be Abel, of course, killed by his brother Cain. And Claudius, in order to gain the crown, killed his brother, Hamlet's father. In this case, as in cases beyond numbering, "This must be so" is not Stoic acceptance; rather, it is among the easy speeches that give false comfort to the guilty. It is frequently, and dishonestly, called "realism." (217-19)Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'Tis a fault of heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corpse till he that died today,
"This must be so"
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