Pierre Manent: The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times.  Paul Seaton, editor and translator. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022.

 

In his introduction to this judiciously ordered thematic selection of Manent’s writings, Paul Seaton distills the philosopher’s central thought: “The Imago Dei is also the zōon politikón.” One might initially respond, How can this be? Upon reflection, aided by the arguments Manent frames, one might equally ask, How could it be otherwise? If human beings are made in the Image of God, and if God is a person who rules not only His creation but Himself—in no fewer than three Persons, as the Gospels teach—then human beings must be political by nature. By contrast, the “Religion of Humanity” which animates so much of European and American politics rejects God and denigrates self-government. Insofar as we adhere to this novel faith, the identity of the Image of God and the political animal will be lost on us. At the same time, precisely because it is true, we will fail to understand ourselves, with all the attendant moral and political derangements that lack of self-knowledge must engender.

Seaton has Manent open his argument with an account of the political history of Christianity, the story of “a succession of theological-political arrangements, of solutions to the theologico-political problem,” wherein “each solution ends by revealing itself to be as unsatisfactory as the one that it succeeded”—precisely because the “problem” can only be truly solved by the rule of God on earth, an event which has yet to occur. The first solution, which posited God’s Assembly or Church as “the true republic, the perfect society,” in contrast to which all merely human associations held “an ontologically inferior rank,” led to the doctrine of the plenitude of power or authority in the Catholic Church. But because this Church lacked the physical power to rule human beings directly and in all respects—Jesus Himself recognized this in telling His disciples to leave the things of Caesar to Caesar (who didn’t need Christians to tell him how to raise and spend taxes, and did not wield his sword in vain)— this led to an uncomfortable dual citizenship, an allegiance to God’s regime and to whatever worldly regime a Christian lived in—”a permanent division and uncertainty, since two loyalties necessarily share the heart of each Christian.”

In an attempt to overcome this dualism, European rulers founded a new state form, the form of absolute national (and some might say ‘statist’) monarchy. In these countries, “religion remains a command, but this command is essentially administered by the temporal sovereign,” as exemplified by the Tudor dynasty in England and, most strikingly, the Bourbons in France. “The national monarchy was intended to overcome the medieval duality of the priesthood and the emperor, ‘to reunite the two heads of the eagle,’ to bring it about that Christian subjects ceased ‘to see double,'” as certain modern political philosophers put it. The Christian or apparently Christian modern state (“apparently” because, after all, the philosophers quoted followed Machiavelli and his hints about the benefits of a purely ‘civil’ religion) might have one of several regimes: the English monarchy heading the ‘English’ or Anglican Church, attempting to adapt such an institution to English common law, thereby satisfying neither Catholics nor the more ardent Protestants; the democratic-republican regime of American Puritans, who fled the English regime only to establish a sort of absolutism of ‘the many’ instead of ‘the one’; and European nationalism, first instantiated as monarchic and then, in France, very much in opposition to the Church and to the God of the Bible, as republican. 

It is the European form that concerns Manent, first and foremost. Whether under a monarchic, republican, or oligarchic regime, nationalism without God, the elevation of each nation to quasi-divine status, has ended badly. The ‘secularized’ nationalisms that advanced throughout Europe after the French revolution culminated in the debacle of nationalism in the world wars. Those wars “have worn away the charm of the sacredness of the nation.” The victory of republican regimes over the others has ameliorated the problem but at the cost of the exhaustion of the nationalist sentiments that animated them. Ambitious and fearful men alike began to call for, then to implement, a “supranational” Europe; among other things, supranationalists imagine that political borders are at best meaningless, at worst harmful to trade and dangerous to defend. The resulting “massive immigration of non-Christian populations,” populations whose supranationalism often consists not in the dream of the European Union but in the dream of the ummah, not the Religion of Humanity but the religion of Allah, contradicts the very principle it was intended to demonstrate. 

Having first separated Church and Caesar on Christian terms, then fusing them on terms that might have been sincerely Christian or covertly Machiavellian, European liberalism separated them. Manent observes that separation is one thing, separate but equal another. “When one considers the question of government, or of command…one sees how much separation—far from being a stable situation that leaves the two protagonists intact—is an endless process that implies the ever growing and indefinite domestication of the Church” because the Church relinquishes coercive power to the State. “This gives a decisive advantage of the public institution over the private one.” The Church can and does attempt to rule within “civil society,” beneath the ruling apparatus of the State, ruling by consent rather than coercion. “However, to govern is to govern. To govern in civil society is not so different from governing in the State.” Under any genuine liberal regime, I can exercise my right to liberty by leaving the nation ruled by the State or by leaving the church that I have joined, but it’s much more difficult to leave my country than it is to leave my church. I can exercise religious liberty simply by attending the church across the street, or by staying home. And even the ‘liberal’ attempt to make exercising political liberty by leaving my country almost that easy, by making borders porous throughout Europe depends upon a shared sense of belonging that transcends one’s sense of national language and way of life—no simple effort, one animated by the rather casual expectation of a sense of ‘Europeanness’ as strong as Englishness, Frenchness, Germanness, and so on. 

This being so, the Church might pretend that religion entails no form of government at all. It then becomes “the collective ‘beautiful soul'” of the German Romantics, a “bearer of ideals and values”—entities which, “in contrast to law, cannot be commanded.” European churches today “propose ‘Christian values.'” Unlike laws, such entities “cannot be commanded”; “unlike the old Decalogue and also unlike democratic law,” they “are impossible either to obey or to disobey.” This leads Christianity away from itself and towards the Religion of Humanity because “under the rubric of ‘values’ it is hopeless to make ‘the Gospel message’ listened to, or at least heard, except by engaging in humanitarian and egalitarian overbidding.” ‘More compassionate and democratic than thou’ replaces ‘holier than thou.’ But ‘holier than thou’ always remained in principle governed by the admission that only God really was. Humanitarian and egalitarian sentiment come with self-righteousness built in, with no real authority above it.

The same goes for the standard of natural, as distinguished from ‘human,’ rights. The natural rights of the original liberal republicanism were said to inhere in every human being as such, thus serving as a criterion for human conduct. But ‘human’ rights as conceived by the Religion of Humanity cannot have recourse to nature because “modern humanity…desires to be the sovereign over nature, creator of its own nature,” right down to ‘gender assignment’ by oneself rather than by birth or (as in Eden) by God. The Church has long posed the question, What is man? or (what amounts to the same thing) What is Adam? But modern democracy “neither can nor wants to respond to this question in any manner or form”. Modern democracy rules, but it cannot say in the name of what, other than in accordance with certain sentiments, coming from it knows not where. The Church no longer rules, but it does attempt to “overbid” the democratic State in terms of the State’s own self-legitimizing sentiments. This gives the Church a sort of “dialectical advantage” over the State—or would, if the Church could shake off its own confusion. The Enlightenment had hoped to wrest not only political sovereignty but dialectical advantage from the Church by philosophizing its way out of Christian doctrines; today, the democratic state, in its moral and intellectual egalitarianism or relativism, can no longer command itself, although it does not hesitate to command others. “No one knows what will happen when democracy and the Church become aware of this reversal.”

Seaton next causes Manent to get down to the particulars. NATO’s 1999 war on Serbia, which had attempted to quash an independence movement in what had been the Serbian province of Kosovo. NATO characterized its military action as a “humanitarian intervention”—a novel concept at the time. While “the notion of humanity conceived as universal” dates to the Roman Empire, an empire presupposes an emperor; “it therefore was a universal that remained political.” It also was not universal in fact, making it necessarily political in its foreign relations. As for the Catholic or universal Church, it remained universal in principle but, being spiritual, not as a political fact. Indeed, it soon “produced divisions and separations in the world,” between believers and unbelievers and between the several denominations of those who thought of themselves as Christians. What makes Christian charity realistic, however, is that centers on the love of God and of God’s image in one’s neighbor, who is as intrinsically unlovable as oneself. When, in anticipation of the Religion of Humanity, Rousseau’s notion of compassion replaced the Christian principle of caritas, the ground was tilled for the field of humanitarianism. Unlike charity, which is so difficult for human beings that it requires God’s grace to aid us in feeling it, humanitarianism comes naturally to most, easily to many. This also distinguishes it from humanism, which requires arduous self-development whereby the soul aims at becoming fully human. [1] Unlike Christianity, which retains the Biblical sense of politics, of friends and enemies, those in the Church or Assembly of God and those outside it, humanitarianism pretends that nothing human is foreign to me. 

Being at once sentimental and active, humanitarianism “habituate[s] people to disdain political reflection, politics themselves and their concrete conditions of existence, as if the affirmation of humanity sufficed itself.” While NATO was right to intervene (“it was dangerous and dishonorable for Europe to allow a regime that institutionalized the oppression of a minority to continue to act”), in “refus[ing] to call ‘war’ the massive bombardment of a country, week after week,” the NATO countries lied to themselves and to the world, including the Serbs, who were not dignified with the title, ‘enemy.’ Consistent with this inhumane humanitarianism, NATO also adopted a policy of ‘zero fatalities’ for itself, obviating the idea of self-sacrifice, whereby “war “in a certain way ‘redeems’ itself own immorality” by risking the lives of the warriors. Finally, NATO evaded the political question of what Winston Churchill called the aftermath of war: What to do with Kosovo, after victory.

To think of the aftermath of war, to think politically, requires more than mere sentiment, however pure. It requires prudential reasoning. And even Rousseau, the founder of the demi-politics of compassion, sees that “human beings are not capable of a disinterested sentiment,” a morally pure sentiment, but “only natural sentiments, that is to say, they necessarily seek their interest and their pleasure,” experiencing compassion because “the visible suffering of another person tells me that I too could experience it, that I am as venerable as the other.” “There is nothing in pity that is heroic or impossible, since its wellspring is the selfishness of each person,” yielding “the society of the Goodwill soup kitchen.” The soup kitchen attends to the needs of the body, its organizers feeling compassion for nothing specifically human. This “tends to weaken the consciousness and sentiment of what is specifically human,” of reason, albeit in the name of humanitarianism. This is why animals too are now said to have a ‘right’ not to suffer physical pain, as per the morality of Peter Singer, who defends abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia so long as they cause no pain.

The apolitical character of the humanitarian military intervention obviates the sovereignty of states. Humanitarian action is indeed a Christian and humanistic duty, but it isn’t the same as humanitarian military intervention. The aim of military action is victory; victory entails responsibility for ruling the defeated. That is, “to modify the political circumstances of a humanitarian crisis”—to bomb Serbia—results in “political consequences,” and “the one who takes the initiative thus immediately assumes new political responsibilities.”  If prompted to intervene solely by sentiment, the humanitarian statesman will likely “engage in a political and military action in conditions that he does not know well, with inappropriate instruments, and for vague political objectives.” To so “falsify the conditions of political judgment” has “a profoundly demoralizing effect, “plac[ing] political life under an exigency that is impossible to honor and which contributes to the delegitimation of the normal political life of democratic nations.” To be genuinely political, the Religion of Humanity would need to animate some political institution that rules humanity as a whole. But “humanity as such does not have a political existence.” How, then, can national governments pretend to be agents of humanity, especially since the sentiment of humanitarianism isn’t shared by non-Western nations? In so pretending, and by doing so without reference to a standard outside themselves, beyond their own sentiments, they confuse themselves with God. This does not mean, Manent pertinently insists, that to make moral judgments and act on them amounts to ‘playing God.’ On the contrary, it is to be human. But to be human, guidance must come from that inside us that is distinctively human, which is thoughtful, and operation of logos, the distinctive feature of human nature that, in Christian terms, bespeaks the Image of God.

Manent elaborates on this new religion, the Religion of Humanity, beginning by citing Tocqueville on ‘democracy’ or social equality and its intellectual and moral effects. Tocqueville observes that aristocratic societies have a weak sense of “humanity in general.” The idea of the human species is strongly present in the minds of the very few, the philosophers. Democratic societies, however, consist of individuals who readily see other individuals as their semblables, their ‘similars,’ their fellows. This seeing is at least as much a feeling as it is an insight, and so finds its highest expression in poetry. Victor Hugo was the poet of the nineteenth century—the ‘democratizing’ century—the writer “who expressed most amply and insistently, almost systematically, the idea and sentiment of Humanity.” Although “Hugo’s poetic style no longer suits our taste,” we still “share the poet’s religious or quasi-religious sentiment.” The sentiment is so powerful that it governs even rationalists, even an Auguste Comte, whose positivism complements his humanitarianism—so much so, that he invents a sort of social (if not truly civic) religion of humanitarianism, complete with rituals and symbols imitating those of the French Catholic Church. 

Why does Manent object to this kinder, gentler historicism, surely a thing preferable to the harsh practices of Marxism and Social Darwinists? Because even if, per impossibile, “the principal evils of society will have been healed by altruism,” will human beings find some new object for their striving or will they rather cease to strive at all? Manent predicts that humanity living under ‘Comteian’ conditions “will be a humanity closed in on itself, one that is prey to an immense, or sublime, selfishness,” home to the contemptible being Nietzsche derides as the Last Man. “The religion of Humanity is Christianity and specifically Catholicism, with all the vices Nietzsche sees in it, but without the grandeur that a belief in God entails, that is, in a Being greater than humanity.” Christianity becomes Christianism, an ideology. Depending on how one translates Nietzsche’s German, the Last Man either blinks, toadlike and uncomprehendingly, at “the Roman roads, the medieval cathedrals, the Renaissance palaces,” “strangers to the motives that produced these works,” or he winks at them, feeling himself superior to the supposedly benighted folk who made them, superstitious ignoramuses who lacked the “historical perspective” of modern man. But this perspective, Nietzsche complains, “produces the flattest disposition of the soul, that of the tourist”; “the effectual truth of the modern religion of Human is tourism,” seen today in the public television programs ‘hosted’ by that cheerful bland twit, Rick Steves. “Just when present-day humanity aims to include and congratulate itself on excluding nothing that is currently human, it excludes its entire past, all past generations, from itself”—as remarked by the aristocratic Mr. Burke. “It is at the moment when it embraces itself wholly that it ceases to understand itself,” ceases to exercise its distinctively human capacity to know itself. 

Unlike human self-understanding in terms of the Image of God and of human nature, both of which respect the political character of human persons and thus the limits of human sentiments and actions, the complacent universalism fostered by the Religion of Humanity rejects “all mediation and concretization” of the human ways of life—such political institutions as nation-states and their attendant borders, with provinces and cities within those borders, and with the political responsibilities which human self-government possible. Contemporary Europeans have been able to imagine themselves “natural citizens of humanity” because the United States has taken responsibility for their military defense. Writing in 2010, a decade before Russian soldiers rolled into Ukraine, Manent warns that “this does not constitute a vigorous political order, or one likely to last.” “Sooner or later, Europeans will have to remember the political conditions of humanity.” This realization won’t come readily, as the Religion of Humanity invites us to enjoy “the certainty of doing good as well as the feeling of being good, all the more so because in the world of fellow-feeling, most of the doing lies in the feeling,” consisting primarily if not exclusively of “acknowledging and appreciating the similitude of the ‘other.'” “This way of thinking entails the inglorious death of civic virtue, as well as of serious attention to the Christian proposition.”

The central section of the book as Seaton has carefully designed it consists of a sequence of considerations on the Christian proposition. Like Jesus, the Son who mediates between the Father and Man, the Church mediates, or should mediate, between “real humanity and a dreamed-of ‘Humanity,'” between human beings as they are and human beings as they should be, at least as envisioned by the secular prophets and priests of the Religion of Humanity. Since the founding of the Church, pseudo-religions have arisen, religions that distort “this-or-that aspect of Christianity” and attempt to impose it upon men—Communism yesterday, Nazism the day before yesterday. The Religion of Humanity shares in their attempt to fuse theory and practice in “a powerful enterprise of great extent to regulate the human world by means of international rules and institutions, so that nations, losing their character as sovereign political bodies, would henceforth be nothing but ‘regions’ of a world en route to globalization, i.e., unification.” Although the Church has always been distrustful, even critical, of sovereign states, often regarding them as loci of the libido dominandi, such states also “prevented imperial stagnation” and, in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, often protected small nations from the big ones. States are not simply fields of ‘power’; they also serve as fields of politics rightly understood, there being “no more powerful source of the moral development of each person than concern for the common good or the ‘common thing,’ the res publica.” “The formation and then the deployment of the human virtues require the participation in a collective ‘unit of action’ before the members of which we feel ourselves responsible, and whose praise and blame we experience.” ‘Humanity’ constitutes no such field of action. “There is, to be sure, a human race, but it is only actualized in the plurality of human communities” in which the political nature of human beings can flourish, a nature which is the Image of God. The Catholic Church would be better advised to treat with friendship the other real communities, the nations, which, whether Christian or not, at least form a cadre of education and action in which human beings can truly engage in a search for the common good.”

There are those who argue that multinational corporations can replace nation-states as intermediaries, ultimately providing the institutional structures for world government. But commerce alone hasn’t prevented wars; commercial republican regimes have prevented wars amongst themselves, but corporations are oligarchies, not republics. And as commercial and industrial enterprises, corporations lack a full understanding of human nature. Corporations undertake exchange, an activity that “only needs very limited agreements that bear upon the characteristics of the object in question and its price”; corporate agents need not even know one another personally, as “commerce demands but little of ‘the common’ and therefore only produces a little of ‘the common.'” Commerce is a res without a publica. As such, corporations can distribute goods and services without thinking much about the distribution of honors, which requires knowledge of persons, not things. Corporations have done very poorly in managing their relations with China and with the more seriously religious elements among Muslims, even as they often blundered their way through relations with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. “China, Islam, the Jewish people, the Christian world, these are not the different colors of a rainbow humanity, these are ‘grandeurs,’ they are ‘political and spiritual quantities,’ which come to sight as proposals and affirmations of humanity and which need to be made compatible.” Manent regards the Catholic Church as likely more capable of serving as a mediator among these grandeurs than corporations will ever be, as “the only completely established real universal community, the sole ‘perfect spiritual republic.'” Its spirituality makes it a physical threat to no one; its republican character registers its political dimension, beyond mere economics.

In doing so, it can uphold the distinction between charity and compassion. [2] Com-passion is “indeed a passion,” prompting us to aid those who suffer or are in danger. “If we didn’t have this sentiment, human life would be much crueler than it is, and it would lose a good deal of its sweetness.” As a passion, however, compassion shares the weaknesses of all passions: “it is weak,” often fleeting, and “it is largely blind,” lacking the guidance of reason. “One cannot found or govern any community by means of compassion alone” since communities require virtues to sustain them—courage, justice, moderation, prudence—not passions, or at least not passion alone.

So, for example, the migration of suffering populations inspires compassion but “does not include the duty to make fellow citizens of those whom we aid.” It provides a spur to action but does not tell us what to do. By contrast, “charity is clearly a virtue, and even the culminating virtue, of the human being and the Christian,” directing us to love with the prudence of serpents and the innocence of doves. Agapic love “characterizes not certain acts, but the tenor of a life.”

This is why Seaton places Manent’s article, “Who Is ‘The Good Samaritan’?” in the center of the book, tenth among nineteen chapters. [3] Manent wrote the article in answer to Pope Francis’s encyclical, Fratelli tutti, in which the pope deploys the Gospel parable to illustrate “fraternity and social friendship.” Fraternity and social friendship are admirable, yet human-all-too-human. To interpret the parable in such terms is to ignore its centering in the things of God, not of Man. Even the Jewish priest and the Levite, who see the injured man and pass him by are thinking of God—more specifically, of His law, which bars men who are ritually clean from touching what appears to them to be a corpse. The Samaritan is under no such legal restriction. More, and supremely, “the amplitude to his deeds,” the “liberty of his conduct,” the “competence in his care for all wounds,” the “competence in his care for all wounds,” the “authority to his word,” and the “ability to make promises worthy of belief,” all point to his more than human character. “The Church Fathers were right: the Samaritan is none other than Jesus himself.” We humans lack God’s charity, strength, “reparative virtue,” patience, hope or faith “to be like the Samaritan.” “There is no Christianity outside of Jesus Christ,” and we humans need to recognize that. 

God needs no boundaries. We humans do. Among those boundaries are national borders. The migrations which have given the question of charity and compassion an inescapably political dimension in our time “oblige all citizens to take a clear and precise view of the political community that they wish to form, and they force Christians to define the meaning and significance of the virtue of charity that is the center of the Christian life.” Traditionally, the Catholic Church “put the social and political nature of man at the fore, or on the first plane,” recognizing that “the development of a person’s humanity passes by the mediation of his or her civic and social association.” To speak of the rights of migrants is to define rights in exclusively ‘individual’ terms, but whatever rights inhere in individuals as such do not translate simply into citizen rights. Manent here goes too far, denying that rights “can be attached to the isolated human individual” at all. This confuses human being as potential with human being as more fully actualized within a political community. Human being as potential, seen in individuals born and unborn, in and of itself implies no civil right, although the political nature of human beings implies a right to civility, to the membership in a regime that both protects individuals from harm and assists in their development as mature citizens. [4]

Be this as it may, “borders are the condition of existence of a political association capable of assisting” migrants.” And political borders make human approximation of Christ’s charity possible in reality. Love God and neighbor, not neighbor alone, recognizing that while God is limitless neighborliness implies the limit of propinquity, the limit that human persons must respect when they consider their own nature as undivine beings defined by the Image of God but not by godliness itself. “No one can claim to know to what point a political body can accept a growing heterogeneity without falling apart,” thereby becoming a ‘failed state’ of the sort the migrants themselves have fled. Respect for immigration laws expresses “concern for the stability and viability of the civic body of which we are a part,” of “preserving and, if possible, of improving the conditions of a ‘good way of life’ or a ‘good life'”—a good regime. And as to the Church, its charity, centering on God, identifies the good way of life as God’s way of life, expressing agapic love by tending to the souls of those who suffer primarily, their bodily needs and even their moral rights secondarily. Humanitarian care “is precious but is spiritually empty because it does not bring the Word and does not show the Way.” Meeting the displaced person who is a Muslim, can a Christian not care first and foremost for the conversion of the Muslim’s soul to that Way, by means of that Word? [5]

Political and Christian prudence alike call republican citizens and members of the City of God alike to understand their obligations to migrants as conditional, not all-encompassing. Migrants “impose themselves on us by the strength of their numbers and their aggression,” having been “encouraged, even directed, by foreign states who have unfriendly, even hostile aims toward us.” Acts of war are not limited to bombings and tank sorties. In us, in ‘We Europeans,’ “It is a major political and moral fault to yield to force hiding itself behind misery.” Further, in agreeing to accept a measured quantity of migrants, we “cannot agree to abandon the principles of our political regime.” In the republics, “we are the sole judges of this possibility, as is fitting for political bodies that govern themselves democratically.” The same goes for the Church, which consists of discrete churches, none of which has unlimited physical resources, even if their members could command unlimited spiritual resources—which, being human, they cannot do, either, although they can pray for as many of them as God chooses to grant. It therefore makes no sense, politically or Christianly, to renounce our sovereignty in our own communities or to “weaken what remains of Christian dispositions and Catholic habits, for the sake of a religion of Humanity that delivers us over to the strongest.” Under that religion, “‘Christianity’ now only presented the general idea of humanity under the form of a particular opinion,” an ‘ideal’ in the Hegelian sense, an instantiation of a particular moment in the history of the Absolute Spirit, an entity very far from the Holy Spirit. Even as modern political philosophers from Machiavelli on denigrated Christianity as unrealistic, a belief in an “imaginary principality,” even such sympathetic observers as Chateaubriand inclined to accept that categorization, albeit with friendly feelings, an ideal which inspires noble sentiments. 

Why do so few persons today recognize this transformation? Manent suggests that the reconfiguration of Christianity as an ‘ideal’ forms part of a much larger moral and intellectual framework. As a result of modern philosophy, we no longer think politically. This seems paradoxical, because Machiavelli and his followers called for the construction of the modern state, a vast political task. But the size of the modern state establishes a distinction between ‘the state’ understood as a government apparatus and ‘civil society’ located inside the territory ruled by the state. (Christianity anticipated some of this, in its separation of the things of God from the things of Caesar, thereby “having broken apart the ‘beautiful whole’ of the pagan city.”) This, along with the ‘state of nature’ doctrine, has inclined many thinkers to locate the fundamental elements of politics in pre-political and sub-political places, which are said to have generated the state. To think so is to think that sociology deserves intellectual primacy over political science. Moreover, sociology partakes of the aspirations of modern science, especially its tendency to abstract ’causes’ from the phenomena in the form of mathematical formulae, in order to propound ‘theories’ of society. “While Aristotle’s point of view” in his political science “is a practical perspective, the point of view of the sociologist is a theoretical point of view.” Theory so conceives ‘objectifies’ the phenomena it studies; “it is difficult to know what the sociologist shares with the human beings he studies,” separated as he is “from his object by his scientific instruments themselves.” Europeans now think of religion ‘sociologically.’ If they think scientifically, they regard it as objectively empty, except as a social fact, more or (increasingly) less prevalent. If they think religiously, they assume there is “nothing objective and shareable to say about it to those who are outside of it.” 

Manent resists. It is true that the ancient city no longer exists, that the historical context of classical political science has been discarded. But politics remains, even in the modern state. “I propose preserving and affirming the ‘architectonic’ character of political science among the social sciences,” which Aristotle affirmed. True, modern states have brought on an attenuated civil life, leaving the intimacy of self-government in the small poleis far behind, at least on the level of nations. But can anyone doubt that modern states actually do rule? Or that tyrannical regimes of modern states have aped the compactness of the poleis in pursuing ‘totalitarianism,’ always with a malignant form of personalism rightly derided as a ‘personality cult.’ 

“I therefore propose to study religion first of all politically—as a human association and as a government.” After all (one might add), every religion consists of a regime, a way of ruling. Given that European democrats “define ourselves by two ideals,” the “practical ideal of sincerity and the theoretical ideal of objectivity,” we handicap ourselves when we think about religion by consigning it to the realm of subjectivity in practice and scientific, even mathematical criteria when we consider it theoretically. That is, when we ask, “How is one to talk politically about religion?” “The way the question is posed renders it even more opaque and practically insoluble.” Muslims don’t think that way. In their opinion, “the divine Law is immediately positive and manifestly rational,” and “obedience to it constitutes the umma,” the Muslim religio-political community, a community that occupies territory. On that territory, Muslims are objectively at war with non-Muslims—spiritually at all times, physically when that is advantageous. Since the best political regime existed only under Muhammad’s monarchy, “no one regime characterizes Islam” in other times; Muslims ready themselves to make war within them all. They tend to be disadvantaged by democratic republicanism, whose way of life that consists of give and take, ruling and being ruled, scarcely comports with strict obedience to Islamic law.

Empire is “the political form,” as distinguished from the political regime, “closest to Islam.” Islam’s last empire was the Ottoman caliphate, gone now for more than a century, replaced by Mustafa Kemal’s nation-state, Turkey. This abrupt transition contrasts with the decades it took to replace the Holy Roman Empire and the Christendom it embodied with the modern state. “We therefore find ourselves in the presence of an immense empire, or at least an immense imperial imprint, without an emperor”—religiously powerful but politically weak, its subjects indignant at their own weakness. When they go so far as to call Europeans and Americans ‘crusaders,” we think the charge an absurd anachronism. The language may be antique but were we to understand our own regimes better we might see the point. In our regimes, states guarantee equal rights, “especially freedom of conscience, to everyone, believer and unbeliever alike. This can only be so in a regime founded upon no one established religion. For that to happen, a people must derive their rights either from nature or nationhood, or both. If it is from nationhood, then the nation becomes a new form of the sacred community. Nationality replaces Christianity without necessarily abandon crusading or imperialism. This is what Muslims are talking about. In contemporary Europe, elites want nationality to go the way of Christianity, but the elites have their own religion, the Religion of Humanity. That religion commands ‘openness to the other,” but if the ‘other’ is Islam, a religion that prohibits openness, how will the Religion of Humanity deal with it and remain openness? Without Christianity or the nation-state, it cannot. “Let us, therefore, return to and ‘reenter’ the real Europe that we are trying in vain to leave.”

As a preliminary to this return, Manent commends the writings of Charles Péguy, “one of the most penetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modem consciousness.” In Péguy’s lifetime, the preeminent event that raised the religio-political question was the Dreyfus Affair, the twelve-year-long ordeal that wracked French politics, beginning in 1894 with the false accusation and wrongful conviction of the Jewish French Army captain Albert Dreyfus on charges of treason. The Affair brought out the worst of French anti-Semitism, implicating the Army and involving the French Catholic Church hierarchy, while reviving antagonism against the republican regime. A fervent Catholic himself, Péguy sided with Dreyfus against the ultra-nationalist monarchist Right, but also came to oppose the Dreyfusard socialists, whom he charged with “wanting to control thought and word” every bit as much as the Catholic Church and the Old Regime had done in previous centuries. 

Crucially for and in anticipation of Manent’s own argument, Péguy “saw the Dreyfus Affair as the event par excellence, the event which is unforeseeable, which neither historians nor sociologists could understand, because they try to find general laws of history, because they make and deal in general categories.” The affair wasn’t ‘historical’ in that sense (the sense most doggedly pursued in France by the ‘historicist’ historian, Hippolyte Taine) but personal, first of all concerning a person, Alfred Dreyfus, and his identity as a Jew, his status as a French army officer, the relations of his Jewishness and his membership in the Army to the republican regime and, more broadly of both Jews as such and republicans as such to the Catholic Church. This unpredictable coincidence of ’causes,’ all centering on a person, raised “what was to become the central mediation of [Péguy’s] life: what is a people? What is a city? And indissolubly linked to these two: what is Christianity?” 

In his meditations, Péguy came to see the “radical conflict” not merely between those who believed Dreyfus guilty and those who understood him to be innocent—there were anti-Dreyfusards and Dreyfusards among republicans, monarchists, army men, civilians, Catholics and non-Catholics—but between the ancients and the moderns. Among the Dreyfusards, the socialists were resolute ‘moderns,’ not genuine republicans at all but statist, would-be oligarchs, ready to suppress their opponents and to rule without dissent. They shared this tendency with the modern or Hobbesian-Bodinian, monarchists, seeking to level civil society while centralizing political power in their own hands. The true republicans (contra their Catholic accusers, remembering Jacobin depredations of a century back) shared with the ancient world the sense of politics as ruling and being ruled, in turn. We Dreyfusards, Péguy wrote, “demand that science, art, and philosophy be left unsocialized”—free, personal, not reduced to matter. “What struck him most was that this materialism, this atheism, lived only on what they rejected, that is, on the Christian, or perhaps the ancient, idea of the world.” the secularist Dreyfusards admired the after-shine of Christian charity and Roman civic virtue while perverting both. “History is not socialist,” Péguy wrote. “It is historical. Philosophy is not socialist. It is philosophical.” Philosophers love wisdom; the socialists claimed to have achieved it, parodying God. But for a human being to take on the role of God is to become incapable of “achieving consciousness of himself,” the self-knowledge Socrates prized. And the familiar trope invoking ‘the judgment of History’ in an attempt to end political debate amounts to “a parody of the Last judgment.” It divinizes ‘History’ or the course of events, dismissing the original meaning of history as inquiry, not humanly-conceived revelation. As a result, “freedom and the risk inseparable from genuine human action…are hunted down by modern intellectualism.”

Risk implies a sort of wager, which in turn reminds one of Pascal. It was here that Péguy began to see the worth of the Christianity that he had previously rejected. He saw that “humanity as implied by Christianity is also that which is revealed in the precise observation of human nature.” Christians were on to something. Even the terrifying Christian teaching on eternal damnation began to make sense. As Péguy writes, if men must choose, “there must be a total risk,” and Christianity extended the Roman virtue of gravitas, of seriousness, ‘all the way down’—quite literally! It is true that Hell is inhumane. But that is the point.

Where does Christianity leave citizenship in the earthly city, and specifically in France? To be a citizen or rather subject in the Kingdom of God, loving its Ruler, in no way precludes citizenship in France, loving one’s neighbor as “a citizen of a given city.” For this reason, Péguy departed from Pascal’s inclination to denigrate ‘the World,’ although this surely did not imply indulgence of the flesh and the Devil. Rather, “the eternal is the dwelling place of the temporal.” Where Manent in his turn departs from Péguy is seen in his refusal to follow Péguy’s hope of reuniting the pagan sense of civic holiness with Christian holiness, “the city of nature with the city of grace.” No: creation and Creator remain distinct, even if intimately related in love. Manent rejects “some absurd sentence in which [Péguy] suggested that a ‘French’ saint and a ‘French’ sinner would form a community from which a ‘German’ saint would by his essence be excluded.” Saintliness is a category within Christianity, and its claims remain universal. Every country is ‘God’s country.’ Sinners abound and saints are martyred in all of them, even as Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards could be found among all social, political, and religious groupings in France. It is likely that there were saints and sinners among both Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, too.

With this book, Pierre Manent’s considerations on the greatness of political and Christian life have been introduced to Americans by an expert arranger and translator of these writings, Paul Seaton, and by Daniel J. Mahoney, author of an introduction that gets readers right on track. 

 

Notes

1. This is true of the Renaissance humanists and also of later figures—for example, André Malraux, whose “tragic humanism” clearly implies struggle and indeed sacrifice.
2. For the reader of the Bible in English, this distinction is often obscured by the translation of the word for Christian love, agape, as ‘compassion’; for example, the King James Bible does this, perhaps to avoid the Latin-based (and therefore Roman Catholic) translation, ‘charity.’
3. Nineteen is also the number of chapters in Machiavelli’s The Prince, the book in which Machiavelli proposes to replace a prince of war with the Prince of Peace. Aristotle, however, considers peace the object of war, and in Christ Christians fight spiritual warfare for the sake of spiritual peace; both understand politics in a way Machiavellians cannot.
4. This is the answer to Manent’s question, “How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of right presupposes an already instituted community or society?” That is, contra Manent, individual natural rights need not assume the ‘state of nature’ propounded by modern political philosophers, as he argues in his 1988 article, “Some Remarks on the Notion of ‘Secularization,'” reprinted in this volume.
5. In Europe, the question of non-Christians living within civil societies must always recall the ‘Jewish question.’ That question differs from the ‘Muslim question’ in several ways, one of them being the sheer size of the Muslim population; Jewish Europeans hardly threaten, and have never threatened, to overwhelm European Christians by their sheer numbers. The radical depopulation of European Jewry, first by the Holocaust and then by emigration to Israel, has caused a very different problem. “The destruction of Europe’s Jews put the Shoah at the center of Jewish consciousness, but also of European consciousness, or of Western consciousness in general,” but “this center cannot suffice to provide the spiritual coordinates we need to orient themselves,” as it is a ‘negative’ bond, sure to weaken as memories of the Shoah recede. The relations between Jews and Europeans require “a positive principle, a principle of friendship.” There is indeed such a common bond: “To express the meaning of Jerusalem in the language of Athens, since man is by nature a political animal, God can only make himself known to human beings by forming in their midst, or out of their midst, a people that can be His people.” To recall this, both political Europe and Catholic Europe should understand that while nation and Church have their important roles to play, neither role requires the assumption “that Israel is only left with blindness and hardness of heart,” as the Church wrongly taught for centuries and as some nations taught not only to the peril of Jews but ultimately to the peril of themselves. 

 

 

Michael Spencer: Humanly Speaking: The Evil of Abortion, the Silence of the Church, and the Grace of God. Colorado Springs: Believers Book Services, 2021.

Peter Singer: Practical Ethics. Third edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Chapter 6: “Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus.”

 

Writing first of all to Christian pastors, Spencer remarks that “the Church in America has largely abandoned the unborn.” Pastors fear to preach against abortion, lest they offend their own flocks. But they should know that the Church can “be a thunderous, protective voice for the unborn threatened by abortion while at the same time a grace-extending community for those who have had abortions or been responsible for them.” As Edmund Burke might say, sublimity may offend but beauty can soothe, and Christian love animates both.

“Abortion is the intentional and unjust killing of innocent unborn human beings.” The injustice of abortion inheres in the innocence of the unborn, which can hardly be disputed, and their humanity, which is. Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards asserts that “for me,” the life of her three children “began when I delivered them.” Except that we know it didn’t, even for her, inasmuch as her children made their presence known to her long before their births. “An objective understanding of our biological beginnings cannot be formulated by relying on subjective tests or wishful thinking,” since “species membership is scientifically determined,” not “open to personal definitions or opinions.” Each human being has his or her “own unique DNA” at the moment of conception. “At this point, the sperm and egg cells essentially die to themselves, giving their constituents over to the creation of an entirely new entity or being,” a “genetically whole human being,” a zygote. All the rest is growth and development. “Emerging from the birth canal does nothing to change the human nature or intrinsic value of the one being killed, nor does being in the womb mitigate the injustice of such killing.” If anything, the zygote’s presence in the womb protects and nourishes, giving no warrant for killing.

“Nevertheless, while scientific evidence can establish when a human comes to be, it is incapable of establishing or determining human value.” After all, there have been those ready to kill millions of human beings for the sake of racial purity, victory in the class struggle, or ecological balance. Such persons often defend their actions by assuming that human goodness inheres strictly in what human beings do, not in what they are. (Alternatively, and even more lethally, they may deny that the objects of their killing are human at all.) It is undoubtedly true that what human beings do is one test of whether they deserve to die; we impose capital punishment on murderers, fight just wars on those who plan and undertake unjust, violent attacks. But the human capacity to do evil or good requires human existence. If the human nature of individuals is not good, why do we punish those who kill those who have done nothing to deserve extinction? Zygotes have done no such thing.

Some abortion-on-demand advocates argue that zygotes may be killed because they lack self-awareness. But “if self-awareness is what confers personhood status, then those who have more of it would have greater value and would be deserving of greater moral rights.” This argument, along with such criteria as level of development, environmental policy, or degree of dependency amount to attempts to excuse “the legal destruction of weak and vulnerable unborn children in the name of ‘choice’ simply because they do not measure up to the subjective tests the strong and powerful have arbitrarily established for them.” The appeal to ‘choice’ persuades primarily those who “view the unborn as an impediment to their own comfort or convenience.” The American Founders saw things differently, holding the right to life among the self-evident truths government should aim to secure. “The pro-life position holds that every living human being, at every stage of development and without qualification, has inherent moral worth and deserves legal protection”; “abortion is not wrong primarily because of what it costs us.” Rather, “it is wrong because of what it costs those who are aborted.” Christian defenders of the unborn have the additional reason given by the example of Christ, who “stretched the boundaries of our love to include outcasts, sinners, and even our persecutors”—that is, to the guilty. Why would Jesus not want us to preserve the lives of the innocent?

What, Spencer asks, does the ‘right to choose’ mean? It means the right “to destroy a human being,” since the mother’s right to bear her child isn’t being contested. Moreover, since all human beings bear God’s image, “abortion is ultimately an attack on God Himself,” the “ultimate act of vandalism against our Creator.” An atheist like the Chinese Communist tyrant Deng Xiaoping ‘limited’ families to one child each because he deemed this necessary in order to prevent population growth from “devouring” the “fruits of economic growth”—this, despite the fact that socialists typically deplore ‘putting profits over people.’ In individualistic America, the slogan instead has been, ‘My Body, My Choice,’ a formula that simultaneously “dehumanizes the unborn, deifies individual autonomy, and obliterates moral responsibility” by “grant[ing] one class of our citizenry, namely mothers, the legal right to force death on another class of our citizenry, namely their unborn sons and daughters.” The claim that laws prohibiting abortion would ‘force’ pregnant women to seek dangerous ‘back-alley’ abortion is absurd on its face, since no one forces them to do that. (The claim that five to ten thousand women died annually from such illegal abortion is false, as the person who fabricated it has since admitted.) As for the children of rape victims, the person who forces himself on a woman is the criminal, not the child who results from the crime. “We do not believe the violent and forceful act of rape against women justifies the violent and forceful act of abortion against unborn children.” 

Pro-abortion advocates once claimed that legalized abortion would reduce the rate of child abuse. It hasn’t. And indeed the rate of child abuse has increased since the Supreme Court’s decision in the Roe v. Wade case. Pro-abortion advocates also claimed that abortions themselves would become ‘safe, legal, and rare.’ Safer for the mother, perhaps, if not for the child. Legal, yes, by definition. Rare? If anything, more frequent. Life-enhancing for the mothers who commit to the ‘choice’? Not necessarily, as the suicide rate after an abortion has been three times the general suicide rate and six times that associated with birth. As for the fathers, it has “stripped good and responsible fathers of their legal right to protect and provide for the children they helped create” while granting amnesty for bad and irresponsible fathers who want to get out of child support.

“Christians who remain indifferent are dehumanized as well,” ignoring Christ’s command to love their neighbors as themselves. Such “silent pastors and dispassionate Christians have a great deal in common with the abortionist: both view unborn children as miserably inconvenient.” Such persons typically judge themselves to be decent sorts. But why should “those who stand by idly in the face of evil deserve to be called good?”

Such Christians sometimes protest that the Bible nowhere condemns abortion. True enough, but it does condemn the murder of innocent human beings, does it not? “Since we know every human being is a member of the species Homo sapiens, and that human life begins at conception, we do not need a commandment declaring, ‘Thou shalt not murder unborn children.'” The Sixth Commandment already has that covered. Christ Himself “did not become flesh at His birth, but at His conception.” How, then, “can Christians marvel at the Incarnation and yet remain unconvinced of the full humanity or full personhood of the embryo or fetus?” “To marvel at the Incarnation while being indifferent to abortion’s victims is like worshipping Christ while siding with Herod.” In fact, “the word translated ‘baby,’ comes from the Greek word, brephos, which is used consistently by the New Testament writers to refer to babies born and unborn.” Did either Mary, mother of Jesus, or Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, consider their unborn sons anything less than human?

Spencer enumerates six frequently heard attempts to bridle open opposition to abortion among Christians:

1. ‘Abortion is a political issue, and the Church should stay out of politics.’ “But nearly every moral issue is eventually politicized, including war, slavery, and in recent years marriage.” This has actually been admitted by many feminists, who aver that ‘everything is political.’ But if so, “Jesus Christ is lord over all.
2. ‘The Church should confine itself to prayer.’ Aside from the fact that people who say this “are usually the last ones to do so,” why would the Church not pray and act, as well? Pro-abortion advocates often urge the Church to become ‘activists’ when matters of ‘social justice’ are at stake. 
3. ‘Abortion is a women’s issue; men have no right to speak against it.’ Evidently, they have every right to speak for it, however: “This conversation-stopper is never used to silence pro-choice men.” Spencer correctly identifies this as another instance of ‘Critical Theory,’ which “argues that the lived experiences of oppressed (or seemingly oppressed) groups grant them privileged access to truth,” that “rational thought and objective facts count for nothing.” But why so? Obviously, “disqualifying nearly half the U.S. population from speaking about abortion”—or, more accurately, from speaking against it, if they so choose—because “of their gender is nothing short of sexist.” And highly convenient for those doing the disqualifying. And “in fact, pro-life women use the same arguments as pro-life men.”
4. ‘At least, aborted children go to Heaven.’ So do all other murder victims.
5. ‘Speaking out against abortion will turn people away from the Gospel.’ “No, it won’t,” and even if it did, that would mean that the Church should tiptoe around the Ten Commandments. Rather, “to abandon the unborn is to abandon the gospel itself”; “the pastor’s obligation is not to try to predict how someone might possibly respond so he can tailor his sermon in such a way as to guarantee no offense is taken” but rather to “trust in god’s Spirit to convict and draw people to Himself.”
6. ‘Pro-lifers are angry, violent types, unworthy of association with decent folk, failing to act in a Christian manner.’ This amounts both to what logicians call a ‘hasty generalization’ and an argumentum ad hominem. Even if it were true, it would have no effect on whether abortion is right or wrong.

Instead of shirking their responsibilities, Christian pastors should lead their congregations in prayer for the unborn and their parents, teach their congregations about human dignity and equality, condemn abortion from the pulpit, and lead those who have had abortions to Jesus Christ. “Something has gone horribly wrong when a congregation cannot agree that killing unborn children is morally reprehensible,” or when pastors fail to understand that “preaching about the sin of abortion and the forgiveness offered to the guilty doesn’t interrupt the healing process, it helps it to begin.” 

None of this contradicts Jesus’ command to be as prudent as serpents, along with being innocent as doves. If a pastor fails to take an honest interest in others as he speaks against abortion, he can expect them to become bored or ‘defensive.’ Agapic love is not to be suspended during abortion discussions but affirmed in them. When speaking about abortion, stick to the arguments and do not respond in kind to ad hominem attacks, or seek to humiliate your opponent in debate. Don’t be distracted by side-issues but keep the core argument in mind: it is morally wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being; abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being; therefore, abortion is wrong. Don’t test the patience of the one listening to you by rattling on. And bear in mind that the world is watching you. You may eschew ad hominem debates, but your adversaries will not. Give them a small target by your conduct and the tone of your conversation.

“The American Church is producing a listless, shallow generation” because Christian children, like those of non-Christians, are left to be “ruled by feelings” while “feeling nothing for others.” Snapping ‘selfies’ doesn’t amount to much as a ‘lifestyle choice.’ Life is more than just styling, and it’s up to the Church to show why this is so.

Peter Singer is hardly concerned with the American Church or any other religious institution. He does acknowledge “the central argument against abortion,” as stated by Spencer and many others: It is wrong to kill an innocent human being; a human fetus is an innocent human being; therefore, it is wrong to kill a human fetus. The pro-abortion debaters usually deny the second premise, claiming that a fetus isn’t human. Singer, however, concedes that there is no “morally significant dividing line” between “the fertilized egg and child.” “The conservative”—his term for persons opposed to on-demand abortion—stands “on solid ground in insisting that the development from the embryo to the infant is a gradual process, not marked by any obvious point at which there is a change in moral status sufficient to justify the difference between regarding the killing of an infant as murder and the killing of a fetus as something that a pregnant woman should be free to choose as she wishes.”

To vindicate abortion rights, Singer instead denies the first premise, that it is wrong to kill an innocent human being. And it is indeed true that many just-war theorists will not condemn the killing of innocents when such killing attends the destruction of a military target that is crucial to the enemy’s war-making capacity; for example, a pregnant woman and her unborn child might die during the bombing of a military factory in which she is working, having been conscripted. Singer rightly avoids that analogy, since a just war is a war in self-defense, whereas only an abortion done to save the life of the mother could be so understood. He instead criticizes the first premise for relying “on our acceptance of the special status of human life.” Drawing the distinction between ‘human’ as Homo sapiens —a member of the human species—and ‘human’ as a person—a “rational or self-conscious” being—he first observes that an unborn human being lacks personhood. To abort a fetus is to kill a human but not to kill a person. As for killing an innocent member of the human species who is not yet a person, how does that differ morally from killing a cow or a pig? “Whether a being is or is not a member of our species is, in itself, no more relevant to the wrongness of killing it than whether it is or is not a member of our race.” The only morally relevant consideration is the avoidance of pain, or perhaps of needless pain. “The belief that mere membership of our species, irrespective of other characteristics”—such as the ability to feel pain—is “a legacy of religious doctrines that even those opposed to abortion hesitate to bring into the debate,” Heaven forfend. It is “a biased concern for the members of our own species.”

Singer does not hesitate to draw a (false) conclusion: Infants are pre-rational, if not pre-conscious. Humane (i.e., painless) infanticide is therefore permissible. And it was a common practice in pre-Christian times, “practiced in societies ranging geographically from Tahiti to Greenland and varying in culture from nomadic Australian aborigines to the sophisticated urban communities of ancient Greece or mandarin China or Japan before the late nineteenth century.” More, under some of these regimes “infanticide was not merely permitted but, in circumstances, deemed morally obligatory,” as killing “a deformed or sickly infant” relieved families and communities from serious burdens. True enough, but if avoidance of pain is the criterion which limits the right to kill, this should mean that abortion is wrong the moment the fetus can feel pain.

Singer would be the first to admit (well, in this instance maybe not the first, but among those to) that customs do not rightly determine moral principles. His argument therefore depends upon his claim that we have no moral call to ‘privilege’ our own species over others, to spare the life of a human fetus only because it is innocent (being a fetus) and one of us (being human). But why is this a “bias”? That is, why is it unreasonable? Is ‘speciesism’ wrong?

Ethics aims at what is good for all things, necessarily beginning with ‘the human things,’ inasmuch as among the natural species only human beings inquire into what the good is and what the right means to obtain it are. Absent divine commands (and going along with Singer’s insistence that we ignore them, for the sake of the argument), we can only start our inquiry and deliberations ‘where we are,’ that is, as the only species we know of that is capable of this sort of complex reasoning. This doesn’t mean that human beings ought to be unconcerned about the good for other species, ‘the planet,’ and even nature as a whole. John Locke observes, and deplores, boys’ propensity to torture small animals, and he intends his education to bridle such impulses, among others. He is primarily concerned with the effect of such behavior, if habitual, on boys. But there is no reason why he might not deplore its effect on the animals, too. 

The question then arises whether slaughtering animals for food or other human purposes, if done while inflicting minimal pain or no pain, is on a par with slaughtering human fetuses while inflicting minimal pain or no pain—say, at an early stage of their development. The Bible clearly teaches that animals may be slaughtered or enslaved humanely, as God gives Man sovereignty over them while insisting (for example) that men not yoke together oxen of unequal strength. Is that divine teaching in favor of ‘speciesism’ rationally justifiable?

It is, because the sovereignty of man over other species is an ineluctable fact of nature as a whole—or, to be cautious about the possibility of ‘intelligent life’ in other nooks of the universe, the earth. It is the nature of human beings to be capable of ruling the other animals because human beings by nature are smarter than they are. This gives human beings the authority, and with it the responsibility, to rule the earth for the human good first and foremost, as all rulers in all regimes rule others first and foremost. That is, the ‘is’ of human power brings with it the ‘ought’ of human rule. They must rule reasonably, according to natural right, but rule they must, by nature. Ruling ‘humanely’ means to rule in accordance with their nature—reasonably, not tyrannically—but surely aiming at the good of themselves, first and foremost. 

The consequence of this for the abortion dispute is that Singer’s argument in favor of abortion, based on his charge of ‘speciesism,’ really makes little sense. This leaves inviolate Spencer’s argument, even with its religious dimension excised. 

 

 

Jacques-Bénigne de Bossuet: Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture. Books IX-X. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

 

The king’s chief support is God, who makes warrior-princes. In the Bible, God gave express commands to the Israelites to wage war, “order[ing] his people to make war on certain nations,” first of all the seven nations that lived in the land He had reserved for His chosen people (IX.i.2). God promised this land to Abraham and his posterity. That is why Saul was “punished without pity and deprived of royalty” when he ventured to spare the Amalekites (IX.i.2). These “were abominable nations, and from the beginning devoted to every sort of idolatry, injustice, and impiety” (IX.i.4). God had endured these nations with long-suffering patience, but in the end He “chased them from [the Promised Land] by a just judgment to give it to the Israelites,” to whom He gave laws restraining them from those evils. God initially did not will that the ancient inhabitants of these lands be dispossessed, or that blood-ties among them be counted as nothing, that their memory of ancestors be obliterated. But the giants who inhabited the wilderness across the river from Egypt were not only physically large but “bloody, unjust, and violent, oppressor and ravishers” (IX.i.6). They deserved to be conquered. In disobeying God after the founding of Israel, Saul was undoing what God had done.

Ordinarily, however, “God wills that men view these lands as given by him to those who first occupied them, who have remained in tranquil and immemorial possession” of them, reverencing their ancestors (IX.i.6). Esau was as much a son of Jacob as Isaac. Because God serves as “the father and the protector of human society,” no matter what their origins, “he wants to make all the ties of blood respected among men, in order (so far as possible) to make war odious in all sorts of ways” (IX.i.6). In this, Bossuet provides Scriptural confirmation of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia. There are, nonetheless, just motives for war, such as defense against unjust aggression, the refusal of safe passage on equitable conditions, and injury done to ambassadors. 

Bossuet enumerates four motives for launching unjust wars. Ambition or libido dominandi is the first, as seen in Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord who hunted men as well as beasts, “the first whom the love of power brought to invade neighboring land” (X.ii.1). Such men love war, undertaking it to satisfy their ambition by depopulating the earth, violating God’s command to multiply, to replenish it. If a conquered people shows resistance to the conqueror’s forces, if they dare to fight back against the invasion, he will “revenge himself for their resistance” (IX.ii.3). His pride inflamed, “he believes he has a legitimate right over everyone,” and “because he is the strongest, he does not view himself as an aggressor,” calling his “plan to invade the lands of free peoples” a matter of “defense” (IX.ii.3). They commit a sort of idolatry respecting their own flesh; “intoxicated by the success of their victorious arms, they call themselves masters of the world, and think their arm their God” (IX.ii.3). God will let them run, for a time, while “preparing a strict chastisement” for them” (IX.ii.4).

The other unjust motives for war are pillage or greed, envy of a prosperous neighbor, and the desire for military glory and “the sweetness of victory” (IX.11.7). And so, the Judean king Amasias, his taste for glory whetted by victory over the Edomites, provoked a war with the Israelite king Joas; Joas won. Similarly, Josiah fought the King Nechao of Egypt, with the same bad result. Bossuet teaches his readers not to be surprised at such outcomes. To undertake an unjust war, a war “without reason,” puts you at a disadvantage, whereas “a good cause adds, to the other advantages, of war, both courage and confidence”; “indignation against injustice augments power and makes one fight in a more determined and bold way” (IX.ii.9). One may reasonably believe “that one has God,” the “natural protector” of justice, “on his side” (IX.ii.9). After all, it was Jesus who said, “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” (IX.ii.13).

Turning next to civil war, Bossuet offers six examples of such conflicts or near-conflicts. The first dispute began when the tribes of Reuben and Gad, along with half of the tribe of Manassa, erected a massive alter on their bank of the Jordan River; acting on the “false suspicion” that their brethren who lived in Israel proper imagined that the outliers were announcing a break with God (IX.iii.1). Once they were assured that the Judean tribes only wanted to reaffirm their allegiance, that for their part they worried that some day the Israelites might disown them, peace among the tribes remained intact. The second motive for civil war was exemplified when the tribe of Benjamin refused to hand over the murderers of a visiting Levite and his wife; in just punishment for this crime, the other tribes joined with the Levites in nearly exterminating the Benjamites. Another just cause of civil war is punishment of those who refuse conscription or refuse to give provisions to the army. To take from such “rebels and mutineers the fortresses which they abuse” “leaves an example to posterity of the punishment one gives them,” as “the public power must be armed, so that force always remains with the sovereign” (IX.iii.3). 

Bossuet’s fourth example is the civil war between David, the divinely-chosen king of Israel, and Isboseth, son of a powerful warlord who had served under Saul and put his son forward as if he were the rightful king—essentially a coup d’état. Bossuet emphasizes David’s observation of jus in belo throughout this war, his “disposition to spare fraternal blood” and his refusal to enter any of the battles himself, by which decision he ensured that he would have no Israelite blood on his hands. “In a civil war a good prince must take great care of the blood of citizens. If murders happen, which might be attributed to him because he profits from them, he must justify himself o highly that the whole people is satisfied.” (IX.iii.4).

But David failed to rein in his ambitious eldest son, Absalom, who died in battle. Here, the motive for war was impatient ambition; with his father’s authority weakened by his adulterous affair with Bathsheba, Absalom moved to usurp the royal power. This example, which should not have been lost on the Dauphin, whose torpor and overall mediocrity made him an unlikely usurper in any event. Bossuet carefully veers away from this hint, concluding that the lesson to be derived from this example drawn from Scripture is that kings should always keep standing armies ready to defeat such schemes. [1] 

His final example, like the first, highlights civil strife that ended well. The House of David faced a rebellion at a time when they were also being attacked by foreigners. [2] The rebels built fortresses and arsenals on Judaic territory. Despite this, God commanded that the Judahites make no war against “their brothers, rebels and schismatics though they were” (IX.iii.6). As always, God was right: the two sides eventually reunited in opposition to a land grab by the king of Syria, who counted on the division of the Israelites to keep them too weak to resist his aggression. “Through this one sees that, for the sake of peace and the stability of human affairs, kingdoms founded at first on rebellion are afterwards viewed as having become legitimate either through long possession, or through treaties and the recognition of earlier kings,” even though the rebels had defected from God Himself (IX.iii.6). Under such circumstances, the legitimate kings “should always show themselves most moderate, by striving to recover through reason those who had abandoned their duties” (IX.iii.6). And in God’s own time, He punished both sides, exiling to Babylon the children of Judah, who had fallen into sin after David’s death, and allowing the Kingdom of Israel to be conquered and assimilated by the Assyrians.

At those times God was pleased with the conduct of His people, He aided them in their battles. He nonetheless “wanted to harden them by giving them warlike kings and great captains,” lest their spirit soften into effeminacy (IX.iv). Hence “most of the battles of David were carried out in the ordinary way,” as indeed were most battles fought by most of the kings. “God wanted to make warriors and wanted to make military virtue shine brightly in his people,” lending “suitable resolution to the leaders, and intrepidity and obedience to the soldiers, on these occasions” (IX.iv.2). That was God’s reason for leaving some of the Canaanites alive, so that “Israel might be instructed by their resistance” (IX.iv.3). He gave them great captains and warlike princes in order to “shap[e] them for war,” and so they were shaped: “One cannot doubt that military virtue shone brilliantly in the holy people” (IX.iv.4). Even such women as Jahel, Deborah and Judith “excelled in courage, and performed astonishing acts” (IX.iv.5). 

Although God does not love war, preferring peaceful kings to warrior kings (He did not allow David to present the Temple to Him, reserving that task to wise Solomon), war in defense of the people of God is not only just but “pious and holy” (IX.iv.6), an occasion “where the glory of dying courageously is worth more than victory” because it “leave[s] behind a reputation for valor which astonishes the enemy,” making such heroes “more useful to their country than if they remained alive,” so long as their love of glory aims at “defending one’s country and its liberty” rather than personal aggrandizement (IX.v.1). Soldiers so motivated will rush to certain death, as Samson did, but in so doing they make themselves more likely to gain the victory, as “anything is possible for him who knows how to despise his life” (IX.v.3). Yet heroics alone will not suffice. A just king will make war equitably and show moderation in victory, following the example of Abraham who gave his allies far more of the booty won in war to his allies than he kept for himself. Do not make yourself odious in a foreign land you have conquered. 

Military commanders should be ready to speak to their soldiers before battle, “to ensure that soldiers have nothing in their hearts save fighting, and nothing in their memory which could dampen their ardor” (IX.v.7). He should invite those still gripped by fear to leave, and they should lead their men by example. As Gideon told his troops, “What you shall see me do, do you the same” (IX.v.11). As a result of such leadership, many of the tribes of Israel complained when they were not the first summoned to fight the enemy, an excusable resentment prudent leaders mollified by praising their bravery. Kings should reinforce esprit de corps with material support, military exercises, and suitable alliances. Frequent victory in war will deter potential enemies. 

Bossuet concludes Book IX with several miscellaneous observations on peace and war. The prince should honor brave men. “This is the means of drawing brave men to oneself. If you take on one, you gain a hundred more. When men see that it is merit and valor that you seek, they begin to recognize the good you have done to others, and each hopes for it in his turn.” (IX.vi.1). He should also work for cooperation among his military commanders (“there is nothing finer in war”) (IX.vi.2), for obedience to orders among the common soldiers, and for stability in command, as soldiers more readily obey a commanding officer they have come to trust. 

Above all, however, “it is good for a state to be at rest”; “the peace of Solomon’s time secured the conquests of David” (IX.vi.5)—likely advice aimed at the Dauphin, who seemed destined to succeed his warlike father. Peace is necessary because it allows the country to rebuild its strength in preparation for wars to come—and they will come, so “one must never forget war entirely” (IX.vi. 6). Solomon rebuilt cities, established Israelite colonies on reconquered land, and raised new and well-fortified cities as well. When war does loom, do not rush into it, keeping in mind “the uncertainty of events” (IX.iv.7). “Pride yourself neither in your power, nor in your diligence, nor in your happy successes, above all in unjust and tyrannical enterprises. Death, or some frightful disaster, will come to you from the side that you least expect it; and public hatred, which will arm the feeblest hand against you, will crush you” (IX.vi.7). “One must among all things know and measure his [own] powers” (IX.vi.9).

In foreign wars, secure the vanquished peoples by disarming them and severely punishing any violations of the peace treaties. In instances of war precipitated by “horrible outrages, as when the Ammonites injured David’s ambassadors, the king “wanted to make an example of them, which would leave eternally in all nations a feeling of terror which would deprive them of the courage to fight, by causing chariots armed with knives to pass over their bodies, in all their cities” (IX.vi.10). Bossuet immediately cautions that Christian emperors should refrain from such sanguinary practices, despite their exemplary value: “A Christian conqueror must spare blood; and the spirit of the gospel on this point is quite different from the spirit of the law” (IX.vi.10). 

Book X continues the topic of “helps” to royalty, beginning with the importance of material support, revenues, but quickly turning to human support—the prudent governance of counsellors and ministers—before ending with warnings against what Bossuet announces in its title, the “inconveniences and temptations which accompany royalty and the remedies that one can bring to them.”. 

Regarding revenues, Bossuet recommends that kings distinguish between expenses of necessity (particularly the necessities imposed by war and war-readiness) and expenses which sustain “majesty in the eyes of peoples and of foreigners”—not a physical necessity but a necessity of maintaining the authority to exercise rule (X.i.1). Although a prosperous state has no shortage of gold and silver, “the first source of such riches is commerce and navigation,” as Solomon understood (X.i.3). Building prosperity is one of the things peace is for, and Solomon, knowing his subjects not to be accustomed to either commerce or navigation, “knew how to link himself with the ablest traders and the most assured leaders in navigation who existed in the world,” the Tyrians, forging treaties with them; once Israelites had learned “the secrets of commerce” from them, they no longer needed the alliance (X.i.3). Second in importance to raising revenue is the land the prince owns—his ‘natural resources’ as we now say; “true riches are those which we have called natural, because they furnish nature with its true needs,” the “fertility of the earth and that of animals” providing “an inexhaustible source of true goods,” gold and silver having been invented only “to facilitate exchange,” not to horde as if intrinsically valuable (X.i.10). Third is tribute imposed on vanquished kings and nations (Israelites softened the sting of these impositions by calling them gifts), and last of all taxes. Taxes are just, but they should remain the least important source of royal revenue. True enough, “in all states, the people contribute to the public expenses, that is to say their own preservation; and the part of their goods which they give up secures the rest to them, together with their liberty and their tranquility” (X.i.6). But the prince must not “overwhelm the people” with high taxes; Bossuet quotes Solomon as John Locke (no Catholic advocate of absolute monarchy) would also do: If you blow your nose too hard you will bring out blood in the form of rebellion—in itself wrong in Bossuet’s eyes but also understandable (X.i.7). In general, the king should recall Jesus’ monition about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. “Religion does not enter into the details of establishing the public taxes,” as every nation can set them for themselves; “the sole divine and inviolable rule among all the peoples of the world, is that of not weighing down the people, and to proportion taxes to the needs of the state and to public burdens” (X.i.9). 

In all, “the true riches of a kingdom” are its people. “The pinnacle of felicity and of richness” consists of each one eating and drinking “the fruit of its hands every one under his vine and fig-tree, rejoicing”—the last phrase a quote from Proverbs (X.i.11). To increase this true wealth the king should, as per Aristotle’s advice, make the people “somewhat comfortable,” that is, middle-class. Discourage idleness, strengthen marriages, “make the education of children easy and pleasant” (X.i.12). Ban prostitution (which causes sterility by disease and abortion) and luxury, which elevates the rich at the expense of both middle class and the poor, providing the whole country with a bad example to emulate. 

Along with their military commanders, guards, financial and secretarial assistants, the kings of Israel had priests and men of letters among their highest officials—a point that the learned Bishop of Meaux does not hesitate to emphasize. “The dignity of their priesthood was so eminent, that this splendor made it be sad that ‘the children of Israel were priests,'”—although, Bossuet hastens to add, they could not be real priests (X.ii.1). Even some of the military commanders were called men of letters, showing that “great men did not disdain to join the glory of learning with that of arms” (X.ii.1). And of course erudition among the Israelites meant first and foremost knowledge of God’s law. “Care for religion revealed itself not only through the part which the great priests had in the public business but also through the office of the king’s priest,” likely the overseer of “religious affairs in the house of the king” (X.ii.1). 

Bossuet also esteems historical learning, made possible by the maintenance of accurate public records. Since there really is nothing fundamentally new under the sun, records of past events serve as a way to “consult the past, as a faithful mirror of that which passes before our eyes” in the present (X.ii.3). Still, circumstances change; hence the need for prudent counsel. The king must “join the histories of past times with the counsel of the wise,” men who know “the ancient customs and laws” but also “know how to make application of them to the matters that must be regulated in their times” (X.ii.3). “Such ministers are living records who, always brought to preserve ancient practices, change them only when forced by unforeseen and particular necessities, with a mind to profit simultaneously from the experience of the past and the circumstances of the present” (X.ii.3). The wisest kings are the readiest to take counsel from counselors chosen among men of discretion, having subjected them to the tests of experience and even suffering. Princes like Roboam, who listened to young men given to flattery, pleasure, cupidity, and undue haste, brought about political disunion. Yet, “whatever care the prince may have taken to choose and test his counsel he should not deliver himself over to them,” as this breeds contempt (X.ii.8). He must be alert to cabals among his counselors, as well as those in which they play no part. Although the counsel of men of importance, aristocrats, needs to be accommodated in order to give them no just cause for rebellion, a king should recall the example of the priest Joiada, who counseled King Joas of Judah for years; after his death, Joas listened to the princes of the kingdom, and they ruined him. Kings “have nothing to fear so much as bad counsels” (X.ii.15). 

Even the Gentiles, even the Romans who persecuted Jesus and His apostles, won praise from the Holy Spirit when they conducted “wise policy” (X.ii.16). “Bellicose as they were,” the Romans seldom rushed into wars, preferring to “advance and secure their conquests still better through counsel and patience, than by force of arms” (X.ii.16). They also took care to hold up their end of their alliances; “their friendship was reliable” (X.ii.16). They cultivated their well-earned reputation for military prowess among distant countries, since an intimidated people is more readily conquered, later on. And they usually avoided petty personal rivalries, attending “only to the fatherland and the common good” (X.ii.16). While a republic, “they kept to the equality and modesty suitable to a popular state,” a point suggesting that the inequality and and tendency to immodesty suitable to a monarchy or an aristocracy—a regime of modern French characteristics—will need to address. Therefore, “be careful of the personal qualities and of the hidden interests of those from whom [you] take counsel”; “the Holy Spirit teaches us to take men through their most eminent qualities,” so don’t ask an atheist about religion or a coward about war (X.ii.17-18). 

Know your counselors. Although “good counsel does not give intelligence to him who has none…it excites and wakens one who has it” (X.iv.4). Bossuet’s first example of a good counselor was a man whose counsels were despised: Samuel, who humbly acceded to popular demands to appoint a king other than his sons, whom the people distrusted, then retired to a life of neglect, a life in which he was not permitted to advise but only to pray for the king. “So fine a retreat left the people of God with an eternal souvenir of a magnanimity which till now has known no rival” (X.iii.1). Another model advisor was Nehemias, sent to govern Jerusalem by King Artaxerxes of of Persia, and who faithfully set out to repair the city and to establish justice there. “What is finest of all, is that he did all of this in the sight of God and his duty alone,” owing his conduct to “a solid piety, a perfect disinterestedness, a lively attention to duty, and an intrepid courage” (X.iii.2). 

Samuel and Nehemias were entirely good men, a type perennially in short supply. Joab, the son of David’s sister, exhibited both great virtues—courage, piety, optimism at those times when David despaired, and loyalty. But he was also vengeful and ambitious, “one of those who will the good, but who want to accomplish it alone under the king” (X.iii.3). A sound counselor himself, he would not in turn take counsel from others; his loyalty bled over into jealousy. 

Holofernes, the leading general of King Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Nineveh and Assyria, numbers among the evil or decidedly unhelpful ‘helpers’ of a monarch. He invaded Israel at his king’s commands, destroying all temples that did not dedicate themselves to the worship of Nebuchadnezzar. “It is useless to expect religion in ambitious men,” as “the god of proud souls is always the one who contents their ambition” (X.iii.4). Such was Holofernes, who “dreamt only of satisfying his desires,” allowing himself to be seduced by Judith, who got him drunk and beheaded him in his stupor. The Assyrian troops were driven back, Holofernes in effect having permitted a woman to rout the Assyrians “by a single blow of her weak hand, more easily than a hundred thousand fighters would have done” (X.iii.4).  

Aman (or, more usually, Haman), adviser to King Assuerus of Persia, was raised above all the great of the kingdom by his king. Only the Jewish Mordechai dissented. “What flatters the ambitious is the idea of omnipotence, which seems to make gods of them on earth” (X.iii.5). Infuriated at his one detractor, Aman intended not merely to murder Mordechai but to destroy all Jews, simultaneously “cover[ing] private vengeance with a more general order,” attacking the religion “which inspired Mordechai’s refusal,” giving the world “a more striking sign of his power,” and “because the hanging of a single individual was too little food for his vanity” (X.iii.5) “The happy favorite is full of himself alone” (X.iii.5), full of anything but the Holy Spirit. Assuerus’ Jewish queen, Esther, learned of Aman’s plot and devised a stratagem of her own, inviting the king and his favorite to a feast (which Aman was only too flattered to attend), then exposing the counselor’s intention to the outraged king. “Men do not know their destiny. The ambitious are easy to deceive because they themselves aid in the seduction, and because they believe all too easily those who favor them” (X.iii.5). When Aman got on his knees to beg mercy of Queen Esther, the king, entering the room after storming out of it, interpreted this as an attempt at seduction, sealing his counselor’s death warrant. “Confidence, once injured, carries itself to the most extreme feelings,” as seen in Assuerus’ mistaken but just sentence; his adviser, “deceived by his own glory,” became “the architect” of his own destruction,” hanged on the gibbet he had prepared for Mordechai (X.iii.5). Lesson for the Dauphin: Do not elevate one counselor over all the others, as you may corrupt his soul, destroying the virtues you esteem in him.

Know your counselors but, more generally, “know men well” by understanding the several human ‘types’ (X.iv). This is “one of the most necessary kinds of knowledge in a prince” (X.iv.1). Again drawing his examples from Scripture, which has the advantage of divine authority combined with historical accuracy, Bossuet identifies fifteen bad kinds of persons, ranging from “those who find nothing good except what they want, nothing just except what they want,” to the self-important, with gullible, lying, scoffing, braggartly, greedy, impatient, lazy, frivolous, indecisive, rash, obsequious, and rumor-mongering sorts in-between. The worst sort of all, who might be characterized by any number of these vices, is the false friend (X.iv.2). He “is the one who must be watched the most,” a “badly brought up soul with a corrupt heart” (X.iv.3). The best guarantee of genuine friendship is a shared fear of God, since “good faith is maintained under those eyes which penetrate everything” (X.iv.5). That goes for the statesman as much as for his counselor. “The evenness of his conduct is a sign of his wisdom, and causes him to be viewed as a man who is certain in all his undertakings,” as “neither humors nor prejudice alter him” (X.iv.6). Even unstatesmanlike, evil kings may credit the advice of a religious man, for “religion causes fear even in those who do not follow it,” whereas “superstitious terror which is without love makes men weak, timid, defiant, cruel, bloody—everything that passion wills” (X.iv.7). In still another suggestion that kings should heed the advice of men like himself, Bossuet remarks that many of the ancient kings surrounded themselves with a Council of Religion.

Even nearer to the prince, and indispensable to an orderly succession, his family must remain unified, as Solomon and Job succeeded in doing and as David attempted to do, with mixed results. And he must take care of his own person. Unlike more fanatic Christians, who regarded medicinal treatment as a blasphemous compromise of reliance on God, God Himself “has not condemned medicine, whose author he is” (X.v.2). What God does forbid is putting undue confidence in medicines and in physicians, exclusive of God, “who alone blesses remedies,” the maker of them and the true director of their use” (X.v.2).

Bossuet concludes Book X by describing the disadvantages and temptations royalty is heir to, along with remedies for those disadvantages and temptations. Pride, disobedience to God and His law, lust (e.g., David with Bathsheba), self-delusion, and “attachment to one’s will” are the (as it were) occupational hazards of royalty (X.vi.1). Absolute power wielded by one man can be very good, so long as the one who wields it understands that there is “no barrier against it,” no built-in guard against shamelessness and rapine (X.vi.1). “There is no temptation to equal that of power, nor anything so difficult as to refuse oneself something, when men accord you everything, and when they dream only of even exiting your desires” beyond what you yourself imagine (X.vi.1). Authority is both necessary and easily abused. Given the absolute character of the monarchy Bossuet favors, he needs to offer effective guards against arbitrary rule.

There are remedies for the temptations of monarchic rule, fifteen remedies “which God himself has ordained to kings against the temptation of power,” the power He has given them (X.vi.2). First, princes should know the upper and lower limits of their power: not only does every ruler rule under a “superior empire, which is the empire of God,” who prepares “a more rigorous justice and a more exquisite torture” for those who defy His rule than any tyrant can devise (X.vi.3), but princes should remain mindful of their own mortality, which “throws together the prince and the subject,” making “the fragile distinction between them” far “too superficial and fleeting to merit being counted” (X.vi.4). Scripture shows that God even punishes His favorites, such as David, making an example of him for all monarchs by showing that the only road back to royal glory is penitence. God’s love is corrective before it is restorative. Impenitent princes—Saul, Belshazzar of Babylon, Antiochus of Syria—all were struck down by God in His justice.

The prince must respect God, but also “respect the human race,” especially the judgment of posterity (X.vi.9). And he must respect the future regrets of his own conscience, which punishes evil acts unknown to history.

Ask yourself, King, “Does God fear my power?” If not, “what mortal is hidden” from His justice? (X.vi.11). Blessed are the poor in spirit—not those materially poor, who may be as arrogant as the wealthy, but the humble, those “who know how to detach themselves from their riches” and “to deposit themselves before God through a true humility” (X.vi.12). King David himself prayed to be “humbly minded” (X.vi.13, from Psalm 130). And, acting under God, the king should “make himself attentive to all his duties,” as forgetting God “is the greatest of all evils” (X.vi.14). His private conduct should match the goodness of his public actions, setting an example for family and subjects alike.

Bossuet concludes with an account of “the true happiness of kings,” which he humbly draws not from his own reflections but those of Augustine, who reminds kings that their good fortune is God’s gift, their happiness found in “rul[ing] with justice,” yearning not “empty glory” but animated by “the love of eternal blessedness” (Conclusion: Augustine, The City of God I, V, xxiv).

 

Notes

1. Such armies need not be large and burdensome, since a king can conscript additional troops, as needed (IX.vi.12).
2. He later remarks that revolts are most likely during times of transition between one king and another. This is “a moment of weakness that one must always watch with extra care, if one wants to ensure the public peace” (IX.vi.11).