Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part 2: Chapters 6-8. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2026.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

Frank S. Meyer: The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1961.

 

Born in 1909, Frank S. Meyer worked as a member of the Communist Party USA throughout the 1930s until his departure in 1945. Turning against Marxist ideology he became a major influence on postwar conservatism, an ally of William F. Buckley, Jr. and regular contributor to National Review. His book rests firmly on his experience in ‘The Party.’

Communists, he observes, cannot be understood by assuming that they think and feel as others do. “Reality looks different” to them because they have not merely been instructed but molded, their souls reoriented by the Party regime to which they have pledged allegiance, a regime animated by a “secular and messianic quasi-religion” instituted not merely to understand the world but to change it, as Marx adjured. Lenin followed in this line, in effect saying, “Give me an organization of professional revolutionaries and I can transform the world.” As with any regime, the Party aims at producing a certain human “type,” in this case the “one Communist type,” a dedicated member of a cadre, that is, the political equivalent of battle-hardened soldiers around whom the mass of men can form. And as in any political regime, the cadre member may not be one of the apparent rulers. “Cadre Communists can be found in apparently the humblest of positions when there is a reason for their activities at that level”: “a dramatic spy or a policy-subverter in a high government post, a world-renowned writer or speaker or a Communist trade-union leader with great public prestige and power, may be little more than an office boy to obscure and unknown men with no formal position in or out of the Communist Party.”

The cadre man has strictly subordinated his individuality, emotions, and will to an intellect “totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism,” a doctrine that defines freedom as “the recognition of necessity”—recognition of History’s inexorable ‘dialectical’ advance toward communism through the rule of the Party commanding a state structured on socialist lines. Socialism is the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ the urban, industrial working class, itself ruled by its ‘leaders,’ who constitute the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat. In the words of Josef Stalin, “It is not given to all to withstand the stress and storm that accompanies membership in such a Party.” To gain admission to a cadre, one must exhibit absolute devotion to the cause of the ‘working class’ as embodied in the Party along with an ability to persuade oneself that he is maintaining “close contact with the masses” when “in actual fact, most of those who constitute the cadre have very little contact with the masses.” From there, a process of “Bolshevik hardening” or “Bolshevik discipline” commences, preparing cadre members to become “the forerunners of the ‘man of a new type,'” capable of committing such acts as “organiz[ing] a movement of Asian coolies under circumstances of incredible terror and deprivation or direct[ing] a system of slave camps which systematically dehumanizes and destroys millions upon millions of helpless people.” 

Thanks to this hardening, this discipline, “fine and devoted human beings can become conscious agents of organized evil.” The Party “considers every moment of life material for the process of molding its members.” Cadre leaders carefully observe, analyze, and criticize members’ “intellectual and psychological personality traits, operating at all times, at every moment of personal as well as political life” to reaffirm and strengthen their “consciousness” that the historical dialectic is inexorable, the Party infallible. Marxism demands “the unity of theory and practice,” that “all activity be considered as a school and all schooling as a continuation of activity.” Lenin himself went to considerable lengths in advancing this claim, writing a treatise on epistemology, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which purports to demonstrate that the mind is nothing more than a particular organization of matter, a constellation capable (again, if properly hardened and disciplined) of understanding the operational patterns of all other organizations of matter—especially the organization of society along the lines of class, an organization animated by class struggle.

“Social interactions have for the Communist the scientifically predictable character of Newtonian physical reactions” and, like other objects studied by modern science, are “manipulable.” Modern science “implies not knowledge for the sake of knowing but knowledge for control.” A Communist must not only know socio-economic and political events, but he must also know (in Lenin’s famous phrase) what is to be done in response to them. He gains that knowledge from the Party leaders, the master-scientists. Marx and Lenin themselves satisfied this requirement by writing polemics. Even their most nearly ‘theoretical’ works (Capital, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) “are full of polemics”; “their essential inspiration is polemical,” the atheist equivalent of the Christian’s spiritual warfare. “Thought for thought’s sake or for the sake of pure knowledge is, from the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, not merely sterile; in the last analysis it is impossible.” 

This claim in turn justifies the use of social pressure “as an irreplaceable tool of training.” Social pressure “forces to the surface, out into the open where they can be handled, all he psychological and intellectual contents of the personality which must be remade—ideas, habits, prejudices, attitudes” in weekly sessions of “criticism and self-criticism”—again, in imitation of some Christian Church, the institution of the Confessional. This is the deployment of the “dialectic” to the human personality—not, however, in the one-on-one individual Church confession or Freudian psychoanalysis (individuality is too ‘bourgeois’) but in a group session ruled by the cadre leader. Eventually, “the evolving Communist begins to apply this same method to himself,” a thoroughgoing habituation presented as a means of ever-increasing ‘consciousness.’ “Whether externally applied or internally generated, however, this questioning, probing testing process maintains a pressure upon the personality which transforms the solidity of the previous intellectual outlook and psychic set into a state of flux in which it can be remolded.”

Admittedly, “the emotions present something of a problem.” They cannot simply be eliminated or reliably repressed. In the end, however, most of them “are susceptible of being channeled in directions of value to the Party.” With careful observation, supervision, and pressure, such powerful feelings as “filial devotion, love, or friendship” can be transferred to the Party, its Leader, and Party ‘comrades.’ Meyer offers the example of shame. This must not “exist in connection with [the cadre member’s] subordination to the decisions and discipline of the Party,” but it should surely prevail when a Party member exhibits any deviation from “his subordination to the decisions and discipline of the Party.”

None of this implies that Communists regard Marxist-Leninist ideas the way they regard the ideas of other systems of thought—as mere ‘superstructures’ concealing the material interests of one’s class. “The assignment of a secondary role to [the Communist’s] consciously held theoretical outlook can lead to serious misunderstanding of the Communist personality as well as to disastrous misjudgment of the power of Communism” because “for the Communist, life takes place in terms of the categories of Marxism-Leninism as surely as the normal eye sees in terms of color or the monochromatic in lights and shades,” providing him with “certainties and clarities which fit with precision into the well-ordered patter of his total outlook.” And so, “the Communist leader will not hesitate to tell a physicist that the principle of indeterminacy represents unclear thinking and imperfect science, or to instruct the novelist in the principles of his craft.” Conversely, the true Communist who is a physicist or a novelist will take such strictures “more seriously than he would those of leaders in his own profession.” And if he encounters anything that doesn’t fit into the system? Dismiss it as yet another of the “unsubstantial vaporings” emitted from the swamp of human illusion. You already have, or someday can have, the answer “to every meaningful question” (emphasis added). Whatever cannot be understood in terms of Marxist-Leninist science does not really exist and deserves no serious inquiry.

In this, Marxism-Leninism resembles other modern materialisms and positivisms, also animated the Machiavellian “concept of thought and life as control.” But unlike the competing ‘bourgeois’ doctrines, Marxism-Leninism maintains that “control over existence is not simply a goal of thought but its essential being.” It is also unlike those doctrines because for Marxism-Leninism “theory is not reducible to practice, but indissolubly united with it in a relationship where neither exists without the other, where each determines the other, permitting independent validity neither to abstract theory nor to empirical practice” in “a strange marriage of rationalism and empiricism.”

In line with this epistemology, the central moral question for the Communist is not ‘What is the Good?’ or (assuredly) not ‘What would Jesus do?’ but “Will this act help or hurt the revolution—the Party?” Morality implies freedom, choice. Sure enough, according to the Party, the Marxist is “truly free” because he recognizes the dialectical necessity that is History and accepts it. “It is this recognition and acceptance…not the physical fact of being a proletarian, which gives freedom and power.” ‘Freedom’ means freedom from ‘bourgeois’ morality and from any consideration not “strictly derived from strategical and tactical considerations.” “In every situation [the Communist] must ask himself: ‘What is the objective situation, what forces do we have, what allies can be won, what is the first thing to be done, what mechanisms are available or can be created?”

Struggles with one’s ‘conscience,’ with childhood trauma, or with any of an individual’s “inner personal struggles” betoken only “distorted reflections of social reality.” Religious self-examination and psychoanalysis are equally bogus. While Marxism “cannot deny the biological antecedents of society,” it takes the Faustian view of them: In the beginning was not the Word; in the beginning was the act—not, it should be needless to say, the act of God but the act of man. “Man qua man is neither the result of a creative act of God nor of the process of evolution. He comes into being as a result of his own act,” the act of producing “their means of subsistence”—labor. Labor is the source of all value because such production is what makes man man. 

Pack up your troubles, then. Get busy with agitation and propaganda as fused with “activity.” By itself, action is merely “reformist,” unrevolutionary because it lacks the ideational guidance propagated by the Party. Communists distinguish agitation from propaganda: agitation aims at the masses, unifying them emotionally behind the useful ’cause’ of the moment; propaganda raises the consciousness of “the riper elements” of the masses, through “more restrained argument affecting the understanding.” But by themselves, agitation and propaganda are “sectarian,” incapable of “produc[ing] substantial results, because ideas can only move the recipient when they are unified in his experience with practice.” 

How to begin? Begin with your friends and acquaintances. “Everyone with whom the Communist is in contact is, at a greater or less remove, a potential recruit,” preferably someone of whom he has “thorough knowledge.” “His approach moves from the particular to the general, starting with the already accepted beliefs, the attitudes, and the personal problems of the individual concerned; he introduces the Party position slowly and gradually, step by step, as a development which seems to arise naturally from analysis of that person’s own problems.” Writings, discussion groups, classes organized by the Party all come later and are “ancillary to the central technique of personal discussion.” A final invitation to join the Party depends upon the circumstances prevailing in the regime in which the Party operates. If secrecy is necessary, the Party will be more cautious than it needs to be in most ‘bourgeois democracies,’ most of the time.

The moment of the invitation is “the crucial moment” in the process because this is when the person targeted is likely to balk. The danger is not merely that of losing the potential recruit. “Those lost at this point can become almost as inimical to the Party as ex-Communists” or, if they continue to hover on the margin as “useful but cynical and critical sympathizers,” the Party’s time and efforts have been squandered. “Therefore, at this stage extraordinary efforts are made by the Party to assist the recruiter.” Call in the “leading Party members…to help personally in conversation and discussion”; use such “emotional methods” as participation in mass meetings and inclusion in “social events with Party and fellow-traveling dignitaries.” (You’ve seen Jane Fonda in the movies, but would you like to meet her?) 

“In my years in the Party, I had considerable experience both with direct recruits of my own and as a Party leader called in to assist with others’ recruits.” Meyer learned that “the final block” against joining the Party “seem[ed] to have forms as multifarious as human character and experience.” A reluctant or critical spouse; a personal dispute with a Party member; moral qualms; worries about the possible impact of Party membership on one’s career prospects or the prospects of one’s children: “Whatever the problem might be, there is almost certain to be a problem.” It is up to the recruiter and his Party associates to find a path to persuasion.

The Party also must find a path in the larger sense, the path to the future. “Communist leadership…is up against a continuing contradiction between two incompatible goals: the building of a mass Party and the molding of an iron Party.” These goals, then, are in a dialectical relationship. Under some circumstances, the Party will spread its net widely; under others, “smaller, but better” becomes the slogan and the Party undertakes to purge itself of dross or at least to pressure its members into stricter conformity with the Party ‘line.’ Between 1936 and 1941, the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Party turnover reached about eighty percent in the CPUSA. While mass recruitment is a desideratum, “the primary aim is the creation of a steeled cadre, flexible enough to take any tactically desired stand on current questions, accreting strength as it moves through opposite and contradictory campaigns and feeds upon generation after generation of the rank and file of the formal Parties.” Acceptance of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, after years of vituperation against fascism, requires exactly the sort of discipline the Party needs at its core. Weaklings need not stay. The lukewarm must be spit out of its mouth. Or, shifting the metaphor, “the Communist examines an individual very much as a carpenter examines a piece of lumber.” 

As for the piece of lumber itself, it finds itself in “a world of trans-valued values.” Persons “never suspected of being Communists” turn out to be just that. Some supposedly Very Important Person will be dressed down by a seemingly “more or less insignificant figure.” The Communist has taken an oath “to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious Socialism,” to “remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the Party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” Although Marxism lays claim to the final form of rationality, of science, the actual appeal is more to the spirited element of the soul, to thumos rather than logos: “duty, responsibility, and the privilege of being one of those who have elected for History.” Or, to lower the tone, it is an appeal to that part of men and women that wants to ‘know the score,’ wants to be on the inside, not on the outside, “dragged by events.” In exchange for this privilege (and to be sure, there is as much snobbery attached to Party membership as there is to membership in a ‘country club’) , one must accept the Communist Party as “the be-all and the end-all of life, the center of all human purpose,” rightfully demanding of him “no partial segment of his life but all of his life.” 

“The whole of Communist training…drives towards the acceptance of the revolution as the end to which all things and all persons must be strictly subordinated as means.” For example, Party recruits need indoctrination, and dialectic rules the Communist schoolroom “through a guided discussion directed toward a predetermined end”—that is, in imitation of the way ‘History’ itself works, according to Marxism. “Conflicts, tensions, and their resolutions are the very stuff of the transformation of traditional man into Communist man.”  As the more senior Party member, the teacher-leader is always correct, putting forth “not their personal opinions, their judgments…but their scientific analysis.” This, again, is how all the Party meetings work, not only the ones that take place in classrooms; the leader “will utilize his superior command of dialectics” to assert his unquestionable authority. For those that waver, the Party reserves sessions of “criticism and self-criticism.” While “the first time the neophyte is himself subject to ‘self-criticism,’ it is probably the most painful thing that has ever happened to him,” but that is the point: toughen up. The compensation for such humiliation comes with “feeling the power of the Party, a power with which he identifies himself,” as a small cadre of Party members “carry out plans which have been worked out in detail beforehand,” successfully bending a much larger organization—say, a teachers’ union—to commit itself to the Party line without knowing it. 

Training of Party members within a cadre is “qualitatively different from pre-cadre training in one important respect: the decisive role of self-imposition of pressure.” To be sure, “external” pressures are still there, “but the force of the Communist ethos has been absorbed into the personality itself.” “A Communist is still not ‘tested’ until his will has become fused with the will of the Party.” The test comes when a cadre member deviates, however slightly, from Party commands and practices, any “clash between personal judgment and Party judgment.” For example, if the Party line abruptly reverses course, you will follow the new course. “To reverse one’s self before other human beings, Party or non-Party, without losing one’s self-respect, necessitates full inner acceptance of the rightfulness and power of the Party,” the “god of a godless world.” “Only by a god can such acceptance be demanded and only to a god can it be given without the utter destruction of self-respect.” Meyer had met several of the Party luminaries of the day—CPUSA chairman Earl Browder, French Communist Party chairman Maurice Thorez, East Germany Party General Secretary Walter Ulbrich of East Germany and Bulgarian Communist and erstwhile General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov. He reports that each regarded himself as being in “a state of tutelage” to his superiors. Such men take “what anywhere else would be regarded as unmitigated abuse,” subjecting subordinates to the same, “as necessary,” all “with extraordinary little of the emotions of abasement or resentment, on the one hand, or aggressive ego-satisfaction, on the other.” To do less is to succumb to “subjectivity,” the thoroughgoing Communist’s “cardinal sin.” “To put anything before the Party is subjectivity.” Thus, the true Communist “can only be understood if we understand the end to which he is devoted as the compass is drawn to the magnetic pole: the conquest of the world for Communism.”

True enough, the Party is “in actuality the creature of the rulers of the Soviet Union.” But the rulers of the Soviet Union are held up as the leaders of the Party, not of the regime of Russia’s nation-state. “The faith triumphant, the Soviet Union, is…but an aspect of the faith. It is the faith, whole and entire, Communism, the Party, which inspires the Communist’s universe and is the object of his devotion.” Tyranny, the Gulag, purges of Party members, mass murder of ‘class enemies,’ aggressive war against other states, “even Khruschev’s exposure of Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956” are only “necessary casualties of the historical process, unfortunate but unavoidable” features of the dialectic. “Emotionally they simply are not real, even when [the Communist] has actually seen horrors with his own eyes. Facts that do not fit the theoretical outlook of Marxism-Leninism have only a shadowy existence,” since “reality rests only in the doctrines of Communism and the institution of the Party.” Such men are products of “the extirpation of every remnant of philosophical, moral, aesthetic principle or instinct natural to the human being, and the substitution of the principles and instincts of the Communist world-view.” It is the final conquest of nature, of human nature itself. 

It is easy to assume that Meyer’s book is a well-informed, vigorously argued ‘period piece,’ consigned to irrelevancy by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is true that the center of the worldwide Communist movement is no longer Moscow. But it still has a center, does it not?

 

 

 

William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors.

 

This lecture was written for the Sixth Annual Will’n in Weslaco Festival, South Texas College, Weslaco, Texas, April 8, 2025.

 

“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

John Locke: An Essay on Civil Government. Book II, Chapter xviii, Section 202.

 

“Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying insofar as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.”

Agnes Repplier: In Pursuit of Laughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1936.

 

The Comedy of Errors presents these themes of law and laughter, of law and nature. What are the tensions between these two pairs? Can they be reconciled?

We know that this play was performed a part of Christmastime celebration at Gray’s Inn, which was one of the four Inns of Court in London. the inns were professional associations for lawyers and judges which also served as la schools. Part of the seasonal fund was the election of a Lord of Misrule, typically a student whose reign was mercifully brief and whose powers were prudently limited. The strictness of the rule of law and of lawyers relaxed for the holiday celebrating the birth of Christ, Redeemer of souls guilty before the Law of God.

The Comedy of Errors is perfect for such an occasion and it’s not untimely in today’s circumstances, either. Students still take over some elite university campuses, and they are nothing if not lords of misrule when they do.

Not only that, but in the play there’s a trade war going on.

It would be a comedy of error on my part if I tried to summarize Shakespeare’s wild and twisty plot, and that would take the fun out of watching the play. But I do want to show how the play, for all the laughs, brings out some serious points about law, about ruling and misruling, and especially about how, in ruling, we can weigh evidence and testimony in order to make just and wise judgements  in the face of confusion: the face of confusion often being what we see all around us, and also when we look in the mirror.

Although I won’t attempt a plot summary, I will pay particular attention to the play’s first scene and its last scene.

So: What’s so funny about the law? Judging from the play’s first scene, nothing at all. The law is serious, and it can turn deadly. Syracuse and Ephesus began as city-states—as sovereign in their day as the United Sates, Mexico, and Canada are today. Each was a major commercial country—Syracuse, a Sicilian city founded by Greeks from the city-state of Corinth, eventually served as a trading link between Eastern and Western Christendom.

By the time of the actions depicted in the play, Christianity evidently has been introduced, however, which means that these cities are now under imperial rule—probably of Rome, since the Duke of Ephesus, Solinus, has a Roman name. The Apostle Paul evangelized in Syracuse and of course his Letter to the Ephesians when those cities were part of the Roman Empire.

Neither secular empire nor the sacred empire of the Church stops these cities from acting like sovereign states, however, at least when it comes to trade. And their trade war isn’t just a matter of reciprocal tariffs, either; Ephesus has banned Syracusans from the country, in response to harsh penalties enacted by the Duke of Syracuse on Ephesian merchants. Illegal interlopers from Syracuse must pay a heavy fine or pay the ultimate penalty of death. City states generally took citizenship, and therefore ‘foreignness,’ more seriously than many do today and when they fought a trade war, they played for keeps. You won’t find much talk about ‘globalization’ among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or among the European states of Shakespeare’s time, for that matter. Shakespeare’s Ephesus makes its own laws regarding trade, and indeed the old empires allowed subject nations a considerable degree of self-rule.

Where does law, severe or mild, come from? To take a prominent example, Moses receives the laws of Israel from God, the supreme Ruler. The ancient city-states often supposed that their laws were divinely ordained, with each city having its own protecting and oftentimes lawgiving deity: for both Ephesus and Syracuse, it was Artemis—Diana, in the Roman pantheon. Now, in Christendom, they still have women as patron, or should I say matron, saints: Agatha for Sicily, Hermione for Ephesus, both associated with the power of healing. With the coming of Christianity, then, they exchanged the goddess of the hunt for saints of health.

Secular regimes also derive their laws from rulers—that is, from the regime of the country. Regimes consist of four components: rulers (one, few, or many, good or bad); the ruling offices the rulers occupy; the way of life governed by those rulers and ruling offices; there is, finally, the purpose or purposes that the rulers, ruling offices, and way of life aim at. As mentioned, the purpose of the Ephesian and the Syracusan regimes is commercial prosperity, and they achieved it.

Law isn’t supposed to be funny, and in the play’s first scene it doesn’t look like it will be. This comedy begins as if it will be a tragedy. In Shakespeare generally, comedy and tragedy are on a knife’ edge; one might easily turn into the other, and in most of his plays the genres are mixed, often with comic and tragic scenes interspersed. Solinus, the name of the Duke of Ephesus, means ‘solitary one’; he rules as a monarch. In the ancient world and up to and including Shakespeare’s time, monarchs were not primarily what we think of today. While they were ‘commanders in chief’ in wartime, in peacetime they were not primarily ‘executives’ but judges. That’s why to this day we speak of a ‘king’s court.’ We encounter Solinus in his role as a judge in a legal case.

Aegeon is a merchant from Syracuse, arrested under the Ephesian law banning Syracusans. Since he’s obviously guilty as charged, he throws himself on the mercy of the court, telling a tragic story of family separation. Decades earlier, he and his wife, Aemilia, had twin sons for whom he purchased twin slaves when they were all in their infancy. A few years later, the family suffered shipwreck in a storm. Father, one son and his slave were rescued by one ship; his wife, one son and his slave were rescued by another, taking them to different cities, the destination of each unknown to the other. Upon reaching adulthood, the son and slave who remained with Aegeon went on a mission to find their lost brothers and never returned. Aegeon embarked on what has been a five-year mission to find them, coming to Ephesus only as a last desperate resort.

The law he has violated is a convention—not a divine or natural but a man-made thing—enacted by the Ephesian regime, which intends to defend its commerce, its way of life aimed at the purpose of citizens’ prosperity—arguably, a natural human purpose. By contrast, the purpose of Aegeon’s mission has no conventional content; it is entirely natural: to reunite his family. We see its natural character in the fact that it’s a search that has proceeded through many countries, many regimes with many sets of legal conventions. In Aristotle’s book, the Politics, families are the building blocks of political communities, of city-states, giving them a natural foundation. Thus, the legal conventions of Ephesus now collide with human nature in a legal case. Right at the beginning of his play, Shakespeare has the full attention of those lawyers, judges, and law students of Gray’s Inn, who are responsible for cases at trial under English common law within the English regime, which is also a monarchy, one that is part of Christendom but recently had separated from Roman Catholic Christendom in an act of sovereignty taken by the father of the current monarch, Elizabeth I.

Duke Solinus keeps to the letter of the law: he tells Aegeon to raise money to pay the fine in 24 hours or suffer death by beheading. The Duke’s argument in justifying his sternness—his tragic judgment, if you will—may seem tyrannical to us in modern America, but it is crucial to understand that we are looking at it through the lens of our own regime, a democratic and commercial republic, where we are often encouraged to ‘Question authority.’ That isn’t the traditional way of understanding law or of understanding the rulers who make and enforce the law, either in the ancient world or in Christendom. The Apostle Paul famously tells his missionaries to respect the ruler, who “wields not the sword in vain”—a ruler who was then a pagan, and sometimes a persecutor of Christians. The difference between our moral sensibility and that of other regimes suggests that our judgments are crucially influenced by the regime we live in.

It therefore takes an effort for us to consider the argument the Duke make in the case of a foreign merchant who has knowingly or unknowingly violated Ephesian law, for an understandable natural purpose. He doesn’t blame Aegeon’s plight on Aegeon, but on “the fates”—the winds that caused the shipwreck, the initial cause in the sequence of events that brought him to this trial. Solinus tells the defendant, “We may pity, though not pardon thee.” Why not?

Because the law is the law, and the regime behind that law (“my crown, my oath”—notice, an obligation—and indeed “my dignity and my “honor”) require that the regime’s laws be respected, that the laws be taken seriously and not ‘comically. Laws laxly enforced become laws ‘in name only,” comical, things of derision. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of men and women who follow the law, a set of laws made by God or by human beings, but in either case necessarily ‘solemnized,’ obeyed. And even ‘we democrats’ know that. We know that there come circumstances in every regime when legal justice can no longer be tempered by mercy, or the regime will collapse in a crisis of dishonor, of disrespect, of comedy. Satire is an engine of such disrespect. As the Bible says, God is not to be mocked. Shakespeare audience of legal authorities, of dignitaries, expect citizens to stand up when the judge enters the courtroom. Even democratic America’s Judge Judy, no stranger to comedy, expects and demands that.

Another way to put it is that Solinus is a monarch, but he is a constitutional monarch. He is not a lawless tyrant. John Locke could not find fault with him, in that regard. I emphasize this so that you’ll see the themes of the play clearly, as Shakespeare sets them up from the outset, themes that must be understood in the way they were understood by learned and intelligent ‘men of the law’ in the English regime of his time.

But just as the convention of law has a sort of nature to it, a serious and potentially tragic nature, just as it sets limit on comedy, and especially on mockery, legal convention also has its limits. Law and respect for law are necessary to the regime, but their consequences may contradict justice when it governs what lawyers call ‘a hard case’—a case that the legislators who framed the law did not, could not, anticipate. Can such tragic consequences of legal reasoning be averted by comedy—that is, by the kind of natural reasoning that, first, recognizes how circumstances alter cases—what jurists call ‘equity’—and second, that the circumstances that Solinus and Aegeon both understand are not all the circumstances of the case he has adjudicated?

Laws govern both city-states and the households within them; there is tariff and criminal law; there is also marital law. In Ephesus, the city-state law is violated by the arrival of Aegeon; the marital law i challenged, if not intentionally violated, by the arrival of the twins from Syracuse. Their arrival also challenges criminal law, as it relates to commerce, as seen in the errors surrounding the gold chain that the goldsmith, Angelo, mistakenly gives to the Syracusan Antipholus, because he confuses him with his Ephesian twin—a circumstance to which I shall return.

With reasoning beyond the strictures of the law, comedy begins—the chance for a happy ending. A monarch/judge needs first to know the law; second, he needs to know the facts of the case, the real evidence; he finally needs to make a reasoned judgment base on that law and those facts, which really provide the circumstances of the case. A sound judgment doesn’t ‘print out’ a good result, lie a photocopier attached to a computer. A sound judgment takes practical reasoning in addition to legal reasoning, which deduces guilt or innocence from the letter of the law. Notice that these three steps constitute an ascent, an ascent from convention, from law, to the nature of the actions taken by the accused and the accuser, and finally to the exercise of natural, prudential reason, which is the distinctive characteristic of human nature and the basis of right judgment, not only in law courts but in our lives, generally.

This is comic, not tragic because tragedies end like Hamlet, with dead bodies on the floor, including the bodies of persons who didn’t deserve to die, whereas comedies end happily, whether it is in marriage (as they often do in Shakespeare) or in the philosophic death of Socrates 9who contentedly dies so that philosophy may live on, or in the Divine Comedy of Dane, where God’s judgments are understood to be both just and merciful. God’s judgments are always right because God knows the true identity of those He judges. Human judges are less reliable, and they need to understand that. They need ways of discovering the true identities of those accused and of their accusers who appear before the court.

The Comedy of Errors therefore proceeds more philosophically than religiously, by reason not by divine revelation. It proceeds a bit like an argument in a Platonic dialogue—an argument, however, in actions, with errors made and opinions exposed as incorrect by means of human sense perception and human reasoning—both fallible.

First, let’s take a look at sense perception. Both slave twins are named “Dromio.” ‘Dromio’ means ‘path’ or ‘way. The slavish path to knowledge, its way of knowing, is by sense perception. We see this especially in Act III, Scene 1, where Ephesian Dromio, having earlier suffered a beating from Syracusan Antipholus, replies to his real master’s denial of having struck him, “I know what I know.” When it comes to knowledge, his physical experience, his sense perceptions, cannot give way to his master’s authority. And he’s right: He was beaten, only wrong in mistaking his master for his master’s identical twin. His simplest sense, touch, which registers bodily pain and pleasure, gave him part of the truth, even as another sense perception, from sight, deceived him.

In one sense, the senses are always right he really did get beaten, and he really did see a man who looked exactly like his master. Sight is a higher sense than touch. Touch perceives only parts of things, out of their ‘context,’ their surroundings. Sight gives us a picture, often a bigger picture, than touch can do. Also, we can rely on sight more readily to reveal the identities of one another, the inner ‘regimes,’ so to speak, the souls and the purposes souls pursue, motives. Sight perceives facial expressions, ‘body language’; the eyes are the ‘windows of the soul’ both for looking out and for looking in. But physical sight of course cannot fully disclose a soul. The senses need to be supplemented with reasoning about the evidence presented to the human mind by the senses. That is a task preeminently for rulers, not slaves. Slaves are tasked with obedience, rulers with responsibility.

The path of natural reasoning runs roughly because the human mind easily misconstrues the facts, the evidence that bodily senses bring before it to judge. That is how masters can mistake rational actions of other masters and slaves as irrational. Rational Luciana (her name means ‘light’) mistakes Syracusan Antipholus for Ephesian Antipholus, who is unhappily married to her sister. When the Syracusan truthfully denies that he is married and, having fallen in love at first sight, proposes marriage to her, she doesn’t fall back on her senses as her source of knowledge (as in “I know what I know”) but arrives at a seemingly reasonable explanation of the contradiction: Antipholus must have gone mad; he must have lost his reason. Her error is to reason from a false premise.

Another way in which the human mind deceives itself is to interpret sense-evidence through the soul’s passions. Luciana’s sister, Adriana (which means ‘dark’) is near madness, herself, maddened by jealousy. Jealousy darkens her mind. Passions, such as jealousy, impede reasoning, distorting the mind’s judgement of the evidence the senses place before it. Both lucid Luciana and mind-darkened Adriana contribute to the derangement of their household, the first by reasoning from false premises, the second by abandoning reason altogether.

Superstition is yet another impediment to reasoning. On several occasions, those who mistake the identity of one twin for another assume that they are witnessing sorcery, witchcraft, deviltry, demonic possession. This evokes not the passion of jealousy but the passion of fear. Ephesus had a reputation for such supernatural things, and the Apostle Paul takes them with supreme seriousness Shakespeare presents the as still another source of error, as illusory, indeed delusory, opinions purporting to explain the naturally occurring actions of natural persons by supernatural influences. This is no small point, especially when made before lawyers, judges, and law students. Witch trials were not unknown in Shakespeare’s Europe, and his Puritan countrymen would bring the practice to New England, not many years later. Shakespeare suggests to men of the law: Are you quite sure of the evidence? Such errors derange city-states, as fear leads either to cowardice or to rage, passions, and thus to injustice, ruinous to good regimes, and conducive to tyranny. His comedy implies a limit to the law, a rational limit.

To put it in terms of the play, the double duality of two sets of twins embodies the dualities of the world in which we make judgments, a world of appearance and reality, passions and reason, misrule and good rule, tragedy and comedy. It is very easy to mistake one element of those pairs for its opposite. Shakespeare’s well-known and sometimes criticized fondness for puns, for words with double meanings, exemplifies this in the very way he uses language. In fact, the Greek word for ‘speech,’ logos, means both speech and reason. Speech, words, can clarify or confuse our reasoning.

Given this duality of human perception, reasoning, speech, how to avoid tragedy, how to obtain a comic—that is, happy, reasonable ending, a just verdict in trials but more broadly, good judgment in the life you live?

Act Five begins with the apparent violation of the city’s law pertaining to commerce. Angelo the goldsmith is assuring his creditor that he, Angelo, will soon receive payment for the gold chain he sold to Ephesian Antipholus, a man of “most reverend reputation.” He doesn’t really believe that Antipholus deserves such a reputation, or such reverence, however. He thought he’d delivered the chain, but he gave it to the wrong Antipholus. When he later demanded payment from Ephesian Antipholus, that estimable gentleman denied having receive the chain; Angelo had him arrested. He’s only buying time with his creditor. Now, he sees Syracusan Antipholus, who is wearing the chain, and he’s duly outraged at the apparent injustice, lying, double-dealing.

Before Angelo or his creditor can do anything, Adriana enters the scene. She misidentifies this Antipholus as her husband and demands that he and his slave be bound and returned home. Deeming them all mad, the Syracusans flee from both sets of accusers to the sanctuary of a nearby priory.

Th Abbess of the priory arrives and questions Adriana, concluding that she has driven her husband mad. “The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.” Unquiet meals, she explains, lead to indigestion and fire in the stomach causes madness. That is, regardless of her religious status, the Abbess understands matters in terms of nature not of demonic possession. She refuses to release her supposed husband to her, ruling that she’ll bring him back to sanity herself, an intention consistent with Ephesus’s matron saint. For her part, Adriana can only think that she’s lost her husband to another woman, after all!

When Solinus and Aegeon walk past, on their way to the latter’s beheading, Adriana, at Luciana’s urging, begs the Duke’s intervention. Evidently, a mere execution can await the resolution of her dilemma. He agrees to negotiate with the Abbess—given the independence of Church authority from secular authority, he cannot simply command her, but his stated reason for initiating an informal judicial inquiry on the spot is his respect for Antipholus’ wartime service to Ephesus.

At this point, the real Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio charge in, this Antipholus demanding justice against his wife on the grounds that she has locked him out of his house. Adriana, who saw the man she supposed to be her husband escape into the priory, and now at the end of what wit she has, recurs to superstition, imagining that he must have the power to move invisibly, saying, it is all “past thought of human reason.” She has, in her own way, reached the same modest conclusion Socrates reached about himself: Unlike Dromio, who says he knows what he knows, she knows that she does not know. The supremely self-assured accuser has reached her own ‘teachable moment.’ 

For moment, Aegeon seems doomed to die, Ephesian Antipholus and Adriana doomed to divorce, and Angelo can’t know what to do about his gold chain. Public justice, domestic justice, and commercial justice are all on that knife edge ready to fall into tragedy. To the Duke, they all seem mad.

The most helpless person tries to save the day. Aegeon identifies Ephesian Antipholus, whom he hasn’t actually seen in more than two decades, as his son—easily enough, of course, since he is identical to his other son, whom he last saw only five years ago. Since this Antipholus cannot know his father, everyone takes the old man to be senile. But when Syracusan Antipholus emerges from the priory with his slave, the confusion quickly resolves. Now, everyone’s sense of sight finally perceives the whole picture, and they can reason rightly, from correct premises. And finally, when the Abbess is revealed as Aemilia, Aegeon’s long-lost wife, the family is reunited. In legal terms, they have been “made whole.” Nature and law now coincide. Aemilia means ‘rival,’ and the Abbess has indeed rivaled her daughter-in-law, but in a satisfactory way with a just result: each Antipholus is restored to his father and to the right women: Ephesian Antipholus to his wife and mother, Syracusan Antipholus to his mother, with a real prospect of getting a rational wife for himself. The original married couple are together, with both their sons and their slaves restored to them and to one another.

Domestic justice has been served. But what of political justice, criminal and commercial? The case of the gold chain will be no problem, but the criminal case is more difficult. The Duke pardons Aegeon. Before, he had steadfastly enforced the rule of law. What has changed? Surely not the law; surely not the fact that Aegeon has violated it.

Solinus now has corroborating evidence that Aegeon’s story is true, but he believed him initially, anyway. The law is still the law. But now he knows that Aegeon’s Ephesian son is not only the merchant respected and even loved throughout the city, a man to whom he owes a debt of gratitude for his military service to the city and its regime, but he also knows that the debt Ephesian Antipholus has asked him to repay by prosecuting Adriana can now be discharged by pardoning the man now known to be his father. And he also knows that his prisoner is the husband of the eminently respectable Abbess of the priory, a person he is unlikely to wish to offend.

“Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons,” Aemilia tells them. “Travail” is a synonym for labor, for giving birth, and thirty-three is the traditional estimate of the number of years Jesus lived on earth. Her sons do indeed seem born again, to her. As for the two Dromios, whose mother sold them into slavery, they now celebrate not a miracle but their natural equality: “We came into this world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other.” Birth order, a product fate or chance, is irrelevant to justice.

What can a playwright, a man of no high social standing in Elizabethan England, teach a distinguished gathering at Gray’ Inn? Since the men of the law are on holiday, this may be what we now call a ‘teachable moment.’ Shakespeare builds on the fact that English lawyers had won the separation of the common law from the Church’s canon law, centuries earlier. But that boundary needs to be guarded by its inheritor, his audience. Do not, he suggests, assume that witches and demons are the cause of apparently irrational behavior. And even down-to-earth sense perception is not unimpeachable evidence, and a physiological/’scientific’ diagnosis of madness may prove mistaken. The Comedy of Errors sees a family and a city saved from hasty judgments based on false or incomplete premises. The monarch-judge and his subjects learn the true premise the Socratic way as enacted, as set in motion by actors on stage: by testing the various conflicting stories they hear and by finding the rationally coherent overall story that accounts for each piece of each person’s narrative—the comprehensive argument that encompasses all the others in a non-contradictory way. That is comedy’s happy ending, the triumph of reason over unreason. The true Christmastide Lord of Misrule at Gray’s Inn is William Shakespeare.