Pierre Manent: Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge. Ralph Hancock translation with an introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2016.
After the founding of the American federal state, with its democratic and commercial republican regime, George Washington did not need to address Muslim-American citizens, as there were none. The more immediate question for Americans was whether the several denominations of Christians could live together. And could any of them live with Jews?
Before the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of religion, President Washington answered this question in letters he wrote to each of the major religious congregations in the United States. In his First Inaugural Address he had already reminded Americans that the peaceful ratification of the Constitution owed something to God’s providence, that their self-government was not (to use a word not in his vocabulary) a matter of `autonomy’ but of staying within the limits set by the laws of nature and of nature’s God. To the United Baptist Churches in Virginia, the Presbyterian Churches, the Roman Catholics in America, the Annual Meeting of Quakers, and, perhaps most significantly, to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, Washington enunciated the American view of peaceful religious practice as a right not a privilege. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no factions, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection to demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” It is noteworthy that Washington in settling the question of religious liberty Washington addressed religious believers not primarily as rights-bearing individuals but as members of congregations, as voluntary associations within American civil society.
Knowingly or not, in this letter to his countrymen, the French political philosopher Pierre Manent follows Washington’s example. He addresses the French first of all as fellow citizens, not as human beings abstracted from the political circumstance in which they now find themselves. The book consists of a preface followed by 20 succinct chapters. These are structured in a series of three six-chapter waves, cresting in the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth chapters, followed by two chapters of summary, conclusion, and exhortation. In his fine introduction, Daniel J. Mahoney provides a clear overview of Manent’s argument; here I will follow that argument as it unfolds.
He begins with one the most familiar and perhaps distinctive features of modern politics: the state and civil society. While modern, centralized states are “large, over-burdened,” and “slow-moving,” the citizens in the societies governed by them “work, reflect, decide, invest, whether in their families, their associations or their enterprises” (3). Despite these energies, citizens seldom “manage perceptibly to modify the course or the physiognomy of the big animal,” except in times of crisis (3). “In fear or in hope, each person is now confronted with what is held in common and what war threatens to ruin or revolution to overturn” (3). The thoughts and actions of hitherto ‘individualistic’ or narrowly ‘groupish’ semi-citizens widen, as “each in deciding for himself decides for the whole, and in deciding for the whole decides for himself” (3). For France, the most recent such moment was June 1940, when the Nazis attacked and conquered. “The defeat was the extrinsic accident that revealed the sickness of the nation’s soul”—a disease Charles de Gaulle diagnosed as the renunciation of moral and political responsibility of the French for France. De Gaulle’s founding of a new republic aimed above all at restoring civic responsibility to the French, but the New-Left uprising of May 1968 shook that regime. Without overthrowing the Fifth Republic, the French Left wounded it; their cherished communitarian illusions defeated, the Left whipsawed from activism to comfortable career advancement within the apparatus of the state that had sought to overthrow: “The citizen of action was followed by the individual of enjoyment” (5). This happened not only in France but throughout the Western republics. But (as usual?) the French took this one step farther. “What is specific to France is the political victory of an essentially apolitical movement” (5), by which Manent means that the utopianism of the Sixties Left and the careerism of French leftists ever since both stemmed from a rejection of the Gaullist call to responsibility, to politics.
This apolitical utopianism found both its expression and its camouflage in the project of European integration. De Gaulle too wanted a European federation—even to the point of saying to the astonished Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, “Come, let us build Europe together.” But de Gaulle’s Europe was “L’Europe des patries,” the Europe of the Fatherlands: a federation in which each nation and its state remained self-governing, responsible. But in the Europeanist project that actually developed, “the people, unhappy with government, and the government, unhappy with the people, both turned their faces towards the promised land of Europe where each would finally be rid of the other” (6). Manent remarks, “These sweet hopes are no longer with us” (6), as neither states nor peoples can consummate the grand divorce settlement for which they had hoped in pursuing the European Union.
This failure has had a serious consequence. “Neither the institutions of Europe, nor the government of the nation, nor what is called civil society [for if apolitical, how civil can it be?] have enough strength or credibility to claim the attention or fix the hopes of citizens. As rich as we still are in material and intellectual resources, we are politically without strength” (6). And those without political strength leave themselves vulnerable to those who are: when Muslims in France “take up arms against us in such a brazen and implacable way, this means that, not only our state, our government, our political body, but we ourselves have lost the capacity to gather and direct our powers, to give our common life form and force” (6-7). The failure of moral responsibility has resulted in intellectual confusion and conflicted feelings, as “our irritated and vacant souls” revolve on themselves, incapable of understanding what is happening to us because we no longer understand ourselves (7). Manent seeks to bring his reader a measure of self-knowledge—”to know better his own soul as a citizen” (7).
Manent’s book appeared in France in 2015, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks by Muslim Frenchmen. In his first chapter he identifies these attacks not as crimes but as “acts of war” (8). This identification (which would have been obvious to such early modern philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu) had become difficult for the French of Manent’s time; “we do not know what to think because we do not know how to think” (8), and we do not know how to think because we no longer think of religion “as a social or political fact, as a collective reality, as a human association” (9). Manent assures his readers that he isn’t about to urge them into the confessional but to urge them to think, and to think politically. The liberal regime of the modern French state inclines citizens to regard “public institutions [as] responsible for guaranteeing the rights of the individual,” including the right to one’s opinion on religion (9). More, the education established by that state “discourages all effort to take religion at least a little seriously as a social and political fact” because that education propounds a notion of historical progress which consigns religiosity to the past. Supposedly, “Humanity his irresistibly carried along by the movement of modernization,, and modern humanity, humanity understood as having finally reached adulthood [as per Immanuel Kant’s formulation], is a humanity that has left religion behind” (10). But, as Gilles Kepel argued more than two decades ago in his book The Revenge of God, no one told this to God. The complacent assumption that Muslims would `progress’ towards secularism has proven false. Both Arab nationalism and Arab socialism have staggered and fallen, beginning with the 1979 collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran—”the beginning of an unseen detour from the great narrative shared by liberals and socialists” (10). Manent eschews the grander debate over whether the great modernist story will resume, although he evidently doubts that the supposed historical laws of historical progress are really laws at all; “it would be better to try to focus on the present, and to take up the task of seeing more clearly what it is we see” (12).
What we see at present is a “disagreement between the average Western and the average Muslim views” respecting the right “way of life”—the right moeurs. For the West, “society is first of all the organization and the guarantee of individual rights,” whereas for Islam society “is first of all the whole set of morals and customs that provides the concrete rule of a good life” (13). The modern, liberal state that so organizes and so guarantees individual rights failed in both its imperial form with the decline and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and then with the several secular nation-states that succeeded it, including those founded by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, Gamal Nasser in Egypt, and the Pahlavi family in Iran. Crucially, even as in the West the state has strengthened while moeurs have weakened, in the Muslim East states have weakened as moeurs have strengthened. “While we for our part strive to live with no law and no moral rule other than the validation of the validation of the ever-expanding rights of the individual, they hope to find in divine law a just order that political law has too rarely or too sparingly provided” (14). In the West, we see “social dissolution and the loss of the common good” even as “still more rights” proliferate; in the Muslim East, even “those who are offended by the brutality and sometimes the cruelty of Islamism already share the rule of life which the Islamists would like also to make the exclusive political law” (15). In view of this, how could `moderate’ Muslims “oppose very vigorously the imposition of a law whose fundamental goodness they accept? (15). They are more or less in the same moral position as the left wing of the American New Dealers of the 1930s, who jocularly called the Communists “New Dealers in a hurry.” Manent observes that both of these assumptions disregard the “political approach to common life” (16), by which he means what Aristotle means, namely, the practice of ruling and being ruled, shared rule, reciprocity, the way of life that practices reasonable discussion in common of the common good. “Both sides are committed to a process of depoliticization” (16). In France, where both the West meets the Muslim East in the schools and on the sidewalks, there is little foundation for any such shared rule, because neither side understands or wants it and because they would not know how to begin practicing it if they did.
Concretely (as the Marxists used to say), the French and the West generally face the problem of “how to accept the Muslim way of life as the way of our Muslim fellow citizens, and yet avoid this way finally being confused with the law or taking the place of the law” (17)—precisely the aspiration of so many Muslims. The fact that Muslims freely adhere to Islam does not commit them to the way of life of civil liberty any more than the free adherence of some on the Left to the Communist Party committed Communists to civil liberty. In so arguing, Manent disputes the claim of Western secularists, who suppose that any way of life that does not limit the ways of life of other citizens can find safety within the modern state. He begins by distinguishing between “secularity” and “secularism.” Secularity means what the George Washington and the other American founders meant by the separation of church and state, whereby government guarantees freedom of worship so long as the practices of a given religion do not impair the natural and civil rights of other citizens. But secularism means something else; it means the attempt by the state to promote religious indifference within civil society. Secularism extends secularity’s religious neutrality of the state to the society the state governs. As Hancock and Mahoney remind us in a footnote, the 1905 French law establishing laïcité resulted in closing Catholic schools and religious orders, a move halted only by the need for national unity during the First World War. Since then, however, secularism has moved less forcefully but more effectively. However, Manent insists, this increased secularism or social areligiosity has actually resulted in a sort of “interpenetration between secular State and a Christian society profoundly marked by Catholicism” (20)—not quite what contemporary Voltaireans have in mind. Instead of a thoroughly secularized state and society, France sees “the neutral or `secular’ state, a morally Christian society, and the sacred nation” (20)—the latter raised up by the French revolutionaries of 1789, reinvigorated in the union sacrée of the First World War, and revived once again by de Gaulle in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Yet many French persist in envisioning “an imaginary city,” the “secular Republic” wherein historical `progress’ has brought them far beyond religiosity as a matter of civic concern. In religion-free utopia, the current troubles with Islam can be overcome as readily as Catholicism supposedly was. “Yet, in the real Republic, which has been declared henceforth altogether secular, we find nothing to suggest the slightest perceptible progress on this path that we imagine we will follow tomorrow at a vigorous pace” (23). This “secular faith” depends upon an exalted notion of “the State”—a notion some readers may recognize as Hegelian in origin and aspiration. The State has indeed been, “for four centuries, the great instrument of modern politics” (24). But how has it actually worked in France? Has it produced the secular society its proponents long for?
In actuality, the French state “is much weaker than would be necessary for event slight success in this task” (25)—weaker, indeed, than the state at the disposal of the Third Republic, which itself reached only a compromise (though a beneficial one) with the Church and the nation. “The big difference is that the State of the Third Republic had authority. It represented a nation that all held sacred,” a nation committed to the modern project of social democratization, as Tocqueville had described it. Animated by the philosophic principles of Kant and Comte, the Third Republic had confidence in historical progress and, toward this end, unhesitatingly conscripted young men into military service and, above all, “laid down the content of education very precisely, putting the French language and French history at its center” (25). The state fostered democratic nationalism within the framework of an ideology that combined German idealism with French positivism. If the idealism gave it moral elevation, the positivism gave it at least the sense, the hope, of hard-headed practicality. Today, however, “our life is much more pleasant” than it was at the turn of the last century but “our State is much weaker” (25). It has “abandoned its representative ambition and pride, thus losing a good part of its legitimacy in the eyes of citizens” as the indeterminate internationalism of pan-Europeanism has partially replaced democratic nationalism (25). A de-nationalized citizenry cannot sustain any real citizenship, so the nation’s ability to `push back’ against the weakened French state languishes. It no longer dares to conscript its citizens and it no longer cares to educate them civically, to provide them with “a truly common education designed to produce a common mind” (26). Even the secularism that remains amounts to little more than moral and cultural relativism: “Under the name of secularism we dream of a teaching without content that would effectively prepare children to be members of a formless society in which religions would be dissolved along with everything else” (27). The strong and decisive modern state has become an imbecile, having “gradually but methodically stripped itself of the resources that once made it the characteristic instrument of modern politics” (27). This is what the much-touted ‘post-modernism’ of French intellectuals has produced. Although utopians dream of ‘globalization,’ in reality the weak state leaves itself vulnerable to another form of internationalism, the Muslim ummah. “How would such a weak State suddenly find the strength to give the law to religion”—as the Third Republic did—”especially when the religion in question has no doubt concerning the legitimacy of its collective rule and when its believers have no particular reason to respect the State in question?” (28).
But in fact, and quite apart from the grand compromise of the union sacrée, even the French state under the Third Republic experienced “an enormous political and spiritual failure,” “a religious obstacle that no one had anticipated” (28). This was the Dreyfus Affair, which highlighted the dilemma of the place of Jews in the democratic-nationalist French state. If the Third Republic collapsed in 1940 because factions had weakened it far too much to withstand the Nazi attack, and if these political divisions were symptoms of as well as aggravations of moral irresponsibility (as de Gaulle argued, with Manent concurring), the rise of anti-Semitism in the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the Second World War “signals the first great failure of the liberal State” (29)—specifically, the failure of that state to protect Jews in the society governed by that state. The state’s failure in this task—a task that George Washington saw as indispensable to a regime of civil liberty—its failure to convince its own citizens why Jewish citizens must be respected by their fellow citizens, enabled enemies of the liberal state in France and elsewhere in Europe to use an ever-strengthening anti-Semitism as a weapon against the regime of liberal and democratic republicanism. Monarchists and fascists alike, in opposition but also in symbiosis with the communists (who were not anti-Semitic but who of course detested liberal and democratic republicanism), fatally weakened the Third Republic and the network of republics throughout the Continent.
French republicanism hadn’t started out that way. In the formulation of a prominent liberal aristocrat, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre—like so many of his political friends, a victim of the extremist Jacobins a few years after he made his speech in December 1789—the Republic intended “to refuse everything to Jews as a nation, and to grant everything to Jews as individuals” (quoted p. 29). The problem with this, as Washington implicitly saw when he wrote to a Jewish-American congregation, is that Jews are both individuals and a nation, in fact a nation with a unique mission and regime or way of life. In the years subsequent to the First and then the Second Republics, and especially in the Third Republic, “the European liberal State… failed to bring about the transformation of the Jewish way of life into the guarantee of rights to Jewish individuals as citizens” (30). This failure had two opposing consequences: the Holocaust or Shoah and the subsequent founding of the state of Israel as a homeland and refuge for the Jewish nation which had been persecuted and left to die by the European liberal state. At the same time, Manent observes, the founding of Israel does not solve the so-called Jewish problem not only because that state has no shortage of virulent enemies but because the Jewish nation has a meaning for humanity beyond the borders of any state, whether that state is secure or threatened.
Given these facts, what now is the status of Jews in France, in the wake of terrorist attacks by Muslims in France? The formulation of Clermont-Tonnerre no longer suffices. One suspects that the nineteenth conflation of the notion of nation with the biological notion of race—seen in the very word ‘anti-Semitism‘ as distinguished from anti-Judaism—inclined Europeans (who supposed ‘race science’ actually to be scientific, a thing on the very cutting edge of scientific progress) to deny the natural-rights individualism that allowed men like Washington to uphold the rights of human groups who had covenanted with themselves or even with God to pursue aims consistent with the laws of nature and of nature’s God, the Creator Who endowed human beings with rights as individuals, including the liberty to enter contracts and covenants. Be this as it may, the regime of the Third Republic, animated by the principles of Kantian idealism and Comtean positivism which had replaced unstably the more coherent natural-rights principles of the First Republic, never adequately addressed the question of Jews’ status in French society, and today’s much-weakened French republican state has failed to protect not so much their civil status as their natural right to life itself. This failure has yet to approach the failure of the last years of the Third Republic, leading to the crisis of 1940, but it “manages less and less to give meaning to the association” of “force and justice” upon which the legitimacy of any decent modern state must rest (31).
This requires both Jewish French citizens and non-Jewish French citizens to “outline the contours of a new association that will no longer be simply contained in the political regime [of republicanism], indispensable as that regime remains” (32). French citizens of Christian inflection (including those who have abandoned Christian theology and Church membership) are “heirs of Israel” (32) by way of Jesus’s Judaic witness, His insistence on the validity of the Law of God. “If the Jews were set apart from the ‘nations,’ this was to reveal God as a friend to mankind among the nations, and to make Him present among them”; the Jewish nation, the light unto those nations, has thus “assur[ed] the mediation between God and humanity,” whether in the original Israelite regime or in the renewed spiritual regime that centers on the worship of Jesus as Christ (32). In Europe, “this mediating role was appropriated and claimed by the Catholic church, reducing the Jews to the role of passive witnesses who transmitting the Books without understanding them”—a nation supposedly superseded by the Church (32).
The searing memory of the Shoah remains one side of Europeans’ horribly late recognition that the doctrine of supersession cannot withstand rational scrutiny. But more is needed. The term ‘anti-Semitism,’ with its overtones of race theory, made sense in the intellectual atmosphere of the Dreyfus Affair, but it only obscures the circumstances France and the West generally face today. Islamists target not some supposed ‘race’ but religions and their adherents, including but by no means limited to Judaism and Jews. “The word that fits the new reality is the word war” (33). This war targets Jews, Christians, blasphemers, Muslim ‘apostates,’ and also “the authorities and institutions of Western nations” (33). For non-Islamists, this war is a “defensive war” (34), but a war it is. And in fighting it, every Western nation-state will need to find “the contours of a new friendship for which the political means are not available” (34), given the morally and intellectually disoriented character of the modern state (34). “Within this friendship”—which can only begin in civil society, not the state—”Jews as Jews and as a people are an essential element. The part they will now play in the world will demand of them a mediating role that might be said to correspond to the deepest vocation of Judaism” (34). For France this would mean a reconstituted and improved union sacrée. What the French state of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics all failed to solve ‘from above,’ the French themselves must move decisively to solve ‘from below.’ If they can do so, ‘2015’ will prove to have been another ‘1940,’ another ‘1871,’ another ‘1789.’
Thus the first ‘wave’ of Manent’s essay begins with a consideration of modern political regimes and the modern state, especially as seen in France. It culminates in a consideration of the failure of that state fully to solve the religio-political question with regard to the Jewish citizens of France and a call for a renewed effort to re-found the liberal state through a civil-social coming-together of all French citizens threatened by Islamist violence in the service of a profoundly illiberal projected regime. The next ‘wave,’ which gathers strength in chapters 7 through 11 and crests in chapter 12, addresses the question of Islam in the civil society that must take over the task the State has failed to perform.
Insofar as the modern republican state weakens, “we return to the pre-modern situation”—feudalism—but without the now-vanished features of the original feudal societies in Europe (35). The Catholic Church remains, but in much-chastened form, while the aristocrats and dynasts have disappeared almost entirely. Nonetheless, like feudalism, the post-modern, post-statist Europe features societies without clear borders, wherein ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ mingle transnationally. Globalization is the new feudalism. “What is often neglected… is that this effacing of political borders leaves religious or more generally spiritual borders largely intact”; their borders “tend to become the main borders” (36). These too are somewhat porous, at least in Europe, given the influx of Muslim immigrants. Europe’s problems “will prove insoluble if we do not succeed in developing a coherent and stable disposition that defines our relation to Islam as such socially, politically and spiritually” (37). Republicanism in France aims at the common good, at “civic friendship” (38). How shall the French establish such friendship with Muslims, admitting the failure of secularism to transform Islam or to transform a critical mass of Muslims? The fact is that “Islam fulfills and brings together the three dimensions of human time, giving stability, compactness and completion to the umma” (39); Islam gives its adherence a purpose secularism simply cannot offer. Why would Muslims, especially young Muslims, abandon the one for the other? “Thus the world in which we must live and act is a world marked by the effort, the movement, the forward thrust of Islam”(39) even as “Europe is disarming itself in its core” (40) precisely by eschewing common goals and common efforts in the name of individualism in the Tocquevillian sense of a refusal of political activity, of political and civil-social organization, in favor of an ever-narrowing circle of friends and family—all valorized in the name of ‘rights.’
Islam “advance[es] into Europe” by immigration, by investment, and by the use of terror (41). Although these three means of advancement (or to put it more dramatically than Manent does, conquest) are analytically separable, they are related in practice. Immigration provides a demographic base; money provides mosques and publishing houses. As for terrorism, it “would not be what it is, it would not have the same reach nor the same significance, if the terrorists did not belong to this population and were not our fellow citizens” (42). In view of this, the “coherent and stable disposition” the French must develop “must be essentially defensive” (43); emotionally satisfying as it may be to (as Americans say) ‘go on offense,’ that will not work as a means of achieving a peaceful conclusion to this war.
Manent regards French and indeed Western disorientation in the face of the “forward thrust of Islam” as entirely understandable: “This is the first time for quite a long time that something new in the West did not come from within Western life, from the internal development of Western society and politics” (44). So much so that the West even generated an ideology, historicist progressivism, to valorize and to explain this development. In formulating a strategy of self-defense, such complacency will only continue us in our illusions. Given the demographic and spiritual strength of Islam in Europe, Manent calls for intellectual and spiritual regrouping; “our regime must concede, and frankly accept their ways, since the Muslims are our fellow citizens. We did not impose conditions upon their settling here”—why would we, if we believed in the inevitability of historical progress toward secularism?—”and so they have not violated them” (45). Even the new, nationalist French Right of Le Pen père and Le Pen fille will find, if they eventually win office, that control of a vitiated State will not enable them to do the things they want to do. A defensive strategy will begin with French self-knowledge—a consciousness resulting from the forced acknowledgment of the differences between ‘Frenchness’ and Islam brought on by the Muslims’ advances—a knowledge of the “great moral and spiritual resources that can be renewed, activated, and mobilized in order to contain this inevitable change within certain limits, and to preserve a country whose physiognomy remains recognizable” (46). The French must therefore, first, accept Muslims “as they are,” “renounc[ing] the vain and somewhat condescending idea of an authoritarian ‘modernizing’ of their way of life,” and, second, “preserve and defend, as an inviolable sanctuary, certain fundamental features of our regime and certain aspects of France’s physiognomy” (46-47).
Specifically, with regard to prudent renunciations by the French, Manent finds requirements that public schools serve uniform menus (including pork) to all students a policy of “meanness”, and the refusal to allow different swimming pool hours for girls and boys an instance of civil discourtesy that deserves prudent abandonment (48). But Manent devotes much more attention to the features in need of defense, perhaps because the French are so confused about them. As the fundamental unit of political life, the one in which children first learn what political relations are by observing the reciprocal rule of husband and wife, the family is another matter; “it is our right to prohibit polygamy and this we do, [he adds with Gallic irony] at least in principle” (49). In the public square, moreover, “the burqa is inadmissible,” inasmuch as the social “physiognomy” of the West cannot survive the concealment of the human face (49); “it is by the face that each of us reveals himself or herself at once as a human being and as this particular human being”—a “mutual awareness that is prior to and conditions any declaration of rights” (49).
Beyond the family and civil society, the political realm too has elements deserving “intransigent preservation” (49). Principal among these are “complete freedom of thought and expression” (51) and the French “way of life” (55). With regard to civil liberty, the French should reject the use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ to repress any and all critical discussion of Islam, thereby preserving “the capacity to treat Islam in the same way all political, philosophic, and religious elements of our society have been treated for at least two centuries” (51). To (as it were) privilege Islam would amount to “the worst service we could render to Islam at a time when demands for its reform are heard on all hands,” first and foremost Islamic hands (51). While respecting Islamic persons (and perhaps because we respect them as persons, as human beings), the French must reserve the right to combine that respect with “vigorous criticism of opinions that seem to be false” (52). At the moment, we in the West live more and more in a society in which any opinion is tolerated but persons are routinely subject to vituperation and contempt. We would do better to reverse that practice, and better still to meet the opinions with reasoned argumentation. On this point Manent takes gentle issue with Pope Francis, whom he catches equating respect for one’s mother with respect for one’s religion. The figure of the Mother Church notwithstanding, my mother is mine in a way my religion is not, inasmuch as Christians are adjured to share their religion but not their mothers with the rest of the world, and are additionally commanded to turn the other cheek in response to insults to their persons and opinions but not necessarily to insults to their mothers. “Precisely because the freedom to judge, and thus to criticize, has such a strong tendency to provoke passions… it is so important to obey the law that commands us to respond to critical speech, if one is to respond to it, only by critical speech” (53). Bombing the office of a vulgar and irreligious publication will not do. Why so? Because criticism of opinion “demands reasons” and reasoning is the distinctive characteristic of the political relationship, the reciprocal rule of one another by discussion and compromise (54). Today, our postmodern, post-rationalist (and therefore post-Western) attitude causes us to demand “a freedom without reason, a freedom that does not need to give reasons since it always has a ‘right’ or a ‘value’ at its disposal; so marvelous are these claims that they are established just by being stated” (54). But even Nietzsche—especially and above all Nietzsche—would scorn this democratizing, leveling assumption that Everyman can be his own Superman. Such democratized and therefore individualized or privatized self-assertion feels like strength but ends in weakness, as it spoils our ability to organize ourselves into groups strong enough to offer prudent resistance to groups that organize themselves spiritedly around spiritual claims.
The twelfth and culminating chapter in this second ‘wave’ of Manent’s essay considers the European way of life in its relation to the self-confident Muslim way of life. Although in Aristotle a ‘way of life’ referred to one dimension of the regime of the polis or self-ruling city, the spread of religions—themselves requiring adherence to God’s way for His creatures—gives a regime-like dimension to populations that cut across many sovereign states. Europe, once the heart of Christendom, has a “physiognomy,” too. In Europe, the way of life shared by citizens has an internal or regime dimension strictly speaking (limited to one’s country) along with an external or civilizational dimension that extends across the continent, reaching its limits on the borders with Russia and the Balkans. “Islam presents a question to each nation, and at the same time to our civilization, or to European history” (57). Unlike Europe, “Islam was never able to abandon the imperial form that Christianity was never lastingly to assume” (58).
By “political form” Manent means something different from “regime.” Aristotle classifies political communities in terms of regime, with their four dimensions: quantitative (a community is ruled by one, a few, or many); qualitative (those rulers are good or bad); teleological (the purposes or aims of the community); and finally the Bios ti or way of life, what Tocqueville later calls the habits of mind and heart. Another way of classifying political communities (and Aristotle knew this, too, although he doesn’t dwell on it) is in terms of their geographical and demographic size on the one hand and their degree of political centralization on the other. Manent contrasts the city (‘city-state,’ as it is usually called)—small and centralized—with the sprawling and perforce less centralized empire. In the city we find “the purest political form” (59), the community in which who rules, what their purposes are, and the way of life they foster matter a lot to every resident; in such a small place, rulers can really rule. “The city has no other raison d’être than to produce the association, or the community, whose material and moral resources are sufficient to allow citizens to lead the ‘good life'” (59) But “the moral character of the empire is more uncertain, even suspect, insofar as the pride of domination flourishes there in an expansive movement that has no natural limits”; even if “very well and very humanely governed,” the empire “is subject to a principle of boundlessness that prevents or hinders the mind’s self-reflection” (59). And in more gritty terms, the empire often simply lacks the means effectively to control its own periphery; its boundlessness thus may lead from rapid expansion to sudden shrinkage, as seen in the Soviet Empire in the past century, and as seen throughout the long history of China. Ancient Israel managed to be universalist in its mission, the light unto the nations, while (usually) preserving “its knowledge of the meaning of humanity” by resisting imperial boundlessness (59).
By contrast, the Muslim prophet Muhammad founded an empire, thus subjecting Islam to “what might be called the curse of extension, which brings about the fragmentation of imperial territory and often the tendency towards independence of distant provinces, which do not, however, really achieve a true independence that would remove them from the imperial form of Islam” (60). Imperialist expansions and contraction have plagued it, as the contemporary example of the ‘Islamic State’ demonstrates for our generation.
What made Western Europe differ from the equally Christian but perennially imperial Eastern-European ‘Byzantium’? What made it, if not a realm of city-states, a realm of nation-states? Manent doubts the argument that the Catholic (and later partly Protestant) civilization of Western Europe took Jesus command to separate the things of God from the things of Caesar more seriously than the Orthodox world did. The early Church did not emphasize this distinction. What is more, the distinction between Church and State, which made so much of Jesus’s aphorism, “was in fact clearly set forth only after Europeans had re-founded their political order by entirely emancipating their political principles from all dependence in relation to the Christian proposition, and even from any direct connection with it” (61). The notion that there is an entity called ‘the State’ that can be considered entirely apart from the individuals who compose ‘civil society,’ and that moreover those individuals have rights the State should secure, but quite independently of whether the State actually does what it should do: that notion does not suggest the existing of a dispute between the claims of rulers (God and Caesar). Further, “what the declarations of the rights of man say of humanity and to humanity has nothing to do with what Christian preaching says of and to humanity”; to say that man is “born free and that he can and must govern himself according to his freedom” differs sharply from “tell[ing] him that he is born a slave of sin and that he can only be freed by the grace of Christ” (61-62).
In addition to this historical critique of the ‘God-and-Caesar’ origin story of Europe’s civilizational distinctiveness, Manent offers a political one. In order to separate Church and State, citizens need to think and act as citizens capable (by the fact of their citizenship or membership the ruling body of the regime) to do any such thing. This includes Christians, citizens of both this ‘city’ and God’s ‘city.’ What caused this unity of purpose in Europe? Europeans “strove to bring this collaboration [of their religious and their political purposes] to fruition in a new political form, a political form ignored by the ancients,” a form combining “the pride of the citizen, or more generally of the acting human being, and the humility of the Christian” by leaving to the Church the spiritual formation of citizens while reserving self-governing political action to the State (64-65). This meant that Christians, their souls decisively inflected by the Holy Spirit, would take actions consensually guided by Church teachings but not directed by Church officials. “The object of Europe’s ceaseless quest can be defined, in theological terms, as the common action of grace and of freedom and, in political terms, as the covenant between communion and freedom” (65). This in turn enabled Christians to participate as citizens of the city of God, in a catholic or universal religion, while simultaneously exercising citizenship in particular, limited human communities. Europe became a community of spiritual education that wove together self-government and a relation to the Christian proposition, a two-fold intention that opens a plural and indefinite history, the history of the European nations” (66). In Western Europe, the Catholic Church remained Roman—a body that recalled, even in its centuries of empire, the political and republican origins of that empire: “There was always the city as a living, even if almost smothered, principle; beneath the princeps or imperator, there was the populus romanus” (65).
Once the unity of purpose that separated Church and State disappeared into the mono-atheism of secularism, once the union beneath the division was removed, Europe lost any coherent purpose. It became spiritually and morally weak, therefore politically weak because lacking a way of life that inspires the moral strength needed to defend itself against devotees of Islam, who are not at all lacking in purpose, and in the strength that goes with it.
In the third wave of his argument, Manent returns to France without forgetting Europe. He begins by considering the way Muslim citizens of France should be addressed by the non-Muslim majority. The argument culminates in an appeal for a special role for the French Catholic Church in this civil-social crisis. He first clears away the ideological debris blocking the initiation of such discussion. If French secularism precludes religion from discussion in the public square, why does this apply to Christians and Jews but not to Muslims? That is, if critiques of Muslims by non-Muslims deserve to be dismissed as ‘Islamophobic,’ why are Muslim (and secularist) critiques of Christians not condemned as ‘Christophobic,’ and critiques of Jews condemned as ‘Judeophobic’? If secularism requires us to ignore religions as associations or communities and make moral and political judgments solely on the basis of individual rights abstracted from their sociopolitical context, does not the “unhindered presence of Islam” mark a not only a “spiritual evisceration” of Christianity and Judaism not required of Muslims, but also a denial of the obvious reality of religions as social entities? “If have one ambition, it is that the analysis I propose of the European experience might be adequate to allow us to see Islam as an objective reality, instead of its remaining in the reflection of our self-misunderstanding” (69). This self-misunderstanding stems from Europeans’ loss of “faith in the primacy of the Good” (69), a faith powerfully reinforced by religion but not necessarily requiring religiosity in every citizen. Because “every action, and especially civic or political action, is carried out in view of some good, especially in view of the common good” (70), loss of faith in the Good paralyzes both thought and action. In Christianity and Judaism, faith in the primacy of the Good rested on faith in the God Who is the ultimate Good, and Who works through His Providence to coordinate events so as to serve His purposes. For seventy years, the Shoah has been deployed as evidence against Providence. “The Judge seems to be under judgment: Where was He?” (70). But to judge God not only entangles us in arguments answered impressively in the Book of Job; it also forces us into either Epicureanism, the so-called religion of the philosophers, or to a sort of Manichean or at least pagan claim that God or the gods must be evil. Avoiding theological disputation, Manent simply observes that neither Epicureanism nor a theology of despair can possibly support “the desire to govern ourselves and the confidence in or own powers that alone can nourish this desire”(70)—precisely what a firm defense of abstract human rights requires. Our semi-politicized Epicureanism actually replaces divine Providence with the Invisible Hand of the marketplace; “we have constructed a system of action that can best be described as an artificial Providence” (71). The marketplace valorizes in the material realm what individualized, depoliticized human rights valorize ideologically: satisfaction for everyone. But this valorization undermines the civil framework within which markets can be protected and human rights can be secured.
Islam can enter and remain in Europe only if Europeans move from ‘rights talk’ to purposeful action. “Islam can only be received within a community of action that engages it and essentially obliges it to participate what is common,” a shared understanding of the Good (73). As a civilization, Europe forms the geographical and moral ground for that understanding, but politically this can be done only through self-governing nations and not through that combination of market and bureaucratic forces that ‘Europe’ consists of. Here the governments of those nations have failed, preferring obfuscation to real discussion by refusing to acknowledge Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as social realities and condemning those who dare to discuss Muslims as Muslims. European governments command their nations to close their eyes in the hope that this will make the world go away. “By their determination to lay down the law concerning social perceptions and the words that translate them, our governments are increasingly abandoning the domain of actual political action” (75). In the name of human rights defined as equality, governments turn out the lights in the hope that all cows will become black.
This being so, “What does equality mean for the Muslim citizens of France?” (78). At present, “we have only a very vague and incomplete knowledge of the extent of their claims” because they do not elaborate them (78). And even if they did articulate their claims more fully, the current French tendency to filter all claims through the sieve of individual rights may distort them. If these circumstances persist, Muslims “will tend more and more to be a distinctly solid and compact element, while neither they nor their fellow citizens will be capable of giving meaning to a coexistence between heterogeneous ways of life” (80). Each side will stay in its own box, hermetically sealed, breached only by explosions. This results from separating “the rights of man… from man” (81)—that is, from the social and political nature of man; “the rights of man have been separated radically from the rights of the citizen” (85). This cannot actually happen, if only because it would require Muslims to stop being Muslims and to become beings attentive only to human rights as defined by non-Muslims. But any transformation of Muslims (or any other group) can only come in a social and political setting—in France, and in the rest of Europe country by country.
To bring Muslims more fully into the French republic no such a priori transformation is feasible. This is especially true, given that “the political and spiritual weakening of the nation in Europe is doubtless the major fact of our time” (82) and that there has been no corresponding political or spiritual strengthening of Europe to compensate for this weakness. “If Islam spreads and consolidates in a space deprived of a political form, or in which all forms of common life are delivered over to gnawing criticism from the standpoint of individual rights, now the source of all legitimacy, then there hardly remains any future for Europe but that of an Islamization by default” (82). Why would Muslims feel the slightest need to adapt, particularly in light of the global reach and imperialist bent of their religion? Since the modern state “tends to deny the relevance or importance of the question of the regime or political form because, by guaranteeing members of society the enjoyment of their rights, it seems to dispense them from having governed themselves” (86), why would a religiously serious people view such tame but undisciplined persons with anything other than distaste and contempt? And why would a religiously serious people regard persons in the thrall of secularism as anything better than fools, if not scoundrels? In contemporary Europe what is called ‘governance’ “is really only government by the State alone“—government by administration (87). But government by administration (as Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America) amounts to soft despotism over human beings reduced to the status of timid and industrious herd animals. Despite its net of rules and regulations, the administrative state really wants to issue only one core requirement for its subjects to obey: “to relax” (96).
Returning to the topics of regime and religion, Manent defends republicanism or representative government, beginning with the observation that representation “presupposes a people to represent” but Europeans are not one people but many. Therefore, they must turn to their own countries if republicanism will survive; at most, a European parliament could only represent the constituent nation-states in a federal structure. If the people are to govern themselves, they must do it at home. In so doing, they can discover if Muslims in France and elsewhere really want to participate in a republican government with their fellow citizens or instead “see themselves as on the margins and so to speak in secession” (89). More than this (and here Manent shows a citizen’s toughness) the French must test French Muslims by “commanding [them] to establish the independence from the various Muslim countries that send out imams, and that finance and sometimes administer or guide the mosques” (89). “The point is for each party to the debate to show that it is serious and to this end to take certain actions that cost something and that show a commitment” (89). The imperial ambition blurs the distinction between internal and external, citizen and foreigner; ruling many from afar, it prefers an attenuation of self-government. Manent demurs. In this defensive war, France’s republic must determine whose side each citizen is on. If it refuses this elementary responsibility, the French will see “whether we still have a government” (92) at all. Forced to show their hand, to decide, French Muslims will relinquish their passivity: no more deceptive waiting game. In return, they would be afforded their own “place in the French public square,” liberated from “all slavish dependence on the powers that dominate the rest of the Muslim world” (93). “If we fail, that will mean both that our regime has entirely lost the representative virtue that had defined and animated it since it founding, and that France’s Muslims are incapable of moving beyond the immobility of their moral practices in order to nourish a political desire, that is, in order to experience effectual freedom as Muslims” (94).
Manent brings these currents together in chapter 18, the third crest of the three waves of his argument. Today, “when we are asked to adhere to the values of the Republic, nothing is asked of us” (96) as rational and civil beings. “The new citizenship consists in demobilizing the affects of citizenship”; the so-called identity politics of human-rights assertion looks to the state and not to civic friendship for validation (96). “The ‘I’ imagines that it can identify itself with all things as it pleases, and identify all things with itself” (96), unconcerned about ‘otherness’ because ‘difference’ can be dismissed in a cloud of verbiage. Against this, Manent calls upon French Muslims “to become truly citizens” as Muslims. “If the nation in a certain sense detaches them from their religion, since they share it with non-Muslims, it immediately gives it back to them, and they receive it now in a way from the nation in which they have finally found, not only a place, but their place”(97). No secularism, and no sectarian enclaves governed by religious law instead of French law: “It is up to Muslims to find a place in a place in a Christian country, or a country of a Christian mark” (99). This is no dhimmitude in reverse, no subservience to Christianity. “Christians, or particularly Catholics, do not rule in France” (101) because of course Catholic made exactly the same transition, balancing citizenship in their native city as well as in the Kingdom of God, in the past century. To demand this adaptation by Muslims will have the salutary effect of reminding French Catholics that they are the Catholics of France. Recalling that Manent had remarked the Catholic-Christian assertion of supersession regarding Judaism, Manent effectually recommends that French Catholics now live up to that claim. Given that the West now features “five great spiritual masses”—Judaism, Islam, Evangelical Protestantism the Catholic Church, and human-rights secularism—”what characterizes and distinguishes the Catholic Church within this configuration is, if I may say, its calmness and equilibrium” (103). The other groups “wish to know only their own rights and their own reasons,” but the Catholic Church, having undergone a true crisis of conscience in reaction to the Shoah and in response to “its responsibility for anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism” seen in the Dreyfus Affair at the beginning of the century and the anti-republican Vichyism of substantial elements of its clergy at mid-century (103), now reaches out to “each of the other great spiritual forces” (105). “Alone capable of nourishing a meaningful and substantial relationship with all the other spiritual forces,” “at the center or the pivot of a configuration in which we have to lie and the think,” the Church can become “the mediator par excellence” (105)—exactly the role Manent earlier ascribed to ancient Israel. Roman Catholics have long claimed that Christianity has superseded Judaism; now we will see if they really can do so. France needs it to do so, and maybe other countries also do. After all, France and the Church themselves have exemplified the genuinely political relationship of ruling and being ruled: “If the Church has played an axial role in the history of France, France has often played a determining role in the history of the Church” (106). Pope Francis, do not forget Cardinal Richelieu.
In his parting words to Catholics, who have often felt ‘marginalized’ in contemporary France, Manent wonders, “How can one leave this quasi-clandestine state without joining the prideful competition of claims and counter-claims that is the scourge of our whining age?” (107). He addresses this question in his two final chapters, widening it to Muslims, as well. On the periphery of today’s “public life,” Catholics remain at the spiritual center of the West; they will return to the center of the public domain if, imitating the traditional role of Jews but now in the modern world, undertake “the task of holding together the configuration that joins her with Judaism, Islam, evangelical Protestantism, and the doctrine of human rights” (108). For their part, Muslims must answer the Catholic and simply French invitation (if it comes) and assume the role “not simply… as rights-bearing citizens, accepting other bearers of the same rights, but as an association marked by Christianity granting a place with which it has never before mixed on an equal footing” (108). It is further “necessary that they accept this nation as the site of their civic activity, and more generally of their education”—not, to be sure, to accept a secularism as repellant to them as it is to Catholics, observant Jews, and evangelical Protestants—but to ensure their status as “a distinct community in a nation in which they are citizens like others (109). That nation will remain “a nation of a Christian mark in which Jews play an eminent role” (109). Can this aspiration be realized? “While our failure would signify the dislocation of the nation and the inglorious end of an enduring hope, success would resonate well beyond the narrow limits of our country, since the man spiritual forces of the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds would be concerned” (110). I am reminded of President Charles de Gaulle’s invocations of “Latinity”—Roman republicanism with a Christian mark—an appeal to both moderation and grandeur with France as its originator in the modern world, but with all nations with the heritage of Rome as its audience. “This should motivate our desire for glory, if we have any left” (110); de Gaulle might nod in approval.
Each in its own way, Europe and Islam have denigrated the measured limits of political life. Europe has done so in the name of markets, “the free movement of capital, of goods, of services, of people, just as no law must circumscribe the unlimited right of individual particularity” (111). Islam has done so in a religio-imperial attempt to win the world for the rule of the laws of Allah. Whereas Europe has abandoned politics, Islam has never found it. When well understood and powerfully felt, Christianity (with Islam?) rejects immanence, the notion that ‘god’ is in everything, the Hegelian claim that ‘god’ is the Absolute Spirit instead of the Holy Spirit. Holiness means separation; the God of the Bible creates the world out of nothing; He does not extrude a part of himself (dialectically or otherwise) to make the world. The God of the Bible is the God of Providence, not of ‘History.’ “The collapse into violent immanence that characterized the twentieth century”—seen in such historicist movements as communism and fascism, less malignly in progressivism—”derived from the weakening of Christian mediation” (112). The God of the Bible sets loving limits on human action; historicism does not, cannot. But historicism does not even explain the history it claims to know. “The history of Europe… is unintelligible if one does not take into account a very different notion a notion elaborated by ancient Israel, reconfigured by Christianity and lost when the European arc was broken” (113). European history only becomes intelligible if understood as Christians understand Christianity, and this holds true whether one is himself a Christian or not.
The holiness of God, His separation from man, finds its political bridge in the Covenant. With that, God permitted freedom to man while setting humanly knowable limits to that freedom. Man can ‘talk back’ to God, and God might even change His mind, depending upon what the man has to say. “As great as man is in his pride as a free agent, his action is inscribed in an order of the good that he does not produce an order of grace upon which he ultimately depends” (114). Manent acknowledges that “an important part of contemporary Judaism” no longer trusts the Covenant, asking, Where was God during the Shoah? “This is a natural and so to speak irresistible movement of the soul” (114), but to give in to it entirely would be to fail to recognize the limits of even the several vast genocides of the last century. One of those limits was the Muslim world (despite, one should never forget, the sympathy Hitler found in some elements of it, most infamously exemplified by the Mufti of Jerusalem). “Islam, for its part, does not know how to enter into a moral world that makes no sense to it for two reasons: on the one hand, its relation to God, consisting wholly in obedience, ignores the Covenant; on the other, having nothing to do with the destruction of European Jews, Muslims are hardly able to be sensitive to the infinitely poignant drama playing out between Europe and the Jewish people” (114). Even so, is it not possible that Muslims, also children of Abraham, begin to consider the Covenant he accepted, the relationship to God that the Covenant embodies, if Christians renew “the meaning and credibility of the human association that bore the Covenant until the European arc as broken, that is, the nation” (114-115)? Christians will lose, and Muslims will never gain, the civic life that the God of the Book of Genesis wanted for them unless they act together to rebuild the nation, which is the only viable form for a life of ruling and being ruled within the modern human condition.
The question then must be: Do Muslims as Muslims want a civil life? Does the Allah-imposed shari’a brought by Muhammad preclude in principle any genuinely political life, any rule by consent? If the right human relationship to God is God-determined obedience to God’s will, with no rational element in it, then Muslims will reject the offer of a common civil life within the nation with repugnance. Manent seems to say: Let us find out. We are at war. We should offer terms for a peace, which may or may not be rejected. And then we will know.
Recent Comments