Catholic Republic Read online

  Catholic Republic

  Why America Will Perish Without Rome

  Timothy J. Gordon

  Copyright

  Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

  Timothy J. Gordon

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  Copyright © 2018 by Timothy J. Gordon

  All rights reserved

  Version: 002

  Nothing is more to be feared than too long a peace. You are deceived if you think that a Christian can live without persecution. He suffers the greatest persecution of all who lives under none. A storm puts a man on his guard and obliges him to exert his utmost efforts to avoid shipwreck.

  —St. Jerome

  Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

  —St. Augustine

  Acknowledgements

  This book is dedicated to my best friend, my editor, and my wife, the lovely Stephanie Carissa Gordon, without whom it simply would not have come to exist. In the summer of 2016, together she and I rewrote the entire book, in its present form. Her fealty and robust encouragement made her, among other things, the book’s greatest natural advocate. (Moreover, she has been finishing my sentences for me since April 11, 2003, an “edit” which changed the course of both our lives forever.)

  I would also like to acknowledge the great dialectical contributions to this book by my brother David Gordon and my dear friends Chris Plance and Joseph Polizzotto. Other professional or dialectical friends to the penning and/or publishing of the book include: Michael Voris, Jay Richards, John Zmirak, Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg, James Carrisalez, Sean Panick, Brian Cobb, Martin Raymond, Ashleigh Rossi, Anthony Bedoy, Bradley Birzer and The Imaginative Conservative, John Vella and Crisis Magazine, and Carmen, Christine, all the good folks at Church Militant.

  I would like to thank Milo Yiannopoulos and Dangerous Books for publishing a truly dangerous book, which bounced from publisher to publisher.

  I would also like to thank my philosophical mentor Fr. Kevin Flannery at the Pontifical Gregorian University and my legal mentor Professor Thomas A.C. Smith at the University of San Diego School of Law. “Game-changing” additions to my analysis were provided by the publications of: Dr. Edward Feser (Chapter One); Dr. Laurence Claus and Dr. Thomas Pangle (Chapter Two); Professor Philip Hamburger (Chapter Four).

  Foreword

  by Milo Yiannopoulos

  I believe in free speech so powerfully that I believe in giving platforms to highly disparate points of view, even—and perhaps especially—shocking ones I don’t necessarily agree with.

  Some people will read this book and think it’s advocating theocratic tyranny and the suppression of all non-Catholic views. That isn’t true. But even if it were, I’d have published it anyway. Stretching one’s mind by grappling with deeply different views from your own is a treat. It’s fun! And it’s done far too rarely these days.

  Free speech has to include truly shocking speech—speech that springs from intellectual positions that reject the popular presuppositions. When we stand up for free speech, we are not defending the right to say “Taylor Swift sucks.” I’ve long said that, in the case of racists, it is better for them to be speaking in public, where decent people will hear what they’re saying and reject it. Otherwise, we’ll have them festering in the shadows, hoodwinking vulnerable people into believing that their twisted views have merit, or are secretly shared by a majority of the public.

  Another reason—a more high-minded one—for publishing a book that is largely at odds with mainstream public opinion is that our age’s intellectual life is dying, thanks to the narrow, constricted space that exists for public argument about the highest human things. It’s bad enough that you can be tossed off Twitter for something as trifling as a joke about an unattractive actress. It’s way worse that most public platforms will be withdrawn from you if you ask, for instance, whether truth exists. Or whether it’s wrong to help a mother kill her unborn child. Or whether we have immortal souls that may not all end up in a happy place. If that sounds implausible to you, ask yourself how many Hollywood actors’ careers would survive the revelation that they are a proud, pro-life Trump voter. Whatever you or I may think about the answers to those difficult questions, having them asked and—more importantly—debated with vigor, will determine whether there is a Western civilization in the decades to come.

  One of the best things about America is your tolerance for busybody foreigners like me, who enjoy coming here to give you warnings from the front lines of Europe. Not long ago, my fellow Brit Christopher Hitchens warned you about the dangers of Islamic terrorists, among other things, and before him there was the famous French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited and wrote about America in the 1830s. He saw much to admire, but one of his less well-remembered warnings involves the collapse of serious debate which I’m admonishing you about now. With the horrors of the French Revolution in his mind, Tocqueville wrote:

  Dare I say it in the midst of the ruins that surround me? What I dread most for the generations to come are not revolutions.

  … People believe that the new societies are going to change face daily, and I am afraid that in the end they will be too unchangeably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same mores, so that the human race will stop and limit itself; that the mind will fold and refold itself around itself eternally without producing new ideas, that man will exhaust himself in small, solitary, sterile motions, and that, while constantly moving, humanity will no longer advance.1

  Although it’s not well remembered, John Stuart Mill, the political thinker best known for a radical defense of free speech, shared Tocqueville’s worries about the likelihood that modern nations, who boasted of having more liberty than earlier regimes, would end up starved of serious debate. In fact, Mill felt compelled to write his best-known work, On Liberty (1859), not because he wanted (cue a sappy Dean of Diversity voice) “every special snowflake free to affirm his or her or xir own truth,” but because he feared a mass of men and women would oppress the rare dissenting voice.

  He knew that voice would spring from the theoreticians of the Left. Writing to his wife to explain why they needed to draft On Liberty, Mill observed that public opinion “tends to encroach more on liberty, and almost all the projects of social reformers in these days are really liberticide—Comte, particularly so.”2 That’s Auguste Comte, who fathered secular humanism and the bogus field of sociology, whose depredations of academe continue down to our day.

  In her introduction to On Liberty, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb summarizes Mill’s argument about the “new form of tyranny that was confronting mankind.” In the old days, tyranny had meant “despotic government, in which rulers imposed their will upon the ruled,” but that threat had ended as nations like Britain, France, and America enjoyed popular self-government. Now we face a “new and more formidable despotism” that Mill called the “tyranny of the majority.” That tyranny, Himmelfarb continues, was one which Mill saw

  was now exerting itself not so much in politics as in the entire area of social life. ‘Society is itself the tyrant’, and more oppressive than any tyrant of old because ‘it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself’. It imposes a new ‘despotism of custom’; it dictates its will by means of public opinion; it presumes to tell men what to think and read, how to dress and behav
e; it sets itself up as the judge of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety; it discourages spontaneity and originality, personal impulses and desires, strong character and unconventional ideas; it is fatal, in short, to individuality. And all of this, Mill predicted, was bound to get worse as the public more and more felt its power and acted upon it.3

  * * *

  So, now you know some of the broader reasons for me to be willing to publish this book. There are also reasons to publish it which don’t involve assuming that its argument is outrageous.

  This book is actually less outrageous than it may appear. In brief, our author is saying that the America you know is indeed a decent and free nation that deserves admiration. He doesn’t want Americans’ practice of life to alter radically, because the nation is an impressive achievement, even though not perfect. (As a Catholic, the author knows that no nation can ever be perfect, and utopians who teach otherwise—whether Marxist socialists, National Socialists, or Social Justice Warriors—actually bring about the worst tyrannies.)

  No, the author doesn’t want to change our practice radically, he wants to change our theory of ourselves, so that our theory provides us a better understanding of human nature and politics. He thinks the ancient Greek philosophers and the Catholic thinkers of the Middle Ages have a richer understanding of the human soul and of human communities than do early modern thinkers like John Locke, who loom so large in America’s traditional understanding of herself.

  That doesn’t mean he wants our life to go back to the semi-oligarchies of pagan Greece or the Christian monarchies of the Middle Ages. It just means he thinks older thinkers were wiser than more recent thinkers. In this, he resembles one of the founding neoconservative intellectuals, the late Irving Kristol. When Kristol taught college students Aristotle’s Politics, he found many of them swooned for ancient Greece, because Aristotle’s theory about politics and human nature is much more profound than the shallow modern ideas those students had previously learned. Kristol shared his students’ high opinion of Aristotle’s noble theory, but he wanted them to understand that the practice of politics in Aristotle’s day was not so lovely. So he had them read Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, which describes in detail what ancient Greek political life was like. The students were greatly sobered, because my pagan ancestors’ lives and political communities weren’t half as delightful as Aristotle’s beautiful thoughts about what political life could be.

  The book you’re reading works in something like the opposite direction. It argues that while the actual politics of modern Western republics let most of us live lives far better than the historical average, the theory about politics held by America’s Founders was flawed. And as Aristotle observed in Book V of the Politics, a small error in the beginning leads to large errors later. The author hopes to show you that the older Catholic theory about what man is, and how his political community should operate, is far more accurate, and so it can help correct the flawed understanding of political life that is common today. That, in turn, should help to correct the serious distortions in our political practice today, such as the “soft despotism” of the nanny state that Tocqueville warned of, and the appalling notion that every human being, instead of possessing infinite dignity as a unique child of God, is really just a unit in some politically correct collective identity that’s based on race, or ethnicity, or sexual proclivity. Yuck.

  Even if the author doesn’t persuade you, I know that engaging with his ideas will help you think through more clearly what you do believe. And I also know that if there is one thing the present day requires, it is recognizing that the American experiment, which was launched so wonderfully, has hurtled desperately far off the rails. That’s a fact on which Bernie and Trump supporters alike can agree. (The only people who don’t get it, alas, are the ones running everything.)

  One of your country’s worst maladies is the way in which both wealthy liberals and establishment conservatives refuse to admit there are big, fundamental problems in America today. An author with grander credentials than I, professor Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, writes about this left-right collusion in his latest book, Why Liberalism Failed. By “liberalism,” he doesn’t just mean left-of-center views held by the likes of Nancy Pelosi. He also means the kind of establishment conservatism that once sprang from classical liberalism but now only cares about the top marginal tax rates—a conservatism that doesn’t feel much attachment to this nation, especially compared to its passion for keeping global corporate money flows well-lubricated. The consensus held by these left-right allies, Deneen argues, is

  shattering because it continues to be believed and defended by those who benefit from it, while it is increasingly seen as a lie, and not an especially noble one, by the new servant class that liberalism has produced. Discontent is growing among those who are told by their leaders that their policies will benefit them … liberalism’s apologists regard pervasive discontent, political dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and populist rejection as accidental problems disconnected from systemic causes, because their self-deception is generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will become more pronounced, the political duct tape and economic spray paint will increasingly fail to keep the house standing.

  Personally, I don’t wish to depart one inch from the ideal of being liberal—in the old sense of being gracious in one’s personal dealings with others. But as an -ism, liberalism, including economic libertarianism, appears to be in its death throes, and I’m enough of a Nietzschean to eschew pity for tottering things and to want to escape the falling timbers of the burning building with the old and enduring sense of liberalism intact.

  I started Dangerous Books to do something about this civilizational crisis. Whether or not you agree with this book’s proposed Catholic substitute for the collapsing consensus of today’s squishy Left and Right, I pray that you’re brave enough to join me in returning to the rational, but not timid, debate that St. Thomas Aquinas taught was the fiery core of our society.

  Citations

  1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 616-17.

  2. Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Editor’s Introduction to John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Pelican Books, 1974), p. 23; emphasis in original.

  3. Himmelfarb, Introduction, p. 34.

  Pippin: “Why are they still guarding [the Tree of the King]?”

  Gandalf: “They guard it because they have hope, a faint and fading hope that one day it will flower, a King will come, and the city will be as it once was, before it fell into decay. The old wisdom borne out of the West was forsaken. Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living, and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry, or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin. The line of Kings failed. The White Tree withered. The rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men.”

  —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

  We have thought it fitting…that this letter should be addressed specially to you. It will also be our care to see that copies are sent to the bishops of the United States, testifying again that love by which we embrace your whole country, a country which in past times has done so much for the cause of religion, and which will by the Divine assistance continue to do still greater things. To you, and to all the faithful of America, we grant most lovingly, as a pledge of Divine assistance, our apostolic benediction.

  —Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae

  WHY AMERICA WILL PERISH WITHOUT ROME:

  Six Elements of Crypto-Catholicism in Our Republic Since the Declaration

  Chapter Zero: An Introduction Important Enough to be a Chapter

  America is a nation that is wired Catho
lic, labeled Protestant, and currently functioning as secular. In a book written for non-philosophers and non-theologians, I will show why this is the case and how it led America to most of its major problems today.

  Every American—Protestant, Jew, Muslim, or atheist—is ideologically Catholic, a claim that may be unpalatable for many Americans, however true. This is the case because we live in a republic and all true republics need certain Catholic ideas. And when a republic denies the source of its heritage, like America has done, fatal problems ensue: widespread immorality and tyranny. In reality, these “problems” are really just symptoms that the republic has become a non-republic. Only the true source of republican principles—Catholicism—bears the answer to the problem underlying six American symptoms to which I dedicate each of the chapters.

  While Catholic apologetics usually aims at mass conversion, this book orients itself at something less ambitious: exposing America’s crypto-Catholicism, which is to say secret or hidden Catholicism. That’s it. Doing this alone could be enough to save America. Many religious and political conservatives long for the “return to principles.” That’s nothing new. The purpose of this book is first to locate the source of American principles—Catholicism—and only then to return to them.

  Hoping to reverse cultural degeneration and the expansion of the state, the patriot notes that our republic can go only one of two ways. Either it will disappear (the way of the Roman Republic, a large republic which slowly disintegrated) or it will perdure (the way of the Roman Church, a process whereby something stays essentially the same despite a series of meaningless changes). We’ll either follow one road or another, republic or church, finding that “all roads [really do] lead to Rome.”