Thursday, November 30, 2006

Integrity

An essential quality in politics is integrity. Integrity is a consistency between the desires of one’s heart, thoughts, words, and deeds in the pursuit of the truth. Gerald Wegemer claims that Thomas More was the first to use the word integrity in the English Language. He also claims that he always practiced this virtue. He did so in revolutionary times, and he refused to take an oath recognizing the divorce and remarriage of the King of England.

A similar situation, as have been seeing, faced the citizens of France, and perhaps us as well though in more subtle ways, during the French Revolution.

As we saw yesterday, the Civil Constitution required the Bishops and priests of France to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. All but four of the Bishops of France refused to take the oath. One Bishop, De Lomenie, took the oath in a way that he thought could please both sides. He would allow the new political regime to control the areas it desired and still keep alive the distribution of the sacraments. In essence, he said that he could take the oath, assenting to all of the political matters while in his heart making a mental reservation in all matters that touched on Church dogma.

Pius VI wrote a letter directly to De Lomenie, because he did not want silence to be percieved as assenting to this dangerous doctrine. He reminded De Lomenie that dissembling showed a lack of human integrity. Integrity is a consistency between the desires of one’s heart, thoughts, words, and deeds in the pursuit of the truth. When someone takes an oath in matters of the faith, there is special reason for complete consistency in these matters. Taking the oath the way that De Lomenie suggested with respect to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy would be a lack of integrity. Dissembling, throughout history, is a doctrine used by revolutionaries and subversives to spread confusion in society as to their true motives. It would only bring harm to those who did not dissemble and the dissemblers themselves over time.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Dissembling Revisited

Between August 1790 and December 1790, the Revolutionaries further refined the plans for the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Principal among their plans, they thought that it would be appropriate to require all priests and Bishops to make an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. On November 23rd, 1790, Cardinal de Lomenie wrote to the Pope, suggesting that, as Cardinal, he could apply the doctrine of dissembling to this case, that a person could take the oath, but in their heart adhere to the Church.

Pius VI responded on February 23rd. In response to de Lomenie’s actions, the Pope could only express sorrow. He saw the dissembling of de Lomenie as dishonorable because he actually took the oath, preached its contents, and created a new diocese, putting it under the power of the civil authority (93). Taking an oath entailed promising to carry out every action associated with the oath. And so, it was not possible to take an oath and dissemble, promising to carry out some parts of it and not others (93-95).

Pius VI noted that de Lomenie had reasoned that the oath was an exterior action, and that the words that his mouth spoke did not agree with what his heart murmured when he took the oath. Pius VI called this reasoning “false and indecent. It is to authorize a pernicious moral teaching of a so-called philosophy that would imagine all sorts of subterfuges that are unworthy of morality.” In condemning this way of acting, the Pope was doing so not on the basis of a religious reason. Instead, he condemned de Lomenie’s actions because they violated “the natural sincerity of an honest man.” The Pope also noted that the Church has always condemned or proscribed this doctrine (95). While the Pope did not come out and directly punish de Lomenie for his actions, he encouraged him to repent, warned him of the potential penalties he could receive for not repenting, and also warned him of the bad example he set for other Catholics in France as well as the faithful of his diocese.

He also explained that he has written this letter in particular to de Lomenie so that he would not mistakenly “take my silence to be a mark of approval” (95). He urged de Lomenie to do nothing that would lead to conferring the power of the Episcopacy on to new Bishops independent of the judgment of Rome, because, as de Lomenie well knew, this would be afflicting “the Church with rebellious ministers” (95-97).

The Pope also centered in on one of the contradictions inherent in the Revolutionary plans for religion. On the one hand, the National Assembly claimed to leave “man free to think and write as he pleases on matters of religion.” On the other hand, it wrote a Constitution, taking away the freedom of the Catholics in France to speak and act as they wished in religious matters. In short, it “touches inappropriately on that very freedom of religion itself, [and] ….negates or reverses the spiritual authority of the Church and it denies it all of its rights” (99).

“How can one not see that the Constitution established by the National Assembly, in leaving man free to think and to write as he pleases on matters of religion, touches inappropriately on that very freedom of religion itself, as well as many other of the novelties that it introduces, it absolutely negates or reverses the spiritual authority of the Church and it denies it all of its rights” (99). The Constitution, rather than promoting or defending the truth, sought to “muffle the truth.” Rather than preventing vice, it created the conditions for expanding vice.

The Pope reminded de Lomenie that to fail to resist evildoers is to encourage them. Thomas Beckett showed this well in letters he wrote to his fellow bishops. There is a point at which a person must show himself to be an opponent of a crime, otherwise, one becomes complicit in the crime. In short, the Pope urged de Lomenie not to fall into the hands of those who “under the pretext of reforming religion,… are actually looking for ways to sap it of the foundation of the Catholic faith and of the religion of our Fathers” (103).

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Legislature Caught in a Fury

Can a legislature be taken up by a passion? Yes. Pius VI recognized this when he wrote to his Archbishops in France during the summer of 1790. Here is a paraphrase of what he said:

By writing the way that he does to the Archbishop, the Pope shows his fatherly diplomacy. He tries to speak in a way to each person, understanding what that person is capable of accepting and doing at that moment. The Pope thinks that to say these things clearly and publicly would not be prudent at the moment. It would only exacerbate the fury of the Revolutionaries. To say things directly and strongly to the king would not be prudent. The King is in a state of confusion. He might not be capable of understanding the principles clearly. If he were to act on them, he might do so in a confusing way.

Could a similar set of circumstances exist in the United States right now? Our national legislature is wounded, but it is also caught in a passion. We are potentially in a state of confusion. We are not sure whether we want to stay in the Middle East or go. Some in the Middle East or who have a stake in the events there, want us to stay. They are using all of their efforts in Congress, the Media, and elsewhere to keep us there. They are caught up in the fury that perhaps the US should be at the vanguard of the world movement to democracy.

The Pope is now in Turkey, attempting to quell the violence. Will his voice (the voice of conscience), or that of the war party become predominant in the US?

Friday, November 24, 2006

Freedom from Perturbations

Did you ever wonder what a perturbation is? It is when your mental emotions, (the four basic ones are fear, sadness, joy, or hope) are out of whack. A perturbation can happen to an individual or to a society. In Latin, after we pray the Our Father at Mass, the priest prays to libera nos de omnes perturbationes, or to free us from all perturbations. The modern English translates this as "anxieties."

Now, a person or a society can be subject to perturbations.

In the case of the French Revolution, in 1789-1790, the society fell into two kinds of perturbations, the kind that comes from delving into the two kinds of lust, pornography and violence, or sex and power. When a person or a society falls into a perturbation, they will start to rail against whatever strikes them as representing the moral order.

This is why, when Pius VI wrote to the Archbishop of Bordeaux in the summer of 1790, he indicated to him that "France, and Paris in particular, are now “the theater of violent perturbations.” Unless reason finds its way back into society, it “will be agitated to a position from which is will not be able to rise.”

In particular, France will start to direct its violence against the institutional Church. Ironically, the revolution that claims to be in the name of freedom will lead the revolutionarie,s and the rest of France with them, into moral slavery.

The Pope senses that the effects of the revolutionary actions, as represented by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, will be “to abolish the Catholic religion, confirming unbelievers in impious systems, and oppressing the faith by leading faithful Christians down the paths of unbelief. They cover their designs under the pretext of liberty, but it is a liberty that is but a mere shadow of the real thing. This liberty is really nothing other than license with all the excess that goes along with it.”

One might apply the dictum here: "the passions, when they take over the soul, present themselves as liberators, but when they rule in the soul, they rule with despotic tyranny."

Burke and Adams also understood that a regime needed a political and moral order to protect the possibility of living virtue and acquiring freedom. Adams, perhaps more so than Burke or Pius VI, understood the role that well designed political institutions and constitutions could play in helping to preserve this moral order.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Church, State, and Politics

In an attempt to clarify principles in the mind of Louis XVI, the Pope sent him a second letter dated August 17, 1790. In this letter he explains the Civil Constitution of the Clergy within the context of the principles that govern the relationship between the spiritual power and the temporal power (letter to Louis XVI, 17 August 1790, 47-53). The pope begins this letter indicating that the political power cannot alter the discipline and the rules of the universal Church. Each power has spheres of government that are proper to it, and, if each power recognizes its domain, the two powers can offer each other mutual aid. If the state attempts to extend its authority into the sphere of the spiritual authority, the harmony between the two will be disrupted and it will lead to disorder in the state itself. The state should leave the Church free so that she can “carry out with faithfulness everything that applies to the living of the Catholic faith.” Examples of the areas where the Church should be left free are appointing her own rulers, regulating marriages, and educating her faithful according to her doctrines.

The Pope reminds the king that the Church “has approached with tolerance the affairs of France during these years, judging it better not to raise our voice, nor to make break out a more rigorous severity, during which we heard the first hot opinions and the vehemence of the errors; but letting the fury of the times to calm down, and hoping for the spirits to return to themselves, and the knowledge of true principles of belief and evangelical rules.”

The Pope was exercising a certain detachment from his own opinion about what might be the best political regime for France. He resisted speaking during the first year of the French Revolution, in the hope that political events would take their course. He also hoped that once the political regime changed that the leaders of that regime would find themselves more amenable to leaving the Church free in her sphere, or even return to the cooperation that used to exist between the Ancient Regime and the Church. Instead, the Pope found the new regime becoming hostile to the Church, to the point of taking over functions that belonged to the Church and did not belong to the state, no matter what regime was in place.

The Pope made clear again the reason for his silence. He also made clear to Louis XVI that he would speak out against the designs of the revolutionaries either when the situation returns to one of calm or when, for the good of preserving the Catholic faithful in the faith, he had to speak. He hoped, however, that France could deal with her own problems. The Pope stated that if the Christian political actors in France were to make clear the distinctions between the proper autonomy of the State and the proper autonomy of the Church, that it might offer a way of avoiding the evils that the Constitution could bring about. And so, he advised the king: “you also could give confidence to all, if you were to speak clearly in the defense of the religion that is under attack in your realm by so many writings that have distributed to the faithful the poison of impiety.”

The Pope reminded the king that silence from Rome did not mean neither that the Vatican was wavering on the truth, nor that it was attempting to dissemble, which the Pope feared would only lead to disastrous consequences for Louis XVI. The Pope also stated that he had written or spoke the same thing to every sovereign leader and member of the Church that he had spoken to. And so, the King should not take the silence of the Pope as a reason for reconsidering, compromising, or changing what are necessary principles of the doctrine and discipline of the Catholic faith. He ended the letter not by threatening any punishments to the King, but by calling the King to courage and patience. True courage and patience would lead the King during a time of trial to be “firm and invariably determined to keep to true principles.” He also indicated to the King that the Bishops in France will for the most part concur in what the Pope has written to the King.

In addition, he told the King that he was gathering a group of Cardinals at the Vatican to study the principles of Church and State relations over time in order to better evaluate the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. From what the Pope has said in the letters that he had written to the Cardinals and to the King up to this point, it is clear that he was not calling the Cardinals together because he was considering deviating from the principles of discipline and dogma established in the Church. Instead, it seems to be the case that he wanted to study the principles in the context of history, so that when he spoke publicly about the Constitution, his words would be precise.

In addition, it would be clear that what the Pope was about the say would be the collected wisdom of the ages, not a reaction to a singular event. This is an important point to emphasize: that if the King knew how to read, it would be very hard for him or anyone else to be mistaken about what the Pope was saying and about how he would judge the Civil Constitution. If there was confusion about the nature of the Civil Constitution with respect to Catholic discipline and doctrine, that confusion would have to be coming from a source other than the Pope.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Dissumlation Defined

Have you ever wondered what is dissimulation? Here is the answer from Aquinas (II-II.111):

I answer that, As stated above (109, 3;110, 1), it belongs to the virtue of truth to show oneself outwardly by outward signs to be such as one is. Now outward signs are not only words, but also deeds. Accordingly just as it is contrary to truth to signify by words something different from that which is in one's mind, so also is it contrary to truth to employ signs of deeds or things to signify the contrary of what is in oneself, and this is what is properly denoted by dissimulation. Consequently dissimulation is properly a lie told by the signs of outward deeds. Now it matters not whether one lie in word or in any other way, as stated above (110, 1, Objection 2). Wherefore, since every lie is a sin, as stated above (110, 3), it follows that also all dissimulation is a sin.

Can A Politician Dissemble?

Sometimes one might wonder if in public matters it is okay to separate one's private beliefs from one's public beliefs? This is a tricky question, but one thing that one cannot do is dissemble. During the French Revolution, as in many revolutionary moments, it is tempting for someone who is about to suffer or who is suffering persecution to say to himself, I can publicly profess doctrines contrary to the truth, but in my heart I can stick to the truth. This is a situation that faces Catholics right now in China, where there is pressure to belong to the Chinese Catholic Church run by the government. One way that someone might try to compromise is to agree to the Creed of the government, but in one's heart maintain that he is still united to the Church in Rome.

A similar situation was brewing in France in June 1790. The Revolutionaries contemplated requiring all citizens, priests, and Bishops to take an oath of loyalty to the new French Church. In this situation, Pius Vi realized that the King and some Bishops might try to dissemble as a way of conceeding to the demands of the political regime and still remaining united to teh Church. In a letter to the Archbishop in Vienne, June 10th, 1790, he encouraged the Archbishop to warn the king against dissimulation. Because the Constitutions touched on matters that affected the Catholic faith or the truth, it was not permissible to dissimulate, that is, it was not possible for the king to approve the Constitution, with the hopes that at some future point coming to the truth when the circumstances have changed.

There is a natural human integrity that should lead someone to avoid dissimulation in matters of the truth. Dissimulation, considered on the political level, leads to confusion, subversion, and eventually, revolution. It is an action that leads to instability in a political community because it weakens the truth, which is the first requirement of the common good.

Comment on the African Archbishop

A commentor has noted that the African Archbishop might be mentally ill. If this is the case, then it speaks even more to my point that there is some group of handlers who are using his condtion to advance a political agenda. It would behoove some inquiring investsigative reporter to find out who these people are, who they are connected to, and where they get their money from. There could be a story in the making here.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Priestly Celibacy in the News: Another Example of Revolution at Work

Since August 2006, we have seen reports in the papers that a now-excommunicated Archbishop from Africa is attempting to garner a following for married priests. This past week, the Pope gathered some Cardinals in the Vatican to study this issue. The media reports came out early in the week asserting that the Church might be about to change its doctrine on the married priesthood. Of course, on Friday, the news reports came out that the Pope and his commission had re-affirmed the Church’s stance on the priority of celibate priests.

This series of events close to our own time can help us to understand the silence of Pius VI from 1790 to 1791. The first provisions of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy began emerging in June 1790. Among other things, the Constitution eventually required the priests of France to marry in order to serve in French parishes. The King of France, Louis XVI, wrote to the Pope asking for advice, for principles to help his thinking on the Constitution, as well as to see if the Church would ever go along with the provisions of the Constitution as outlined by the Revolutionaries.

The Pope made clear in his letters to Louis XVI that, in fact, no, the Church could never go along with the provisions of the Constitution. The Pope also told Louis XVI that as Pope he was going to gather together a commission of Cardinals to study the provisions of the Constitution. The Pope told Louis that there was no chance of the Church accepting the provisions of the Constitution.

The reasons the Pope gave for gathering together the Cardinals in the Vatican was quite different than what was printed in the revolutionaries papers or spread by the promoters of the Constitution. To begin, the Pope did not want to speak right away publicly. He did not want the revolutionaries to think that he was acting in what we would call a knee-jerk way. He also wanted the Cardinals to meet with him so that, when he spoke, it was with the weight of principle, history, and tradition in his statements, and not simply his reactions to the circumstances of a moment.

The Pope then, as the Pope is doing now, gathered together the Cardinals in the Vatican to study and to confirm what has become the discipline and practice of the Church. The Archbishop from Africa, his American promoters (whoever they are), and the media are acting now as the French Revolutionaries did they. They are encouraging revolutionary activity that will cause confusion in the hearts and minds of Catholics, they will attempt to discredit the moral authority of the Church in the United States especially with respect to issues like the defense of the family and the upcoming wars in the Middle East, and they are spreading false notions like when the Pope is silent or when he gathers Cardinals in Rome to discuss an issue, it means he is contemplating changing a matter of Church doctrine or a disciplinary matter closely related to doctrine.

The Pope then, as the Pope now, was not silent or gathering Cardinals for the sake of appeasing revolutionaries. He was simply hoping to study the circumstances in order to more effectively bring the principles of morality as well as the history and tradition of the Church to bear on the circumstances that the Church faced.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Why the French Revolution II

In May 2006 the Economist printed an article reflecting on the status of the European Union and the European Constitution. The article began as follows: “AS CHOU EN-LAI observed of the 1789 revolution in France, the full impact of events in that country can take centuries to discern. That may yet prove true of the French no to the European Union’s draft constitution, expressed in a referendum on May 29th last year.” I take this to be, in general, true. However, the impact is not simply one of the events. It is also how those events are a working out of basic principles and ideas that flow from those principles.

Someone else once said that one can see happening in ten years of the French Revolution what has happened in the last 200 years in American democracy. The ideology that drove the French Revolution has affected life of nations in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. The study of the French Revolution is not simply a study of the events themselves. Though, the events themselves are fascinating to behold.

It is also a study of how certain ideas make themselves felt in culture and society over time. The Revolutionaries set out to radically change certain aspects of French society in order to bring about their conception of a democratic culture. This included instituting a version of pure democracy as embodied in a national legislature, a materialistic conception of liberty, equality, and rights, de-emphasizing the traditional family as a political social structure, democratizing religious institutions, and further concentrating power in a centralized government.

The French Revolution is important for America in 2006 because we are starting to show many similarities to developments that took place during the Revolution. Power is concentrating in the national government, our notions of equality and liberty have become increasingly materialistic over the past 100 years, there are pressures in all major religious institutions to democratize them. We increasingly rely on rights as articulated in the French Human Rights documents. We have liberalized marriage and divorce laws in ways already achieved during the French Revolution. Our culture has adopted many characteristics of the culture promoted by the revolutionaries.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Why is the French Revolution Important for America in 2006

Reading the comments from my post of 11/14 has led me to make a statement to explain why we should study the French Revolution. The Revolution was not simply about liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was also about cultural and moral change that was, at its heart, anti-Christian. A fact that shows this is that the Marquis de Sade (the "father" of Sadism) was a prisoner in the Bastille up until the evening of July 13th, 1789. When the revolutionaries rushed the Bastille on July 14th, the first room they ran to, in the hopes of liberating him, was the Marquis de Sade. The French Revolution began what some historians call an over 100 year cultural war in France that was eventually won by the Revolutionaries in the early 20th Century.

The Revolutionaries themselves, I am thinking of Condorcet as an example, thought that culturally, the elite Germans were ahead of the French at the moment the Revoltuion began. As a sign of this, he could point to the 130,000 priests and religious in France that served a population of 26 million. Germany, on the other hand, had far far fewer vocations and the Church's influence on culture, especially in Prussia, was waning. By the 1820s, France ordained six or so priests a year, far from replacement levels. There was a revitalization of the Church in France in the 19th Century, but the Church seemed to have lost the "war" of French culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries. This was due, in part, to way in which the revolutionaries controlled the media, the culture, spread pornography throughout the country, and, in general, was able to control the minds and hearts of Frenchmen, at least as far as they behaved.

Due to the two great European civil wars in the first half of the Twentieth Century, wars that were the fruit of the moral combat of the 19th Century, many of the cultural revolutionaries of France and Germany came to the United States. They have been promoting cultural revolution here since the late 19th Century. This is what Adams feared, the erosion of a moral culture that would undermine political concord. The fruit of an stable moral culture could be an easier acceptance of great wars that will either build up or destroy an empire. And so, it is worth looking into the unfolding of the Revolution, not simply to understand the particular dates and events, but to understand the nature of the tension that exists between the Christian way of life and the revolutionary way of life.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Religious Views of Adams and Jefferson

An insightful question and comment to the first post of this blog asks what were the reigious views of Adams and Jefferson, and how that influenced their political theories. Anyone who is interested can look this up in a book called The Adams Jefferson Correspondence, edited by Cappon. I used it for a course once, and it has many fascinating discussions in it. I would have liked to have accessed it to explain their views, but it has mysteriously disppeared from my library. I probably loaned it to a student and never got it back. In short, towards the end of their lives (they died on the same day, July 4, 1826!), Adams thought that the two of them should explain their religious views to each other. If I remember correctly, Adams claimed he was a Unitarian, who believed in a Divinity and believed in some order in the universe. He thought that any political order should reflect this divine order in things.

As an example, Adams wrote to Abbe Mably in the 1780s asking the Abbe to write a moral and political catechism for the Constitution fo the United States. Adams thought that the Constitution was a Creed. Every Creed needs a Catechism that explains how to live up to the requirements of the Creed, and Mably was the man for writing such a catechism. I do not think, however, that the Catechism got written. Adams thought that without being supported by a moral culture, the American Constitution would not survive.

Jefferson, was some sort of traditional protestant as a young man, perhaps Episcopalian. As he aged, he seemed to become less and less a believer and certainly more cynical about organized religion. One of his last public statements is something to the effect that the American Republic would show once and for all that men could throw off the chains of monkish ignorance.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Diplomacy Against the Civil Constitution

Second, the Pope realized that the Church in France was in an extremely perilous situation. He sees that the Bishops of France are frightened by the situation. Because of this, they lack the capacity to follow his words and speak with authority. He sees that the priests of France are already discouraged. They no longer have the right to meet together in assemblies to discuss their circumstances.

Third, he realizes that the King is in a weak position, that he is under a restraint to confirm the decrees of the Assembly, regardless of his personal attitude towards the decrees (7-9).
Given that the position the Pope was in, the conditions of the Church in France as he understood them, and the circumstances that Louis XVI found himself, the Pope understood the peril involved in an environment of revolutionary “free speech.” He saw that his voice could easily be “lost in the middle of a multitude.” The revolutionaries might choose to regard the voice of the Church as one of a multitude of voices in a society. He also saw that the revolutionaries could easily misinterpret and overreact to any of his public statements. The revolutionaries lacked “the capacity to contain [their] anger, that carries with it all of the excess that goes along with license, that does not spare fires, nor thievery, nor torture, nor massacre, and does not allow around it access to humanity. And at the same time, they will always be subject to imagine that they are being hated and that they are being irritated to their disadvantage and that any effort to approach them will be perceived as new attacks upon them.”

In short, any effort we make to speak with them they will take in the wrong way, they are irritated. They will easily misperceive it as an attack on their power and as something to their disadvantage. They are tyrants, slaves to sin, like alcoholics or others who are stuck in a cycle of sin and misrepresenting the facts so as to rationalize further injustices.

In a revolutionary situation, a leader like the Pope often has to resort to silence. Pius Vi speaks about the meaning of silence. He is not going to be silent to approve what the revolutionaries are doing. He is going to be silent in the hopes of letting irritated consciences quiet down, in the hopes that reason will once again take the place of the passions. He wanted to wait for the right moment to speak publicly, knowing, at the same time, that such a moment might not arise. He also knows that for “he who has received the duty of speaking, silence has its limits, but it is permitted to keep silence until the moment where one can break it without compromising the others and one’s self” (11-13). As he understands the circumstances in France, “the wounds that have been done to religion are already deep, the Church is already suffering under lively attacks, and our silence is not the silence of indifference or approval” (13-15). It is silence that waits for the right circumstances under which his words will be able to have some healthy effect. At the same time, he is aware that such circumstances might not arise, that there might arise an occasion where he will have to speak despite the adverse circumstances.

It ought to be noted that the silence of Pius VI was in no way an indication that he was wavering with respect to what are essential points in the structure and organization of the Church. The charge is commonly levied against Pius VI that he waited too long before saying anything about the Constitution, and that this public delay was a sort of implicit approval of the Constitution. It was first levied against the Pope by the revolutionaries themselves in the hopes of discrediting his words among Catholics. It fails to understand what Pius VI thought he was doing and the ways that he hoped his thinking on the matter would be made known.

He realized that the monarchy was in ruins, that the Bishops in France were paralyzed by fear, and that the revolutionaries were not in a position to listen to reason. Due to these circumstances, he supposed that any public action on his part would be misinterpreted by the revolutionaries as a threat to their regime. So, he had to either wait until reason returned, or he had to seek a way of opposing the implementation of the Constitution that, in fact, was not threatening, and, at the same time, would not appear to be threatening to the revolutionaries. His opportunity arrived in July 1790, when Louis XVI sent him the first of a series of letters, asking the advice from the Pope on the provisions of the Constitution (The quotes in the following section will be taken from the Pope’s letter to Louis XVI, 10 July 1790, 19-25).

Monday, November 13, 2006

Opposing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy I

As early as March 1790 Pius VI knew of the designs of the revolutionaries with respect to the Catholic Church. In his address to his Cardinals on March 9th, 1790 he assesses the situation in France and the character of the revolutionaries. First, he has gathered around him a group of prudent advisors to help him understand and treat the wound that pains France and the Church. He is a realist about the situation in France, with respect to his own political power as well as the power of the King in France. He understands that the wound in France might be a wound that is untreatable, a kind of sickness that will lead to death (Discourse, March 9th, 1790, p.3). The Pope, then, envisions himself as a doctor or a potential doctor dealing with a patient who may or may not want his help.

He gives his analysis of the patient. He first understands that the monarchy in France is perhaps unable to sustain itself. With respect to the revolution and the Ancient Regime, he sees that the Monarch “is fallen all at once into an abyss of evil, and it is at its ruin.” The revolution has already extended beyond the goal of taking over and changing political institutions.

He distinguishes between the fall of the monarch and the attempts of the revolutionaries to use religion to their advantage. In doing so, he is simply attributing motives to the revolutionaries that are similar to the motives that inspired earlier kings. The kings of Europe also had attempted to use the Church or to control her within their kingdoms.

In as much as the revolutionaries sought similar goals as the Catholic Kings of Europe, there is not much difference in their behavior to that of Joseph or Leopold. However, their actions have an intensity and a virulence that even Leopold’s lacked. The revolutionaries are frequently turning violent, bloody and seditious. He thinks that the revolutionaries are pursuing a further goal: making religion “subservient to and at the service of political interests.” He suspects this goal because the Revoltuionaries by March of 1790 had already violated several principles of the Concordat established between Rome and France. They have decreed a false toleration, one that allows for the freedom of conscience in religion while it attacks the Catholic Church. They are taken up with “the vain phantom of liberty” (9) that will lead to different philosophical schools fighting and harassing each other to death.

The Assembly decreed that it would no longer recognize religious vows, and it was encouraging religious priests and nuns to leave their communities (5-7). The Assembly by this point had also claimed that the nation now possessed all the goods of the Church.

In the light of the actions of the Assembly, the Pope proceeds to articulate principles, that he will, in turn, apply to the circumstances. The Pope sees that Christian doctrine is the health of a society. He also sees that the philosophy upon which the revolution is based is a philosophy, or a series of philosophies, that are unstable for the overall moral health of a society. Unrestrained freedom could lead to serious problems of its own accord. Unrestrained freedom over time leads to the unhealthy mix of demagogic and tyrannical souls. The Pope makes clear that this insight comes from reason and experience, that it arises independent of the personal sorrow he is experiencing at seeing the French repudiate Catholic principles, tradition, and history,

As the Pope assessed the Revolution, he did not misrepresent his relation, and the Church’s condition, with respect to the revolutionaries, the faithful in France, and the King himself. First, the Pope realized dealings with the revolutionaries would be difficult. He sense that because they were revolutionaries that they had already committed a number of injustices. This would make them overly sensitive to perceived corrections. It would also lead them to be eager to look for some word or deed of the Pope as a pretext for committing more outrages against the Catholic faithful in France. At the same time, the Pope understood that he would have to speak publicly in order to give guidance to the Bishops, the priests, and the Catholic faithful of France. So, as he understood the circumstances, he had to measure every word in public. For the time being, he would remain silent. But, he could not be silent indefinitely, even if it meant losing his life. There would come a moment when he had to speak. He understood that his public words, however hard they might seem, needed to be the fruit of study and reflection. They would hopefully have the effect of changing the hearts of at least some among the revolutionaries.

Second, the Pope realized that the Church in France was in an extremely perilous situation.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Philosophy and the French Revolution

Last night, a student asked me, why have I never heard about an alternative version of the French Revolution in my history textbooks?

Response, there are many features of the French Revolution which are not very salubrious. In fact, there are many aspects of the Revolution that the Revolutionaries themselves thought of as united to their movement. They saw the Revolution as a culmination of a certain philosophical movement which had been impregnating itself into culture and institutions over time. Many of those who write history, philosophy, political philosophy, and even theology books are committed to the philosophical ideas that are part of the revolution, human rights & equality.

And so, they have a natural capacity to overlook or omit what might be distasteful things that go along with their ideology. All the more reason for us to look into the thought of those who reflected on the Revolution. Some of them, like Burke, DeTocqueville, and Adams, considered themselves part of the Englightenment tradition. And yet, they were horrified at the Revolution. Others, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Kant, were enamoured with the Enlightenment and with the way its ideas were being carried out by the Revolutionaries. Finally, Pius VI is a representative who many would categorize as outside the Enlightenment tradition. And yet, due to his "connections" he is a person who in the end had something to say about the Revolution and its effects.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Adams, Jefferson, and the Revolution

John Adams
In 1812, John Adams sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson, along with some homespun, in the hopes of rekindling a correspondence that the two men broke off due to events surrounding the election of 1800. A mutual friend suggested to Adams that he try to renew the friendship. Adams began the correspondence partly to lure Jefferson into a dialogue about the history of their relationship. At the very least, he hoped that he and Jefferson could explain themselves to each other.
Adams wanted to discover why their intellectual relationship and friendship soured over the years. Adams and Jefferson were friends and among the more radical members of the group that signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Despite this fact, by 1800 they found themselves on opposite sides of the political debates plaguing the country. The presidential campaign, Adams’ loss to Jefferson, and much else broke all communication between the two great founders and led to Adams’ retreat from public life.
Among the topics that Adams sensed were potential causes for their break-up, was each man’s reaction to and interpretation of the events and aftermath of the French Revolution. This led to disagreement over what the French Revolution and its philosophy meant for the United States, and what was the purpose in general of revolution for a culture and society. Adams was critical of the French Revolution before, during, and after it happened. That is to say, before the French Revolution he was critical of the political theorists that he thought were behind it. During the French Revolution, he was immersed in political efforts to prevent the United States from becoming another revolutionary France. After the French Revolution, he feared revolutionary philosophy and practices influencing the United States and ruining its government.
On a most basic level, the events leading up to the Revolution led to difficulties over getting a book translated and published. In the late 1780s, men were writing books about the American constitution and preparing to write a new Constitution for France. Turgot, Godwin, and Malby all wrote essays or books critiquing America for installing a constitution that allowed for three branches at the Federal level and also divided power between the federal and state level.
The French critics were more enamored with the idea of a country with a single parliament and centralized federal power. Adams read the works that critiqued his own ideas and wrote a response, __________________. At the time, Jefferson was in Paris. Adams asked Jefferson if he could get the book translated and published in France. But, Jefferson’s social group was made up of those who were critical of Adam’s ideas. And so, Jefferson did nothing. That summer, he went on a wine-tasting tour in Bordeaux. It seems that, at the time, Adams did not think that Jefferson was at fault for his book not getting published.
But, a few years later, in 1791, Jefferson inadvertently had published an introduction to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man a critique of the work of Adams. Did Adams read this critique? What were the details of the 1790s that led to the break up? Surely, the FR had something to do with it.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

John Adams and the French Revolution

John Adams observed that the American Constitution required a moral political and social culture to support it. One of his great fears was that the ideas of Rousseu would penetrate American culture and, in undermining the culture, undermine the Constitution. I propose that we look at the ideas of Adams and other thinkers of the French Revolution in order to understand what it was that Adams feared. The influence of Rousseau, his ideas, and philosophers who have ideas and assumptions like Rousseau's is everywhere in our current political landscape.