21 Nov Why Conservatives Lose
Conservatives have lost and shall continue to lose in politics until it is no longer concerned with conservation. When the term “right wing” came into common parlance it was to refer to monarchists sitting to the right of the presiding chair in the Estates-General in 1789. We have slipped considerably since then into territory that is unrecognizable to that assembly. It seems that the right wing since the French Revolution has either handed over decisive victory after decisive victory to the left wing, or at its best slightly impeded them for a time before permitting them another, better victory.
I believe this is the case in every sphere, but it is true especially in the Catholic Church. I am prepared to highlight the Catholic Church as the central organized conservative body primarily because of its importance, but its age also allows for a good historical analysis. I also believe that if we use the term “Culture War” to designate the tug-and-pull exemplified by the left-and-right political struggle, then the Catholic Church is the emblem of the right wing since it is in fact the target of every Kulturkampf from the earliest conception of nation-states.
The Conservative Instinct
Many traditional minds have at some time felt the urge to defend their intellectual inheritance over and against outsiders. There is nothing absolutely wrong with this impulse. False friends after all can disrupt and confuse the meaning of what we have received, both in terms of the strict apostolic deposit in Christianity and to varying degrees our philosophical or moral conclusions. These cannot be mere premises for some other conclusion, but suffice as conclusions in themselves. I recognize the nerve and goodwill which begets this attitude. It is Christ or nothing, and there cannot be room at the altar for both good and evil.
Another related disposition however cannot be tolerated. This one esteems the deposit of faith as a mystical gnosis, so it goes, that necessarily excludes. It determines one’s own group as a lasting remnant that must withstand a temporary tide. If that tide never recedes then our remnant must remain strong. This self-portrait I shall briefly argue has a suicidal ecclesiology attached to it that consequently foments worse circumstances for the secular age to come. Certainly this attitude is present in many a right-wing group, but my specific focus on the Catholic Church is where I encounter the rhetoric the most. The argument goes something like this: we must keep the walls high and the gates closed lest we permit smoke to enter the Church and corrupt our deposit of faith. The attitude of Hans Ur von Balthasar, that we must “raze the bastions” and engage with the secular world, has failed, which is evident with the fruits of the Second Vatican Council. The attempts to have the Church enter the world has resulted in the world entering the Church, and the inexcusable has become commonplace all across the globe wherever the Sacrament is offered. We must, as the Church has always done, keep ourselves in our enclaves with our mission focused on sustenance of the Church Militant.
I understand the sentiment which ignites this kind of fire in people. I not only sympathize with it but I agree its concerns are valid, which is why I wrote it out as I have. We cannot accept false ecumenical unity, we cannot offer dubious praise of evil, we cannot tolerate indifferent attitudes toward religion. The saying is sure. I also agree that the Second Vatican Council failed to do what it set out to do and it even gave political and intellectual cache to the Church’s enemies. My goal is not to criticize the people who make these arguments but to illustrate why this attitude cannot dictate the strategy of the Church, or the right-wing, at large: because this was the attitude for both the Eastern and Western Church for hundreds of years and it coincided with the fall of Christendom, the receding of their influence and their total abasement.
Refusal as an Historical Strategy
Without exception, the narrative-weaving for this kind of rhetoric about the Church’s obligations to secure itself begin with the Modernist Crisis in the late 19th century or afterward. Most begin with the Second Vatican Council as if the council itself invited actual devils to write its documents and introduced novelty into the Church, some more insightful commentators examine the postwar period and scant few go back to Pope St. Pius X himself. The story might go something like this: the Church was receding due to persecution across Europe, as it was also gaining ground in the Americas. At the same time the Church was struggling to snuff out Modernism within clerical ranks, and the solution was found in raising walls against these errors. This worked for some time but eventually the soft-hearted Modernists succeeded in institutionalizing their thought and it went downhill from there. Those who say sede vacant might stop here while others give specific details about this or that error promulgated at the highest episcopal offices. The tale ends on a high note with the Church taking back slowly what ground was lost during this time.
Unfortunately when we begin weaving a narrative in media res we forgo the context for the inciting events. If we start lifting the cable out of the dirt that led to the Modernist Crisis we start finding it runs back to the War of Italian Unification and the loss of the Papal States; we run it back further and find the French Revolution; we run it back further and find the Thirty Years’ War and by the time we get to the full context we’re looking at Judas accepting thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus to the Sanhedrin. We look around then and suddenly the ground is covered in loose dirt and the picture is no less clear than it was before because we have only really accumulated a series of facts about history. Nevertheless I’d like to say that the real root of the sentiment which ignites that feeling of conservation in us is that we mourn the loss of Christendom and dread that it could get even worse. That is why I think it’s best to think about the loss of Christendom as a whole and not merely this or that particular crisis.
The disappearance of Christian patrimony was definitely underway by the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The conservation attitude of the Catholic wing was likely in place at this point already, with the Council of Trent a hundred years before being interpreted in this fashion. Bishops would have to answer to the Pope, there was going to be widespread standardization in cult and rite, the Roman clerics would intervene more often, so on and so forth.
Every century thereafter would have a rapidly escalating crisis for the Church in which these initiatives remained in force. The following century would see the French Revolution and the devastation wrought on the Church with utter impunity. The century after that would see the Italian Wars of Unification which both rent the Papal States from papal authority and also proved that there were no more political allies of the Church in Europe. Finally in the 20th century there were two World Wars which, by the time hostilities ended, had demonstrated that there was no longer a place for religion in the coming contemporary age.
The Church from the 17th century and into the early 20th century acknowledged the reality of its eroding position in Europe. This was not a case of the Church failing to recognize the historical writing on the wall, though much like the Biblical analogue, the Church’s approach was to refuse their opponents and exert their authority over what it could. In the 16th century this was mainly western and southern continental Europe. By the late 19th century the Church was losing authority even within its own clergy and the early 20th century was marked by the emergence of Modernists in its ranks, and to them little tolerance was shown. The trend seen in the Church’s strategy is that of nearly every right-wing organization, which is this: we must conserve our political order in its present state by controlling what we can, and resisting what we cannot.
Meaning-Making within the Bastions
Napoleon’s adage holds true for conservatism as a whole, that the logical end of a defensive war is surrender. So long as the right-wing busies itself with images of “holding a line” or “returning to form” it is a defensive war that results in the right-wing tailing the left-wing’s slow march through history, dragged behind by liberalism’s theologians. With some regret I also add that it was precisely Rome’s attitude towards the World that permitted such devastation. The Church’s magisterial power requires engagement with those it wishes to correct; failing to do so caused its magisterial power to recede and left in its wake a gaping abyss from which the horrors of the past few centuries sprouted. I read von Balthasar’s Raze the Bastions as a call to war and not a call to surrender; it was time to send out our forces and not time to fortify for a long siege. The Maccabean comparison of a final remnant is sometimes considered, but in reality we have become more like the Jews before them who holed up in a cave, refused to fight on the Sabbath and were brutally martyred. The Maccabees were not a remnant in hiding but an army on the march.
In sharp contrast the Church lost its relevance long before it lost its power, which coincided with the loss of relevance of Catholic philosophy. The disappearance of Catholic philosophy after the end of Baroque scholasticism was not because Catholics ceased doing philosophy. Rather the disappearance was in part due to a growing hostility toward Catholic philosophy and the World’s refusal to engage with the old schoolmen. The answer to this however was not to answer in kind. Though it is widely blown out of proportion there is a considerable truth to the portrayal of “manualists” drilling theology students into recitation rather than contemplation. The pride of the scholastic period was a master of the Sacred Page commenting on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which was not a quiz to answer in the style of one’s mentor but an exercise in independent study. Similarly the approach to non-Christian philosophy cannot be strict refusal. St. Albert the Great knew that the Averroesists were in error but that did not make Aristotle useless; and St. Thomas Aquinas knew that St. Albert the Great was an admirable theologian but was not shy in building upon his work.
The momentous shift in Catholic scholarship in the latter half of the 19th century, what would later become the ressourcement, emerged from participation in contemporary scholarship rather than bludgeoning it or avoiding it. This is typified in St. John Henry Newman’s assessment of Arianism, which realized that there was not merely one kind of Arianism and that Trinitarian theology in the 4th century was far from a settled matter. Development of doctrine was a necessary admission for that reason: one cannot in earnest examine the Church Fathers and believe they share the same terms on key dogmas, even if they are all formally members of the unifying Church body. By the mid-20th century the Church began to reengage with its old enemies in a way that regained its prominence: Anscombe, Stein, Geach, Przywara, Ratzinger, Wojtyła and many other explicitly Catholic scholars are not relegated to an intellectual ghetto because they are Catholic but are exemplars of the fields they inhabit because of their excellence and the fact they did not fear to tread on reclaimed ground.
An Example From Patristic Studies
The call to undo this progress is a desire for safety, again understandable but nonetheless a wasted opportunity and potentially fatal decision. I highlight the philosophical engagement of the Eastern Orthodox Church as a principal example. For almost the entirety of the Schism between East and West, the East has depended on Catholic scholasticism for its own philosophical agenda. This included sending their best theologians to Italy to learn and writing commentaries on Latin schoolmen. While this did little to foster mutual understanding between East and West it did permit the East to borrow Latin terms and systems for their own ends. To some extent this mirrors a certain Catholic approach to philosophy in the 20th century: send secular scholars to universities to hock scholasticism in exchange for Heidegger or Russell and then use these new systems to tear down modernity. This has largely failed, as it did in the East, to do much of anything except convince the purveyors of their own genius.
However I must remark on a rather glaring development which shows not only the fruitlessness, but the harm, in this approach. In the 20th century, Catholic ressourcement revived the study of many Church Fathers from relative obscurity. This does not mean these Fathers were not read or honored but rather not discussed and understood. A stinging instance of this was von Balthasar’s monograph on St. Maximus the Confessor. Up until that time he was best understood as the “dyothelite guy” and a martyr alongside Pope St. Martin I. In view of the fresh mercy killing of the Ottoman Empire, the Eastern Orthodox Church finally rejoined the scholarly conversation after their even longer absence since the 15th century. Their understandable jealousy at von Balthasar’s emblazoning of St. Maximus as a fine Latin theologian led to a rapid redeployment of their own resources, most notable under Vladimir Lossky.
The Eastern Orthodox however did not reenter academics on a colt with palms a their feet. Rather their fresh, combative scholarship surged into a panicked reaction in an unfamiliar battlefield. Lossky and those after him had to pick up Catholic ideas, such as De Regnon’s dichotomy of Eastern and Western theology and the entirely anachronistic category of the “Cappadocian Fathers,” or worse, “Cappadocian theology.” While temperamentally disputing Catholic positions they were further entrenched into those positions and using them in the way that an occupied country repurposes munitions left behind by an opposing military. This culminates into the irredeemably embarrassing mistake of many professional Eastern Orthodox scholars reading Kant’s noumena-phenomena division back into the Palamite ousia-energeia distinction. Needless to say this has at best been a setback and largely a waste of time for the Eastern Orthodox in academics. It could at worst be fomenting a hideous crisis to come and a reckoning for which their hierarchy is inadequately prepared. Time will tell, but these efforts are in all honesty far from serious efforts.
What went wrong here becomes obvious if you view the challenge posed by the Maximus studies as a conservative reaction as opposed to a real development in understanding. Reactionaries tend towards less-than-convincing narrative revision, and this particular example illustrates a rather blatant veering toward borrowing the tropes needed for such a narrative revision. The Eastern Orthodox scholars could have examined and built upon the direct opposition to deepen their understanding of St. Maximus the Confessor, rather than merely acknowledging it. In their haste however they galloped through several hundred years of philosophy to allude to but not thoroughly systematize their own doctrine in light of it. De Regnon’s division is accepted by second readers without anyone knowing who this man was or what his purpose was in supposing such a division. Kant is employed as a plausible parallel, then becomes a probable position, finally entering the lexicon absent any recognition of where St. Basil the Great ends and David Hume begins.
It is not an isolated occasion, it is the product of conservative defensive posturing. This causes strange situations among other fields such as German idealists and English-speaking Hindus reading each other and thinking that they have more in common than in reality; the German idealist finds antiquity for his ideas while the Hindu finds sophistication for his, all without either one doing any legwork before committing to the marriage. The desire to safeguard a specific position causes an overenthusiastic response to a challenge that cannot be ignored. The World can be evaded for a while but it has a way of bearing down when a new generation grimly accepts that it is a credible intellectual threat. As Maximus studies which are still somewhat wet from the womb progress, I imagine that despite their blustering intermission the chief exegetes are not going to be from the East.
Conservation as a Modern Foil
I dredge up this example as a rather cogent warning to those who believe that the best defense is a good defense. Confining oneself to a sort of academic reservation cannot be the winning solution because it has never worked. The inoculation against Hellenism in early Christianity ensured it would not be swallowed up by it, and the retooling of non-Nicene philosophical assertions became central to the promulgation of a pro-Nicene agenda. The commentating on Arabic and Jewish philosophy prevented it from overwhelming Catholic universities. Flexing one’s lordship “as the Gentiles do” in pushing out unfavorable positions has allowed those positions to become more extreme, more embittered and more influential. Worse yet, these ideas tend to return in due time with the force of custom, and at that point there is no strength left to refuse them.
The Catholic Church succeeded in subduing its intellectual antagonists when it dealt with them as intellectual antagonists and not as political ones. The political victories of the Church were won by infiltration of those institutions and not by intellectual grandstanding. To broaden Étienne Gilson’s appraisal of the philosophical experience, use the right tool for the right job; you cannot fight intellectual enemies by exerting political power, or political enemies by converting them with good arguments. The right-wing when it approaches these battles as a conservative force guarantees its own defeat, as the struggle is to keep what it has and not to take what the enemy has. All truth belongs to us. As such, we are always reclaiming our own territory. In an intellectual conflict we are obliged to reclaim the truth that has been distorted by our opponents. In a political conflict we are obliged to reclaim the power that God gave to those institutions and abused by the heathen.
The battle between the left-wing and right-wing must therefore be understood as a logically deleterious framing because it has already depicted the right-wing in a defensive position and a perpetual loser, a via antiqua in constrast to a via moderna. When we grant modernity its time-specific consciousness, in which we are always looking “forwards” or “backwards” in time, we pose liberalism as “forwards” and conservatism as “backwards.” Thus to prop up conservation as our purpose, we permit perpetual defeat insofar as time moves forwards and not backwards. So long as we allow our position to be framed this way and to accept the terms of the battle set forth by our enemies, we become worse than infidels, incapable of defending our homes. The amount of human carnage to be produced by the left-wing death march is not even half of the way there; we are complicit in this massacre if we do not open the gates and send out our garrisons.