Lord of the World

A political theology diptych for Ascensiontide

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In The Real Victory over Evil I wrote of Solovyov's fingering of disbelief in the resurrection as the hole in our culture through which is draining its vital forces; and of the vacuum thus created, into which are drawn antichristic powers that purport to have a competence they do not have—to rescue, and so to rule, mankind. These powers play on man's fear of death, though about death they ultimately can do nothing. They enslave, rather than liberate.  

I was still thinking about all that when I read Matthew Crawford's account of the political operation of such powers during the pandemic, as "a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and [to] a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government."

Crawford describes the transition from a liberal society, with a Lockean orientation to the potential of man as a rational animal, to an illiberal society, with a neo-Hobbesian orientation to man as a threatened and vulnerable creature. In this transition, he suggests, we are witnessing the rise of Leviathan—of the unbounded bureaucratic state that manipulates us through our sense of vulnerability, regarding us not as rational animals but rather as herded, even hackable, animals.

“Covid was liberalism’s endgame” (UnHerd) sheds light on something that puzzles many, viz., the simultaneity of two seemingly disparate phenomena: technocracy, which parades as scientific progress; and a culture of victimhood, which evinces psychological regress. That is my own way of putting it, but Crawford detects the link between the two and sees the reason why those taking charge of the former are so indulgent, even solicitous, of those promoting the latter. Hobbes, he says,

offers a fable of human origins, the state of nature, according to which we are originally in a condition of acute vulnerability. Even after the rise of political society, civil war is always a threat, and is the problem that his politics is meant to solve. The problem comes down to the fact that we are prone to pride, or vainglory; we are ornery. This is based on a false consciousness in which we place too high a value on ourselves; we then feel slighted and insulted when others fail to recognise us. Such aristocratic brittleness leads to faction and civil strife. The good news is that it can be overcome through a shift in perspective, if we (and especially the proud) come to identify with the weak rather than think ourselves strong. We are all potential victims, and this is the self-awareness that grounds political authority in consent. Out of fear, we consent to a social compact in which we all submit to Leviathan, whom Hobbes calls “King of the proud.”

Hobbesian liberalism, observes Crawford, "begins with the politics of emergency," which turns out to be an addictive politics that progressively shrinks the collective and individual psyche.

Leviathan is supposed to end this state of emergency; that is the whole point of it. But the emergency must be renewed, over and over again, if Leviathan is to thrive. This requires renewal of the consciousness-raising program as well, cultivating the vulnerable self. This is the self that is implicit in the cult of safetyism that children are brought up in. It is also the guy you see riding his bicycle double-masked.

Cultivation of the vulnerable self goes hand in hand, we may add, with cultivation of the guilty self. Most people weren't sure whether they were being masked, locked down, and vaccinated to protect themselves or to protect others. The ambiguity was deliberate, since in reality no one was being protected. What mattered was consensus about the need for protection, the comforting feeling of protection, and anxiety about failing to protect. The masked man on the bicycle (I saw one in the park yesterday) is not just virtue-signalling; he is atoning.

The apparent inconsistency of a government that greets peaceful anti-mandate protesters with riot police, while simultaneously facilitating violent BLM or Green protesters, evaporates when set in this light. The former, by repudiating an excessive sense of vulnerability and refusing to plead guilty to violations of the vulnerable, challenge not only the narrative but the very existence of Leviathan. The latter, on the other hand, serve nicely to heighten feelings of guilt and of vulnerability—in this case, vulnerability to violence—in the population Leviathan wishes to control.  

The particularly harsh treatment of religious gatherings also begins to make more sense, because religion, at its best, represents an altogether different way of addressing vulnerabilities. (At its worst, and we saw it at its worst during covid, it is simply more of the same; hence redundant.) The new Hobbesian, like the old, must do away with appeals to the transcendent, for such appeals compete with Leviathan's claim to necessity and, just so, to unquestioned authority. Implicitly or explicitly, appeals to the transcendent render the state accountable to goods greater than "peace and safety" or "public health.” They subject it to standards higher than the mere maintenance of order. They undermine the cynicism on which Leviathan feeds, and the low view of man it cultivates. They also raise the question of evil, a question that makes the monster squirm.

When reading Solovyov, we focused on the attempt to dismiss evil, to put it behind us without so much as a fight. Crawford, however, reminds us that the age of "progress" begins with a certain resignation in the face of evil:

Hobbes wanted an education that emphasises that human nature (especially that of the “noble”) is selfish and base. Why? Because any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked. In his political metaphysics, a summum bonum to be aimed at is replaced with a summum malum (death) to be fled from. Lowering the sights of political life in this way helps tame the pride that leads to conflict. Men will submit to Leviathan only if they inhabit a moral universe that has been emptied of transcendent referents.

That resignation, as Solovyov himself was at pains to show, underlies the whole business of the present era. It may be rather glum at first, as (absent resurrection faith) it tries in its own way to get to grips with the prevalence of evil. But soon enough it tires of this glumness or finds relief from it in a period of relative peace. It then inclines to a more optimistic view. It pretends that evil was normal but need not remain normal; that if we leave off fighting—or rather, if we fight only our sexist, racist, warmongering, colonialist past—we can somehow leave evil itself behind.

Leviathan, naturally, is only too keen to assist us in resigning our past. That kind of fighting it is happy to do with us and for us, spouting apologies through its blow-hole at every opportunity. Resigning our past leaves us open the future it has in store for us. Resigning our past concedes to Leviathan what it desires and requires: the high ground, morally speaking, in a very low world; a world that, lacking any true conception of the good, lacks also any ability to recognize evil.

In that world, Hobbes’ commonwealth ceases to be “Ecclesiasticall & Civill” and becomes purely civil, albeit in the rather ecclesiastical fashion we call “secular.” And to that world belong only the lesser goods, the material goods, the candied goods of its ubiquitous advertising campaigns. Far from disappearing, then, the baser motives, unbridled by religion or by high-minded moral philosophy, begin to prevail. The strong victimize the weak with nary a pang of conscience. A culture of death emerges out of our unaddressed fear of death. Reason reduces to cunning, and even cunning is undercut by reliance on the amoral “peace” of Leviathan, until (as in the pandemic) it is overthrown altogether by fear, the basest motive of all.

Much of this is disguised, of course, by all that talk of progress that (from Lessing onwards) marks liberalism. Religion, too, though widely despised as the enemy of progress—indeed, as the vice corresponding to its one necessary virtue: secularity—can in a pinch be called on to help with the disguise. For example, “fear God, honour the emperor” is convertible in peace-loving minds back to older adages urging honour to the emperor as if he were God. “Love your neighbour” is equally convertible; with modest effort, it can be fashioned either into a pro-choice or a pro-mandate trope, as the occasion demands.

Crawford does not remark on all this, however. For his part, he looks in critique, not to Solovyov, but to C. S. Lewis, who also traces the moral crater left behind by the "value" cynicism that liberalism has produced from its superficially optimistic, but essentially pessimistic, view of man. Both men warn of the consequences of rejecting fixed moral certainties and objective hierarchies of lower and higher goods. Like the latter, Crawford highlights the ersatz transcendence that science now takes on, at the expense of its own objectivity. "In a technocratic regime," writes Crawford, "whoever controls what Science Says controls the state." Or perhaps we should put it the other way round: whoever wishes to control the state must also control science, forcing it to do the state's work.

In his trenchant essay, "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State," Lewis exclaims: "I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in." Too true, as Chesterton had already made clear! And too little remarked by scientists themselves, though recently some have begun to complain about the corruption of their disciplines through mandatory EDI statements—statements that, when missing or deemed insufficiently sincere in their obeisance to Vulnerability, deny them access to jobs or grants—and the highjacking of their regulatory bodies through raw exercises of Power. Long live the dialectic!

Crawford concludes by asking the same kind of question Lewis asks in "Willing Slaves," though he seems a bit more hopeful than Lewis about the answer. He wants to know whether we can "reclaim the blessings of Lockean, political liberalism" while retreating "from the aggressive metaphysical debunking of Hobbesian, anthropological liberalism," or whether the one inevitably brings us back round to the other. Lewis frames his own query a bit more pragmatically, directing it to all of us: "Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?" He doesn't think so, for "the King of the proud" is the proudest of all. Leviathan, as in the famous sketch, is Tarquin writ tall.

I share Crawford's concern about the liberal tradition, which got off on the wrong foot and was illiberal from its very first step. (Even Rawls had some inkling of that, questioning the growth of so-called "comprehensive liberalism," or metaphysics by stealth, that has been morphing steadily into the mighty Welfare State.) I also share Lewis's pessimism about our honey-seeking enterprise. His reason is my reason: power corrupts; we have no basis whatsoever for supposing "that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves."

Hobbes, in other words, was right about human nature, which has not changed since man's fall. (Put that way, we can escape both liberal pessimism and liberal optimism.) Where Hobbes was wrong, and the whole liberal tradition with him, was in thinking that political salvation is possible by artificially elevating peace and security above all things, especially religion and metaphysics and morals. The truth is not that human beings can and should do without these things, as if they were foreign substances dangerously injected into our collective bloodstream by priestcraft or witchcraft. The truth is that human nature—to which such instincts and pursuits belong, that man may properly distinguish good from evil—needs fixing, and that the unfixed cannot fix it.

But it has been fixed, in the real victory over evil. And this anthropological fix is the basis, the only basis, for any political fix that affords liberty, that nourishes liberty, even in the face of tyranny. This was acknowledged, and well stated, by the framers of the Barmen Declaration:

As Jesus Christ is God’s comforting pronouncement of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, with equal seriousness, he is also God’s vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life. Through him there comes to us joyful liberation from the godless ties of this world for free, grateful service to his creatures.

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Son of God, who ascended in glory, save us who sing to you; for behold the kings of the earth have assembled, they have come together.  

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Thursday was Ascension Day, which bears witness to the fix. Some of my readers will know that this solemnity is dear to my heart, and has been since I first began to study Irenaeus. Here in Montreal, Église Saint-Irénée provides a welcome venue for keeping it; not only because this parish, unlike others, does honour the day on the day—the liturgically lazy look to it on Sunday—but also because it honours patronymically the saint in question, who on 21 January of this year was belatedly declared a doctor of the Church.

St Irenaeus was dubbed doctor unitatis, a title shared with Leo the Great, who is doctor unitatis ecclesiae. To the former title, we might append scripturae, for no one ever took more trouble to show the unity of the scriptures than did Irenaeus. Or perhaps we might refer to him as doctor recapitulationis, since he laboured with Paul to show that all things in heaven and on earth, including the scriptures, have been made to cohere in Christ, in whom they have been summed up anew.

Jesus Christ is himself the Word through whom all things were made. But the summing up of all things in him, when he actually appears in the world, is a summing up that is also a refashioning, so that things are not left in the state of dissolution or disrepair into which they have fallen by reason of sin, but emerge after all in the form proper to them and in the condition God intends for them.

And what condition is that? The condition of openness to the divine bounty, readiness for inexhaustible gifts and graces, and—by way of the ascension of our Lord, through whom they are dispensed—the actual receipt of these graces. Otherwise put, what this summing up accomplishes is first a confirmation, then a reparation, and finally a perfection, where "perfection" means always advancing towards God, with the help of his Spirit, to the glory of the Father.  

Humans need fixing because they are not actually advancing, but retreating. Recapitulation gets them turned round and moving in the right direction. What the results will be, Heaven knows, for it has already received Jesus, body and soul. He has reached the goal, the prize of the upward call. We know only by eucharistic anticipation and such other signs and wonders as accompany the preaching of the gospel, including the conversion of human hearts and the transformation of human lives.  

Woe to those preachers who do not preach the gospel! Woe to those who deploy the present feast to strip Jesus of his humanity, hence of his true political import, so that what they call “spiritual” never makes any secular demands. Woe also to those who, by some similar ruse, dare to transfer his sovereignty wholesale to earthly kings or pontiffs, thus to degrade it with vain political ambitions. Woe to those who have divided the Church or keep it divided, in denial of the gospel. And woe to those who hear the gospel—who even borrow from it, as the “liberal” always does—but do not believe it. All will be caught in their own snares.

Irenaeus can help us avoid such snares, as I tried to show in Ascension Theology. I'll not expand on that here, except to remark that chapter six, "The Politics of the Eucharist," goes to the heart of the matter. Political theory, where it means to be Christian, does not begin where the social contract theorists begin. It does not begin with the dilemmas of Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau or Rawls. It begins with the covenant, the covenant in its present eucharistic form, the form given it by the ascension of Jesus. It begins with the "union and communion" (a favourite Irenaean syntagm) proper to the Church. Only thus does it try to work out what it should say to the nations about the ordering of their own affairs.

What I want to do instead, since I cannot do all that, is offer a brief meditation on the petition, bolded above as the hinge for my diptych, that our ascended Lord save us from the false ordering of the nations—from what Irenaeus calls their "minglings without cohesion” and from the union without communion they mean to impose as they themselves, per impossible, attempt to scale the heights of heavenly power and glory. Those who are resisting Leviathan may find some small encouragement in this meditation, which brings us back to the psalms, where we began in "The Real Victory Over Evil." Far better encouragement, naturally, will be found in prayerful use of the psalms themselves, where Jesus found it.

He will drink from the brook by the way;
    therefore he will lift up his head.

Now, this petition—Son of God, who ascended in glory, save us who sing to you; for behold the kings of the earth have assembled, they have come together—serves as the second antiphon for Ascension Day in the divine liturgy as sung by Ukrainian Catholics and other Eastern-rite Christians. The psalm in which it is embedded is Psalm 48 [47], which begins as follows:

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised
    in the city of our God!
His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation,
    is the joy of all the earth!
Mount Zion, in the far north,
    [is] the city of the great King.
Within her citadels God
    has shown himself a sure defence.

For lo, the kings assembled,
    they came on together.
As soon as they saw it, they were astounded,
    they were in panic, they took to flight;
trembling took hold of them there,
    anguish as of a woman in travail.

Psalm 48 (there’s more to it, of course) conjures in turn Psalm 2, which opens with a question about the phenomenon, the all too frequent phenomenon, to which Psalm 48 refers:

Why do the nations conspire,
    and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
    and the rulers take counsel together,
    against the LORD and his anointed, saying,
‘Let us burst their bonds asunder,
    and cast their cords from us.’

In the context of this diptych, it conjures in my own mind the plutocrats who have parked their flying machines—an invention predicted in R. H. Benson's Lord of the World—at Davos, where they are conspiring to control another invention Benson foresaw, viz., our instruments of mass communication. In their lust for control, they do not realize what those realize who have thought on “the steadfast love of God,” who have recognized that his right hand, not theirs, “is filled with victory.” In their refusal of all restraint, they have not heeded the psalmist's warning that they should serve him with reverent fear, or Isaiah's momento mori:   

You said in your heart,
    ‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
    I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
    in the far north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds,
    I will make myself like the Most High.’
But you are brought down to Sheol,
    to the depths of the Pit.

The psalmists, of course, like the other prophets, are men of ascension faith. Though they have not as yet heard the gospel in its entirety, they know of the true Lord of the World and of the gates of glory that must open to receive him when, like David himself, he goes up with a shout and the sound of a trumpet. The author of Psalm 2 therefore proceeds to ridicule the pretenders' plans, by which they prepare to storm heaven:

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
    the LORD has them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
    and terrify them in his fury, saying,
‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’

This declaration, which found its fulfillment in Jesus, is repeated in Psalm 110, which the early Christians also loved to employ in connection with David's greater son, not least when contemplating contemporary iterations of Leviathan:

The LORD says to my lord,
    ‘Sit at my right hand
     until I make your enemies your footstool.’

The LORD sends out from Zion
    your mighty sceptre.
    Rule in the midst of your foes!

 Your people will offer themselves willingly
    on the day you lead your forces
    on the holy mountains;
from the womb of the morning,
    like dew, your youth will come to you.

Note that we have here two components: the sovereignty of God and his Christ, who (as Fr Keefe says) is “the source of our free unity”; and the freedom of those who confess Christ to offer themselves in his service. In other words, we do not have a vulnerability/power dialectic, but rather a dominion/donation dialectic.

From the dominion side of this dialectic comes a word of encouragement for our own times. Let schemers scheme to their heart's content. Let plutocrats plot to "recalibrate" our rights and freedoms. Let them play Monkeypox or whatever they call it. Let them even conspire to co-opt ecclesiastical bureaucracies, to suppress the divine liturgy, to divide the faithful. Let them spread the blackness of their bureaucratic night to the four corners of the earth, if they can. It changes nothing. For "the LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength" (Psa. 93). He holds them in derision. His royal mirth precedes his royal wrath, but he will act at the right time.

He will shatter kings on the day of his wrath,
he will execute judgment among the nations.

We can be fully confident of that, because he has already acted. He has donated himself, in the person of the Son whom he loves, to the very people who crown him with thorns and enthrone him on a cross. Thus did he exercise a first judgment, an atoning judgment on sin, with a justice full of mercy. Then, through the resurrection, he exercised a second judgment, a conclusive verdict on Jesus, whom he publicly declared “Son of God” with a justice full of power. Finally, he installed him on the heavenly throne at his own right hand, that he might exercise a third judgment, the judgment of the nations, with a justice full of glory.

In all of this, God subverted the vulnerability/power dialectic we were discussing earlier—that devilish dialectic that was already at work when the serpent taught the first humans to fear what they ought not to have feared, and not to fear what they ought to have feared, so as bring them under a perverse dominion. And from the divine response we can learn, with Augustine, a crucial political principle: “not that power is to be shunned as something bad, but that the right order must be preserved which puts justice first.”

Might does not make right. Office alone does not make right. Real judicial authority, authority that both binds and liberates, is found only where power is added to justice or justice accedes to power (Trin. 13.17). This we ought to remember when faced with those who refuse to follow Augustine’s sage counsel:

Let mortals hold on to justice; power will be given them when they are immortal. Compared with this, the power of those men who are called powerful on earth is shown to be ridiculous weakness.

The first sign that justice has acceded to power is not a decree of some kind, but a further gift—the gift of the Holy Spirit who can and will bestow immortality upon us, and who meanwhile enables us to petition the Lord of Glory for our own salvation and that of others. What is celebrated next Sunday, on Pentecost, is just that: the further self-donation of God made possible by the ascension, the donation of the Spirit who “will convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.”

The three features of this convicting work, as a close examination of John 16 reveals, correspond to the three judgments enumerated, but we must leave that for another time. It is more important at the moment to notice something else; namely, that with God, the Holy Trinity, dominion is donation and donation is dominion. Lordship is love and love is lordship. It is quite right, then, to say that Christ reigns already on Golgotha, though he reigns afterwards (and differently) from Glory. Likewise, it is right to say of the Church that “even now the saints reign with him, although not in the same sense in which they will ultimately reign” (Augustine, Civ. 20.9). They reign by donation, in martyrial glory.

This utterly undoes the offending dialectic that appeared in the first leaf of our diptych. Vulnerability is not victimhood. Both Christ and the martyrs give their lives freely. (The technical sense in which the liturgy speaks of Christ as “victim” does not contradict his own claim: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”) And power is not a faculty of imposition or exploitation, but of love and self-control. (“I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.”) Power increases with justice and because of justice, with love and because of love. Absent justice and love, it decreases and eventually collapses.

From this, then, a further word of encouragement. Real power, dominical power, lies with the Lamb and with those who sing the Lamb's song. Of false power there is an inflation that precedes its collapse, a runaway inflation in which deception and coercion are the prominent features. That is what we have been witnessing, and we must expect to see more of it. With the author of Psalm 93, we have every reason to cry out,

 The seas have lifted up, O LORD,
    the seas have lifted up their voice;
       the seas have lifted up their pounding waves!

But we do well to recall the answer he receives from the heavenly sanctuary, the reassuring reply that resounds today with the authority of the risen and ascended One:

        Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
     mightier than the breakers of the sea—
  the LORD on high is mighty.

The proud kings are assembling, they come on together. In their company we espy more than one mitred Judas, ready to betray the city of God into their hands. The “King of the proud” will emerge in his time. But within the citadels of the city, God will show himself a sure defence. The Son of God, who sits serenely in heavenly session over the tumultuous seas, will come in his glory to save those who are singing the new song he has taught them. The city of God shall stand, Babylon shall fall. To this all the scriptures testify, from the ancient psalms to the book of recapitulation we call the Apocalypse.

Meanwhile, from the donation side of the divine dialectic comes an invitation to offer ourselves willingly. The young, especially, are invited to gather round the Son, to hold his banner high, to heed what he says, to follow no orders that contradict his orders. For he is not Lord of some, but Lord of all, per omnia saecula saeculorum. He gave all, and he asks for all. That is the eucharistic witness, and the fundamentum of our politics.

So look to him and be radiant. Renew the spirit of Barmen in our time. “The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come!’ And let him who hears, say ‘Come!’”

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Sunday After the Ascension, 2022

Bamberg Apocalypse