This is a very good discussion of some important aspects of our national political mess in the United States: Liberal Constitutionalism and Us.
At the same time, something is missing and that something is a more general understanding of our world, in fact, of Creation as a whole. Until we have that understanding, one which encompasses Christian revelations along with—so to speak—the thoughts of Einstein and Darwin and also those of Lord Acton and Wallace Stevens, we are merely floundering with our efforts to understand and maybe reform specific realms of the world which are not self-contained. God’s story, Creation in a general sense or this world in a particular sense, is the setting for all other stories; God’s story is the stuff from which the lesser stories are formed; God’s story, as best understood in modern terms, will give us our best ideas of the Almighty’s purposes as Creator.
The above paragraph is an effort to put my position in a short way which might appeal to Christians thinking in modern secular terms. I write this as a Christian thinker who has, I think with some substantial success, tried to produce an understanding of Creation, the abstract truths and the concrete things and the stories we live and the grander stories being told by God. From my viewpoint, Creation is a whole in a meaningful sense, this world is a lesser whole but itself has the important characteristics of unity and coherence and completeness—as do those human animals who achieve the status of `personhood’.
The story God is telling is the birth and death of the Body of Christ beginning with the incarnation of the Son of God as Man. The Body of Christ contains as members those who will be raised to share the life of God through union with Jesus Christ, the head of the Body, but the Body is itself an entity not fully definable as a gathering of its individual members. Even our political and business activities have to be understood as activities directed towards the development of the Body of Christ, in a contemplative way and not in a way that provides direct practical guidance. Our current crises in Western Civilization, our various processes of decay which we so dimly perceive and so poorly understand, are caused by that root cause: we are the heirs of Christian peoples (more accurately—baptized and poorly assimilated pagan peoples) and we are trying to live within a Civilization which had a greatness coming directly from its Christian ways of thinking and feeling and acting. Again, we were never truly Christian peoples but that might not be possible in this mortal realm and, since this is the story being told by God, it’s seems to be His will that we develop towards our best states rather than somehow popping into those states by instant conversions of individuals or communities.
This is the big picture from the Christian viewpoint: this world is the story of the development of the Body of Christ and of the members, and failed members, of that Body in this mortal realm. We Christians need to set in this context all that is and all that God is bringing into existence by a pure creation or by shaping existing stuff.
I’ve claimed over the past few years in a number of writings on this weblog ( Acts of Being) that the Body of Christ isn’t just the Church. Rather is the Church an organ of that Body, the organ of worship and spiritual and moral guidance. There are other organs in this entity, the Body of Christ, which is complex beyond our current descriptive capabilities. To move toward better capabilities, we need to draw upon the fullness of created being as currently understood. There is an understanding of created being which is slowly coming into view and it will, as one example, force us to use the more complex geometries of modern theories of spacetime in place of the Euclidean geometry found in such phrases as “the straight and narrow way.”
We also need to move toward developmental models in our moral and political and economic thought.
We need ways to describe, that is—understand in a narrative sense, those complex entities such as modern communities or the individuals formed within those communities. We and our communities, including our political communities, are far too rich and complex and dynamic to fit within the traditional concepts and languages of political and economic and moral philosophies and sciences of all sorts.
Even our more substantial poets and novelists haven’t yet caught up. I write novels and have not yet finished a novel more than suggesting what can be done to heal our badly damaged individual and communal selves. My finished and downloadable novels, such as A Man for Every Purpose have been efforts to describe the damage. Even The Hermit of Turkey Hill, set in the 1930s and with a protagonist based on a grandfather I never knew, was—from an abstract perspective—an effort to describe the stresses upon various levels of moral and social order at a time when the stresses had not yet caused major breakage, at least not in smalltown New England.
There is much to be done, much to shorten the coming periods of chaos as a new phase of Christian civilization forms. Describing broken political entities which are set in a Western civilization reduced to ruins populated by the barbarian children foreseen by José Ortega y Gasset is a good and useful task toward a greater understanding that will help the creative re-formation to advance in a smoother way that might lead to better results. Yet, this part of our effort will work better if the analysts realize and explicitly consider that Western Civilization was a work of Christians and their God; our civilization will not survive if it has no Christian understanding of Creation to guide it. If I’m right, it’s God who is forming the Body of Christ and, if we don’t do our part right, God will continue rolling forward and crushing all who don’t learn to be part of the Almighty’s story—see the books of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah for details of the damage God inflicted on His own people when they refused to move properly with that story which is this world. (There are good insights in those books, although the views of even Isaiah and Jeremiah were necessarily local and simplistic compared to modern understandings of our world.)
In any case, God will eventually raise up those with a broader and deeper understanding of our world, including even our political entities. It’s quite possible God is doing this now even as those in the mainstreams of human civilizations move along, sleepwalking?, with understandings of the world which correspond not to the richer and more complex understandings of spacetime or physical matter nor to the increasingly rich and complex reality of modern human communities.
The main point to take away is that a Christian people need to understand the world according to their revealed truths. This might not have been so obvious even in some of the writings of Aquinas because he was a Christian fish living in a Christian ocean. The ocean is increasingly non-Christian or even anti-Christian and the Constitution itself and the more general political constitution of the United States were shaped by men who were on their way out of the Christian story. The United States, as it currently exists, will itself be seen one day as a nation formed as part of the process of decay in the West.