In one of his novels about the American Empire, Gore Vidal quotes the American-English novelist Henry James as claiming, circa 1900, that it was the United States which was corrupting political systems around the world. The Irish political scientist, William E.H. Lecky, wrote in the 1890s of the great divide in American morality, the citizens being so generally well-ordered in their private lives and the (caucus- or machine-controlled) politicians being so corrupt at least in their political activities. The French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote in the middle of the 20th century of American politics being dominated by machines which select politicians of weak moral character because their job is to help the machine-bosses to deliver the goods to clients. Those bosses can’t afford politicians in their systems who have enough moral character to vote the interests of their constituents or of the entire country, let alone traditional understandings of moral truths, because that might not serve the clients of the political machines.
So far as I can tell, the American political system is corrupted beyond repair and that raises serious questions in my way of looking at this world as being a physical world ordered to some purpose or purposes of God. As a Catholic Christian trying to make sense of the totality of Christian revelation and empirical knowledge, I see the world as having been created for the purpose of allowing the Son to make of Himself a willing and trusting sacrificial lamb for the purpose of learning obedience and showing His love for the Father. Given this particular world in which this drama of self-sacrifice took place and especially given the incarnation of the Son as a man, the world is also ordered to the related purpose of allowing the birth and development of the Body of Christ. This world is a womb for the Body of Christ which will come to healthy and perfect adulthood in the world of the resurrected. In this world, developments seemingly analogous to diseases and cancers and parasitic invasions can occur. Is the American machine-controlled government a parasite which should have never have been allowed to attach itself to the body republic? Was it once a legitimate organ which has gone cancerous? Is there another analogy more appropriate?
But what of the individual human beings in whatever regions or organs within the Body of Christ as it develops on Earth?
Regions or organs? Let me speak in general terms first before hinting of some great complications, and greatly interesting complications.
Individual human beings aren’t simply absorbed into the Body of Christ as in a science fiction movie where they, or alien beings, become entirely enslaved to some sort of collective. Those who are saved will remain individuals and yet will be one Body of Christ as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remain individual divine Persons and yet are one God.
One real-world implication of my worldview is that it’s likely, certainly more than possible, that there are a multitude of organs in this developing Body of Christ. I doubt the Church is the entirety of this Body though She is the organ which is the linked to God in specific ways and thus the most important of the organs. Yet, I believe there will be organs in the Body, even in the world of the resurrected, which will correspond to a variety of needs and talents, many of which the Church has nurtured in various ways over the centuries and yet are mostly independent of the Church. Complex human relationships will continue to exist in the Body of Christ. In this way, we will apparently differ from the relationships of the Persons of the Holy Trinity.
Let’s follow the organic metaphor implied by the Body of Christ and especially by the nature of the Body of Christ as a union of the Head, Jesus Christ, with those who belong to Him. Organs which work against the health or even the formation of the Body of Christ would be the equivalent of tape-worms or cancerous masses or infectious bacteria or viruses. Yet, as I’ve said before: there are various needs of human beings living in communities and governments of some sort seem to fit the bill. Just because there will be no enemy countries in Heaven doesn’t mean there won’t be any need for human beings to engage in some purer and more abstract form of politics.
I’m sure the language of organisms will be part of my final results but I’m vaguely imagining organisms, including ‘abstract’ organisms formed of concrete organisms, which will have aspects needing more powerful descriptive language than that drawn from our knowledge of human beings and human societies at the purely concrete level. The traditional languages used in the modern West to describe human political and social and moral activities are themselves expansions upon the languages inherited from thinkers who had not, for example, seen anything analogous to modern industrial economies or the complex of modern research universities.
I’m planning to develop a language partially drawn from modern physics. To tighten this summary a little bit: I envision that the Body of Christ, and maybe many lesser groupings of individual organisms, exist partly — maybe even largely — in regions of Creation more abstract than the granite structures of Washington, DC. They would also have relationships which exist in regions of more abstract forms of being. Describing the Body of Christ in terms which are enriched by what we now know of Creation will require the application of abstraction best explored so far by mathematicians and physicists.
I’ll return to my perhaps eccentric discussions of particular political and social and moral issues, though I’ll soon be putting up for free download a fairly long and complex novel — my first (finished around 1998) but in storage since it was ignored (even SASE didn’t guarantee a response to us lesser folk) or rejected by publishers in the mid-1990s. I mention this because the novel is, in part, an experiment in integrating some of the insights of modern science into our language and our thoughts. I also mention it because writing such works should be a sign that I’m not developing a politics solely for the afterlife but rather an understanding of human political needs and possibilities that might help us to solve some of our current problems.
I’ll never tire of reminding people that the great thinkers of the past, Plato and Augustine and others, responded to new knowledge of the world rather than just shuffling about well-established ways of looking at, say, possible forms of human polities. As one example, there seem to be no political forms of organization in our tradition catalog of possibilities in which power and responsibility are in proper balance for a technologically advanced human race with a population in the billions. Yet, our political reformers and political philosophers, even those who claim to possess moral imaginations or something of the sort, can do no more than return always to that catalog and try to solve serious problems by degreasing a cog or by painting a dial. Similar but more complex statements could be made about our forms of social organization and our ways of structuring our moral lives. The complexities are of a sort analogous to those of modern physics, leading to the need for speculation and disciplined theorizing but making it pretty much impossible that there is any way of replacing what might be called the ‘Aristotelian catalog of political possibilities’, as one example, with a similar set of political schemas. I’m not suggesting we build a new catalog but rather that we respond to reality but respond to it by serious, hard thought which will lead to good abstractions from particular empirical situations.