Can We Keep It?

235 years ago today, on March 4, 1789, our current U.S. Constitution went into effect  (which is why presidential and congressional terms of office began and ended on this date until the 20th amendment changed those dates). Just two years earlier, at the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, Benjamin Franklin had supposedly been asked what kind of government the new constitution had created. His now famous response was, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

If you can keep it. Franklin's rhetorical question has acquired a renewed salience in recent years. Perhaps not since the American Civil War in the 1860s has the answer been more in doubt.

In the unique path that American history has followed from the founding, the classical republican tradition was especially dear to the founders, every bit as dear as (maybe more than) the liberal-capitalist tradition inherited from John Locke and the other usual suspects of the Enlightenment conspiracy against traditional communitarianism. The republican tradition has long emphasized citizenship and citizen virtue. Self-government requires citizens who take citizenship seriously. That means that they take community seriously, which is always in tension with the Lockean liberal capitalist individualist tradition, which at its worse degenerates into libertarianism but which remains somewhat problematic even at its best because of its valorization of the individual over the community. 

The civic republican tradition has long contrasted republic citizen virtue with corruption, and I think it is really hard to understand the U.S. Constitution and the debates surrounding it without that context. Certainly, one can hardly read The Federalist Papers outside that tradition. What does the civic republican tradition have to say about the disordered values and disordered priorities of our present-day politics?

Also, although the Constitution did not create an explicitly Christian republic and indeed specifically sought to preclude an official religious establishment, the U.S. was from the outset (and certainly since the Second Great Awakening) very much a kind of Christian republic. Of course, even before the First Amendment explicitly outlawed a federal religious establishment, article six specified no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. That said, one of the great examples of American exceptionalism has been the seemingly successful (at least until recently) harmonious combination at the cultural level of the classical republican tradition with religion. Thus J.G.A. Pocock famously observed in his Introduction to The Machiavellian Moment: "that the revival of the republican ideal by civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described by Aristotle was to receive its fulfillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment." (The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton University Press, 1975). 

Hence John Adams' famous formulation: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Between that and MAGA's moral and religious corruption, there can be no common ground. A fortiori, what our second president said about citizens' moral and religious virtue applies as much as and more so to would-be leaders. Hence the famous White House Inscription, taken from a letter Adams wrote from the White House in 1800 to his wife Abigail (and eventually engraved on the State Dining Room mantlepiece in FDR's time): “I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.” 

Unfortunately, getting back to Franklin's warning whether or not we can keep our republic, former President (and present presidential candidate) Donald Trump has tested all the norms of civic republicanism, has pushed them beyond their limits, and in the process has brought us to the brink of one of the founders' great fears that (as befell republics in the past) ours would fall eventually prey to a non-civically-oriented demagogue. Even if Trump loses and the nation is saved from a catastrophic second Trump term, enormous damage has already been done to our political culture, to elections, to the rule of law, to the presumption in favor of the peaceful transfer of political power, and to the U.S. as a serious, trustworthy ally.

And that, sadly, is how it seems on our federal government's 235th anniversary!

A Road Map through Life's Desert

 

Today’s Gospel’s account of an angry Jesus at war with the Temple’s money changers is a familiar one, which has had influence far beyond its original setting and significance. Almost a century ago, on March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated the 32nd President of the United States. Everyone remembers his famous line about the only thing we have to fear. That same speech also included the following words: 

Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than monetary profit.

 

In retrospect, FDR may have spoken too soon, too confidently about a future from which the money changers seem never to get completely evicted. But, in an era much more religiously literate than our own, he could at least be confident that almost everyone would recognize his reference to the story told in today’s Gospel.

 

The “cleansing of the Temple,” as it is often called, was certainly provocative. It may have been one of the principal provocations precipitating Jesus’ eventual arrest and execution, which would certainly add significance to our retelling this story during Lent.

 

Around 20 BC, King Herod the Great had begun a grandiose renovation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, making the Temple, which since Solomon’s time had been the central site for Jewish worship, one of the most impressive shrines in the ancient world. It was the ultimate “stimulus package,” one of the largest construction projects of its time.

 

In the process, however, the classical, pagan model of a temple as a cultural, commercial, and social center seemed to creep in from the surrounding culture. Jesus’ strong reaction to the various activities taking place in the Temple precincts perhaps reflected his fidelity to the more traditional Jewish idea of what the Temple was all about, which got him into trouble with the Temple’s priests (known at that time for their more accommodating approach to secular society).

 

In effect, what Jesus was fighting for in the Temple was Israel’s core national value – faithfulness to God alone, God who had made Israel a nation and given it his Law, transforming a semi-nomadic mob of ex-slaves into an actual nation.

 

Like that exodus generation, we too are wanderers in life’s desert, desperately in need of direction. We may wander far and wide, with only the vaguest idea at times of where we may be heading. Along the way, however, God has given us the roadmap we require – the familiar one he gave the Israelites in the desert – what Jewish tradition refers to as God’s “10 Words” and which we commonly call his “10 commandments.”

 

The 10 commandments constitute the core of the Law that was God’s gift to his people. The key to understanding the 10 commandments is contained in how God identifies himself in the very 1st commandment: I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me. The Lord himself, the Lord who has shown himself to be God by liberating his people, is the rationale for this and every subsequent commandment.

 

The 10 commandments spell out in daily life the consequences of becoming God’s people. Moral living is our response to God’s covenant with us, our cooperation with the plan God has been pursuing through all of human history – from creation to Christ, from Christmas to the end.  In our moral lives we reflect our gratitude to God and our commitment to remain faithful for the long haul.

 

According to an ancient legend, at Mount Sinai God made the wombs of all of Israel’s women as clear as glass – so that all future generations could see for themselves what was happening and personally commit to the covenant. I suppose that’s pretty poor biology, but it’s a great image! It makes the important point that the commandments are addressed to each of us individually, which is why they are phrased in the singular. (Those of us above a certain age will certainly remember having learned them in the singular form – “thou shalt … thou shalt not.”). We are all each responsible to respond to God with what we do and the way we live.

 

As our road-map through the desert of daily life, the 10 commandments constantly call and challenge us to commitment and fidelity:

- commitment and fidelity, first of all, to God, who has revealed himself to us, above all, in Jesus his Son;

- commitment and fidelity to God’s world, which God has entrusted to us and which we have individually and collectively managed to make such a mess of and done so much damage to;

- commitment and fidelity to one another, our companion wanderers in the desert, whom we have been commanded to care about and to care for, whether we like it or not, whether we like each other or not, both when war or economic hardships make us more conscious of our shared condition and common need, and in times of peace and prosperity when wealth and security tempt us to go it alone and leave others behind;

- commitment and fidelity, finally, to God’s holy Church, by being part of which we are united with one another in Christ’s body, the true and eternal Temple, and become God’s people in this world.

 

Commitment is never automatic, and fidelity doesn’t come easily or cheaply – not for the folks at Mount Sinai (as so many subsequent episodes in Exodus illustrate) and not for anyone else either. But the commandments teach us that the fast food of individual fulfillment and personal autonomy just can’t compare with dining with one another in God’s kingdom.

 

For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

 

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, Grand Rapids, MI, Saturday, March 2, 2024.

 

Leap Year

 

Every fourth year, our otherwise predictable, relatively repetitive civic calendar does something just a little bit different (albeit predictably so), which makes me think that today, February 29 - this extra day we have every fourth year, every "Leap Year" - should always be a holiday! (After all, why should labor-extracting employers be given the benefit of an extra day's labor by their employees, just because this happens once every four years?)

"Leap year," as anyone who cares already knows, was first introduced into the ancient Roman calendar by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. Originally, Caesar intended a"Leap Year" to occur every fourth year,  which was what happened until the introduction of the reformed Gregorian Calendar in October 1582. Caesar's reform, while presumably an infinite improvement over whatever the Romans had been doing with their calendar before, was nonetheless slightly off, so much so that by the 16th century the Julian Calendar was about 10 days off, The Gregorian Calendar, which we now almost universally use, corrected Caesar's calculations by omitting 3 leap years every 400 years - e.g., not adding the extra day in 1700, 1800, and 1900, but doing so in 2000 (As a result, the Julian and Gregorian calendars are now a full 13 days out of sync.)

For reasons that made more sense to an ancient Roman than to us, Caesar inserted the extra "leap year" day in late February - duplicating the sixth day before the Kalends of March, which in the Roman way of computing dates was February 24. (February 23, the seventh day before the Kalends of March, was the pre-Christian Roman feast of Terminalia, devoted to Terminus, the god of boundaries, temporal as well as geographical, which may perhaps explain Caesar's choice of the following day.) Hence, the Latin term for "leap year" is annus bisextilis, i.e., a year in which the sixth day before the Kalends of March occurs twice. This curious term for what in English we call leap year is as a result common in all the Romance languages, for example, “anno bisestile” in Italian.  

In the pre-conciliar Roman liturgical calendar, the sixth day before the Kalends of March, February 24, was celebrated as the feast of Saint Matthias. But in a "leap year," when there were two sixth days before the Kalends of March, Saint Matthias was celebrated on the second of them, February 25. Sadly - and to no noticeable advantage to anyone - the present, post-conciliar calendar reassigned Saint Matthias to May 14. So another quaint survival from liturgical antiquity was gratuitously abandoned.

Be all that as it may, we still have this oddity of "leap year," which gives us a February of 29 instead of 28 days and means that for the next 12 months every date will fall two days of the week later instead of the usual one. (Hence the term "leap year.") 

In my ignorant youth, I very foolishly embraced the project of an artificial, invariable "World Calendar." Having long ago recovered from the ultra-rationalist folly underlying the proposed "World Calendar," I can now better appreciate the charm of having so much variety in our actual calendar! (The Second Vatican Council wisely poured cold water on the proposed "World Calendar" with its caveat that, when it comes to any alternative calendar system, the Church has no objection only in the case of those systems which retain and safeguard a seven-day week with Sunday, without the introduction of any days outside the week, so that the succession of weeks may be left intact.)

Not surprisingly, all sorts of popular folkloric customs have developed over the centuries in regard to "leap year." There is, for example, the British-Irish tradition (dubiously associated with Saint Brigid of Kildare, whose 1500th anniversary has been celebrated this very month) that a woman may take the initiative and propose marriage to a man in "Leap Year." 

I don't know what to make of that curious concession in today's very changed society. But I still think this extra day should always be a holiday!

Freud's Last Session (The Movie)

 

I used to go to movies much more often. Now I seldom see new films. Finally, however, one 2023 movie which I have been really wanting to see has recently become available for rental via YouTube. Freud's Last Session, based on an earlier stage play of the same name, depicts a fictional meeting between the founder of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and author C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) on September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, and just 20 days before Freud's own death. 

Dr. Freud, of course, had escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna a little over a year earlier thanks to the efforts of various friends and allies (notably Dr. Ernest Jones, U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt, and Princess Marie Bonaparte). It is known that Freud did meet with an unidentified Oxford don near the end of his life. That could possibly have been Lewis. We will likely never know, but the opportunity for this fictionalized account obviously suggests itself. (Given the extent of Friend's then terminal illness, one wonders how vigorous a conversation could have taken place in September 1939, but again this is fiction.

The storyline of the film is that Freud, a long-term Jewish atheist, and indeed one of modernity's most effective exponents of the case against religion, objected to Lewis' rejection of atheism in favor of Christianity; and so the two met to debate the question of the existence of God. In the course of their discussion, other subjects also arise, among them Lewis' own lingering traumas from his childhood and from  World War I. Meanwhile, we also get to meet Freud's famous daughter and child psychologist Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), on whom Freud was very obviously dependent at that point. We also meet her lesbian partner, Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), a relationship in constant conflict with Freud's possessive attitude toward his emotionally dependent daughter. Despite the film's title and its implied emphasis on the debate between the two men, much of the film focuses on Anna and her complicated relationship with her father, who had famously abandoned the canons of psychoanalysis in analyzing his daughter himself.

The opening scenes set the stage in the context of the panicked atmosphere in London on the first official day of war, including an air-raid warning which at one point causes the two men to take refuge in, of all places, a local church, where Freud correctly identifies the statue of Saint Dymphna, patroness of the mentally ill. Otherwise, most of the men's interaction takes place in Freud's London home, within which Anna seems to have done her best to replicate their Vienna home, and which reflects Freud's long-term interest in religious artifacts. Indeed, he describes himself as "a passionate disbeliever, who is obsessed with belief and worship, ancient beliefs and worship, yours [Lewis's] included."

Freud was, of course, a dying man at this point, which adds further pathos to the story and its seemingly unresolvable debate about God. "Death," Freud acknowledges, "is as unfair as life." Freud's life represented the ideal of scientific rationality, which just cannot make room for religion, no matter how interesting it may find the pre-rational in human existence. Lewis, for his part, asks in exasperation, "Why does religion make room for science, but science refuses to make room for religion." His question remains unanswered, on the screen as in real life.

In the end, the two men part - presumably as friends. but the religion question remains unresolved, as it perhaps inevitably is in this life. Both men remain essentially unchanged, which may be the film's honesty and its virtue.

Two Years of War

Exactly two years ago today, Russia, under its current Orthodox Tsar Vladimir Putin, launched an imperialist aggressive war against its European neighbor Ukraine - the first such imperialist aggressive war on European territory since 1945. Under the leadership of President Joe Biden, the U.S. and NATO originally responded effectively. Since then, however, MAGA isolationism and a general societal fatigue with "forever wars" have imperiled that response and endangered Ukraine's long-term survival prospects.

As if a reminder were really needed, the death of Russian dissident Alexei Novalny has further reminded the world what a monster the current Orthodox Tsar actually is - and by extension how serious the threat Putin's Russian imperial expansionism poses in the immediate term for Ukraine and in the longer term for the rest of Europe. 

The religious component of the conflict may be too complicated to sort out here. However, there is much to be said for Tim Alberta's observation: "Russia wasn’t merely using Christianity to endorse its ambitions. Russia was using Christianity to define its enemies. It was the kind of identitarian programming that presaged some of history’s greatest crimes—and, in the case of Russia’s butchery in Ukraine, it would not have been possible without the blessing of the Church." The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins, p. 236).

Since 2014, Ukraine has lost about 18% of its territory to Russia's imperialism (about 7% before the current war and about 11% more since this war began). In this terrible two-year war, some 130,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed, or wounded, or are missing. Meanwhile, some 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have also been killed and some 25% of the population has been displaced. While Ukraine has never really been "winning" the war, there was a time when it looked at least as if Ukraine were on the offensive. Now that illusion has been dispelled - as may be the illusion that the United States is a reliable ally, After delaying four four full months the President's request for military aid to Ukraine, Congress has taken two-week vacation. So much for any sense of urgency about the government's business!

In the "second-guessing" game that inevitably follows any major conflict, it may well be that the Biden Administration has been too slow in supplying needed weaponry to Ukraine out of  (possibly reasonable, possible misplaced) fear that Ukraine might use the weapons against Russian territory and thus "escalate" the war. Whatever the reasoning was, a mistake may thus have been made in the pace of American military aid. (To be fair, of course, there was reasonable doubt at first that Ukraine could resist effectively. There would have been no purpose sending large amounts of weaponry, only to have it fall into Russian hands. However, Ukraine's willingness and ability to resist were quickly established. And taking the conflict to Russia's homeland was a wise strategy, at least from he Ukrainian perspective, regardless of American nervousness about "escalation.")

What the Biden Administration did do very well was to mobilize European support behind the defense of Ukraine. Europeans, having frittered away the post Cold War "peace dividend" and having for far too long relied too much on the U.S. defensive umbrella, were finally fully awakened to the degree of threat posed by Russian imperialism. Russia's neighbors - Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland) know from their long history what a dangerous enemy Russia inevitably is. So their awakening seems to have been more complete and effective. Of all of this war's ironies, Putin's goal of undermining NATO led instead to Sweden and Finland joining NATO and the overall strengthening of that indispensable alliance.

The problem now is not Europe but the U.S. - more precisely the Trump MAGA dominance of American politics and stranglehold over Congress. Thanks to Trump's envious admiration of Putin and his hostility to NATO and thanks to the slavish subservience of the Speaker and his Caucus to Trump, the U.S. may be on the verge of an irresponsible abandonment of its international obligations analogous to its abandonment of its international obligations after World War I. And we well remember how that story ended!