"Quid est veritas?"

On May 5, I posted a blog regarding Lyotard and his notion of "differend." Continuing on that theme, it ought not to astound us that we are not understood by our contemporaries. Our Lord was similarly not understood by the religious authorities and the civil authorities of His day. He was shunned by the Sanhedrin in the person of Caiphas. He was shunned by Rome in the person of Pontius Pilate. They did not speak the same language. They did not share the same "rule." They were not on equal ground, and so it was forseeable that Christ would be condemned by law. Christ's presence before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate was not a "litigation," but it was a "differend."

In Georges Roualt's "Christ Before Pilate," the poignant scene of the Lord before the Roman Procurator is the French painter's subject. Christ bound by Roman law, is before the representative of Roman law. Pilate is dressed in the judicial robes of red, not unlike the judges in France at the time of Rouault's flourishing. Horrible irony: the author of Law and the fount of Justice is before the dispenser of human law, and He goes unrecognized. The positive human law, and the human judge of that law, has forgotten the source of his authority. He has forgotten the source of his authority, even when he is reminded of it by the Lord. "You would have no authority over me, unless it had been given you from above." (John 19:11) The message does not register, because Pilate has power, and this message is not one that is received by power, or enforced by power, but it is enforced by conscience, the listening to that still, small voice in the human heart which is easily supressible. We must render to Caesar the things that are Caesar, and render to God the things that are God's. (Matthew 22:21) But in the final analysis, all things are God's, since Caesar would have no authority, unless it came from God. In our contemporary world, Christ's message once again goes unheard. It is as though we are Christ before Pilate. Though our fundamental documents presuppose that God is the author of our laws and the source of our government's power, in practice our modern political and legal systems presuppose the opposite. That is why, in a complete disregard of the Natural Law, the State can arrogate to itself the power to define who is human. That allows it to decide who lives and who dies, chosing to defend the life of those who are outside the womb, but letting those that have not yet travelled through the birth canal die. That is why the State has the gall to suppose that it can define marriage in a manner that is against the Natural Law.

Rouault shows no face upon his Christ, and this is fitting. Christ is a victim; he is unrecognized by human law and the human judge. He is no man. He is no God. Certainly the Divinity of the Lord is entirely outside the possible frame of reference of Pontius Pilate. He senses that the man before him has no guilt, but this sense is not strong enough to overcome his practical habit. Pilate is, above all else, a pragmatist, one wholly insensitive to the things of the spirit. It is Pilate's pragmatism, his blindness to things transcendent, his inability to see (much less embrace) Christ, that allows him to issue the unjust sentence against his own God. That is why Rouault depicts Pilate faceless. The man who has misused his power and misused the law to effect the highest injustice has made himself inhuman. He no longer has a human face. By not recognizing the Holy Face of Christ, he has made his own face unrecognizable. Anything human has been rubbed off. Human law and its human dispensers, will only be human--will only have human faces--if they recognize the Lord and recognize His Law.

Summus Hythlodaeus

RAPHAEL HYTHLODAEUS is the protagonist in St. Thomas More's Utopia, and his discussions with More in this hard-to-place work fits in with the notion of Lyotard's notion of "differend." In Book 1 of More's Utopia, the groundwork is set for the philosophical discourse in Book 2. Book 1 is largely composed of a dialogue between Morus (the Latin name for "More") and his friend Peter Giles and a traveler named Raphael Hythlodaeus. The name Hythlodaeus is derived from Greek, from a combination of hythlos (idle talk or nonsense) and daiein (distributor). Hythlodaeus is therefore a sower of nonsense, a buffoon. Hythlodaeus' first name, Raphael, is obviously refers to the Biblical archangel, Raphael (רָפָאֵל), the meaning of which is "It is God (El) who heals." Raphael is "one of the seven, who stand before the Lord," Tobit 12:15, and he is regarded as the angelicus medicus, the healing angel. It is Raphael who, in the deuterocanonical book of Tobit, advises Tobias to catch a fish and use its liver to cure his father Tobit of his blindness.

In More's Utopia, Hythlodaeus, a man just returned from travels that took him to Utopia, and Morus and his friend Peter Giles who find themselves in Antwerp, engage in dialogue with him. Entertained by this man's experiences and knowledge of other societies and their political and economic systems and their laws, they suggest that he ought to become counselor to the king. Hythlodaeus rejects such overtures.

During this conversation two world-views confront each other: Morus and Giles represent the conventional European 16th century view, while Hythlodaeus represents the Natural Law view that prevails in the Island of Utopia. (See R.S. White, "More's Utopia," in Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 109.) "The debate" between Hythlodaeus and Giles and Morus "really takes us right into the heart of the clash between Natural Law and positive law in the sixteenth century ...."

What is striking about this debate is the fact that while Giles and Morus and Hythlodaeus engage in a superficial factual dialogue, they seem unable to understand each other, much less communicate or persuade each other. True engagement is prohibited by Giles and Morus's ideology, which deafens them to Hytholodaeus, though they are entirely oblivious to their deafness. They are deaf twice over. "The real problem [Hythlodaeus] faces in his attempts to persuade 'More' [Morus], or at least enlighten him, is that 'More' and Giles are victims of this ideological blinkering, through an upbringing which immerses and infects them so thoroughly with certain values, that they take these to be truth itself and can see no further outside their constructs." (White, 114.) They are shackled by what Blake called "mind-forged manacles." (White, 115. quoting Blake's poem "London"). What is true for Morus and Giles is true for the entire citizenry:

"Now don't you suppose if I get these ideas and others like them before men strongly inclined to the contrary, they would 'turn deaf ears' to me?

'Stone deaf, indeed, there's no doubt about it, I said, 'and no wonder! To tell you the truth, I don't think you should offer advice or thrust forward ideas of this sort that you know will not be listened to. What good will it do? When your listeners are already prepossessed against you and firmly convinced of opposite opinions, what can you accomplish with your out-of-the-way notions? This academic philosophy is pleasant enough in the private conversation of close friends, but in the councils of kings, where grave matters are being authoritatively decided, there's no room for it.'

'That is just what I was saying,' Raphael replied. 'There's no place for philosophy in the councils of kings.'

'Yes, there is,' I said, 'but not for this school philosophy which supposes that every topic is suitable for every occasion.'"

"This exchange," White suggests, "brings to a crescendo the debate as an exemplification of ideological misunderstanding, the impossibility of a meeting of minds." (White, 114.) Hythlodaeus is resigned that he "cannot cure others of madness by raving himself," and recognizes that his interlocutor Morus is bound, even imprisoned, by his attachment to convention and a failure of imagination. The mental chains are so stiff that Morus cannot even hypothesize a way of life that is "antithetical to his own ingrained fiction." (White, 115.)

The Catholic Christian faces the same conundrum that Hythlodaeus faced in his dialogue with Morus and Giles. The witness of a Christian, informed by the Scriptures and the Church's Magisterium, is foreign, impractical, utopian to the modern Moruses and Gileses around us that have absorbed the secular and neo-pagan conventions of the day. The body politic is, as a whole, vehemently inclined against the Gospel. "Stone deaf"--surdissimis are the institutions of our government--our legislatures, our courts, or public media--to the principles of Christianity and the Natural Law. We speak a language, an idiom that is no longer understood. It is as if we speak in a pitch outside the range of our contemporaries' range of hearing. And their deafness is a serious impediment to reform, to real change, as it is they who are in power and they who cannot be challenged. They cannot be persuaded, they must repent. And that is no longer our work. That is the task of the Holy Spirit. Veni Sancte Spiritus ...

Lyotard's "Differend" and this Blog

IT IS ODD PERHAPS to begin a blog entitled "Lex Christianorum," or Law of the Christian People, with Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of the "differend." After all, Lyotard was a post-modernist, ultra-leftist Socialist, and not by any means, at least by confession, a Christian. He denied any "Grand Narratives," and I would suppose this would include the "Grand Narratives" of the Old and New Testaments. However, there is a reason for the reference to Lyotard. He was a fierce critic of the Enlightenment project. Admittedly, Lyotard engages the Enlightenment and its failures from an entirely different angle than critics of a more traditional vein, such as Alasdair McIntyre (also a fierce critic of the Enlightenment, but whose vantage point is decidedly Aristotelian/Thomist). And, given his perspective, Lyotard arrives at conclusions, proposes solutions, and advances radical political agendas different and unacceptable to the Catholic Christian. However all that may be, it was Lyotard's notion of the "differend" that set me to thinking, and resulted in this blog.

In his The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Lyotard states: "As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments." (p. xi) He explains: "[A] differend [is] the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. . . . A case of differend between two parties takes place when the 'regulation' of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom. . . . The differend is signaled by this inability to prove. The one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps the same one, is reduced to silence." (p. 9-10) This concept is not limited to judicial conflict, but political conflict as well.

For some time now, the Christian has been on the legal, political, and cultural defensive. American legal and political institutions have become increasingly secular (which is falsely touted as "neutral"), and, under the guise of being "secular," anti-Christian. Our civil society, and its fundamental institutions--marriage and the family as prime examples--have become corrupt and subject to the most virulent attacks. Even the right to life (one should think the most fundamental of all rights and one which the government has a preeminent duty to defend), has eroded. The "right" to abortion (which is a "right" to kill, no more and no less) has advanced to the point where some have called it a modern sacrament (v. Ginette Paris' The Sacrament of Abortion.) This spurious "right," like so many others with a shallow and questionable heritage, has certainly become stitched into the fabric of our most fundamental law by way of Roe v. Wade and its progeny.

It has become increasingly apparent to me that we are rapidly approaching that point where the Christian is being robbed of his ability to engage, to participate, to contribute to the democratic political process or have his voice heard through reliance on the Rule of Law and the judicial process. We have come to a point, of long time coming, where there is no longer a "regulation" or a "rule of judgment" applicable to the legal or political arguments of the day from which a Christian may be heard. Christianity and its legal and moral capital has largely become spent or has been abandoned in the breach, and, at least in the foro publico or public forum, the Christian vocabulary is no longer recognized as valid idiom. Similarly, the Natural Law, which was so prevalent at our Nation's founding (one need only take a cursory glance at Justice Wilson's writings or Jefferson's Declaration of Independence to recognize the how the Natural Law tinctured the whole fabric of our fundamental and positive laws), has been banished from the halls of our academe, the assemblies of our legislatures, and the chambers of our courts. As a result of a long process, the legal and political idiom is no longer Christian, nay, not even authentically human; and so in the political and legal conflicts of the day, Christians--and men and women of good will and right reason--are effectively reduced to silence. Christianity and Christians are the new victims. In the words of Lyotard, they have been ushered from being parties in a "litigation" to being parties in a "differend."

This blog will contain musings on the Christian Law and the Natural Law, and will address the philosophical, cultural, and historical processes of how we got to the point where Christians have lost an effective voice in the legal and political discussions of the day (unless Christians speak as non-Christians, but if they use the non-Christian idiom of the day, the evangelical witness is neutralized and their loss in the public debate assured). It will explore the theoretical possibility (and the practical prudence) of advancing the notion of a "law of the tribes" under the umbrella of a "law of the peoples" as an answer to a pluralistic society where there simply seems to be too little to bind us a one people, and where the institutions that were intended to bind us as one people have either failed, have been hijacked to serve other purposes, or for one reason or another have become inimical to a life of virtue, and an authentic Christian life. Which is another way of saying, from an Augustinian perspective, that the "pursuit of happiness" may no longer be ours by right in the City of Man. As Genevieve Lloyd summarized the Augustinian teaching in her recent book Providence Lost : "No one escapes from justice except into unhappiness." (p. 143) Christians and men and women of good will will not be happy, will not flourish, in a society which has become institutionally unjust.