Where to begin? Perhaps only in England does one still find intellectuals holding to the Victorian agnostic belief that ‘Christianity destroyed classical civilisation’. Over 100 years of scholarship has showed how from the outset it preserved it. Unlike Islam, bar Gk philosophy.
Next: because of his brilliant critique of Livy and Cicero etc Augustine has already answered Machiavelli in advance. If one does not realise this, then one has not read the Civitas Dei properly.
In fact Machiavelli was not just a neo-pagan in his theology (the *real* reason for his politics, not his supposedly brilliant realism) but also a sub-pagan because he was a post-Christian. He knew one can only refuse the Xn heightening of virtue by abandoning it for power.
Thus for M everyday Christian morality was just a kind of convenience. The real higher cult was of amoral power serving a sub-pagan God of power. His virtu was not virtue but collective autonomous freedom requiring strength.
It is only true, as John Gray declares, that the survival of one’s state or nation must dispense with all normal notions of justice if one thinks of the state as like a liberal autonomous individual writ large and of its raison d’etre as divorced from value.
But no one thought like this before Machiavelli. And he did not think like this because of his empirical realism but because of his invention of a new kind of proto-liberal republic polis based solely on its own claim to self-rule and nothing else.
Maybe there are anticipation of this in ancient sophistry and stoicism and then jn Livy, Cicero and especially Tacitus. But M brought this to a new height of explicitness.
Thus in recommending Machiavelli as counter-liberal, John Gray instead reveals that he is himself a liberal. Liberalism IS a pessimistic creed, a foundationalism that begins (mythically and unrealistically)with the pre-political merely power-seeking individual or group.
Nor, as Gray says, is liberalism based on the absolute autonomous individual and human rights secularised Christianity. No, it derives from a distorted Christianity that substituted a cult of individual will for the holistic and relational person central to doctrinal orthodoxy.
By now a hundred plus scholars have shown that liberal individualism stems from drastic mainly Franciscan alterations of Christian teaching in the Middle Ages: from Alexander of Hales through Bonaventure and Scotus to Ockham. Both reformers and counter-reformers sustained them.
The Machiavellian notion that the highest thing a state or individual can do is exert a Male (sic: vir to virtu) partial control of unruly people and passions is the paganism Augustine after Paul and Plato critiques: elevated passion, desire or Eros is possible.
To be sure, only communities beyond the state — religious orders, lay orders, universities, guilds — can achieve more an order based on perfected desire and consensus rather than coercion. The state had to compromise: punish people, fight wars.
However Augustine argues that the test of a just state is whether it promotes social association protected and consummated by the church that goes beyond coercion and is founded in a more perfect agreement. Was this Utopianism? No: western history has enacted just this!
Augustine’s belief that the semi-just political city should orient itself to the higher purposes of charitable and peaceful associations is *exactly* what has generated (beyond pagan antiquity) the unique western space of civil society and plural self-governing corporations.
Not a fantasy: our real history! In this context the Enlightenment is only an important footnote: it sustained and even improved some of the Christian legacy but it also distorted it by building on the poor theology already mentioned: thus excess liberalism and utilitarianism.
Machiavelli was one of the first ‘modern’ rebels against this Medieval corporate order that Dante supported and wished to renew. He elevates anarchically just the independent city. Church thought of too much in terms of pure power and the the independent ‘state’ will follow.
Again, surely it is only in England today that one could dismiss Plato as ‘mystical’. That strange representative of a deeper and older English culture, Alfred North Whitehead instead knew that all western philosophy is a ‘footnote to Plato’. It is pretty much literally true.
So Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Cusanus and Althusius yes as inspirers for postliberal thought. Machiavelli no. He *was* a proto-liberal. Those names should all be on Capel Lofft’s Reading list. Plato’s realistic Laws, not his teasing (though crucial) Republic.
