By now it looks as if the sexual revolution has undone Christian fortunes to a far greater degree than the democratic one. Christianity came to terms with that as itself a Christian legacy, even if has thereby dangerously abandoned a deeper Christian ideal of mixed government.
In the case of the sexual revolution a similar critical sifting (Christian corporatist-personalist modification of democracy) has still to be made. In what ways was the sexual revolution Christian (all you need is love) and in what ways anti-Christian (cult of selfish desire)?
Pope Francis rightly insists that there are also issues of poverty and ecology the Church should be as concerned with as sex, gender and life. But this can also be an evasive retreat to less controversial ground. What stays and what goes re sexual rev has one day to be faced.
I would say controversially that while some aspects of the sexual revolution need to be accepted as valid (they already really are) that inversely Christians need to see that total acceptance of democracy went too far and endangered the primacy of truth (as Personalists saw).
The focus regarding sex needs to be unremittingly positive: encouragement of most people into what is right for most people: eventual monogamous marriage (of course between man and woman) and having children.
Otherwise we need a retreat from a legalism about everything else in this area which really the Christian laity has always intuitively seen as at variance with the surpassing of law by gospel and which came to a head in the 1960’s (despite the negative narcissistic aspects).
That naturally includes acceptance of homosexual relationships and perhaps their blessing in church. The denial that this is ‘marriage’ sufficiently sustains the Catholic realist sense that ‘sex’ in the full sense is something occurring between the two different sexes.
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Do I think that 90% of the pop including Catholics raising their families but using artificial contraception are thereby involved in intrinsic evil? Do I think that practising gay couples who live their lives well and generously are similarly involved? Simply, sanely, no.
But of course we are all of us involved in the legacy of original sin, which *does* actually affect sex in a specially crucial manner. But the meaning of that, as Donald Mackinnon saw, is that sin lurks are the heart of apparent good, takes us unawares, is tragically elusive.
Just because the totally autonomous secular is a mistake and engenders disaster does not mean that everything novel that appears in this sphere is automatically wrong or not covertly still working through Christian implications. Discrimination is always needed.
Speculative and very tentative thesis (comments welcome):1. The deep structure of Christian doctrine (Ericsmann) is ‘reciprocal realism’ of essences and things: seen regarding Adam and his sin/Trinity/Christology. 2. Medieval ‘realism’ derives from this (Ericsmann, Marenbon).
3. beyond Boethius Eriugena seems to extend this to Creator/Created relationship. He actually fuses Aristotelian universals schema with Platonic flux from Ideas schema. Does not keep these levels discrete only seems to (contra Ericsmann and Marenbon). Hence Uncreated/Created God.
4. Thierry of Chartres (influenced by Eriugena) then expresses this as enfolding in essence, unfolding in things on mathematical quadrivium models. Applied at levels of genera and species but also at level of emanation from God. 5. Cusa takes this over from Thierry.
Of course it is Edward Feser who is heterodox and not DB Hart. Apparently he believes that eternal good and eternal evil have equal metaphysical weight and reality. Since he was not Zoroaster Jesus will have assumed everyone around him knew that.
We are indeed still living out the irony that with Vatican 2 the Catholic Church finally came to terms with the French Revolution just at the point where a second and bigger cultural revolution was beginning which only validated negative liberty and a given, disenchanted nature.
It should be no surprise that this left liberalism quickly gave rise to unrestrained capitalism and runaway exploitation of a now desacralised natural world. Of course speeding up processes long in existence.
Thoughts on empire:1. All political power us ambivalent. Vertical violence of ‘the state’ tends to limit horizontal power between people and between tribes. There is new oppression, but also a measure of new peace and unity.
2. ALL political formations are ambiguous like this: a strong family conquers weaker ones to make a tribe; strong tribe weaker ones to make a kingdom. Then strong kingdom weaker ones to make empires etc.
3. Not only is this vertical violence nonetheless the deliverer of a certain if not fully real peace (Augustine) but it is also linked to the quest for universal truth in China, India, Greece and Rome.
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.