Fragment on Political Theology

(there’s a lot more of it, which is why I didn’t get to sleep until like two last night.)

Nothing’s hidden that won’t be revealed

No inner ring without an outward call

New York, Athens, Baghdad: all are healed;

Nehemiah’s built the City’s wall.

The City that our poleis had concealed

We’ll rule by gift-right, or not rule at all

The Language of Exile: excerpt from current WIP

The reaction of American conservatives of a certain stripe to Hispanics seems to parallel the reaction of German revanchists to Jews, and for a similar reason: they are what Ilan Stavans refers to as “native strangers,” internal exiles, who challenge our sense that we can make a polity here that fully expresses God’s kingdom.  They are a witness to the already-and-not-yet nature of our lives here; the fact that though we want our Best Life Now, God has promised our Best Life Later, with previews Now.

For whose sake does New York City exist?: Contra Quirk (with reference to a debate occasioned by Hannon/George)

Yesterday evening as I was trying to get off the internet, after a couple of (possibly misspent, lost-weekend style) hours trying to trace the debate in Public Discourse between Michael Hannon and Robert P. George about the question of the nature of the good of political communities,  Jack Quirk made the claim that New York City existed for my sake.  I called him a heretic and repudiated his idolatry; if he repenteth not I will tell the consistory on him.  He then claimed that there was no specific church teaching that said that New York City did NOT exist for my sake, but by that time I had had my dinner (an elaborate arrangement of salad and goat cheese and so forth, plus some cheap bourbon) so I just went to bed.

Today I am employing some of the copious free time I don’t have to elaborately refute Quirk’s position, and possibly talk a little bit about the tension between the equality of all things relative to their Creator and the fact humans are also appropriately subregents over that creation, and that if we are in Christ we are co-heirs to that creation and in some sense share in His authority.

Claim: New York City exists for the sake of Jesus Christ, not for the sake of Susannah Black.

Proof: Colossians 1:16-20:

16 For by him [Christ] all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Reflecting on this, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (not an authoritative document for me, but, I believe, authoritative for Jack) notes this as an occasion to reflect on God’s supremacy and on the equality/solidarity of all His creatures.  All have the same Creator, and all are “ordered to His glory:”

339 Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection. For each one of the works of the “six days” it is said: “and God saw that it was good.” “By the very nature of creation, material being is endowed with its own stability, truth and excellence, its own order and laws.”  Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness…

340 God wills the interdependence of creatures. the sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other.

344 There is a solidarity among all creatures arising from the fact that all have the same Creator and are all ordered to his glory:

May you be praised, O Lord, in all your creatures, especially brother sun, by whom you give us light for the day; he is beautiful, radiating great splendour, and offering us a symbol of you, the Most High. . .

May you be praised, my Lord, for sister water, who is very useful and humble, precious and chaste.

May you be praised, my Lord, for sister earth, our mother, who bears and feeds us, and produces the variety of fruits and dappled flowers and grasses. . .

Praise and bless my Lord, give thanks and serve him in all humility.

[that last bit is, I think, from St. Francis.]

Conclusion: New York City, then, as one of the things in creation, like fruits and grasses and water and humans, exists to glorify God, and is one of the things “on earth or in heaven” which Christ died to reconcile to God.  It does not, therefore, exist primarily for my sake.

I therefore call on Jack to apologize to God and accept His forgiveness.

However, it is also true that aspects of the created order exist for humans: if the former truth is the basis of solidarity, this truth is the basis of subsidiarity.  There is a hierarchy of being, and the relationships within that hierarchy are themselves part of creation and themselves exist to glorify God and publicize things about Him.

But if I get into that I’ll never get my other work done today, especially since I was just distracted by an absurdly long conversation with a pantheist in this coffeehouse where I am typing, a conversation which began because I overheard him talking about Mondragon and which passed through a discussion of bitcoins, the theories of Jane Jacobs, and the nature of history.  And which ended with me agreeing to try to meditate for ten minutes every day this week (after praying that God would make that meditation about Him,) if the pantheist would, every day, ask God, in whom he does not really believe, whether Jesus is actually God.  A good bargain, I think.

Garden City

What this symbolizes=what we’re heading for, I think. This fusion of nature and culture, where the tree (cultivated rather than completely wild) is at its heartbreaking peak of beauty, and the buildings in the background are not in conflict with the natural world, but highlight its beauty.

Across the Reservoir

The Upper East Side as a Vision of the New Jerusalem, basically.

Hipsters at Play, West Village

Well, kind of more like neo-hippies, actually. Note the juggling and the hoops. It was just like Northampton!

Planet of the O’OD

The unfortunate truth:

I’ve been hanging out on an email list with some Reformed types who are discussing the political theology of Anglican writer Oliver O’Donovan.  Whose name someone just, for the first time, abbreviated to O’OD.  Which I could not see without thinking about the creature pictured above.  Which may color my view of O’Donovan’s take on the appropriate relationship between Church and state from now on.

Not unrelated: Seems to me that Doctor Who is actually the perfect anti-Star Trek in terms of its own political theology.  Rejecting the goopy pomo UN-style cultural marxist imperialism of the Federation, the Doctor embodies the opposite of the Prime Directive.  He ALWAYS interferes, ALWAYS sees in the common personhood of all alien species a requirement of relationship.  He can’t stand apart.  And because he is a Time Lord, he has the best possible aristocratic sense that it is his business to care for the weakest in the universe, to right wrongs.  And he constantly searches for ways to not pull the nuclear option, to avoid genocide even of the Daleks, to quarantine where necessary, but to seek redemption and reintegration of even the most hostile species into the community of creatures.

His superpower isn’t time travel.  It’s the ability to see personhood where it exists; to love the good; and to see it as his business to seek it.

NB: The image above is a BBC screenshot.  I hope this counts as fair use.