There is no more fundamental task that lies before us than a self-conscious effort to recover the meaning of politics, civilization, and the soul for this (or any other) time. Not politics as a diabolical realm of power-seeking and “domination” rooted in will-to-power, but the “ruling and being ruled in turn,” as Aristotle called it, made possible by the uniquely human capacity to speak and reason about “the advantageous and the just.” If politics is unthinkable without conflict, it is defined above all by the enduring and humanizing imperative to “put reason and actions in common.” Politics so understood is at once light years from the violent mastery that defines despotism, the metaphysically mad dream of a “solution” to the human condition at the heart of all revolutionary and utopian temptations, and the anarchist and libertarian reverie that freely associating individuals can escape the arduous requirements of moral and civic virtue, debate, and disputation. Politics rightly understood is not reducible to morality. It is at the same time incompatible with frenzied moralism and all ideological projects to move beyond truth and falsehood, good and evil. If politics isn’t identical with ethics, it is an essentially moral enterprise.
By civilization I have in mind that state of human flourishing where ordered liberty is tied to law and self-limitation, and where progress in the arts and sciences, and in economic productivity more broadly, is accompanied by a sober appreciation of human imperfection and the fragility of all human achievements. Civilized human beings must combine a certain confidence in the ability of human beings to govern themselves, and to achieve great things, with a pronounced appreciation of the sempiternal drama of good and evil in every heart and soul, and even of the fragility of civilization itself. In authentic civilized existence, reformation must be tied to conservation, in Burke’s famous words. Civilized human beings should never succumb to the allure of some revolutionary or ideological “Year Zero” where all will be made anew. That is the path of political and spiritual perdition, of murderous negation. The Kingdom of Heaven, in decisive respects, is not of this world.
We “thinking reeds,” as Pascal called us, have no identity, dignity, or capacity for thought or action without the human soul. To deny it is to deny our access to self-knowledge and a common world. “Nothing-buttery,” the reductive explaining away of the soul as nothing but matter in motion, free will and consciousness as nothing but illusions of “folk psychology,” and God as a superstitious projection of infantile fantasies, gravely distorts reality. It is also a recipe for personal and civilizational self-destruction. As Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy both asked with consternation, why do modern intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers take such pride and pleasure in explaining away their own powers of ratiocination? Creatively exercising the remarkable powers of the “angel” in man, they are delighted to proclaim themselves nothing but “brutes.” That, too, is the path of spiritual perdition. It is anything but realistic and “scientific,” whatever its scientistic dogmatists say.
To be sure, there are differences of some importance between these two men and thinkers. Scruton is more concerned with saving the residues of high culture and our inherited tradition; Manent with renewing the possibilities of human action and practical reason. Scruton owes much to Kant and Burke; Manent to Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and (with important qualifications) Leo Strauss. One is unmistakably English; the other strikingly French. As partisans of the self-governing nation, and of the plural civilization that is the West, that is exactly as it should be. In this case, an American will do the mediation.
Manent and Scruton are also profoundly countercultural, and not a little courageous, in their openness to the wisdom inherent in the Christian religion. Both are philosophers who treat religion with some circumspection and with a great deal of respect. In his latest book, “Pascal et la Proposition Chrétienne,” to be published by Editions Grasset in the fall of 2022, Manent emphasizes the radical impoverishment of collective life and the human soul that occurs when spiritually complacent men and women forget “the most high and urgent question that the rational animal” that is man is capable of posing, the question of God, inseparable from “the Question” of “the meaning and urgency of life.” Late modern man confuses the Christian proposition that forgets neither Adam’s sin nor Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, with a complacent belief in human resemblance and self-sufficiency, and in egalitarian politics separated from any need for Divine Grace to save man from his incorrigible sinfulness. Compassion and sentimentality replace charity. A naïve and facile faith in human unity or brotherhood substitutes for faith in God and demanding care for the soul. Cheap grace, indeed, and bad politics to boot.
Scruton’s engagement with Christianity is perhaps more qualified than Manent’s. Scruton oscillates between a defense of the “sacred” rooted in the life-world with an openness to the transcendence glimpsed “at the edge of things.” But in the face of man, which strikingly reveals the reality of personhood and the soul, Scruton sees intimations of God himself, “the face of God” who informs “the soul of the world.” Scruton could not imagine a truly reasonable account of the human world that reduced “the holy, the forbidden, the sacred, the profane, and the sentimental” to something other than themselves. In the Anglican liturgy and the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper, Scruton saw sacramental access to a holy realm where the true meaning of sacrifice, repentance, forgiveness, and communion with God are more fully revealed. In them, Scruton saw “a purifying rite” and “a visitation of the transcendental,” as he put in a luminous 2016 lecture (“The Sacred, the Profane, and the Desecrated”) at Westminster Abbey posthumously published in the Summer 2021 issue of The European Conservative.
In the study that follows, all this will be explored and more. Against the dominant spirit of repudiation, we will rediscover the path of affirmation. Against ideology and moralistic fanaticism, which is the frenzied side of moral relativism, we will see humane political reason at work. Against atheism, whether fervent or indifferent, we will see what is entailed in genuine openness to the Good—and God. And in contrast to the regnant religion of humanity, with its facile cosmopolitanism and failure to engage the breadth and depths of the soul, we will see how moral and political philosophy can allow us to recover all the resources of the soul.