I have been reading The Theocons by Damon Linker, former editor of First Things, conservative journal of Fr Richard Neuhaus. The book is a history of the theoconservatives, the intellectual leaders of the religious right., such at Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Michael Novak. It deals with how the ideology and ideologs of the Christian right have developed. Linker demonstrates how the base of their ideas is conservative Roman Catholic thinking. He connects the ideas with the current pope as well as the previous one. Linker also shows how this ideology is opposed to the separation of church and state and in favor of a Catholic Christian commonwealth.
Anyway, what strikes me is the conversion of Neuhaus from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism and the priesthood. By so doing, Neuhaus clothes himself in the magisterium of Holy Mother Church and so puts on the official teaching authority of the Church, and so he teaches magisterially and officially. Good career move.
What’s so important to the theocons about the Catholic commonwealth is that there is a set and certain order. There’s no room for dissent; you can win every argument satisfactorily just by knowing the “party line.” What powers the party line is logic, well, reason and rationality, and a kind of blind, and blinding, trust in rationality alone that seems to me almost fanatical. But then, I don’t trust in rationality, and certainly not in rationality alone. It strikes me that within the limits of its system it could have been rational for Hitler and his ilk to have done the Holocaust. It followed from their premises. But that’s ridiculous. The premises were thoroughly immoral.
The theocons talk about moral reasoning, and having been trained by Jesuits in moral reasoning, it can be tempting to just have a line of reasoning to follow. But we also need to have a sense of, well, the ridiculous. I remember the business of the punctured condom. It’s how you collect a sperm sample for fertility analysis without imposing a barrier to conception. So when we came to our study of the birth control encyclical, I made the argument that since no form of birth control is 100% effective, and none of the methods are a barrier to conception, but only render it highly unlikely, so all methods of birth control are licit. It’s that sense of the ridiculous that we need to bring to all of reason and rationality. Reason is not sufficient. It often seems cold and inhuman.
I’m glad I’m an Anglican. For Hooker, reason is less that systematic Enlightenment rationality, and more the everyday sense of life as it is lived and reflected on, everyday understanding of everyday events.
I guess we have to find the limits to reason.
I have started rereading Hooker’s Lawes.