St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics  -Pt 2

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher.  This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. It appears in three parts.

 Moral Reasoning in Extreme Circumstances  (continued)

§1.  Lying   (concluded)

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection 

Part 2

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

III      Finding a Home in Baton Rouge

Our relations with the Voegelins took a special turn in the summer of 1944, when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts: as in many summers, Eric was working in the library at Harvard. During their absence from Baton Rouge, the rented house in which they had been living was leased or sold out from under them, this in accordance with a wartime regulation that permitted the dispossession of occupants if the premises were then to be occupied by the owners or members of their family.

This must have been another severe blow to people who, after the troubles that led to their flight from Austria, might have felt they were beginning to get a foothold in America. They evidently felt that they could not contest what amounted to an eviction. It would have been costly; as "foreigners" (though naturalization was imminent, they had not yet gone through it) they would have been at a disadvantage in a legal dispute; and Eric desperately needed all the time he could get at Harvard on materials unavailable at LSU. Had they made the long and expensive trip back to Baton Rouge, they might not have been able to find other rental housing. Apparently the only solution was to buy a house, provided a suitable one could be found for sale. At this point they phoned us and asked us to buy a house for them, that is, to find one for sale, commit them to buying it, and perhaps put down (I'm not sure about this) some earnest money. This was a forbidding assignment; picking out a house for someone else could never be easy, and for people of the Voegelins' fine taste it seemed close to impossible.

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH -Part 4

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth," Chapter 3, appears here in four parts.

The Hollowness of Liberal Construction (concluded)

The notion that we are in possession of a means of evaluating truth that does not involve our own inchoate struggle toward it is one of the great distorting conceptions of our world. "This belief in its ability to understand everything from human culture and history, no matter how apparently alien, is itself one of the defining beliefs of the culture of modernity" (385). It is evident in the conceit that all the richness of traditional meaning can be captured through our meager placement of them in museums, lists of great books, or under the impoverished rubrics of aesthetics. The governing assumption is that all historical wisdom can be absorbed in ways that do not fundamentally challenge the shallowness of our own world. The culminating expression of this approach is reached in contemporary deconstructionism, which no longer even regards texts as wholes and permits us to interpret them freely without any controlling reference to historical context or autho­rial intention.¹⁶

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher.  This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. This appears in three parts.

The Compatability of Personal Virtue and Politics

People hope and pray that their nation will enjoy peace, security, and at least a modicum of neighborly flourishing. They are willing to suffer and bear large amounts of corruption and injustice in the body politic until a time comes when measures are required to save the polity, and perhaps even the cause of justice in the world. Unfortunately, people in such dark times generally are least likely and least suited to save their polity; thus hoping for such action is like hoping for nature to act outside its usual course that would allow a corrupt body politic to decompose and die. Saving the cause of justice in the world and preserving political life requires unusually austere virtue. The devil tempted Christ with a kingdom over the world.

Can one preserve political life without losing one's soul by proclaiming oneself Caesar? Augustine is usually seen to think that one cannot preserve one's virtue, or at least that one can keep one's soul only if one follows the absolute rules of engagement as set by Scripture and by the Church. Taking extreme actions in extreme circumstances is forbidden because forbearance and submission purify the soul.

We will try to show that Augustine, though not denying the virtue of forbearance, thought that one can know the right and good, and act upon it, through right-by-nature, and that moral and political reasoning is not restricted to the application of universal rules to all circumstances. His treatment of political reasoning is considered where following the letter of the law would have disastrous consequences in rare extreme circumstances (lying, adultery, and tyrannicide and rebellion). What appear as exceptions to the absolute rule (based either on natural law or on God's commandment) actually fulfill the law's purpose.

from The Collected Works

Thomas More's Utopia and Unbounded Human Pride

[Note: This excerpt is taken from a long essay considering St. Thomas More's writings and personality.  The original should be consulted in order to appreciate its breadth, originality and  nuanced thought.  It strongly suggests the political and spiritual situation in Western civilization in this year 2010. —ed]

Superbia without restraint is More's accusation against the society of his time. The problem is fundamentally the same as that of Erasmus, but More's horizon is much wider. He recognizes the evil not only in the pleonexia of the princes but generally among all classes of the people; the lust for power and political aggrandizement is only one manifestation among others. For More's famous description of the state of England and of Western society at large, the reader should refer to the monographic literature, or better to the Utopia itself.

Let us only recollect the lords who, after a war, release their retainers who are unfit for regular work and a plague for the country; the landowners who drive away their tenants in order to convert their estates to sheep farming; as a consequence, the propertyless beggars who fill the country and live by charity, robbery, and thievery; the cruel criminal law that punishes petty thefts of hungry people with hanging; the degradation through whoring, drinking, and gambling; the rigging of the law in favor of the upper class; the brutal exploitation of labor, and the dismissal of the aged and sick, leaving them to starvation and death; the corruption of the court society and its loafing hangers-on; the machinations for war; the kings who are not satisfied with tending to the welfare of their own country but want to conquer a second kingdom that they cannot rule anyway; the degradation of the people through excessive taxes, and the king who is not fit to rule over free men; the complete absence of a sense of social obligation and of governmental duty to repair such evils by poor laws, reform of the criminal law, provision for hospitals, building up of a native industry that will give employment to the dispossessed tenant-farmers, and educational institutions.