"Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism" by Juan Donoso Cortes – Book
1, Chapter 1 Reflections
I don’t pretend to go into reading Donoso Cortes’ magnum
opus with any expertise – I know virtually no Hispanophone literature of the
time, with my knowledge of “conservative reaction” being defiantly Anglophone.
But I got a POD photocopy of McDonald’s translation, so here we are.
I’m going to write a summary of each chapter as I understood
it, plus some notes on specific points. I think these will be useful in
cementing my learning, at least. God willing this’ll be of use to others!
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Donoso quickly establishes that this work is polemical, in
the sense that it is polemos, war;
rhetorical war, but war, and therefore direct and aimed at “destroying
obstacles” (2 Corinthians 10.5). This first chapter, I take it, has two
rhetorical aims: to establish theological truth as grounding any other truth;
and to establish the Roman Church as the receptacle of ultimate theological
truth. The obstacles he immediately sets himself up as seeking to destroy are
any sort of indifferentism and, consequently, any opposition to the Roman
Church. This presumably will form a strong subject of the book as a whole.
Donoso does not seek to establish some other first principle
and from that infer that theology “embraces all things”, as he puts it. His
chapter summary is “How a great question is always involved in every political
question”, and he seeks to establish this in the very first paragraph. He wryly
quotes Proudhon discovering that theology is involved in politics, before
simply frankly stating that theology, as “the science of God”, “embraces all
things”. This is a statement of pure necessity – if theology is the science of
God, then ipso facto it embraces all
things.
This is not
beggaring the question. Any presuppositionalist argument necessarily states as
fact its first principle, because without the first principle nothing else can
be comprehensible. Van Til put it this way: “we reason from the impossibility
of the contrary”. As the self-evident only explanation for the universe is God
(thus, say, St Paul in Romans 1), there is no need to prove this beyond the statement of its self-evidence. This Donoso goes
on to state in a hymn of praise of (in this translation at least) real beauty.
All truth is in God and apprehended through God. Donoso
infers from this that where faith diminishes, so does truth. There is not a
separate autonomous mode (perhaps given by God, perhaps not) where someone can
simply know truth. Yes, Donoso says, God does by common grace preserve some
portion of truth to those who do not believe; but even here there is
necessarily “the extravagance of the human intellect” in the sense of
decadence, of autoolatry, of self-deception precisely through great knowledge. Ages of great knowledge without God are “less
luminous than inflamed”. Ultimately, these great ages of wisdom are greatly
deceived, greatly lacking in truth.
This plainly applies to political questions, too. Political
and social science, Donoso says, are not independent things; they are at best
descriptions of theological functions. “Man in his weakness distinguishes what
is united in God in the simplest unity.” Secularism – including the secularism
of many sincere Christians – is ultimately a category error. There is no realm
of “the world” opposed to the realm
of God (no Non-Overlapping Magisterium). The secular priests of the medieval
church, one might say, were in the world (saeculum) on behalf of God;
the secularist priests (philosophers, mock-scientists, political thinkers) of
the modern age are of the world and against God.
“Theology, in its most general acceptation, is the perpetual
subject of all sciences, as God is the perpetual subject of all human
speculations.” Everything is ultimately theological. Politics, as Proudhon was
perplexed to discover, is always theological.
With this established Donoso turns to the second of his
summary arguments – that the highest receptacle of theological truth is the
Roman Church. He does this, intriguingly, not by mere statement, but by a sort
of theory of religions. He draws out – in high rhetorical style – the chief
features of what he sees as “Eastern” and “Western” religion. Eastern religion
is austere, wise, meditative, transcendent, silent; Western religion is heroic,
earthy, immanent, harmonic.
Pre-Christian Rome is where the two meet, via the Etruscan
religions – it has gods, but it has austerity. Pagan Rome is where the true insights of pagan religions meet; it
is already the centre of the world, even though it never conquered India or China,
because it has approached closest to true understanding. “From Sparta she has severity; from Athens, culture;
from Memphis, pomp; and grandeur from
Babylon and Nineveh. In a word, the East is the thesis, the West its
antithesis, and Rome the synthesis.”
But this is all upset by a revolting blasphemy, a bizarre
inversion, a Child born in a Stable. Jesus may have been acceptable if merely “political”,
promising liberation for Israel, but He was also ethical, calling for the
toppling of proud hypocrites. And so Caiaphas – the high priest of true
religion – and Pilate – the representative of lawful authority, the
representative of the centre of the world – came together in judgement. Donoso
argues that Pilate’s propensity to mercy is actually an action out of ignorance
– he thinks Jesus merely “religious”, where Caiaphas rightly understands that
Jesus is ultimately political, will ultimately doom the political settlement of
Rome and Judea and everywhere else. Indeed, this finds some backing in the
Johannine telling of the Passion, and Caiaphas’ true prophecy there. Pilate –
open to exercising mercy, but ultimately “immortal type of corrupt judges” –
goes along with this. Jesus is crucified, and “everything as at rest for a
moment”.
But then signs and wonders multiplied, Jerusalem fell,
disasters struck Rome, Kings paid obeisance to the Cross – this is how Donoso
ends the chapter. But what happened to produce this? “Nothing . . . only some new
theologians are going about the world
announcing a new theology.”
Book 1, Chapter 1
Quotes and Miscellany
“Theology, inasmuch as it is the science of God, is the
ocean which contains and embraces all sciences, as God is the ocean which
contains and embraces all things.” – Theology, the Queen of the Sciences!
“This explains why, in proportion to the diminution of
faith, truths diminish in the world . . . The diminution of faith, which
produces the diminution of truth, does not necessarily carry with it the
diminution, but rather, the extravagance, of the human intellect.” – Not a
contradiction in logical terms, but this seems a rhetorical weakening – except that
Donoso wants to point out that earthly wisdom does not equate to ultimate truth
or a virtuous mind. The extravagance is what produces the diminution.
“The adorer of the infinite substance is condemned to a
perpetual slavery and an infinite indolence; the desert will be for him
something more sublime than the city, because it is more silent, more solitary,
more grand; and yet he will not adore it as his god, because the desert is not
infinite.” – Of “Eastern religion”. We may niggle at the traditional cliché of
Oriental indolence, but the identification of the flaw of any pure expression
of the Vedic religions is precise. The concept
of the transcendent is magnificent, but alone it lacks two things: actual infinity,
and sociability. The Triune God is actually infinite, Creator not created; not
a concept but three Persons; adorable as God, not idea. Yet the Triune God is
also sociable, sociable in Godself but also by the Son’s Immanence as Christ.
“[Of Western religion:] In this multitude of cities and of
gods all will be disorder and confusion. Men will have in them something heroic
and divine, and the gods, something terrestrial and human. The gods will give
to men the comprehension and instinct of the great and the beautiful, and men
will give to the gods their discords and their vices. There will be men of
lofty fame and virtue, and incestuous and adulterous gods.” – The Eastern
religion, in this sketch, is magnificently static and silent; the Western
religion is music and dance, but only that, and so all falls to confusion. The
Western religion desacralizes the gods, as the Presocratics, Socrates, and
Plato all lamented. Yet it undeniably affirms the sociability necessary to
virtuous life, and endows human life with something holy, something heroic.
Donoso calls those who judged Jesus’ fate “the unprejudiced
and enlightened people of that age”, who would have forgiven Him a message of vague
spirituality with a hint of political liberation, but could not forgive Him His
message of spiritual liberation by penance, seeing as it made an existential
demand upon them. Here he obviously and openly targets contemporaries. (Spanish
Liberals, perhaps? Amongst many others.) The self-titled Enlightened, the
self-titled unprejudiced, are those who “suppress the truth” (Romans 1.18) to
hide their prejudices and their own obscurantism.
“ ‘Give to God what belongs to God, and to Caesar what belongs
to Caesar’ – which was the same as – ‘I leave you your Caesar, and I robe you
of your Jupiter’” – A lovely exposition, and a powerful insight. This concerns
the Roman tribute, and whilst Jesus did not rob any Law-abiding Jew of Jupiter –
they did not know him – His division of spheres necessarily topples Jupiter.
Though it was the Jews who saw Jesus as a blasphemer, it was the Roman gods He
truly blasphemed, if one can blaspheme a fiction.
