"Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism" by Juan Donoso Cortes – Book 1, Chapter 1 Reflections

"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.