Roman Catholic Political Philosophy
By Fr. James Schall
Published by Lexington Books
Hdbk, 209 pgs., index, bibliography, notes
ISBN: 0-7391-07745-3

THE DEVIL SEEKS TWO THINGS: FIRST, TO ROB THE CHRISTIAN OF HIS JOY,
AND, SECOND, TO ROB GOD OF THE WORSHIP DUE HIM.
– Martha H. Cheeks, in conversation, March 14, 2006

Philosophy in the age of post-modernism has run out of gas. What started with a great deal of exuberance in the seventeenth century has devolved into the sputtering, stammering, and mumbling of odd inanities by certain distraught sophists and intellectuals about “the end of history,” and the sanctity of skepticism. Fortunately, for the unwashed, it is not quite time to descend into the slough of despond� — chuck it all as it were — for dwelling in the Platonic city is a humble priest/philosopher who not only enjoys quaffing a few brews and engaging in philosophical debate with the working class, but also forewarns potential students that they shall “attend class on assigned days, including Fridays, and enjoy it.”

The gentleman in question, Fr. James Schall, professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, is a no-nonsense, old school Jesuit, given to a deep and perfervid love of God, and a prodigious interest into the great philosophical questions. He has written numerous books and countless essays, magazine articles, reviews, and columns. We are fortunate to have him among us, he has been given the gift of wisdom and he has used his gift in the service of the Lord perhaps best illustrated by his latest book, Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.

Fr. Schall explains that the wretched failure of modernity is predicated on the establishment of a philosophical premise devoid of reason, reality, and a false understanding of human nature, to wit “…the modern hypothesis (is) the effort exclusively to explain ourselves to ourselves by ourselves with no need of anything but ourselves.” In other words, the philosophers of the Enlightenment project sought to replace revelation with the wisdom of man and believed that in time rationalism, pragmatism, and moral relativity would produce the “New Man,” the “Heroic Man.” Sadly, their hopes and ambitions came to naught. In excluding revelatory explications, the “Righteous City,” they gave rise to pernicious ideologies, what Lord Acton referred to as “despotic theories,” best exemplified by the history of the twentieth century and the slaughter of 150 million in war, pogroms, and state sponsored oppression, which does not include 40 million innocents sacrificed to Molech.

Any objective accounting of contemporary philosophy indicates that it has failed to solve the fundamental question, what is. Rationalism, the eldest child of the Enlightenment project, has failed to live up to the high expectations of secularists everywhere. Political philosophy has become, at best, the skeptic’s redoubt, at worse, the nihilist’s hemlock.

Fr. Schell’s thesis is “a non-polemic essay” on political philosophy and its relationship to Roman Catholic revelation. His book is comprised of eleven chapters, each of which addresses “the interrelation of reason, revelation, and political philosophy.” And, while it is an educational experience for the autodidact and armchair philosopher, there will be those academics quick to condemn his thesis. But for those secularists Schall states categorically, “I do not maintain, be it noted, that political philosophy must lead to revelation, or even that revelation must make its relationship to reason and experience so evident that no one could doubt it. I do hold that some relationship is remarkably plausible, but not so intellectually compelling that the connections cannot be disputed or doubted.”

In gathering his intellectual and spiritual ammunition, Fr. Schall counts heavily on Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Aquinas to establish a base of argument. Among the moderns he is most influenced by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, whom he sites as philosophers� who were able to comprehend political philosophy as a “matrix discipline” that “recognizes its relation to the past of philosophy and at least reflects the impact of revelation on its very nature.”

Philosophy, then, is the art of conversation, of speaking, and it is also a search for the truth, to “seek the knowledge of the whole.” However, Schall reveals a danger to the philosopher, that in speaking the truth he places his life in the hands of the politician and, he reminds the reader that both Socrates and Jesus Christ were executed by the “best regimes” of their time.

One of the more refreshing and significant attributes of Fr. Schall’s writing is that he does not mince words, nor does he obfuscate his position. As an example, in the chapter titled, “The Philosopher’s Study of Political Things,” he writes, “Nothing guarantees virtue but philosophy, the philosophy of what is. It is quite possible, to find an example of the sort of situation Socrates anticipates, to have, say, senators, who are even Catholic, who go to church, but who still vote, with all sorts of rationalizations, pro-abortion, that is, implicitly vote to eat their own children.”

Political philosophy and the Christian religion are separate things, yet in order to address the great questions there must be a higher concinnity. Revelation, “which has premises in reason, not just will,” keeps political philosophy from declining into unreasonableness, a “violated morality,” the corruption of wrongs into rights. “The role of Christian philosophy,” Fr. Schall writes, “in politics, at its briefest, is to prevent such a post-human order of things from coming about by demonstrating, in contrast, the truth of right order.”

The danger to political philosophy is that in abandoning revelation it becomes a closed, autonomous system and thus open to a pernicious and debilitating corruption, error, and a profound disorder as witnessed during the twentieth century. It is this poison that infects post-modernity.

In his chapter, “Worship and Political Philosophy,” a work of sublime genius, Fr. Schall posits the question of our age, “…I want to inquire whether, once the outline of the act of worship is set down in revelation, whether the reason why modernity has been in such turmoil is because it sought and could not find an alternative to it?”

Roman Catholic Political Philosophy is a work of great depth, insight, and beauty. It is an exegetical masterpiece, written with a profound erudition surpassed only by a salvific message that gives hope to those that seek the truth, that seek the Christ!

Roman Catholic Political Philosophy is available on Amazon.com.� A paperback version is due for publication in July.