Wow. I'm honored that my humble remark warrants a full-blown denunciation post.
You're tripping on semantics, Mark.
It's obvious that when a well-informed orthodox Christians makes the remark "War is the natural state of man," they are using the word "natural" in the sense of "fallen human nature".
Yeah, Mark. Sin is natural to man's fallen human nature.
Fine. You have a point about natural state of man verses the normal state of man.
But that does not warrant smearing Victor Davis Hanson as a "demi-pagan", whatever that means. VDH isn't an idiot, and he and Hobbes recognize that a fallen man is the normal state of things and that's going to lead to conflict and war in the normal course of events.
I don't see what your big complaint is. But I notice you leaped at the change to call someone you have political differences with a non-Christian. That's exactly what I expected.
"You're tripping on semantics, Mark."
Actually, he's not. He leapt at an opportunity to call VDH a pagan. I'd do the same thing if it were an abortionist we were talking about. But then, abortion is a little more black and white than merely supporting the war in Iraq. Unless, Mark wants to call Iraq war supporters like me pagan.
I won't presume to speak for Mark Shea, but if VDH is a "demi-pagan" than at least I'm in good company.
And Calvin? Umm...no. Try Plato, Mark. I don't give a fig about Calvin.
No, Sydney. I have close friends who support the war.
Mark wants to make clear that the statement "War is the natural state of man" is an expression of a sub-Christian pagan anthropology and is not something a Catholic can glibly affirm. The confusion of nature with the fall is one of the most elementary errors in theology and the source of numerous errors ranging from gnosticism to docetism to Manichaeism to Calvinism. It does not magically become good theology when Victor Davis Hanson says it, even if it makes for good war agitprop.
My suggestion to Catholic war supporters is to find a better anthropology (try a Catholic one) to undergird arguments for the war. I'm confident it can be done. But when it's not done, don't expect me to pretend that sub-Christian anthropologies are going to be ignored on a Catholic blog.
It's obvious that when a well-informed orthodox Christians makes the remark "War is the natural state of man," they are using the word "natural" in the sense of "fallen human nature".
Right. And that's lousy theology. Which is why I corrected it. Calvinism believes in a "sinful nature". Catholicism does not. A "sinful nature" is, for a Catholic, like donut that is all hole. The fall does not constitute our nature, it damages it. Nature is from God.
Mark, I see what you'e trying to say, but you're simply wrong to say that Catholicism does not teach "sinful nature"; our nature is not totally depraved as the Calvinists teach, but it is tainted nonetheless.
As well, have you ever heard of a colloquialism? You're acting like Al Franken when he called Ann Coulter a liar for referring to the endnotes in her book as "footnotes".
Quit tripping on semantics.
The "this is inevitable, it is the natural state of man, and even some bishops and clergy recognize the practical realities" mentality isn't limited in application to discussions of just war. Change a few words here and there and you have the same tired sort of argument about a different favorite sin.
Zippy:
Indeed. Odd that Eric doesn't apply it to those discussions. It's almost as though he has an ideological filter on.
Try Plato, Mark. I don't give a fig about Calvin.
Or perhaps maybe Leo Strauss, Flambeaux?
"It does not magically become good theology when Victor Davis Hanson says it, even if it makes for good war agitprop."
Because VDH isn't speaking with theological language, Mark. All "state of nature" political philosophy starts off as a thought expirement in human relations between man, not as between man and God. And in defense of VDH even further, he doesn't even attempt to engage in "state of nature" political philosophy, the realm of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others. VDH merely looks at the history of man, sees that there is little, if any, true "peace" in that history, and concludes that mankind is normally at war with each other more often than not. You ARE skewering him for a colloquialism.
Yes, the same word problems come about in a discussion of promiscuity. It's "normal" for men to desire lots of women. It's not "natural" for men to be promiscuous, however. But I wouldn't call a doctor who didn't understand or realize the theological differences in the words a "demi-pagan." I'd probably correct him of the point if it was pertinent to do so, however.
Demi-pagan... Sheesh.
VDH merely looks at the history of man, sees that there is little, if any, true "peace" in that history, and concludes that mankind is normally at war with each other more often than not.
I expect that that is a load of crap. If we added up all of the hours that all human beings have ever lived, and then added up all the hours that human beings have been actively engaged in combat operations of one kind or another, I expect that the second number would be many, many orders of magnitude smaller than the first number. When we look around we see plenty of car accidents, but we don't go on to claim that man's "natural state" is to be in a car accident. When we look around we see plenty of sick people but we don't say "to be diseased is man's natural state". We don't even say those things as factual observations, let alone as normative statements. Even just as a value-neutral objective observation of the world the statement "war is man's natural state" is a really dumb thing to say.
Catholics who say, "War is the natural state of man" simply prove the truth of Cardinal George's remark that "In America, everyone is a Calvinist, including the Catholics."
Hey! Cardinal George stole that from my Calvin professor at Harvard Divinity School, Professor Steinmetz. (He was also Edwin Tait's dissertation advisor at Duke.)
Professor Steinmetz could have had a second career on the Borscht Belt. He was one of the funniest guys I've ever known. His lectures, which were incisive and provocative, always contained a certain element of standup comedy. Plus, he was--and presumably still is--a great guy.
He, too, said all Americans are Calvinists. I think there's much truth in that. Especially in my native New England, where the Calvinist quest for religious purism has been transmuted into health naziism, the anti-smoking crusade, and so forth.
I also see the problem another way: I think a lot of conservative Catholics have bought the GOP party line wholesale--and uncritically. I fou8nd this to be distressingly the case during the recent immigration debate. So many Catholics I talked to seemed to dismiss the U.S. bishops' platform in favor of "Rush is right."
We need to realize that the Catholic Church is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party---or of any political party. JGG's and William's balanced comments in the thread below are instructive in that regard.
God bless,
Diane
Oops, sorry for abrupt break in the middle of above post. When I said, "I also see the problem another way," I was referring to the problem of Catholic warmongering justified by such statements as "War is the natural state of man."
BTW, I hate to have to be on the other side of an issue from Flambeaux and Sydney Carton, both of whom seem like terrific guys--I've enjoyed their posts over the years. But what can I say? Gotta tells 'em like I sees 'em.
Sydney:
My remarks were directed to *Catholics* who say such things. When they do, they are, quite precisely, allowing themselves to be made prey "by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ." VDH's human philosophy, in addition to being flat wrong about the facts, as Zippy points out, is but one more human philosophy that is ultimately inaccurate because it does not begin with Christ as its starting point and therefore concludes with a false anthropology. For a Catholic to buy it is to commit exactly the blunder Paul is warning about.
"VDH's human philosophy, in addition to being flat wrong about the facts, as Zippy points out..."
First of all, Zippy pointed out no such thing. He made an unsupported conjecture. (Do you always create facts from thin air this quickly?) In America, it's easy to suggest the unusual frequency of war, but in the ungoverned areas of the world (which was such for most of human history), war is a very, very common feature. And even amongst the "governed" peoples, war is frequent. How many wars happened in the 20th century alone? Here's a small list to get an idea (and notice the lengths of these wars too, some go on for decades):
http://www.militaryhistorywiki.o...i/Category:
Wars
Earlier historical records don't even chronical the frequent wars in Africa, also, so this list is extremely short.
Secondly, to my knowledge, I am unaware if VDH has a "philosophy" on human nature at all. Stating that war is "normal" does not mean you have a philosophy on human nature, it only means you're not a historical idiot.
I really think you're stretching here. You frankly don't know anything about VDH, and for all you know he could be an orthodox Catholic who faithfully believes in God. You're really going to great lengths to impute something that you have no support for, in trying to defend your initial insult against him. You made a good point about the wording of "natural" and "normal," but most people don't speak in such terms and so to continue to dig a hole to find ways to insult VDH is really sad.
I'm not imputing anything. Hanson argues that war is the natural state of man. Fans and enemies alike recognize that this is one of his claims. And it is, by nature, a philosophical claim.
Defend the claim if you like (and good luck), but don't pretend that Hanson doesn't make it.
I don't think it's an insult to call an idea "pagan". I think it is truth in advertising. Aristotle was a pagan and Thomas found much good in him. There may be, for all I know, much good in Hanson. But insofar as he, or any member of the right, claims that "War is the natural state of man" they are espousing a pagan philosophy of the human person that is in need of correction by a proper Catholic anthropology. War is *not* the natural state of man. Wars arise out of sin, as Scripture makes clear. And God is not the author of sin. Saying "War is the natural state of man" is identical to saying that "Sexual deviation and fornication is the natural state of man." If so, then it's no sin because God is the author of nature.
Somewhere in another recent thread someone advocates seizure of land by right of conquest.
It's against International Law, but I suppose that phrase is an oxymoron anyway.
But seizure of land by right of conquest makes me think of those two warring troupes of ape-men at the beginning of Kubrick's 2001. We're still back there, aren't we, two-legged apes bashing one another with clubs, only now we're clever enough to think up reasons to justify it.
"I hit you, take territory. Natural. Good."
Yahoos. Read the last part of Gulliver's Travels.
Pacem! Pacem!
I hope we are all on the same 'side' here.
Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
I hope that is the meaning of commenters that say it's the natural state of man. I think it is not. But, it seems war (as sin) is ubiquitous to all mankind. I am not a philosophist or theologist so I can't go further here. I am an accountant - numbers count.
My peculiar thought on 'proporationality': The prime example of disproportionality and targetting civilians was committed on 9/11 when 19 terrorists in two hours murdered 3,000 American civilians. That's evil. In 14 days of attacking military taregets (roads and bridges used to move missiles are considered targets) wherein Hiz. forced civilans to be human shields, the IDF has unfortuantely killed about one-tenth as many as 19 terrorists got in two hours on 9/11. Do the math.
I've seen in reports the IDF infantry is using tactics that minimze civ. losses while maximizing their KIA. If you think the IDF could not, if it wanted, have destroyed hiz. and everything on S. Leb that could threaten Isr. in the first three days, you have no idea about the firepower of a post-modern army and AF.
Hizbohalla has been committing mass murder for 25 years. That includes about 400 Americans. America never did anything to stop it - in fact after the worst mass murder, of 241 USMC peace keepers, the US cut and ran.
If Israel, in its use of heavy firepower can convince the terrorists that they cannot win and must seek peaceful means, then this war would be justified.
War is waged until one side loses the will and/or means to continue to wage it. Up to now, the terrorists have been led to believe that they may somehow outlast Israel and the US and that's why they keep at their mass murders. For nearly 60 years, the Israelis have tried the half-measures game. Maybe through massive firepower they can achieve a lasting peace.
"War is a crime. Ask the infantry. Ask the dead." Hemingway
I'm confused. Is the idea that "war is the natural state of man" Calvinist or is it pagan?
Mark Shea is exactly right about Victor Davis Hanson.
Dear Mark,
Your comments and analyses are like a breath of fresh air. Thank you.
In Christ,
The disturbing thing is how many above seek to pronounce on Mark's very perceptive antipathy for Hobbes and Hanson and modernist and postmodern philosophies which the Magisterium has told us time and again are not compatible with Catholicism and THE Capital T TRUTH.
For example, the attempt above to portray war and sin as "natural" to man, stems from the wholesale discarding of the Patristic and Scholastic clarification of the difference between "natural" and "co-natural".
Now doubteless, this clarification will be treated with hoots of derision, as unnecessarily complicated, and obsolete--but this just shows how little the hooters know about the history of thought, and yet still feel competent to pronounce on what's compatible with Catholicism.
Hanson, the Straussians and other "modernizing" classicists blow off the Scholastic development, and then consequently distort "natural law" (or "natural rights") for this very reason--that they don't understand or like "connaturality" and the Nature/Grace distinctions that Scholasticism elaborated.
But this is a long way around here saying that Mark, even though he hasn't followed out all the philosophical lines of thought, is right on, and his critics don't know what they are talking about.
First of all, Zippy pointed out no such thing. He made an unsupported conjecture.
I wouldn't say "unsupported". I would say "blindingly obvious". But if someone really feels the need to go do a study, approximate the total man-hours spent by all human beings living and the total man-hours spent by all human beings ever in combat operations, and actually compute how many orders of magnitude lie between them, then more power to them. I expect that even professional soldiers as a class spend orders of magnitude fewer hours in the actual prosecution of an actual war than they spend on other things. A doctor spends only a very small fraction of his own life sick. It isn't "the natural state" of man to be either sick or at war under any reasonable conception of "the natural state of man".
This Hobbesian state of nature nonsense is just a partisan rhetorical trick, obvious lunacy to every human being capable of making the most trivial of observations. Not to a mention heresy. Like many lies straight from the mouth of the Father of Lies it is breathtakingly obvious that it is a lie: it is pretty much impossible to believe it dispassionately. We can only believe it if we really want to believe it. VDH is a war historian, and he has been drinking his own bathwater for way too long.
"This Hobbesian state of nature nonsense is just a partisan rhetorical trick, obvious lunacy to every human being capable of making the most trivial of observations"
Too true. Its just a ploy to escape the fact that the weight of Church Authorities are not compatible with you position.
"VDH is a war historian, and he has been drinking his own bathwater for way too long"
Again, true. His "analyses" of Classical Virtue is just an apologetic for discarding what more competant interpreters of the Classical Tradition (namely the Patristics and Scholastics) found incompatible with the Gospel, and what the Gospel corrects in our knowledge of the Natural Law
His "analyses" of Classical Virtue is just an apologetic for discarding what more competant interpreters of the Classical Tradition (namely the Patristics and Scholastics) found incompatible with the Gospel, and what the Gospel corrects in our knowledge of the Natural Law...
And thus, as Mark says, is pagan: not pagan in an "I like Plato" way but pagan in a "lets strip all of that pesky Christianity back out and head back to Athens" way.
You frankly don't know anything about VDH, and for all you know he could be an orthodox Catholic who faithfully believes in God.
Is he? I went googling for his religious affiliation. If he has one he hasn't seemed to go out of his way to make a public profession of it, or at least one that I could find by googling.
Mark (or anybody?),
Do you have a reference to Cardinal George's remarks. I've been arguing this for a while now, and I think Calvinism drives US foreign policy, but I would love to see what better minds than mine (Cardinal George!) have to say.
Josiah:
The answer is "yes". Trent condemned Calvinism as a resurgent Manichaeism. The tendency to identify nature with the fall is the key element at work here. Once that identification is made you can a) deplore nature (as a Calvinist does when he declares us "totally depraved") or b) make endless excuses for sinful acts as "the way God made me." Both Hanson and your average gay apologist are using strategy B when they bullshit us that "war/my homosexual acts are just an expression of my 'nature'".
If "war is the natural state of man" then Hitler did nothing wrong. He was just living out the warlike nature God gave him. That is the first and most obvious deduction from this piece of philosophical-sounding twaddle.
"Demi-pagan" is in fact a fitting descripion of VDH. In a presentation he gave at my campus, it was pretty clear that although certainly not hostile to Christianity, he is not a believer. Add to that his admiration for the Greeks, and "demi-pagan" is pretty apt.
Is he? I went googling for his religious affiliation. If he has one he hasn't seemed to go out of his way to make a public profession of it, or at least one that I could find by googling.
As I recall, his background is Protestant (as might be guessed from his Swedish name). In his writings, however, he repeatedly lists "secular rationalism" as one of the attributes of the Western civilization he thinks we should be defending, which indicates to me that he has bought into the Enlightenment view that would write off the Catholic outlook that prevailed in the Middle Ages as a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
But characterizing him as a semi-pagan seems spot-on. His moral thinking shows no signs of being influenced by any distinctly Christian insights, or by any philosophical outlook later than that of Marcus Aurelius.
Zippy: "pproximate the total man-hours spent by all human beings living and the total man-hours spent by all human beings ever in combat operations, and actually compute how many orders of magnitude lie between them"
And even during war, people have to sleep, right? So WWII really only lasted 4 years, not 6, because everyone involved was probably asleep 8 hours out of every 24!
Dr. Mabuse: well, when I said engaged in combat operations I was including in my own mind travel to and from the battlefield, sleeping, eating c-rations in the foxhole, etc. It seems pretty obvious to me that the point holds even if we are very liberal in interpreting what does and does not constitute combat.
Mark, for the last time: I said you had a point about the wording of "nornmal" verses "natural."
I went through your google search and could find nothing that indicates that VDH believes in some pagan way that war is the "natural state" of man. I went to NRO and did an article search on him, and could only find this as being approximately close:
"Now in our complacence, we think our recent safety was almost a natural occurrence rather than the result of national sacrifice and ordeal that must continue."
http://
article.nationalreview.co...GEzZDg3ZTM2MDY=
Please point me to something he said directly. I'll note that in the beginning pages of Carnage and Culture, VDH says this:
"I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wreched than, that of the non-West... I am also less concerned in ascertaining the righteousness of particular wars.... My curiosity is not with Western man's heart of darkness, but with his ability to fight - specifically how his military prowess reflects larger social, economic, political, and cultural practices that themeselves seemingly have little to do with war."
I don't think VDH makes the argument that war is the "natural state" of man. In fact, he makes the exact OPPOSITE argument: that war is often done out of efforts to obtain terrority, personal status, wealth or revenge, but that the Western way of war is distinguished from those because it is often an extention of the idea of state politics. None of those things are "natural" to mankind, Mark.
VDH also recognizes that civilization is an artificial construct that must be constantly defended in order to be kept working. VDH rejects the idea that safety and peace is a "natural occurrance" that would blossom like a flower absent any struggle to make it so.
So if we're going to talk about VDH, we should know what the man says, and not discuss a characterization of him invented by people who like to make political smears.
VDH never says that war doesn't arise out of sin. He says he is not interested in that kind of discussion, which is his right. He doesn't have to talk about what YOU want him to talk about. He acknowledges that there are moralities that underlie his discussions, and acknowledges that wars can be morally wrong or right - but again, that's not his concern. VDH is famous for arguing that the Western Way of War is the most lethal, and hence most successful, fighting system in the world. The morality of that, he leaves to others to debate.
Frankly, I'm going to need a quote before I listen to anyone's characterization of what VDH supposedly stands for. People on this thread have a history of transforming VDH, National Review, or the Right into their bogeyman and are prone to making sinful personal attacks on individuals without support.
Zippy: "It isn't "the natural state" of man to be either sick or at war under any reasonable conception of "the natural state of man"."
Nor did I say that. I only said that any idiot knows that wars are an extremely frequent occurrance in human history.
"This Hobbesian state of nature nonsense is just a partisan rhetorical trick..."
First, as I said above, I could find no quote attibuted to VDH in which he says he agrees with Hobbes that, as a theological matter, war is the natural state of mankind as opposed to a frequent occurrance. I couldn't even find a quote of VDH in which he uses the term as a colloquialism.
Second, I was unaware that Hobbes was a right-wing neocon on the payroll of the Trilateral Commission.
Zippy: "VDH is a war historian, and he has been drinking his own bathwater for way too long."
You've produced nothing to substantiate such an attack. Cite directly a source written by VDH which says what you believe him to say, or repent of your gross mischaracterization of his argument.
Zippy: "Is he? I went googling for his religious affiliation."
Thus we see a new low in the standard of charity to be delivered. Failure to find anything in google means we can smear someone as a pagan. Nice, Zippy. Really nice.
al: "His "analyses" of Classical Virtue is just an apologetic for discarding what more competant interpreters of the Classical Tradition (namely the Patristics and Scholastics) found incompatible with the Gospel, and what the Gospel corrects in our knowledge of the Natural Law."
Again, wrong. As I directly quoted, VDH is leaves the moral analysis of his findings to others. He says it is not part of his undertaking, which is his right. Calling it an apology for incompatibilities with the Gospel is a disgusting lie. VDH's ultimate point is that the west is the most violent, lethal system to go to war. If anyone wants to dispute that, go ahead, and you'll find yourself disagreeing with VDH. If you want to argue the morality of that finding, however, go ahead also, but you won't be agreeing or disagreeing with VDH because he says nothing about the morality of it.
Sydney:
Go back to the Google links. You will find that a number of people who manifest adore VDH understand that he is essentially endorsing the sentiment that "War is the natural state of man" (the quote comes from Hobbes, not VDH). You can play games about whether or not those exact words have been spoken, but the obvious fact is that VDH argues this (notably in the essay on Sherman, where he manifestly disagrees with the wussy modern notion that peace is the natural state of man). He's enough of a scholar to know he is offering this diagnosis of modernity in antithesis to Hobbes. And many of his admirers (indeed, *especially* his admirers) attest to similar sympathies, which is my point.
I can see why a Catholic would be uncomfortable with this pagan view, and it speaks well of you that you are.
Again, my remarks were provoked, not by VDH, but by the spectacle of a Catholic endorsing this increasingly-frequently-mouthed bit of pagan pseudo-wisdom. Your quarrel is not with me. It's with the Deep Thinkers at the Google link who imagine that VDH is heroically realistic for espousing such claptrap. If he means no such thing, it would be one thing if his enemies falsely attributed it to him. It's another thing entirely that his admirers do (and he apparently has made no effort to correct them). Not surprising, given his published remarks.
So: the issue here is not what a neo-pagan like VDH thinks. It's what allegedly educated Catholics think. A Catholic who mouths the statement "War is the natural state of man" is either a) ignorant of his Faith or b) a deliberate heretic. That's my point.
I've read Hanson's book on the Peloponesian War, which was a pretty good read and interesting to a non-scholar like myself. But he does appear to glorify Western military and technological prowess, and the West's social organization that, at least in the past, has contributed to the efficiency of military operations. He also seems somewhat over-eager to promote aggressive war-making.
The qualities that he glorifies have their social costs. Be that as it may, the pagan ethos was, as I understand it, essentially pessimistic,
Fate, crushing and indiffferent, ruled not only men but the gods themselves, if one still believed in gods. If the pagans had had bumper stickers, a popular one might hav read 'life's a bitch, and then you die.' Enjoy life, win fame and fortune before you have to check out.
One might as well go to war and enjoy its spoils, since endless oblivion is everyone's fate anyway.
No wonder the ancients opted for Christianity. There's not much to choose from between despair and hope, light and everlasting gloom.
Unless there are some young earth creationists out there on this forum, we all pretty much agree that humanity has been around far longer than civilization, writing, and written history. Thus we have the difficulty of the majority of human experience being without written records.
This makes proper research hard. A good thing that we don't have to do the hard research on war incidence because a recent book, "Before the Dawn" has done it for us. It argues that primitive man was incessantly at war.
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."
Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? ... We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
Assuming the (University of Illinois) professor is correct, it would be proper to provide this sort of information along with the condemnation of the idea that war is the natural state of man.
The reason for this is that it clarifies that you recognize and understand reality, that you're fully cognizant of how humanity works now and in the past, and that talking about all this as "natural" misses the point no matter how pervasive it was and is. The incidence of sin does not make it natural beyond a certain frequency of occurrence. This is why God did not look at Sodom and say "whatever" or "it seems all the kids are doing it these days, let's move on".
I do think that it is unduly harsh to start throwing out slurs like "demi-pagan" without getting a much better definition of what somebody means by natural. In the end, I think (I hope) that this is a linguistic fight and not one so much of active heresy.
I couldn't even find a quote of VDH in which he uses the term as a colloquialism.
I understand that he said in his book An Autumn of War. And even if it was said in a non-Hobbesian way it is still a dumb thing to say.
...that talking about all this as "natural" misses the point no matter how pervasive it was and is.
I agree. It is as stupid in every way to say that war is man's natural state as it is to say that disease is man's natural state.
TM:
The statement, as it stands, is heresy. As with most heretical statements, it is probably a well-meaning material heresy, spoken in ignorance, not deliberate defiance of Catholic anthropology. But heretical it is, nonetheless. Sin is not identical with nature. If it is, then Hitler was simply doing what God made him to do.
Mark,
It wasn't in your google links, but I found this:
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat...1n2/
hanson.html
"We’re told that war is rare or that it’s amoral. It is supposedly an artifact to us who now live in modern post-heroic, post-modern society. Go back to the ancient Greeks. They accepted war as a tragic fact of life. Sophocles the poet said it was hateful. Solon said it hunts out young men and targets them. Herodotus said that it is a terrible time when fathers bury sons rather than sons, fathers. But out of that tragedy, came a grudging acceptance that it was a tool to combat aggression and indeed evil. They also thought unfortunately it was ubiquitous. It was always there, lurking in the shadows. Plato confessed that peace, not war, is the aberration in human experience. The pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclites, announced that war is the father of us all.
Rather than trying to do what the U.N. did in 1986 by essentially declaring war not to be innate to the human condition, the Greeks simply accepted that there was going to be evil in the world, and thus people who would prefer to make war on their neighbors. So over time they established a loose body of thought that explained what war is, and I think it’s valuable to us if we look at their wisdom in a modern context.
Wars, then, are frequent. I suppose that’s why they have Roman numerals."
VDH is ultimately describing the Greek view of war that it is a natural state. But he doesn't agree with that in a theological or philosophical war. He boils it down to the axiom that WARS ARE FREQUENT. This is, admittedly, sympathic to the view that war=natural state, but I don't think it's the conclusion that one can draw from VDH, because he goes on to say:
"Why do such horrible things break out? Well, evil, of course; but in the post-Marxist world we’ve sort of accepted that people go to war because of exploitation and poverty — legitimate pretexts in other words. But if we go back to classical times, the Greeks didn’t consider real material causes as a legitimate source of disagreement. In other words, they confessed that there were grievances, but they were not necessarily economic and they were not necessarily real — at least to any disinterested observer who stood apart from the conflict.
Rather, Thucydides said, they start out of honor, fear and self-interest."
His entire point is to argue against a smugness that believes war can be dismissed from the experience of man as an obsolete event. That will NEVER be the case. We know that, as Catholics, because of the reality of our fallen nature and of sin. And VDH knows it, maybe because of that, but also because of the guide of human history:
"The combination of values in Western culture that makes us fight so well also are responsible for enormous affluence and security, what the Romans called luxus —almost a sort of license. In this way of thinking, for a post-heroic, post-enlightened society, war can be passé, or war is fought among ignorant people in need of education or money, or war is an innate part of our distant and embarrassing Neanderthal past. Then usually affluent and very educated people in the West in their smugness — we see that in Europe to an astonishing degree today — believe that they are beyond the reach of war or, worse still, that the entire human community is at the end of history and thus has evolved to a higher state of peace. Then innocent people — whether they be in Bosnia or Rwanda or in Iraq or in Manhattan — will get killed. And this tragedy un-folds precisely because of the intellectual or moral or even religious arrogance of an elite few in positions of leadership and influence who don’t understand, whether we like it or not, that evil is always with us, and it is our duty on our watch and according to our station to combat it wherever we see that it poses a threat to civilization itself."
Again, he says "EVIL IS ALWAYS WITH US."
War is not the natural state for VDH. It is EVIL. I'd say he agrees with you, Mark.
And you're right to point out that supporters of VDH who believe that Hobbes was right are wrong. And they should be corrected. And VDH would disagree with them, I think, to the extent they say war=natural state. War is an evil for VDH. That is clear as day. It is not natural.
The above comment was mine.
Thus we see a new low in the standard of charity to be delivered. Failure to find anything in google means we can smear someone as a pagan. Nice, Zippy. Really nice.
You suggested that he might be an orthodox Catholic. I actually tried to find out if he was. Attempting to ascertain the facts in response to your statement was a "smear"? A "new low"? Was it a smear for you to bring it up in the first place, or just for me to attempt to ascertain the facts?
All Mark said was that saying that war is the natural state of man is an expression of pagan theology. It was you who brought VDH's personal religious affiliation into the discussion. Now you seem to think that taking what you introduced into the discussion seriously is somehow a "smear".
"But out of that tragedy, came a grudging acceptance that it was a tool to combat aggression and indeed evil."
If we're all evil, of an evil nature, then we're always fighting ourselves, no?
I'm going to look for a quote from part 4, chapter 7 of Gulliver's Travels, where he describes the essentially warlike nature of the stupid, despicable Yahoos.
Mark,
As with most other words, the word 'nature' is capable of being used in several different senses. If you read C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words, for example, he goes into some detail as to the different ways in which the word has been used.
If you're just looking to score cheap rhetorical points, you can assume that anyone who says "war is the natural state of man" must think sin is inherently part of man's nature, and call him all sorts of names for doing so. If, on the other hand, your goal is to seek truth in charity, you might try instead to understand what the man in question actually meant.
I'm not quite convinced by your efforts to identify the ideology you're attributing to VDH (even Mr. Shea's Google search does appear to turn up any instance of Hanson uttering the sentence, "War is the natural state of man") with "paganism." In ancient Greek thought (from which I suspect Hanson is drawing heavily), the idea of "nature" has a different sense than our English word. Indeed, meaning of the Greek word "phusis" (usually translated as "nature") is essentially scientific, and its applications to human behavior and political life are thus essentially made by way of analogy. Aristotle says that a rock thrown in the air falls back to earth because it is in the "nature" of a rock to do so. Hence, when Aristotle says that man is "by nature" a political animal, or that all men "by nature" desire to know, he makes these claims on the basis of an understanding of what people actually do. If that's what Hanson thinks with respect to man's "natural" inclination towards warfare (and I'm almost certain it is) then it seems to be a perfectly valid point, and Mr. Shea's attacks are totally unfair and unjustified.
Sorry; I can only agree with the people who have said that Mr. Shea is arguing semantics here.
Mark Shea - The statement *may* be heresy, I would say. I'm not sure that given the multiple uses of the term natural that it would be proper to be so definitive without actually asking the man. He does have an e-mail address and a response will generally come, if not from him personally, from his assistant who was quite nice to me the few times I've sent correspondence.
I think it's a fair call to say that if you knew you could ask for clarification and you chose not to, what you have done is wrong. If you didn't know, you do now and you should seek clarification before you continue on the road of characterizing his words in the most hostile manner possible.
Zippy - As usual, you completely miss the point.
OK, guys. Color me dumb, but who the heck is VDH?
VDH = Victor Davis Hanson
"... the Dissensions of those Brutes in his Country were owing to the same Cause with ours, as I had described them. For, if (said he) you throw among Five Yahoos as much Food as would be sufficient for Fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the Ears, each single one impatient to have all to itself; and therefore a Servant was usually employed to stand by while they were feeding abroad, and those kept at home were tied at a Distance from each other: that if a Cow died of Age or Accident, before a Houyhnhnm could secure it for his own Yahoos, those in the Neighbourhood would come in Herds to seize it, and then would ensue such a Battle as I had described, with terrible Wounds made by their Claws on both Sides, although they seldom were able to kill one another, for want of such convenient Instruments of Death as we had invented. At other times the like Battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several Neighbourhoods without any visible Cause: Those of one District watching all Opportunities to surprize the next before they are prepared. But if they find their Project hath miscarried, they return home, and for want of Enemies, engage in what I call a Civil War among themselves."
-- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, Part IV, Chapter 7.
http://www.crs.org/our_work/wher...anon/
spiral.cfm
Sydney,
Please read, and think about what you yourself have posted from VDH.
VDH claims that Plato (a very arguable claim on its own) and Thucydides (not a philosopher but a historian) believed that war is a normal part of the human condition, and on several occassions describes the martial "virtue" which much be recaptured by a weakened modernity which has lost it.
What is a subject of virtue (justice, prudence, and for VDH, war) are "normal states of man" which can be expected not to be exterminated, but rather to find proper expression in human affairs.
This is completely inimical to not only Catholic Theology, but most Ancient Philosophy as well, and is most definitely a philosophical statement unto itself
Mark (Not Shea),
That's a prejudiced reading of phusis in Aristotle. Most would read it a teleological, rather than merely observational in significance
"What is a subject of virtue (justice, prudence, and for VDH, war)"
There have been societies in which 'martial virtues' were valued above all else. The Norse Sagas describe them pretty well. they also describe vividly how life in these societies becomes after a while so grim and nightmarish that people rush to abandon their 'virtues'.
From Njall's Saga:
155. OF SIGNS AND WONDERS
It so happened one night that a great din passed over Brodir and his men, so that they all woke, and sprang up and put on their clothes.
Along with that came a shower of boiling blood.
Then they covered themselves with their shields, but for all that many were scalded.
This wonder lasted all till day, and a man had died on board every ship.
Then they slept during the day, but the second night there was again a din, and again they all sprang up. Then swords leapt out of their sheaths, and axes and spears flew about in the air and fought.
The weapons pressed them so hard that they had to shield themselves, but still many were wounded, and again a man died out of every ship.
This wonder lasted all till day.
Then they slept again the day after.
But the third night there was a din of the same kind, and then ravens flew at them, and it seemed to them as though their beaks and claws were of iron.
The ravens pressed them so hard that they had to keep them off with their swords, and covered themselves with their shields, and so this went on again till day, and then another man had died in every ship.
Then they went to sleep first of all, but when Brodir woke up, he drew his breath painfully, and bade them put off the boat. "For," he said, "I will go to see Ospak."
Then he got into the boat and some men with him, but when he found Ospak he told him of the wonders which had befallen them, and bade him say what he thought they boded.
Ospak would not tell him before he pledged him peace, and Brodir promised him peace, but Ospak still shrank from telling him till night fell.
Then Ospak spoke and said, "When blood rained on you, therefore shall ye shed many men's blood, both of your own and others. But when ye heard a great din, then ye must have been shown the crack of doom, and ye shall all die speedily. But when weapons fought against you, that must forebode a battle; but when ravens pressed you, that marks the devils which ye put faith in, and who will drag you all down to the pains of hell."
Pavel,
Quite right, in Njal's Saga, Skarp Heddin is perhaps the best example of this kind of "martial virtue".
But the point of Njal's Saga, written after Iceland had become Christian, is when Njal himself explicitly forgoes this type of virtue after his conversion, and ends the Blood Feud through the rule of law.
I support the war in Iraq because I believe that it meets, both in bellum and in bello, the criteria for just war as stated in the CCC. In that belief, I disagree with some Catholics, including the previous and present popes, and agree with people like Victor Davis Hanson and Richard John Neuhaus. But that doesn't make us heretics: the disagreement arises from differing assessments of empirical fact, not from dissensus about the moral principles applicable to such facts.
That's why Ratzinger said, in his 2004 letter to the American bishops, that it can be legitimate for Catholics to disagree with the pope about the merits of a particular war or execution, but not about the legality of abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem-cell research.
LIKE PETER IN DENIAL
Medic, can you start his heart again
Or make the rhythm roll that was his pulse?
Evil ripples through the universe
Evil hand to hand like a baton
Who will take a cross and walk with Christ,
A brother and a brother side by side?
Adam’s son is Cain, a homicide,
A gambler throwing cluster bombs for dice
See them coming toward us in a line,
Followers with crosses on their shoulders
Pitiful – their names are in a file;
Some of them shredded by a mine,
Some of them are innocently soldiers,
And some of them like Peter in denial
Pavel
July 27, 2006
Mark,
As a catholic, build a commentary on St Paul's Israeli chapters in his letter to the Romans. (Yes, 'Israeli'. And, no, I am not a "left Behind" fundamentalist.)
Have in mind God's double-handed dealings with the Assyrians. How dones one factor in God's history of waging war. The Psalms, the Prophets, the Maccabees - he was preceived as doing so. Maybe the Church has established multiple layers of notions to handle these dealings of God. The only way out of the difficulty (which I do not share) is to declare onesself a super-supersuccessionist in which all of God's acts with the Jews (past and future) are boiled down and filtered through a seive of our making.
This is no ordinary way (between Israel and Hizbollah). In some way (the means and ends we cannot now fathom) this is God's war.
"This is no ordinary way (between Israel and Hizbollah). In some way (the means and ends we cannot now fathom) this is God's war."
http://www.breitbart.com/news/20.../
D8J6BQV80.html
I remember studying Hobbes in college. Because of his thoughts that man's naturual state is War,it leads him to believe the only reason why men get a long in life is fear of the other killing them. If this were the case then we could not love, could we? Our love would be out of fear...and Perfect love cast out all fear (1 John 4:1
I agree with your comments, Mark and thanks for standing up for the truth in our culture where many people are intellectually mislead.
I think much of this "heresy" stems from a misunderstanding over such concepts as "state of nature" or "natural state". (I believe both Hobbes and Rousseau, both of them extremes, were wrong.)
Considering the fact that a West that doesn't spend most of its days war-mongering is an anomaly in the history of civilizations, I think it can be said that war is something as natural to man as hunting. But this doesn't mean that man, by his very nature, is a war machine (nor any sort of determined "machine"). War is like rain...it falls on the just and nunjust alike, and will reward and destroy both just and unjust alike. And as such, both the just and unjust must fight. This is not so much a product of man at his most human, but of man at his most fallen...for it only takes one act of fallenness to throw even the just into battle. War is "natural" in that it is the natural consequence of our condition. Since there is no absolute cure for fallenness before the Second Coming (not even Grace, by God's own design, can override fallen Free Will that chooses not to cooperate with it), only the dead have seen the end of war. So, in that sense, war will be a "natural" part of human experience from now til the world's ending, whether we like it or not. Hence the wisdom of Sun Tzu; to live in peace, a nation must always be prepared for war.
Well, according to the above comments, we may not use the word "nature" to describe our state of being after the fall. But we must describe it in some way, because it sure as heck exists.
Likewise, we may not refer to war as the "natural" state of man, so how about "inherent"? That's a fair enough word, because war always comes about as a result of injustice (certainly no war starts if everyone does the right thing). Since sin is a state we have inherited, and war is a direct or indirect result of sin, it seems fair to me to speak of bellicosity as being inherent in our post-fall state of being. Like any hereditary trait, it is not binding on the will, and can be resisted, but it's still there and exerting an influence.
We're Yahoos.
Huh? I thought I was a Google.
That too.
To read these blogs is to realise that in these discussions of violence and war, Jesus might never have lived.
Is it that Catholics see Jesus as just a founder of a whole ecclesiastical system which will develop without much reference to his own prophetic and revolutioinary vision of how people should live?
He lived and died in a stupid non-violent response to aggression and before rational debate in the Christian world and has become irrelevant?
Certainly any tenuous link with the first three hundred years of Christian hatred of shedding blood and going to war seems no longer to impinge on this discussion. What a catastrophic loss! In the last century a man like Gandhi saw clearly how little heed Christians gave to the non-violent Jesus. How right he was.
6 Visitors Online
Commenting by HaloScan
