The Tony Soprano Theory of the Nation-State

At the risk of sounding a bit defensive, I've always found one problem with Cavanaugh, though to be fair it's not unique to him. It's summed up in the following: 'Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congregatio fidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.'

Of course, Luther wrote the treatise 'On the Duty of Selective Objection,' but that's merely a trifle I suppose. The larger problem with this is that the Lutheran understanding of the Church's sacramental life makes it impossible to even become a Christian apart from the Church, who is our mother in the faith. This is perhaps a minor flaw in his narrative, but it's a typical statement that reflects complete ignorance of the facts, whatever one thinks of the Two Kingdom stuff. I would say that the Lutheran tendency to quietism and state-worship is no more a necessary implication of Lutheran doctrine and practice than is Catholic neocon political thought true to the full breadth of RC moral theology. It's distressing to see such a canard in an otherwise excellent historical argument - I am, by trade, something of an historian, and this is good stuff. I guess the swipe just sort of rankles me.

Jennifer, do you find Cavanaugh's history, particularly regarding the "creation of the individual" and human rights, at all convincing? Here is an excerpt from an article by Jean Porter from the most recent Listening:

"... in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was generally agreed that the rich have a general obligation to share their surplus wealth with the poor through alms, but they did not necessarily conclude from this that a poor individual has the right to the goods of one who is wealthy. Aquinas' oft-cited remarks on this subject would seem to illustrate this view. At the same time, he goes on to say that someone in extreme need who takes from another what is necessary to sustain life is not guilty of robbery and theft. In other words, someone in this situation is free to take from another, in the sense of enjoying immunity from guilt or punishment for the act in question. This is not equivalent to saying that the poor person has a right which could be claimed against the rich person and defended at law, but it does imply that the rich individual cannot lodge a claim against the poor individual for the return of what the latter has taken. Hence, the poor individual cannot defend a claim against the rich, but neither can the rich individual defend an accusation of robbery or theft against the poor person in such a case. This is at least a subjective immunity, if not a full-fledged subjective right.

"This latter example is particularly significant, because it suggests that it is only a short step from the general scholastic view to an explicit affirmation that a poor person has a right to the surplus wealth of the rich. Aquinas did not take that step, but as (Brian) Tierney shows, there were others in this period who did. ... Even more significantly, as Tierney goes on to show, this right came to be regarded as a claim having juridical effect, insofar as it could be asserted and secured through a public process of adjudication. Of course, this does not mean that it could successfully be vindicated apart from some actual legal structure. But this does not mean that the claim in question is a positive right, in the sense of depending on positive law for its force; rather, it is one of the benchmarks of a just society that it provide some kind of forum in which claims of this sort can be asserted and enforced."

Porter concludes that "the subsequent transition from natural law to fully developed doctrines of human rights should be understood, not as a break, but as a development and transformation of tendencies already present in the thirteenth century, if not earlier." Perhaps, strangely enough, through seventeenth century Cambridge.

Neil

Neil Dhingra [dhingra.2@nd.edu]

concerning the creation of the individual, it seems that the Enlightenment added much more that is suggested above concerning trajectory of the rights of the poor ending in general human rights. The short step mentioned above is surely much greater give that the above example is within a binding/mediating ecclesial sacralized community while the formation of the nation-state and it correletive "individual" was meant to break with all such communities binding/mediating communities.

Also, the above case didn't feel the need to create alterative mythologies whereas Hobbes and Rousseau did.

The creation of the individual...I have always wondered if this is always rightly rooted in the Enlightenment. Certainly the historical reality we are swaddled in suggests that, but is this individualism somewhat a reclaiming of Greco-Roman political thought? If Athenian democracy was even vaguely realized, there would have to be a strong sense of the individual. The fragmented nature of the Jewis peoples also suggests this same fragmentation. I will admit that we Americans enter into "individuation" on a level that may not have precedent in any other time, but I get a little skeptical when the Enlightenment is brough to the fore as the Advent of the Individual.

That being said, the nation state as separate from the religious culture is a new-ish thing. But then, our state is hardly separate from its religions...captialism being in the forefront of that.

AngloBaptist [tripp@anglobaptist.org]

anglobaptist,
of course there are degrees at work here, but I respectually disagree with your assesment of Athenian democracy and Isreality community as beginning individualism. "After Virtue" is extremely helpful concerning this. It might be argued that Paul was the creator of the individual, but I think that is more of a Reformational (Lutheran) retrojection.