Again we get another home run from the guys at Post Liberal Order- this time from Chad Pecknold. In the article he demonstrates how the ancient city originated as an outgrowth of the family religious rites, and that because man is by nature is religious so too must be the society. A few excerpts below, but as usual the entire article is worth the quick read.
Quote:
Every city is religious by nature because the human person, and thus human community, is naturally, essentially, and unavoidably religious. Such a claim should not be controversial, but because we are tempted to see political culture in a liberal frame which pretends to religious neutrality or indifference, it is a claim which I would like to present at greater length than I normally would by dwelling first on the place of religion in the ancient city. By doing so, it will become clear that the ancient, and thus pre-liberal, way of conceiving the city was ineluctably religious, and so we must never ask whether a city is secular or religious, but rather the only question we must ask whether the religion of the city is true or false.
Quote:
It is thus not only possible to think of religion as the cradle of the family, but of the hearth, the home, the tomb, and yes, the city. Moderns are sometimes puzzled by ancient prohibitions against the sale of land because we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the ancient city as fundamentally religious. The laws of the hearth were prior to the laws of the city, and those laws were theological through and through. The family was "a little society," and the fundamental building block of the city. It had a directive principle in the paterfamilias, but it is wrong to think of the family as male-led. The father, like all members of the family, was subordinate to the spiritual power, the sacred fire, the deities of the hearth. The father had rights principally because he had duties, and his chief duty was keeper of the sacred fire along with his wife, who in Roman law was recognized as having equal dignity, if not equal rights, as mater familias precisely because she also was a keeper of the flame, the vesta. Everything about the family was thus conceived as divine to such a degree that the chief virtue of the family was "piety." The obedience of children to their parents, and the attachment of parents to their children, were regarded as pietas and so was the love of homeland, or patria. Ulysses longs to see not simply his "country, but "the flame of his hearth-fire," because the love of one's homeland is principally religious. As Catholics love the Church, so did the ancients love their homes, and their homeland as bonded together by domestic and civic religion.
Quote:
The most straightforward reading of Augustine's City, the reading which inspired more than a thousand years of interpretation, including readers like Charlemagne and other Christian rulers, was that Augustine re-envisioned the ancient city on the hinge of true and false religion, not on the liberal frame of a secular space which was neutral or agnostic about religion. Augustine does have a distinctive understanding of the secular thoroughly united to his doctrine of divine providence but his great contribution to the western understanding of the city is thoroughly centered on religion.
Quote:
Augustine rails against the way in which materialism and libertine hedonism in Rome are simply a human performance of the debauchery of the gods. Romans rooted their moral code only in "consent," which becomes one great tyranny built upon Lust. He summarizes Rome's radical libertinism thusly: "get as rich as you can, and let people do whatever they desire as long as there is consent." (2.20) He argues that consent-based morality develops into a society curved-in on itself, and tends to punish anyone who speaks for a higher, more transcendent standard.
Quote:
The progressive civic-religious regime is a very dangerous sort of pseudo-integralism, which is to say an inverted parody of Christianity. The good news is that this has exposed something. It has exposed the lie that a religiously neutral polity is possible at all. For all of human history, political and social order has sought religious unity precisely because religion is a precept of the natural law we cannot do without it. The liberal dream of religious neutrality is an anomaly of a couple hundred years that is simply not natural, and so it's simply not sustainable. So how should we live, then? There are simple things, even within our own national history, which can inspire us.
Quote:
Along with the impulse to recover blue laws, we can recover American blasphemy laws. Those most likely to scoff at blasphemy laws, are often those most likely to enforce an alternative and unwritten set of blasphemy laws which are now more recognizable than ever before: if you offend the pieties and values of the progressive civic religion, you will be punished, canceled, censored. This is all deeply unjust not because we should not care about blasphemy, but because their religion is toxic, the gods they seek to defend are false. The Overton Window we need will entail a recovery of anti-blasphemy legislation that protects Christian speech, that discourages profanity against God's Name. Even if such attempts were to fail in the near term, they would further clarify the true conflict that's really before us.
Quote:
If you think it sounds fanciful to do any of these things as a beleaguered minority in a fight we've already lost, you must stop to consider the reality that American life has been radically altered within a single generation on views which were once fringe. Absurd things which were thought up in dorm rooms by a tiny minority of trangressive postmodernists in the 1970s are now federal laws which determine everyday life for ordinary Americans. Things which would nit have garnered ten percentage points of support in 1988 are now considered so essential for civic belief that to oppose such views is criminal. As my friend and colleague Adrian Vermeule so persuasively has reminded us, "our political world is far more fluid, far more malleable and susceptible to shaping through intentional action, especially the action of committed political minorities, than the putative realists can conceive at any given time."
The flames of the Imperium burn brightly in the hearts of men repulsed by degenerate modernity. Souls aflame with love of goodness, truth, beauty, justice, and order.