Catholicism and Political Philosophy

An important new volume on political philosophy, which appeared last year, by the astute Catholic critic, James V. Schall, is Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2004). In this volume Schall reflects on the relationship of revelation, as understood within Catholicism, to the implications of political life. Writing in The Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2005), Robert R. Reilly observes:

According to [Schall], there is no derogation of reason in Christian revelation. Rather, Christianity contains an invitation to reason because God is revealed as logos. He claims that "what is revealed does not demand the denial of intellect, but fosters it." If God is logs, reason and revelation are not at an impoasse. A division of labor defines them. The common objective is the search for the highest things, and reason is given primacy in this search, including in its examination of the truths claimed by revelation. As Schall says, in Christianity "revelation itself has turned to philosophy precisely to explain more fully what is revealed." Christian revelation confirms reason in its authority. At the same time, revelation has a claim on reason. A philosophy that a priori excludes the possibility of revelation is a philosophy that is not true to itself. This book is about "how the highest things of philosophy, politics, and revelation related to each other.

In an interview with Claremont Institute's Ken Masugi (available at www.claremont.org), Schall said:

[W]e will not know, intellectually, if revelation has happened, unless we have first taken the trouble to examine the questions that arise in the experience of political and human things together with the varieties of answers that have been given to these questions by the philosophers.... I like to say that the study of political philosophy ought to bring such questions forward in our souls so that there is a kind of longing or searching that arises from the suspicion that none of tne answers so given have been complete or adequate.

Reilly continues, playing on Tertullian's metaphorical use of cities to symbolize rival commitments--to reason, to faith, and so on:

Political philosophy has the obligation to look at all cities--Athens, Jesusalem, and Rome. Today, Rome seems the least familiar of these three, and there is not better guide to it than Fr. Schall. For those confronting modernity, it is an essential visit because, as he has pointed out in Reason, Revelation and the Foundations of Political Philosophy (1987), modernity is not a distortion of classical political thought, but of Christianity. Millenarian ideology attempts, in its clumsy and destructive way, to ape the redemptive action of Christianity--of "God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." Therefore, the recovery from modern ideology requires far more than the resuscitation of classical political philosophy, though that in itself is a good thing.

One need not be a Catholic, much less a Christian, to grasp the importance of Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.