Passion And The Structure of Society

By Gary L. Morella

How is a society structured? What part do passions play in this structure? These questions will be examined by comparing society as structured by a modernist philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, with its impact today in terms of the crisis of western civilization, and society necessary to the fundamental framework of a Christian state with its Aristotelian and Thomistic roots.

The English philosopher Christopher Dawson committed the unforgivable sin of denying that it is a function of the Church to create a reign of earthly peace and justice. Moreover, he was dismissed as a "Christian fatalist" for holding to the belief that Europe would die if it persisted on its path toward irreligion. He saw the trend of the times as toward totalitarianism, and strongly implied that the only thing that could save Western Europe and the United States from a totalitarian fate was a renaissance of Christianity. (Pope John Paul II refers to this "renaissance" as the new "spring time of the Church.") As late as 1960 Dawson wrote: "The fundamental distinction which Christians make between Church and State and spiritual and temporal authority is the opposite of totalitarian and is perhaps the only ultimate defense of man’s spiritual freedom against the totalitarian challenge and the growing pressure of the secular state."

Dawson saw totalitarianism as involving an attempt to create a New Jerusalem on earth: "there is the Muscovite Jerusalem which has no Temple, there is Herr Hitler’s Jerusalem which has no Jews, and there is the Jerusalem of the social reformers which is all suburbs." It is this aspiration to divinity that prompts the totalitarian state to claim "to embrace the whole of life and to demand the total submission of the individual will and conscience." Of course, the "divinity" referred to here is the "state."

The fundamental error in totalitarianism, Dawson said, "is the ignoring of Original Sin and its consequences or rather the identification of the Fall with some defective political or economic arrangement," such as the power of the capitalists or the Jews. This lesson seems to have been forgotten in many religious circles today where what passes for religion is barely indistinguishable from the propaganda of the state with "peace and justice" the excuse for the demand of surrendering our rights, inalienable or otherwise, to a New World Leviathan worthy of Hobbes’s original.

For Dawson, the only Kingdom of God that we have a right to expect on earth is the Church, which performs the important function of providing the individual with the wherewithal to resist totalitarian claims by the state. It also helps to preserve civilization. For, when a civilization ceases to believe itself to be based on the Law of God, it is doomed to destruction by the decay of its own energies.

Dawson reminds us that, "All those ideals, which we regard as typically Western – the supremacy of law, the recognition of the moral rights of the individual and the duty of society towards the poor and the oppressed – are not the invention of modern democracy" despite the charade currently being acted out on the world scene by William Jefferson Clinton. "They are ultimately products of the Christian tradition and find their only true justification in Christian principles. Either these elements must be … brought back to their natural basis in the Christian tradition, or they will be eliminated by the reconstitution of society on purely materialistic foundations as a closed order in which human nature is entirely subordinated to the needs of the state machine."

At issue, then, for Dawson is "the choice between the mechanized order of the absolute State, The Sovereign State of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and a return to spiritual order based on a reassertion of the Christian elements in Western culture."

It is important to note that nothing in these views should be taken to mean that Dawson favored a theocracy or anything like it. As Glenn Schram points out in Toward A Response to The American Crisis, "He (Dawson) knew history too well to be optimistic about the results when ecclesiastics become involved in politics or political parties ‘adopt religious programmes and claim to represent the cause of God.’ He wrote: ‘In a sense it is quite true to say that all our troubles are due to the neglect of Christian teaching and that Christianity is the remedy for our social as well as our individual evils. But it is not like a patent medicine that is warranted to cure all diseases. It offers no short cuts to economic or social prosperity.’"

Nevertheless, per Schram, Dawson believed that Christianity can "transform social life not by competing with secular politics on their own ground but by altering the focus of human thought and opening the closed house of secular culture to the free light and air of a larger and a more real world." And in what might be characterized as the "mother-of-all understatements" given the present state of the world where reason has been eclipsed, hedonism the new Baal, and a collective Anti-Christ in power worldwide, Schram concludes by saying "The need for Christianity to perform this role is greater now than it was when Dawson wrote these words more than half a century ago."

Let us now look at society according to Thomas Hobbes as described in his seminal work, in reference to its impact on modern philosophy, Leviathan.

Hobbes rejected the old moral philosophers who saw in virtue the utmost aim of human life. He politicized and socialized virtues, reducing them to instruments thereby degrading them. He maintained that rights are not derived from the principles of nature but rather from the practice of the commonwealths of the ancients. He saw the causes of disorders that affect "Christian Commonwealths" in the writings of Greek and Roman politicians and Christian scripture. His edifice, his Leviathan, the blueprint for his society is founded on only one element: the human individual’s entitlement to rights. The fundamental rights are found in the individual’s commanding need for survival. This pressure is felt when there is no state or the state lacks force in an absolute sense, i.e., when the state of nature prevails. It appears that "rights talk" for Hobbes is true only up to a point as the subordination of individual rights to the absolute power of the state is the final requirement - the final arbiter.

For Hobbes the moral virtues are not ends to be sought in themselves but means to self-preservation. A general inclination of mankind is a perpetual and restless desire for power that ceases only in death.

Modern philosophy takes shape in the seventeenth century in an attack on the philosophy of Aristotle and, more precisely, his doctrine of "substance" concerning nature in general or human nature in particular. Whether a substance, "substantial form", placed in a hierarchy of substances or forms; or a nature at once animal and rational within a hierarchy of natures; or the human soul as the "form" of the human body, it is the teaching of Aristotle, which was essentially adopted by Catholic doctrine through the theological refinements of Aquinas that Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke implacably attempt to destroy. Man is a "substance" and "one" substance is the credo for the new philosophy.

Hobbes reduces human complexity to the desire for power. "The passions that most of all cause the difference of wit, are principally, the more or less desire of power, of riches, of knowledge, and of honor. All which may be reduced to the first, that is, desire of power. For riches, knowledge, and honor, are but several sorts of power." [See Leviathan, chapter 8.] According to Hobbes, men are naturally distinguishable from beasts only by the faculty of science, which is knowledge of the possible consequences of effects. [See Leviathan, chapters 3-5]. Since together with desire men have the idea of power, and since their desires for power in some way neutralize and nullify one another in the war of every man against every man, man will erect the greatest power over themselves that they can conceive of, the sovereign power characterizing the modern state. It works under the fear principle as each man is held in check by his power being subordinate to the state - no matter, I guess, that the state may be capable of the most ruthless acts in a totalitarian sense. If it’s absolute sovereign, it’s OK for Hobbes. What is subtly lost in Hobbes is that the aggressive role of human nature begins to disappear or is lowered. The homogenization of the diverse human faculties and passions, transformed into as many different versions of the same desire for power, presupposes a denaturation.

According to Hobbes, political and moral laws are binding only by virtue of the order of the sovereign, the only legitimate legislator. Laws are made as a function of the one who promulgates them as opposed to the truth of their foundations. Moral notions are arbitrary for Hobbes. In short, "might makes right."

A problem arises. If what is engaging in man’s humanity is contained in the desire for power, in which his nature is in some way concentrated, then his moral "ideas" or "thoughts" as Hobbes calls them, can surely be said to be artificial or conventional and to have no other validity than that conferred on them by the legislator. They have so little intrinsic weight that their flimsiness becomes worrisome. If they have no roots in nature and need the external support of the legislator to have value and thus to be, then what are they and whence do they come? With no support in being, they could only have their origin in that man whose whole nature is to be found elsewhere, in the desire for power.

Hobbes emphatic concentration of man’s nature in the desire for power liberated the world of ideas from every natural attachment and ontological bond. Hobbes affirms that there is no summum bonum and that good and evil only have meaning with reference to the person involved.

For Hobbes, man no longer has any end inscribed in his nature, but he still has a future. He goes beyond the present by his desire for power, which is anxiety and desire for what is to come, desire to master the future, "to assure forever, the way of his future desire." "Forever" stops at death for Hobbes. Man has in him the somber weight of Christian concupiscence, lifted up by a glimmer of ancient magnanimity. Forever sinning mightily because he cannot avoid sinning, he is always superior to circumstances. Neither Christian nor Greek, he is that third man full of force who despairs of the good but not of himself. Whether servant of the king or republican, he will construct the modern state which, like him, has given up seeking the good.

Aristotle was concerned with politic. He speaks of human groups and their goods and deals with "spiritual masses" and "contents of life." Hobbes, in contrast, treats politic with derision as an expression of individual vanity. Hobbes individualizes and psychologizes political claims. For him everything is open to question with no claims justified. Where the Greeks esteemed the citizen’s public voice, the Englishman unmasks the individual’s private passion.

Once claims to power have been subjected to the greatest power men can imagine, the only legitimate power, the Sovereign, they undergo a remarkable mutation: they are all justified. Hobbes and his "perpetual motion machine" which powered his philosophical thought could be very comfortable, evidently, living under tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, and William Jefferson Clinton.

Hobbes held that the ravings of the individual conscience and the sinister authority of Rome were constantly blinding men to what their real interests were. His materialistic philosophy was geared solely to self-preservation under an absolute authority. The safety of the people was the supreme law. He offended all types of Christians because he maintained that all actions could be mechanically explained and that free will was an illusion. He considered appeal to either individual conscience or to Church authority as the most potent of all threats to peace, in particular, singling out the "monster" that was Romanism with particular contempt for inane metaphysical concepts like "transubstantiation." Hobbes had a special dislike for the Roman Catholic Church, which is the unifying characteristic of those who must destroy or reinvent religion to accommodate hedonism. (The uncompromising witness of Catholicism for 2000 years makes them uncomfortable with their vices.) For Hobbes, religion was a system of law not a system of truth. Thus any concept of natural law truths would have been foreign to him. He maintained vehemently that we could know nothing of the attributes of God.

On good and evil Hobbes said that whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calls good; and the object of his hate and aversion evil. He was a moral relativist in this regard abandoning any concept of universal absolute truths saying that good and evil are ever used with relation to the person that uses them; there being nothing simply and absolutely true; nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the person of the man.

He believed that out of civil states, there is always civil war. The actions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place in his Leviathan. Only common power counts, as without it, there is no law.

Every man has a right to every thing, his fundamental law of nature, even to one another’s body. Thus, there can be no security for any man - survival at all costs, of the fittest, the law of the jungle seems to be what Hobbes espoused.

A rival position to Descartes dualism is Hobbes materialism where there is no interest in separate intellectual substance. All we are is material mechanisms, automata interacting with our environment in a type of perpetual motion machine. The main goal is to get what you want from the world by surviving at all costs including, it seems, submission to the tyranny of an absolute state that knows what’s good for society as a whole. Certain fundamental passions set man in motion with fear of violence and death predominant. Our minds are highly wired bodily capacities with the ability to reduce whatever we’re talking about to the body - an empiricist reduction to the chemical interactions of the brain.

For Aristotle and Aquinas, soul is to the body as form is to matter. Descartes sees no way that the soul is related to the body. Hobbes says there’s no soul at all, just body. For Hobbes there is no ultimate end, no goal for human life just satisfaction of appetites. We strive for power ending only in death. This loss of soul as governor of the body has consequences born out in culture. Witness the culture-of-death prominent in the world today, a contraceptive mentality leading to any and all forms of hedonism from promotion of homosexuality as a civil right to abortion as birth control to euthanasia.

The problem with Descartes and Hobbes is that there is no natural good or telos to human nature, and the place of human beings as parts of the whole is rendered inscrutable.

In following Christopher Dawson’s advice to witness to the Faith and the role that Catholicism must play in combating the culture-of-death, the main tool of the new totalitarianism, the liberal media, must be exposed for the heinous lies that it continuously propagates. Only by taking an active part in this crusade for the authentic "New Jerusalem" of the Book of the Apocalypse, and not that of the Stalins, Hitlers, and Clintons, will mankind clearly show that it is with Christ and not against Him - a main consequence of which will be the illustrating of the relationship between faith and reason and of the necessity of a society rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.