LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

It’s a special pleasure to note this new book of our friend, Steven D. Smith: Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Eerdmans), available this fall. I enjoyed reading a draft of this work very much. It focuses in the first half on some of the ways in which Christianity and Imperial Rome beginning in roughly the Antonine dynasty were fundamentally incompatible, leading to the persecution of Christians within the context of an otherwise ostensibly irenic “pax Romana.” But there is a great deal of interest in this book, including provocative and insightful comparisons between the situation of the Roman imperial period to our own contests between law and religion today. Congratulations, Steve!

Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the US wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago in the Roman Empire faced similar challenges and questions.

Starting with T. S. Eliot’s claim that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in Pagans and Christians in the City that today’s culture wars can be seen as a contemporary reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the late Roman Empire. He looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing orientations continue to clash today. Readers on both sides of the culture wars, Smith shows, have much to learn from seeing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.

When Magna Carta passed its 800th anniversary a few years ago, it was clear that its legacy was hotly contested by those who could be called the “celebrators” as against the “debunkers.” The celebrators note the importance of the document as the progenitor of the idea of limited government and the rule of law (including and especially in England and the United States), while the debunkers counter that Magna Carta’s image today is largely the product of nostalgic myth-making (see this op-ed piece, for example).

Here is the paperback edition (the more affordable edition!) of a book that sheds new light on the uses of Magna Carta in the 400 years following its creation: The Reinvention of Magna Carta: 1216-1616 (CUP) by Sir John Baker.

This new account of the influence of Magna Carta on the development of English public law is based largely on unpublished manuscripts. The story was discontinuous. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the charter was practically a spent force. Late-medieval law lectures gave no hint of its later importance, and even in the 1550s a commentary on Magna Carta by William Fleetwood was still cast in the late-medieval mould. Constitutional issues rarely surfaced in the courts. But a new impetus was given to chapter 29 in 1581 by the ‘Puritan’ barrister Robert Snagge, and by the speeches and tracts of his colleagues, and by 1587 it was being exploited by lawyers in a variety of contexts. Edward Coke seized on the new learning at once. He made extensive claims for chapter 29 while at the bar, linking it with habeas corpus, and then as a judge (1606–16) he deployed it with effect in challenging encroachments on the common law. The book ends in 1616 with the lectures of Francis Ashley, summarising the new learning, and (a few weeks later) Coke’s dismissal for defending too vigorously the liberty of the subject under the common law.

Dante’s Purgatorio has always seemed to me to fly under the radar. Inferno draws most people’s attention, and Paradiso, while much less well known in its details, is generally understood to be the final objective of the work. But what is the point of purgatory, after all? Just a way station between the horrible beginning and the heavenly end?

But Purgatorio contains much of what is “political” in Dante’s thought. Purgatory is in some ways a Christian metaphor for this world. While Inferno houses the souls of those who have done unspeakable things, Purgatorio is the place for those with evil in their hearts, impure motives, sinful dispositions that still separate them from paradise. Each of the seven “terraces” concerns a different vice, with virtuous counterexamples. One of the most memorable scenes in the Terrace of Pride is the building of the Tower of Babel, a central metaphor for political pride throughout the ages from Dante to today (see, for example, the magnificent final essay by Michael Oakeshott in this volume).

Here is a new book that focuses on Dante’s political thought in the Purgatorio, with a special emphasis on the role of law: Dante’s Philosophical Life: Politics and Wisdom in “Purgatorio” (Pennsylvania Press) by Paul Stern.

When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled narrative and makes a powerful case for treating Dante Alighieri, arguably the greatest poet of medieval Christendom, as a political philosopher of the first rank.

In Dante’s Philosophical Life, Stern argues that Purgatorio’s depiction of the ascent to Earthly Paradise, that is, the summit of Mount Purgatory, was intended to give instruction on how to live the philosophic life, understood in its classical form as “love of wisdom.” As an object of love, however, wisdom must be sought by the human soul, rather than possessed. But before the search can be undertaken, the soul needs to consider from where it begins: its nature and its good. In Stern’s interpretation of Purgatorio, Dante’s intense concern for political life follows from this need, for it is law that supplies the notions of good that shape the soul’s understanding and it is law, especially its limits, that provides the most evident display of the soul’s enduring hopes.

According to Stern, Dante places inquiry regarding human nature and its good at the heart of philosophic investigation, thereby rehabilitating the highest form of reasoned judgment or prudence. Philosophy thus understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends, but a way of life. Stern’s claim that Dante was arguing for prudence against dogmatisms of every kind addresses a question of contemporary concern: whether reason can guide a life.

Is honor a Christian virtue? A republican virtue? Certainly some idea of “honor” was vital for the political and moral life of the early American republic, and whether this idea was properly described as of Christian or Enlightenment (or, as is even more likely, of much more ancient) origin is impossible to answer. Some scholars have argued that the constitutional oath (sworn by, for example, the President upon assuming office) reflects a commitment to the virtue of honor in both an official and a personal way. And some founders sometimes spoke of a possible conflict between Christian and republican virtues. For example, John Adams wrote that “it may be well questioned, whether love of the body politic is precisely moral or Christian virtue, which requires justice and benevolence to enemies as well as to friends, and to other nations as well as our own.” Adams, Defence of the Constitutions (1787).

Here is a new book examining the virtue of honor as a civic good. It will be interesting to see whether the author explores some of these issues. The book is Why Honor Matters (Basic Books) by philosopher Tamler Sommers.

To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself. Sommers shows how honor can help us address some of society’s most challenging problems, including education, policing, and mass incarceration. Counterintuitive and provocative, Why Honor Matters makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society.