At
election time, we hear of an “obligation” to vote. This phrase always
reminds me of our “right” to choose. Both “to vote” and “to choose” are
infinitives. They mean practically nothing until we learn what we are
voting for or what we are choosing. Looking at the available
alternatives, we sometimes long for an obligation not to vote for this or for a right not to choose that.
The
mechanisms of voting and choosing are very imperfect throughout the
world. Many elections are, in practice, meaningless. Whenever we see
elections decided by 98 percent of an electorate on one side, we can
assume that no real election took place. How many votes in, say,
Chicago are cast by the dead remains a lively issue.
Eventually,
we ask ourselves: How important are politics anyhow? Edmund Burke’s
remark is well known: “The only thing that is necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
But
evil today, as always, presents itself in the name of what is good and
noble. This is why elections are so enigmatic. Tyrants, likewise,
especially the ones arising out of democracies, are often attractive
men telling us what we want to hear so that they can gain or stay in
power.
In his book on St. Augustine, Herbert Deane reminds us:
Nowhere
in the Gospels or in the Apostolic teachings is it ever suggested that
Christians have any obligation to participate in the operation of the
political system or that the activities of the state have any real
relevance to the conduct of members of the Church or to their
overriding concern – salvation and participation in the kingdom of God.
The relative importance of things needs to be kept in perspective.
Though
Revelation contains a warning about absolute state power, the New
Testament was not designed to teach us what we could figure out by
ourselves. Politics was one of these latter things.
We
sometimes have the impression today that everything is political.
Indeed, many believers elevate politics to make it identical with the
kingdom of God.
The
chief rival to Christianity today, besides Islam, is a secular
messianism designed to “liberate” us from religious practices so that
we can devote all our attention to politics as our “real” good.
Religion, in this view, is what holds us back from perfecting
ourselves.
The
modern state wants to fulfill that proposal of Marsilius of Padua
whereby spiritual things have nothing to do with politics. World
religions would be assigned a common parliament that would function
under the aegis of the state.
Nothing
truly transcendent would exist. Religion’s function would be to
explain the nobility of the state’s purpose. No conflict of church and
state would be possible. And what would the purpose of the state be?
Basically, it would be to “take care” of everyone, in life and death,
especially the poor.
In
classical politics, of course, the purpose of the state was a temporal
common good in which people took care of their own affairs. There is
something exhilarating about “taking care” of others. It seems so
noble.
In
a recent talk in Loreto, in Italy, Benedict XVI said: “Grace does not
eliminate freedom; on the contrary it creates and sustains it. Faith
removes nothing from the human creature, rather it permits his full and
final realization.”
The
“full and final realization” of politics can only be understood when
we acknowledge that politics is not an eschatology. Its divisions are
not those of the soul that are worked out in our living and dying.
But
again, politics is not nothing. The fact that the New Testament pays
little attention to it – “Render to Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s” – means that it has a natural importance that we can grasp
with our reason.
Aristotle
called politics the highest of the practical sciences. He understood
that something higher than politics existed. This transcendent order is
what kept politics as politics and not itself a claim to man’s
ultimate allegiance.
When
politics claim our ultimate attention, when it subordinates religion
to the state, it transforms the natural order into its own image. Civil
societies, states, are not substantial beings with personal destinies
of their own, as each human being is. They are arrangements of order
and disorder wherein individual people work out their final destiny.
We
can save our souls in the worst regime, and lose them in the best. Our
politics do not automatically determine whether we reach or don’t
reach everlasting life. Yet what we do and choose in politics also
forms us into what we are, into what we make ourselves to be.
The
polity exists so that greater and more varied goods can come about
through our agency. The last judgment will include our political
choices. Grace does not eradicate nature.
