Deliverance From the Hands of Usurers

Daniel Nichols has posted a piece on the American Bishops’ failure to agree on a statement on the economy. One wishes that they had come out with a stern reminder of the Church’s perennial teaching against usury, and suggestions for overcoming it. Some Americans are attacking usury though; the eccentrics of the Occupy Wall Street  movement. They have had a brilliant idea for saving some people from usurers:

OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)

The name “Rolling Jubilee” is explicitly taken from the Old Testament jubilee. As one commentator puts it “it … feels great to have the opportunity to be an anti-bank for once. There’s something very good about forgiveness.”

Meanwhile, Front Porch Republic reports on a method from a completely different part of the American political “spectrum” to help poor immigrants avoid getting into the hands of usurers in the first place:

Eleven years ago, Bruno Rivas left Mexico City to make a better living for his family in San Francisco. He landed a job at a restaurant and began making some money, but couldn’t figure out how to break out of a cash system into a marketplace driven by credit. [...] he was able to purchase items for daily provision, but without a means of building credit, he struggled to find a way to fund larger purchases or take bigger steps toward financial health. But then four years ago, Bruno learned about the Bay Area-based Mission Asset Fund (MAF)—an organization that has garnered nationwide recognition for its nontraditional approach to lending—and decided to join a peer lending circle, or “cesta populare” (“community basket” in Spanish). Joining a cesta meant that Rivas and the eight other members of his circle would contribute $100 every month to a communal pot. After drawing names to determine order, members would take turns collecting a loan that they could then put toward whatever they chose. When Rivas’ turn came around, he took the loan from the lending circle, combined it with savings from an Individual Development Account (IDA) that MAF had set up for him, and purchased equipment to start a screen printing business.

“Peer Lending Groups” are doing the same sort of thing as the montes pietatis.

The Free Market is a Myth

William T. Cavanaugh brilliantly using Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings to debunk the illusion of the free market:

Oekonomika

Today sees the opening of the opening of the “Oekonomika” Institute in Vienna: a think-tank on applied economics and political philosophy that takes the Aristotelian tradition and Catholic Social Teaching  seriously. I’ve mentioned these people over on Modestinus’ blog. Here’s a snip from one of their statements:

In contrast to the contemporary tendency to make the economy an end in itself, the tradition of the Christian West includes the “art of household-management” (along with ethics and politics) in practical philosophy. Economic agents are not merely driven about by blind economic “laws” such as “supply and demand,” but able, through the practice of virtue, to act in accordance with truly human ends in the economic sphere.

Economics has a subordinate role in relation to ethics and politics. It is therefore necessary for a true understanding of the proper measure in economic matters to concern oneself with virtuous action and the goals of political life. For the existence of human institutions ought only to be justified by their supporting the common good and assisting human persons in the quest for a happy life.

Does John Milbank read the Remnant?

I once pointed out the irony of using Charles Taylor to defend Christopher Ferrara (which I had been doing up to a point) given the radically different intellectual worlds which they seem to inhabit. So it was with some surprise and delight that I noticed that Ferrara’s latest book has a blurb from–of all people–John Milbank. Somehow one doesn’t picture the left-leaning, Anglican theologian à la mode Milbank actually reading the sort of American trad. polemicist who actually writes for The Remnant. Apparently, Ferrara also quotes Milbank a good amount in the book itself. Excellent, Sancrucensis says to himself;   the strategy of uniting the anti-liberal insights of the 19th century popes with that of those intellectuals “on the left and the right [who] have all taken their cue from [...] Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue” (to borrow a phrase from Mark Lilla) is one that has my approval. 

Thomism, Happiness, and Selfishness

Thomistica.net in a post on Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan’s much ridiculed claim to be a follower of St Thomas Aquinas rather than Ayn Rand has linked to an article pointing out that Ayn Rand herself was an admire of the Angelic Doctor. It seems that she admired his epistemology mostly. I haven’t read much Rand, but as far as I can tell her ethics bear a resemblance to a certain influential, though disastrously  wrong, interpretation of St Thomas and Aristotle. Take this passage of “The Objectivist Ethics“:

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.

This does actually look a bit like certain readings of Aristotelian-Thomist eudaimonism. My father recently pointed me to the following passage from Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation:

Belloc and Class War

Recent posts (here and here) by Daniel Nichols of the excellent distributist blog Caelum et Terra have provoked a spirited and eloquent defense of the radical left by Owen (“the ochlophobist”). Owen begins by attacking distributism, and Catholic Social Teaching in general, for rejecting class-conflict, thus rejecting the only realistic means of bringing down the power of capital:

Distributism is a leftist movement, or rather would be, were it not for one major distinction between it and every other leftist movement – distributists are either quiet with regard to the necessity of class conflict, or they state they are against it (in keeping with the “plain” reading of C[atholic] S[social] T[eaching]). Leftists, whether anarcho-syndicalist, anarchist, communist, lib-communist, or socialist (here speaking of socialism proper), all believe that there cannot be an overcoming of capitalism without class conflict. [...] Belloc [...] never, so far as I have been able to find, preached, or even mentions positively, class war and the cultivation of class conflict as a socio-political aggressor which will bring this about. Without a belief in the role of class conflict, you are basically left with a political vision in which you really hope most people, including most rich people, will, without a serious fight, assent to the desires of a society that on the whole wants to be oriented towards distributism. How can a thinking person can look at the history of capitalism and rationally conclude that this is possible?

Belloc, as a faithful Catholic, never promoted class war, but there is definitely a case to be made that he was conflicted about this. His deep sense of the injustice of capitalism made him sympathetic with the vindictive anger of class-revolution. The clearest expression of this is the unrestrained violence of his early poem The Rebel:

There is a wall of which the stones

Are lies and bribes and dead men’s bones.

And wrongfully this evil wall

Denies what all men made for all,

And shamelessly this wall surrounds

Our homesteads and our native grounds.

But I will gather and I will ride,

And I will summon a countryside,

And many a man shall hear my halloa

Who never had thought the horn to follow;

And many a man shall ride with me

Who never had thought on earth to see

High Justice in her armoury.

When we find them where they stand,

A mile of men on either hand,

I mean to charge from right away

And force the flanks of their array,

And press them inward from the plains,

And drive them clamouring down the lanes,

And gallop and harry and have them down,

And carry the gates and hold the town.

Then shall I rest me from my ride

With my great anger satisfied.

Only, before I eat and drink,

When I have killed them all, I think

That I will batter their carven names,

And slit the pictures in their frames,

And burn for scent their cedar door,

And melt the gold their women wore,

And hack their horses at the knees,

And hew to death their timber trees,

And plough their gardens deep and through—

And all these things I mean to do

For fear perhaps my little son

Should break his hands, as I have done.

Small wonder that Belloc’s election to parliament was seen as a disaster by the upper class. Here is how Christopher Hollis describes it:

Conservative property-owners, terrified by the threats of the 1906 election, saw in his oratory the threat of the tumbrils which awaited them. ‘Belloc is in’ went the message round the rich houses of Maifair when the election results came through. They feared the worst. (The Seven Ages, p. 52)

In his magnificent panegyric on Belloc Msgr. Ronald Knox describes Belloc as a prophet who “saw what he took to be the evils of our time in a clear light, and with a steady hatred; [who] found, or thought he had found, a common root in them, and traced them back, with that light God gave him, to their origins.” That I think is just right, but then Knox interprets a famous passage from The Path to Rome in a way that I think is not quite right. Here is the Belloc passage itself, which I quote at length for the context:

I found my cigar and lit it again, and musing much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered the nature of Belief. Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indifference. Those who believe nothing but only think and judge cannot understand this. Of its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back and see our home. What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again … But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions. And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems changed to us. And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only with his fellows. And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the duty of that wrestling.

Now, Knox interprets this in the light of Jeremiah as the prophet in mood to be rid of his burden of prophecy. But this I think is false, it is not that Belloc wanted to be free of the burden of condemning the evils of the age, it is rather that he wanted to condemn them with the full throated violence of the revolutionary, and found it difficult to submit to the gentle doctrine of the Church which prefers cooperation between classes to conflict, and can preach submission to slaves:

Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.  (Eph 6:5-7)

The Sovereign as the Personification of National Unity

As today is Bastille Day and I happen to be in France I want to post something fittingly royalist. I have just been reading Alan Fimister’s fascinating book on Catholic social teaching and the founding of the EU: Robert Schuman: Neo-Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe. According to Fimister, Robert Schuman –  the French foreign minister considered the “father” of the EU – so closely conformed to the model of politician that Pope Leo XIII envisioned that “if he were a saint of the dark ages historians would assume his ‘life’ was largely fictional” (p.28). This means that he was a republican — that is, he was part of the movement of “ralliement,” of rallying to the Republic on the basis of the fact that a republican form of government is not per se contrary to the natural law. Nevertheless, Schuman account of how the sentiments of patriotism were first wakened in his heart is just what a monarchist would desire. It was in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where Schuman happened to have been born:

It is in Luxembourg that I acquired the first notions of patriotism. It was in 1890 under the Grand Ducal balcony. The people acclaimed Grand Duke Adolf who came to make his solemn entry into the capital. I was a little boy of four years old lost in the crowd. I was enflamed by its enthusiasm and taken up in its pride. With everyone else I sang -as best I could [tant bien que mal]- the Fierewonn : ‘Wir welle ja ken Preisse sin’ – before all else we didn’t want to be Prussians. I only came to know the Marseillaise later. Henceforth I knew what it is to love one’s country, and the attachment to the sovereign who personifies and guarantees the unity, continuity and independence of the nation. (p. 145)

This is a marvelous demonstration of St Thomas’s principle that the common good exists primarily in the sovereign:

Since love looks to the good, there is a diversity of love according as there is a diversity of the good. There is, however, a certain good proper to each man considered as one person, and as far as loving this good is concerned, each one is the principal object of his own love. But there is a certain common good which pertains to this man or that man insofar as he is considered as part of a whole; thus there is a certain common good pertaining to a soldier considered as part of the army, or to a citizen as part of the state. As far as loving this common good is concerned, the principal object of love is that in which the good primarily exists; just as the good of the army is in the general, or the good of the state is in the king. Whence, it is the duty of a good soldier that he neglects even his own safety in order to save the good of his general. (De virtutibus, q. 2 a. 4 ad 2)

Rerum Pulcherrima Roma

hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini,
hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit
scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,
septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.

Such a life the old Sabines once lived, such Remus and his brother. Thus, surely, Etruria waxed strong; and Rome has thus become the fairest thing on earth, and with a single city’s wall enclosed her seven hills. (Virgil, Georgics 2.532-534)

O Roma felix, quae duorum Principum
Es consecrata glorioso sanguine:
Horum cruore purpurata ceteras
Excellis orbis una pulchritudines.

O happy Rome! who in thy martyr princes’ blood,
A twofold stream, art washed and doubly sanctified.
All earthly beauty thou alone outshinest far,
Empurpled by their outpoured life-blood’s glorious tide. (Hymn at Vespers of the Feast of Ss Peter and Paul)

*******

Romulus excipiet gentem, et Mavortia condet
moenia, Romanosque suo de nomine dicet.
His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono;
imperium sine fine dedi…

Then Romulus his grandsire’s throne shall gain,
Of martial tow’rs the founder shall become,
The people Romans call, the city Rome.
To them no bounds of empire I assign,
Nor term of years to their immortal line. (Aeneid, I.276-279)

***

Mundi Magister, atque caeli Janitor,
Romae parentes, arbitrique gentium,
Per ensis ille, hic per crucis victor necem
Vitae senatum laureati possident.

The teacher of the world and keeper of heaven’s gate,
Rome’s founders twain and rulers too of every land,
Triumphant over death by sword and shameful cross,
With laurel crowned are gathered to the eternal band. (Hymn at Vespers of the Feast of Ss Peter and Paul)

*******

But, besides that reverence which today’s festival has gained from all the world, it is to be honoured with special and peculiar exultation in our city, that there may be a predominance of gladness on the day of their martyrdom in the place where the chief of the Apostles met their glorious end. For these are the men, through whom the light of Christ’s gospel shone on you, O Rome, and through whom you, who wast the teacher of error, wast made the disciple of Truth. These are your holy Fathers and true shepherds, who gave you claims to be numbered among the heavenly kingdoms, and built you under much better and happier auspices than they, by whose zeal the first foundations of your walls were laid: and of whom the one that gave you your name defiled you with his brother’s blood. These are they who promoted you to such glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state, and the head of the world through the blessed Peter’s holy See you attained a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government. For although you were increased by many victories, and extended your rule on land and sea, yet what your toils in war subdued is less than what the peace of Christ has conquered. For the good, just, and Almighty God, [...] by lowering His Nature to the uttermost has raised our nature to the highest. But that the result of this unspeakable Grace might be spread abroad throughout the world, God’s Providence made ready the Roman empire, whose growth has reached such limits that the whole multitude of nations are brought into close connection. For the Divinely-planned work particularly required that many kingdoms should be leagued together under one empire, so that the preaching of the world might quickly reach to all people, when they were held beneath the rule of one state. (St Leo the Great, Sermon on the Feast of Ss Peter and Paul)

*******

ch’e’ fu de l’alma Roma e di suo impero
ne l’empireo ciel per padre eletto:
la quale e ’l quale, a voler dir lo vero,
fu stabilita per lo loco santo
u’ siede il successor del maggior Piero.
Per quest’andata onde li dai tu vanto,
intese cose che furon cagione
di sua vittoria e del papale ammanto.

For he* was of great Rome, and of her empire
In the empyreal heaven as father chosen;
The which and what, wishing to speak the truth,
Were stablished as the holy place, wherein
Sits the successor of the greatest Peter.
Upon this journey, whence thou givest him vaunt,
Things did he hear, which the occasion were
Both of his victory and the papal mantle. (Dante, Inf. 2.20-28)

*Aeneis

Empire III: Gustavo Dudamel at the Spanish Riding School; or Virgil and the Horses

Sometimes when sancrucensis is writing a paper he comes to a point where he has to take a break and do something else to take his mind of it, but then that something else becomes a kind of projection screen on which the paper takes new form.

On the Elections in France

In a recent post I wrote that I’m not an admire of leftist politics, but I’m not an admire of what passes for a politics of “the right” nowadays either. The sort of populist, quasi-Bonapartist nationalism espoused by parties like the Front National in France and the FPÖ in Austria is a bore. Nevertheless, I was sorry that Marine Le Pen went down in the first round of the French presidential elections on Sunday. Whatever her shortcomings, she is one of the very few European politicians who dares to say anything against abortion. Gallia Watch posted the following clip of Marine Le Pen being interviewed by a “feminist” journalist. The journalist suggests that it is ironic that while Le Pen’s career is only possible because of feminism, her platform is inimical to “feminist values”. “What feminist values?” asks Le Pen. Well, abortion rights for instance, answers the journalist. And then, as Galllia Watch puts it, “Marine gets angry”:

Just for that I wish that she had made it to the second round. By sheer chance I was in Paris during the first round of the 2002 election when Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round with less votes than his daughter received on Sunday. But this time around the Front National was a victim of its own success; 2002 had an historically low turn out, since everyone just assumed that Chirac and Jospin would make it to the next round