By Matthew Scarince
New Polity: A Journal of Postliberal Thought recently published my essay “Pagan Laws and the People of God.” Here is an excerpt from the introduction, you can read the whole essay by purchasing the issue or subscribing to the journal here.
The dawn that dispelled the horrendous night that morn
Was not a Sabbath of rest but a Saturnalia of sorrow
The impious demon rejoiced in seeing the breach of peace between brothers
There never was greater slaughter, nor field so full of war
The laws of Christendom are turned into a rain of blood.
Thus the gluttony of Cerberus pleases the infernal powers.— Angelbert, Versus de bella que fuit acta Fontaneto
These poignant verses describe the aftermath of the Battle of Fontenoy, a decisive moment in the fratricidal war between the three grandsons of Charlemagne. In the eyes of the Frankish poet, the order of the Lex Christianorum—the reign of peace—had given way to the old blood-soaked anarchy of paganism; the divinely instituted leisure of the Sabbath had yielded to a Saturnalia of debauchery. These verses could equally well describe the situation of Catholics in the modern administrative state, a model of state which has come to dominate the political life of many countries. The atrocities of the modern state are without number; for example, in America, until very recently, this form of state sanctioned at its highest levels the mass destruction of innocents in the womb. A growing school of postliberal “juridical thinkers” blame our moral and spiritual decay on the refusal to ground our law in the “Classical Legal Tradition.” They claim that the basic apparatus of the modern state is merely abused; politicians educated in the tradition of classical legal thought can and should adopt “the apparatus of the administrative state” to successfully adapt and adjust “broad positive instruments to changing social, economic, and technological circumstances.” This claim (and the booming juristic community that has rallied around it) lacks any sense of the traditional perspective which pits Catholic society and the Western European tradition of governance against the depredations of the pagan civilizations that it converted and conquered. From this perspective, the modern administrative state has revived the despotism of the pagans.
