Tag Archives: French Revolution

In Defense of Honor

Culture, Faith, God's Will, Virtue, , , , ,

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke comments on the loss of honor that came as a result of the French Revolution. Concerning Marie Antoinette, Burke writes,

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Honor once lost, like any other virtue, is not easily regained. It is especially hard to regain in a culture that is actively hostile to it.

Honor, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines it, “is the reward of every virtue… it follows that by reason of its matter it regards all of the virtues” (ST II-II Q. 129 Art. 4). Thus, it is clear that honor comes from virtue. In order to be truly honorable, a man must be virtuous. Our culture has, in large part, rejected the traditional idea of virtue. There is much talk about rights and what we are owed, but little discussion about duty. Men are encouraged to extol the virtues of kindness and inclusivity, and women, on the other hand, are told that expressing traits like “nurturance” and “family-oriented values” are just mere preferences and not virtues. As always, the devil is in the details. A man should be loving and caring, but if he places kindness and inclusivity above all other virtues then the family and, by extension, society, will suffer. Certainly, kindness and inclusivity would not have saved Marie Antoinette from the guillotine. And families do not need women who prefer to be nurturing and selfless, but women who are nurturing and selfless. There will be, however, some who will object to this and say that traditional notions of honor and virtue are outdated and bigoted. So, naturally, the question becomes, “Why should we care about honor, aren’t we better off without it?”.

There are a couple of approaches one could take towards answering this question. The first would be to ask what will replace the role that honor had in society? What is beyond honor and virtue? Alasdair MacIntyre explores this question in his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Of a society that has lost its vision of honor and virtue he writes,

In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good. Hence notions of desert and of honor become detached from the context in which they were originally at home. Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert.

A society that abandons honor does not get egalitarianism. Instead, it gets aristocracy and credentialism.

For the second approach, one might ask if tearing down virtue and honor would also threaten other societal goods. Failing to examine this question would be like removing a wall in a house without first determining if it is load-bearing. Unfortunately, leaving honor in the past has not been without consequence. Honor is the basis for magnanimity. Aquinas identifies this connection: “Now a man is said to be magnanimous in respect of things that are great absolutely and simply, just as a man is said to be brave in respect of things that are difficult simply. It follows therefore that magnanimity is about honors” (ST II-II Q. 129 Art. 1). In 2020, Ross Douthat wrote a book called The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success about how and why our society has, in many ways, stopped advancing. While his hypothesis is beyond the scope of this article, the phenomenon he is discussing is germane to the point. There has been a societal decline in the desire to do great things. This stems directly from a change in societal value. As MacIntyre pointed out, society values the vain status associated with honor rather than the virtue from which honor is derived. Not only is magnanimity a virtue and therefore necessary for human flourishing, but society needs it. Magnanimity landed on the moon, it sailed to new worlds, it wrote poems and epics, it built planes, and made countless discoveries and inventions. So rather than resent success and laugh at honor, we should have the courage to ask ourselves if we are here on this earth for something great. Perhaps there really is something great in store for each and every one of us if we would but have the courage and magnanimity to pursue it. And even more terrifying is the possibility that part of the greatness God wishes to bring to the world can only be brought through you. Sure, God can bring goodness out of anything, but there may be good that never comes if you abandon honor and magnanimity. In closing, I would like to turn to Pope Benedict XVI who so eloquently reminds us of this truth: “The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness”.

A Boring Holiday?

Leisure, Virtue, Work, , ,

Each year, from sea to shining sea, our nation sets aside the first Monday of September as a day of great festival.  People gather together by the tens and celebrate Labor Day, a day that “constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country” (Department of Labor History of Labor Day).  Labor Day is remarkable indeed, but not for the reasons for the Central Labor Union first envisioned when they celebrated the first Labor Day back in 1882.  Instead, Labor Day is significant because it serves as a sign of a different achievement of modern man—the erasure of what Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper once called the “Festive Principle.”

This festive principle is written into the nature of mankind.  One might even say that it is festival that man is made for.  At the end of the first creation account, the seventh day, God invites man to celebrate a festival with Him, a time to not just to reflect and rest but to revel in the fact that all that is, is good.  Therefore, each man and woman finds buried in his and her heart a desire to celebrate the eternal festival; a desire that is fanned into flame by the great feasts of this life.

This desire cannot be wholly stamped out, but it most certainly can be squashed.  We can and, in fact, have become most un-festive, a truth marked by the “celebration” of Labor Day.  An experiment that began with the founders of the French Revolution has failed because, as Pieper says, “while man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating.  The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death-all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no one can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival” (In Tune with the World, p. 46).

Labor Day, like the other National Holidays including Thanksgiving where no one will name Whom it is we are thanking, are about celebrating gifts we have bestowed upon ourselves.  As the Department of Labor reminds us, “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.” Dramatic pause aside, the fact that there is a most of suspense as we mention not the real Creator of those things, but man, is most telling.  Once God is removed from our festal vocabulary our festivals naturally fall flat.  Labor Day is a completely flat holiday.

Labor Day in a particular way ends up in the orbit of the absurd because it is a celebration based upon something wholly material.  It no longer has the eternal festival in view.  It loses its sacramental meaning and therefore is boring.  Because of its materiality (along with Thanksgiving and secular Christmas especially) its “celebration” also has an interior spirit of competition.  Men and women cannot unite around a common material good.  The limited nature of material things leads away from unity and always end in competition.

If we peel back the layers of secularization, then we can see why Labor was chosen as worthy of festivity.  Along with procreation, it is the way in which we most image God.  In both cases we image God the Creator.  So it should not surprise us that the Fall, in bruising the image of God in mankind, turned these two things into labor.  The work of Christ the Laborer was to dial back these effects so that work now becomes a source of grace.  Now that is something that is worthy of festival.  That the One Who simply speaks things into existence should allow mere creatures to use their strength and freedom to co-create with Him.  Worker bees have no dignity, man the worker has dignity because and only insofar as he works as the image of God.  To flatten Labor Day out also flattens each one of us making us mere cogs in an economic machine.  Celebrate Labor Day in a spirit of awe and thanksgiving to God the Creator and each man is elevated to his rightful place in the cosmos.

Nietzsche, who was no friend of transcendent values, once said that “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.”  For all of the reasons above, Christians should enjoy Labor Day and truly celebrate it for everything that it should be.  “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it.”