Defenders of Truth

Liberalism will not save us, but this is good news for those who see clearly the truth about what will.

Recently I had dinner with a French scholar who studies the influence of Catholicism on American politics. She was an avid reader of the work we’ve been doing at Postliberal Order because she said that we don’t think conservative politics should be about the defense of party, but the defense of truth. Exactly right.

The Catholic vision of politics, she continued, had been distorted by liberalism both in France and America — where she cited Gallicanism and Americanism as the tell-tale signs of the distortion which turned Catholics into partisan pawns to be sorted into either the left or the right side of liberal order. But what is clear is that this order is collapsing now, and Catholics will need to think differently about their political action in the world. She was, of course, preaching to the choir — but it was nice to hear it in French.

As it happens, the day before, I had a very similar conversation with a very prominent Catholic woman who works in conservative politics. We spoke about how many conservatives are now alternatively divided and caught between the old strategies of movement conservatism, and the need to find a new modus vivendi. I asked her what she expected in the next decade along these lines. Her view was that the battle was now religious. I am paraphrasing, but she said that “the faith of this country will either be true, or it will destroy us.” She added that we now have “nothing to lose” because we are on the brink of losing our country to a religion which is utterly hostile to the human person, the human family, and to the Church. We have to break the illusion that liberalism is somehow going to save us. It’s not.

I couldn’t agree more.

But even in these privileged conversations among a small counter-elite, one senses the anxiety that it’s too late. Some will even say that there’s nothing that can be done. God has already decided our fate. The barbarians aren’t at the gates, they occupy all the seats of power — they outnumber us. And how can one deny the disturbing sense that a new faith rules supreme, that a new flag has been planted in place of the old?

Whenever I ponder these perfectly reasonable fears, the first thing that comes to my mind is a passage by the nineteenth century Spanish priest Félix Sardà y Salvany. He writes these words in a chapter called “an Illusion of Liberal Catholics” in his classic work Liberalism is a Sin:

Amongst the illusions entertained by a certain class of Catholics, there is none more pitiable than the notion that the truth requires a great number of defenders and friends. To these people, numbers seem a synonym for force. They imagine that to multiply heterogenous quantities is to multiply power.

Now true force—real power, in the physical as in the moral order—consists in intensity, rather than in extension. A greater volume of matter equally intense evidently produces a greater effect, not by reason of the increased volume, but by virtue of the augmented intensities contained in it. It is therefore a rule of sound mechanics to seek to increase the extension and number of forces, but always on the condition that the final result be a real augmentation of their intensities. To be content with an increase without consideration of the value of the increment is not only to accumulate fictitious force, but to expose to paralysis the powers which one does possess by the congestion of an unwieldy mass. The millions of Xerxes’ army constituted a force of tremendous extension, but they were of no avail against the vigorous intensity of the Greek three hundred at Thermopylae.

Faith possesses a power of its own, which it communicates to its friends and defenders. It is not they who give the truth power, but truth which charges them with its own vigor. This on the condition that they use that power in its defense.

If the defender, under the pretext of better defending the truth, begins to mutilate it, to minimize it, to attenuate it, then he is no longer defending the truth. He is simply defending his own invention, a mere human creation, more or less beautiful in appearance, but having no relation to truth, which is the daughter of Heaven.

Such is the delusion of which many of our brethren are the unconscious victims, through a detestable contact with Liberalism.

They imagine, with blinded good faith, that they are defending and propagating Catholicity. But by dint of accommodating it to their own narrow views and feeble courage, in order to make it, they say, more acceptable to the enemy whom they wish to overcome, they do not perceive that they are no longer defending Catholicity, but a thing of their own manufacture, which they naively call Catholicity, but which they ought to call by another name. Poor victims of self-deception, who at the beginning of the battle, in order to win over the enemy, wet their own powder and blunt the edge and the point of their swords! They do not stop to reflect that an edgeless and pointless sword is no longer a weapon, but a useless piece of old iron, and that wet powder cannot be fired.

Their journals, their books, their discourses veneered with Catholicity but bereft of its spirit and its life—have no more value in the cause of the Faith than the toy swords and pistols of the nursery.

Just as Liberal Catholics, right or left, must repent of their liberalism, so too must conservatives.

It doesn’t take too many. A few hundred charged with the vigorous intensity of truth can defeat forces greater than Xerxes’ with the help of that heavenly city whose rule elevates all those who dare to rule in accord with it. We have nothing to lose.

St. Genevieve Saving Paris from Attila the Hun