Whose Emperor? Which empire?

Sohrab Ahmari’s recent hoorah for an Apostolic Empire is only ostensibly a book review. In fact, it’s a broadside against the enemies of the movement he champions. Call it the New Right, call it political Catholicism, call it integralism if you like: it has set its face like so much steel against “conservative” Christians who would reject “worldly power” and instead “build smaller communities” characterized by a “readiness for ostracism.”

Now nothing quite magics ink from a blank page like an enemy, so it’s easy enough to forgive Ahmari for making a veritable army of darkness out of whatever hodgepodge of pacifists and anabaptists actually fit his accusatory bill. The history of the early Church would forever silence these evangelizing small-guys, these fetishists of the minuscule, if only they would read Henri Daniel-Rops’ history of the Church (with caveats from Ahmari). Despite starting with something as small as an infant; despite taking, as its chief acquisition, something as hidden as the human heart; still, Christianity has a spiritual affinity with Roman Bigness and an “ambition” for the “cosmopolitan and the imperial.” In those days before the conversion of Constantine, it was “prepared to capture an empire for Christ,” to take over the political universalism of the Roman Empire, adopting its legal and authoritative structures.

There really is so much to say about all this.

The paradox of retreatist Christianity  

In a passion for comparisons between big and small, and in their admirable enthusiasm for the former over the latter, the integralists tend to forget a principle they would otherwise affirm, namely, that man, by his nature as a political animal, always acts for the whole. No Christian could propose a plan for society that applied only to himself, arguing that (a) everyone should be Christian and that (b) Christians should “build smaller communities” but failing to conclude that (c) “everyone should build smaller communities.”

Christians who “rather than seek to envelop modern ­civilization ... would build smaller communities characterized by intense piety” are actually proposing, by their action, to envelop the entirety of modern civilization. It may be a despicable plan, but it is as much a plan for the whole world as any dream of the Holy Roman Empire. If it is imperative to shrink, and if the so shrunken communities continue to relate to each other—which they must—then a city and an empire is being proposed by the shrinkers. Coercion would be directed against those who dare dream of New York City, even as, in our day, it is directed against those who do not.   

It is no real argument to accuse such Christians for lacking an imperial vision. Christians can only ever be imperial for the same reason that the truth is always the truth for all. If there is a “modern intra-Catholic debate,” it simply cannot be between Big and Small, only between kinds of Big—between, say, distributed Big and centralized Big. If small-town Christianity is posited as a merely private option, then one is involved in the rhetoric of liberalism, but hasn’t escaped the political imperative: one is actually positing a worldwide empire in which the means and modes of social life are available as private options. The real question is never “whether empire?” only “what kind of empire?”  

The wrong question

Assuming that there is enough of a parallel between the Roman empire and our American empire to make Early Christian action a condemnation of Present Christian inaction; assuming that as they did to Rome, we ought to do to Washington DC, Ahmari argues that Roman Christians did not posit the catacombs as an ideal form of the Christian life—as Americans are apparently doing—rather, “Christians were deeply and publicly embedded within the larger structures of pagan social and political life.”

But the conversion of Rome was not the guerilla activity of non-Romans, scheming as to whether not to “capture the Empire” or, on second thought, “leave it alone and form, like, an intentional community in Hyattsville, man.” The conversion of Rome was the conversion of Romans to Christianity. To say that they were publicly embedded within the pagan social order is about as enlightening as saying that 21st century converts to Catholicism are all on Twitter, and then concluding that Catholicism is a religion with a spiritual affinity for social media. 

Everyone is embedded in their social order. Human being is concomitant with such an embedding. There is much to conclude from Christianity’s conversion of cannibals, but that Christianity was from the beginning suited to cannibalism goes a mite too far. The question one must ask, of cannibals, Americans, and Roman converts alike is—what happened next?   

    

What happened next

We would be surprised if an author, upon seeing a grocer steal a car and immediately crash it into an oak tree, reviewed the event for First Things, deriving from it the edifying moral that “there is a congruity between grocers and the operation of automobiles.” But Ahmari is in something of this position when he argues that Christianity “was from the ­beginning suited to and even prefigured by the political universalism of the Roman Empire.”

For we all know what happened after Rome became Christian—Rome fell, but Christianity endured. When Ahmari writes that Christianity “was a religion of polyglot ports and city-states under the administration of a multinational empire,” we do not deny it, we only add that it rather swiftly crashed that multinational empire into a tree, taking a few of its parts to construct some new thing we call the Middle Ages, or Christendom. And if one insists on calling Christendom a new Empire, that’s fine, so long as one admits that this new thing is not like the old thing; that Charlemagne is not Caesar; that a crusader army is not a Roman army, and so forth. 

Christendom did not have a standing army. It did not have a sovereign Emperor. Power was made efficacious, not in itself, but by its appeal to justice. The whole civilization lost the habit of slavery. Gladiatorial games and human sacrifice went the way of the buffalo. Central administration became an incidental, localized pursuit rather than a civilizational goal and source of order. Bishoprics and fiefdoms, kings and popes, all negotiated an obviously distributed justice, ordering what belonged to their care in the same lands where once all order had descended from Caesar. Ahmari says that “the Church came to assume Roman political forms”; if he means by this something more than the fact that it was the Romans, and not some other people, who converted to Christianity, then it is equally obvious that the Church then came to discard Roman political forms—unless one can strain his imagination so far as to see, in Emperor Theodosius submitting to penance after St. Ambrose excommunicated him for his cruelty, the same Emperor, the same Empire, and the same form. 

Ahmari cites the universalism of the Roman road system as a poetic example of Rome’s congruity with the universalism of Christianity, but leaves us to wonder why, then, the medieval Christians didn’t maintain the actual roads. The obvious answer is that the roads were built for military maneuvers; that, when the converted Roman people forsook their drive for conquest, becoming one in Christ rather than one in fear—they didn’t need the roads, except here, there, and wherever they served the Christian peace. So too with Roman law, which Ahmari admires for spreading “the same legally ordered way of being in the world, whether [Rome’s] subject peoples liked it or not.” If “Roman reality structured the Christian mind and lent it the same universalist impulse,” we are at loss to explain why Roman law fell into the same disrepair as the Roman road, used here and there for its rational axioms and procedures, but nowhere operating as a comprehensive, positive law code. Again, the obvious answer is that the New Testament really is new; that Christianity, even as it “takes what is good” from Roman Law, has no need for universally enforced, positive law code, because it is not about the business of enforcing “the same legally ordered way of being in the world” to all peoples, but freeing all peoples from such a yoke by restoring in them, by Grace, their own capacity to legislate; infusing in them the virtues necessary to instantiate the natural law in their own way, according to their own custom, in their own time and place, and with dispensation according to person and circumstance.

If we are to do as the early Christians did, ours is a destructive task indeed.  

The Church will bring its own universalism, thank you very much

For all the chest-puffing of those who would bravely side with Big over and against the insidious efforts of Small, they have an awfully emaciated view of the Church. She is Mother Parasite, waiting for some hapless pagan host to amass for itself sufficient martial power, treasure, and order that she might latch onto it and fulfill her earthly destiny.

It is true, wonderfully true, that the Church is salt, light, and soul to the world; that in ceaselessly bringing the pagans to conversion she also takes up and fulfills what is good in their customs. But she is not a tabula rasa: she comes with her own customs, with a new word from God (something Ahmari would obviously affirm) and so with a uniquely Christian political form (which seems to give the New Right some consternation, as it fails to jive with their clarion call to “take over” our current political form, call it the liberal-capitalist, bureaucratic nation-state, or call it what you will). We may haggle over whether a particular treasure in the Church’s chest was pilfered from Jerusalem, Athens, or Rome—or whether it was mailed direct from Nazareth. But in the case of universalism, we’d be mistaken to think of the Church as so paltry a mother as to need to hire Rome for a nurse.              

St. Augustine, an actual Roman convert, living the reality which Ahmari theorizes, denies the latter’s claim that “Roman reality structured the Christian mind and lent it the same universalist impulse.” The universalist impulse of Rome was not “universal” any more than is the universalist impulse of Hollywood, USA. It was viciously parochial. Roman rule was spread by war and slavery precisely because it was not for all men, and so Augustine condemns Rome for “provok[ing] with voluntary war neighbors who are peaceable and do no wrong, in order to enlarge [the] kingdom.” As a Christian, Augustine has no patience for the silliness of sovereignty, which would have us bow before a kingdom or an empire just because it attains to its name: 

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. (City of God, IV.4)

What could the universalism of a war-machine and a slave-empire that takes “human glory” as its end “lend” to (that other Roman convert) St. Paul? Was it Roman Law, in its homogeneous and repetitive application to each and every subjugated territory, that allowed him to imagine a universal Church in which there was “no distinction between Jew and Greek [because] the same Lord is Lord of all and bestowed his riches upon all who call upon him?” (Romans 10:12) Was the geographic expanse that Rome nervously and violently ruled the prerequisite image by which Paul could imagine a society in which all things are reconciled to Christ in the peace that comes through Christ and, more specifically, His submission to that same Roman violence? No, Christianity did not borrow its universalism from Rome. Christianity theoretically and historically destroyed the false universalism of Roman dominance along with its material expressions, and in its place built Christendom, whose particular form of politics is not war, but peace, unity in diversity, modeled after the family, which is itself modeled after the Trinitarian God.    

Given the degree to which the New Right relies on the aesthetics of size to make their case, we must point out that there is nothing imperial about a Christian politics that must wait, with its eyes on the hands of rulers of this earth, for the development of a non-Christian form that the Church can occupy; nothing muscular about a Church which can “seize the levers of power” but hasn’t the wherewithal to build the machine and the levers besides; nothing big about a Christianity that lacks its own political form. Still, this odd idea of a needy, dependent Church at least explains the habits of those who believe in it. This sort of thought is tailor-made for posting, a particular online habit by which Christians are able to monitor and respond to the glory of the world, the undulations of earthly power, and the daily workings of “the sphere of politics” which chugs along without Christ toward its natural perfection. Social media is not a mere option for this sort of thinking. Rather, logging on is a moral requirement for the Christian who, destined to “capture an Empire,” must maximize his chances of finding the best means and the most opportune moment for doing so by reading that empire’s news.

Enlightenment now

All of this puts Mr. Ahmari in a difficult place. As a Catholic, he is obliged to sneer at Enlightenment narratives of history, to meet claims of the “Catholic Dark Ages” with so many actually-did-you-know’s and contrary-to-popular-belief’s. But for the sake of a devastating swipe at small-government conservatives, he seems to have little option but to endorse such radical thinkers as Gibbons; to exhume the rotten Dark Age narrative scholars have worked so hard to bury. For if it is the case that “Roman reality structured the Christian mind,” and that Christian minds subsequently sank everything that made Rome Roman, then Christianity only really came into its own, into its proper universalist structure, during the Renaissance, when Roman Law, and Roman habits, and autonomous pagan learning were once more made the bread and butter of the West. What else can one call Christendom but the Dark Ages—an awkward and embarrassing interlude stretched between two moments of Apostolic Empire? 

What’s really going on here?

Ahmari’s essay can be easily forgiven as a rhetorical exercise gone amok (an offense I have given the reading world in far worse ways than he). He slips into the same, convenient, rhetorical strategy as most “postliberal” sophists: identifying contemporary forms of political power with essential categories of political power, in order to accuse anyone who looks askance at the particular form of looking askance at the category. 

Thus, for instance, the state as a particular (basically Hobbesian) form of governance established in the modern era, is identified by the integralist with the state as “the perfect society” (a formal, Aristotelian description of the self-sufficient community subsisting between ruler and ruled) so that those who look askance at the state in this first sense can be accused of being anarchists, or at least idiots—which would only follow if they took umbrage with the state in the second sense. 

Thus bureaucracy, as the particular, inhuman crap we deal with, is identified (somehow) with the general category of “rational organization for the sake of government,” and thus those who would rather not live in a bureaucratic state are dismissed as irrational (what, you’re against rational government?) despite comprising a near universal part of the human population. 

This background in tactics seems necessary to explain Ahmari’s strange insistence that                  “the Church of the Catacombs deployed administration”—strange, insofar as no one with a mind even barely pulsating would think to question that the Church must “administrate” in any definitional sense of the word. I do not make dinner without administration, and certainly a Church of the Catacombs—involving, at the very least, some decision as to where to dig—is unthinkable without it. But Ahmari is thinking of our American administrative state, which many people (and not just small-government conservatives) oppose as a particularly foul perversion of administration as such. Here, the form in which the law is administered is basically positivistic, proceduralist, without dispensation according to person and circumstance, needlessly legislating the particular rather than judging it according to the universal, sealed off from any transcendent claims of justice, stupidly inert before a fictional “sovereign will,” and what is worse, it requires man’s every other cousin to be a lawyer.         

Ahmari identifies contemporary Christian complaint against a particular, totalitarian form of administration with a complaint against administration as such: “Administration itself—the dread hobgoblin of the American conservative mind—wasn’t alien to the Church, but came naturally,” he says, as if he alone had the courage to take up weapons against the well-funded hippie-pacifist-anarchist-conservative whose penchant is for governmental chaos and whose greatest fear is order and rule of law. (Maybe you’ve met him). 

The trouble with this rhetorical method is the trouble with posting more generally: it is hard to know when to stop. Having obliterated the question of form in the present, one is sorely tempted to look back on the politics of past societies and look approvingly on even the most obvious wickedness as the mere implementation of formal political categories that belong to the nature of rule just as such: Rome had administration, administration is good, therefore Rome’s administration is good. Against this disease, we need the medicine of Augustine, who tells us, “let us not ... blunt the edge of our attention by loud-sounding names of things, when we hear of peoples, kingdoms, provinces”—and, I might add, hierarchy, empire, order, administration, bureaucracy, and all the rest. Rather, let us ask 

what reason, what prudence, there is in wishing to glory in the greatness and extent of the empire, when you cannot point out the happiness of men who are always rolling, with dark fear and cruel lust, in warlike slaughters and in blood, which, whether shed in civil or foreign war, is still human blood; so that their joy may be compared to glass in its fragile splendor, of which one is horribly afraid lest it should be suddenly broken in pieces. (City of God IV.3)

Let us not glory in the empire as empire even if the actual, present form of it is miserable and sad. Let us seek, instead, the Christian form. 

A road not taken

Ahmari has it within his own thought to reject this constant substitution of form for category. To defend Catholicism against the charge of Nazism, he distinguishes the latter from other imperialisms, calling Nazism, despite its claims to universality, “a fundamentally particularistic enterprise and an especially nasty one at that,” saying of “modern Germanic imperialism” what Augustine says of Rome. This alone should reduce him, and all of us, to a reformulation of the question. The question can never be whether imperialism; it must be whose imperialism and which empire. Yet, this lapse into good sense does nothing to help his enterprising effort to identify the New Right with the early Church, and so he goes on to more of the same.

There is no Christian who makes a stand against the very idea of “organization,” to be refuted by the bold claim that, among early Christians, “organization was the name of the game.” Ahmari’s point here is not to investigate what constitutes Christianity’s form of organization—which would take some work—but to argue that, as the Roman Empire was “organized” so early Christianity was “organized” and therefore modern American Christians should also be “organized”; by which Ahmari means to take up power within the “organization” of the American Empire and utilize its means of coercion for the glory of God. But the particular form of early Christian “organization”—rather than the mere fact that they were organized—dissolves the argument. Once we attend to what kind of organization the early Christians set up, we cannot possibly draw the conclusion that we, like them, should ship off another round of conservative Catholics to staff, intern, and otherwise rule Washington DC.     

It is true that, in the converting Roman Church, “​​there were rules for worship, for resolving disputes among brethren, for receiving new members, for dealing with apostasy, and on and on.” But the rules for worship forbid participation in state-sanctioned human and animal sacrifice. The rules for resolving disputes took as a given that Christians were to avoid state courts: “When one of you has a grievance against a brother, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?” (1 Corinthians 6:1). The rule for receiving new members was, eventually, a deliberate misuse of the Roman military oath (sacramentum), which once bound the Empire in the common cause of war, now administered to babies and neophytes in the sacramentum of baptism, binding the body of Christ into the common cause of peace. The rules for dealing with apostasy aren’t exactly clear, but given that apostasy from the Roman regime meant death, while the excommunication of the apostate from the Christian brethren was “for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 5:5), this much is clear: the mere existence of rules in the Church does not allow us to argue that “the Church came to assume Roman political forms,” unless by “assume” we also mean crush. 

If we must make an analogy to the American experience, the concrete reality of these early Christian rules would suggest that, if modern American Christians really wanted to imitate the early Church, they would develop their own society within the corpse of the American Empire, develop their own courts, their own modes of policing, their own markets, in a new polity that operates according to a new logic of love and that does not rely on the structures of fear and violence that assure the unity of the old regime. 

But, obviously, this is the very thing Ahmari sets out to refute.

Irony, lost

Now for all the irony deployed by the New Right, they seem not to appreciate it when it is deployed by the Church Fathers. Ahmari ropes Origen to his cause—an odd one, given his rather extreme dismissal of anything good about the natural political order—quoting him as saying “because God was anxious that all the nations of the world should be ready to receive the doctrines of Christ, His Providence subjected them all to the Emperor of Rome.” 

One of God’s finest jokes is to bring about His salvation by means of those who oppose it. The Old Testament repeats the joke with childish glee. From the “spoils of Egypt” to “the walls of Jericho,” the fear and greed that amasses material resources is turned into the means by which material resources are distributed to God’s people—usually in and through the destruction and death of the fearful and the greedy. In this sense, God subjected all the nations of the world to the Emperor of Rome. It was not, as Ahmari suggests, because Christianity was oriented “toward the cosmopolitan and imperial.” It was because God is funny. The Romans who paved the earth to transport troops paved it for the feet of the Apostles, whose preaching destroyed the Roman army. Idolatry held people in such fear that they sacrificed to “an unknown god,” and St. Paul declares this deity to be the only God. Augustine shows us that the common Latin language that “the imperial city ... endeavored to impose on subject nations” meant that “interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless,” and though “many great wars ... much slaughter and bloodshed ... provided this unity” (City of God, IXX.7), it was through this bloody unity that the message of peace was easily disseminated to the whole world. This should no more be taken as a sign of spiritual affinity between Christianity and the Roman political form than the fact that Israel grew rich in Egypt should be taken as a sign of internal congruity between the Egyptian political form and the Divine Law.

There is a whole genre of patristic irony that blasts over Ahmari’s head, from Origen to Justin Martyr, in which the Christian defends himself as “the most loyal subject” of the pagan Emperor. Not that the Christian is insincere. Rather, the Christian uses the words of allegiance common to the pagan idolatry of kings insofar as it subjects the Emperor to the true king, Jesus Christ.

Martyrdom Matters

The controversy is not between the Big and the Small. The controversy is between Christians who think that Christianity should rule the world and imagine that this will be easy, and Christians who think Christianity should rule the world and know that it will be hard. Of course, different understandings of “Christianity” and “world” and “rule” go into producing this opposition, but the result is obvious: one party imagines that another policy change, another election, and a few well-placed job applications should do the trick. The other requires conversion and sanctity from the very beginning. That requirement seems to provoke Ahmari, who is an outspoken advocate for a civilizational Christianity that does not require heroic perfection of everyone, does not require martyrdom to achieve its supremacy. Yes, martyrdom is beautiful and impressive, but “the Church as a whole and most individual Christians didn’t go out of their way to bring about martyrdom, and they looked askance at members who threw ordinary prudence to the winds and tried to force the hands of the Romans.”     

Obviously, Ahmari is correct to oppose “fatalistic over-eagerness for ‘martyrdom’” if all he means is that there is nothing Christian about suicide. Yes, Christians were “not so mad as to stir up against us the wrath of kings and princes, which will bring upon us sufferings and tortures, or even death,” as Origen somewhere says. Yes, it would be ridiculous to “forgo political solutions to persecution by gender ideologues and others, on the grounds that ours is a martyr’s faith.” But it is necessary that, even as we seek political solutions to persecution, we are in fact willing to die, lest our prudential acquisition of political solutions turn into a tacit acknowledgment that given enough fear, we will fold. This kind of solution turns all Christian political solutions into mere “policy variations” within a social order that fundamentally adheres on the basis of fear. Christians might “win,” but only by playing the Leviathan’s game. If the entire nation becomes Christian because Christians were so scared of martyrdom that they became President, Secretary of State, and the Entire Administrative State in order to ward it off, then Christians only “win” by losing on the most profound level possible. They may have “reorientated” a tyranny to their own benefit, but this is not the realization of the Christian political form, only the realization of the pagan political form, albeit “occupied” by Christians. 

Ahmari seems to argue that, because very few of the early Christians actually became martyrs, Christian politics should be the kind of politics that does not actually risk martyrdom—except, perhaps, as a novel and unique calling of individuals here and there. But the mere fact that not many Christians actually became martyrs says no more about the ideal structure of Christian politics than the fact that not so many marriages end happily says anything about the ideal structure of marriage. Rather, just as a single marriage in a sea of divorce proves the thing possible, so the existence of a single martyr proved Christianity possible—proved that there was a political alternative to a peace established through fear of the gods and the emperors. In being willing to die, in being “not afraid,” the Christian proved the existence of a social order that did not need the punishments and rewards of the empire in order to subsist. The martyr says, even to the coward, “you can do it.” And it is simply a historical fact that the witness of the martyrs provoked mass conversion among the Roman people, a people who were, as Augustine notes, quite miserable in their empire of fear, quite sad in their political form of violently established order. The effect of someone who could not be ruled by the fear of death gave them the proof they needed to dispute the aggrandized claims of Caesar—which amounted to “you need me and my threats for the good of order”—and to find order and peace in Christ instead. Adopting the Christian form—not later, but now—means that we always give evidence of a social peace that is possible because of love, not fear. Andrew Willard Jones, in his essay “The Weakness of Caesar and the Power of the Cross” (New Polity 3.1), describes all of this with much more skill, quoting the Passio Sanctorum Scillitanorum’s record of one martyr who said: “I do not recognize the empire of this world; but rather I serve that God, Whom no man has seen nor can see.... I recognize my Lord, the King of kings, and the Emperor of the peoples.” How’s that for apostolic empire?