"For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principlalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of the present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." Ephesians 6:12

"They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes that they cannot see; and their hearts that they cannot understand." Isaiah,44

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Matt:22:21

"And who beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eyes, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" Luke 6:41

"...he that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone." John 8:7

"The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in man in the state of profound self-questioning, a state that is almost always inaccurately recognized and wrongly valued in everyday experience. 'God can only speak to the soul,' Father Sylvan writes, 'and only when the soul exists.' Jacob Needleman: Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery to the Centre of Christian Experience

"...I realized how difficult it is for me to be ever to be wholly in one camp. In all that I love and consider mine -- the church, religion, the world where I grew up and to which I belong, I often see deficiencies and lack of truth. In all that I do not like -- radical ideas and convictions -- I see what is right, even if relatively right. Within religion I feel stifled, and I feel myself a radical 'challenger.' But among challengers I feel myself a conservative and a traditionalist. I cannot identify with any complete system with an integral view of the world or an ideology. It seems to me that anything finished, complete, and not open to another dimension is heavy and self-destructive. I see the error of any dialectics that proceed with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, removing possible contradictions. I think that openness must always remain; it is faith, in it God is found, who is not a 'synthesis,' but life and fullness." The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983[St. Vladimir's Seminary, New York: 2000. September 20, 1974, entry]

Last night I attended a lecture given by Judge Robert Bork at the International Institute for Culture http://www.iiculture.org/in Overbrook. The Institute is a Catholic organization formed in response to Pope John Paul's call for evangelization. The Institute offers courses, lectures, and musical programs on a high cultural and intellectual level -- often followed by elegant receptions with plentiful food and drink, offering occasions for conversation and for meeting new friends. The Institute thus exemplifies the best of the ancient cultural, thoughtful Christian and Catholic tradition -- a tradition that has often proved difficult to transplant on this more rugged and divisive American soil. Though not wholly impossible -- as witnessed by the existence of this Institute and by the many examples of Catholic architecture, community, scholarship and social work and activity here in the city of Philadelphia.

Because more than 300 people were expected to attend, the lecture was held not in Ivy Hall, the Institute's building, but in the nearby basement sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes Church.

I have long taken a deep interest in the thinking and career of Judge Robert Bork, commencing from the days of his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan. On my energy website I made an entry in my Thought Diary-- prompted when I learned of the excessive and pompous obsequies carried out in Washington, D.C. for the former President -- in which I wrote of my feelings, current and previous, concerning Robert Bork. I had been a strong supporter of his candidacy, and my editorial, "Committee decision not to support Bork nomination lacked reason," was published in The Birmingham News on the very day he conceded defeat -- October 9, 1987.

The substance of my editorial concerned by fears of the obliteration of any understanding in American public life regarding the role of reason and the moral value of thinking. When reason is banished in human affairs, all that is left is the bully: the doctrine of Might Equals Right. I believed Bork to be a thinking man, and the vicious campaign mounted against him was essentially the galvanic activation of mob rule.

I wrote a second and much longer article, never published, called "A Modern Mystery Drama: The Trial of Robert H. Bork," in which I argued that the focus of "original intent" (Judge Bork had claimed that judges should not make the law, but interpret it according to the original intent of the Constitution) obscured the purpose for which the Framers had established an independent judiciary. It was not "original intent" that was sacred. "Original intent" is a marker, it is an "icon" for a realm in which it is possible to maintain a distinction between the "Good" and the "True."

Let me explain. I was discussing, in my paper, the axiom of contemporary liberalism, which is the proposition that an increase of rights for some will automatically increase the rights for all. Judge Bork challenged this view, and thus "brought down upon his head the wrath and incomprehension of minds unaccustomed to examining ideas purely on their own grounds." I continued: "Even Senator Arlen Specter... misunderstood Judge Bork on this point. In his editorial [Specter had published an editorial in the New York Times Sen. Specter wrote: "I was further troubled by his writings and testimony that expanding rights to minorities reduced the rights of majorities. While perhaps arithmetically sound, it seemed to me morally wrong."

In answer to this, I wrote the following: "But Judge Bork was not saying that he believed this idea was good; he merely said he believed it to be true.If an idea is true, it does not demand from us, initially at least, that we take a moral position about it. It only demands that we acknowledge it and take account of it. The moral position implicit in our acknowledgement of an idea is not whether or not we agree with it, but whether it becomes part of our view of reality. Morality thus arises out of whether our view of reality is more comprehensive, or less so: which is to say, in essence, that morality arises out of thinking.[See note 1 below]

It was this realm of perspective which, I believe, the Framers wishes to keep above the fray of ideological passion. This realm has to do with the capacity for thought and with the development of the capacity for thoughtfulness in the soul -- the ability to receive ideas and perceptions without immediate reaction of self-identification or opposition. One may not have achieved the divine impartiality of the New Testament expression -- "the rain falls on the just and on the unjust" -- but the ability to think implies the recognition of the sphere of divine and impartial justice.

It is this sphere which is sacred. Thus it is not "original intent" which is in itself sacred. That would mean to make an idolatry of the Founders. But it was unfortunate that Judge Bork was unable to articulate this crucial, if subtle, distinction -- although, given the viciousness of his attackers, this failure was very understandable.

Well... Bork was defeated, and he retired to lick his wounds at the American Enterprise Institute. A few years later he published a book called Slouching to Gomorroh and this book was the fundamental text of his speech last night at the International Institute for Culture. In my June 8, 2004, web diary posting I commented on this book, which I said distressed me even though everything he said in it was mostly true. "What was needed was not another diatribe, not another pointing the finger at someone, but a 'going into the silence,' a purification through suffering. But modern man has lost the ability to suffer fruitfully. Even a man capable of independent thinking, like Bork, was unable to go the final mile.

At the lecture last night Judge Bork brought news from battles that were fought years ago. It was the agenda of cultural conservatism, which I have always supported -- issues concerning abortion, school prayer, homosexual marriage, etc. I have always sided with the conservative position on these issues, believing that the agenda of autonomy favored by the liberals contributed to the disintegration of social bonds, ultimately increasing State power.

This was something Bork did not mention. He charged the "olympian" culture (i.e. the liberal elites) with extreme sexual permissiveness, and said that the mood of radical personal autonomy has grown stronger as the moral order has weakened. This much, surely, is obvious. The weakening of the moral order was the avowed intention of radical autonomy, and Judge Bork's point only acknowledged that the autonomists succeeded in accomplishing what they avowedly set out to do.

But forces and their interaction are always going on, and what may seem to be a victory in one sphere will invariably seek compensatory weight in another. The dismantling of all sources of moral authority plus the enormous accession of State and corporate power welded together -- all of this has resulted in an enormous increase in government bureaucracy. But Mr. Bork's speech last night consisted only in a diatribe against liberalism. He discussed Max Weber's well-known point that the loss of religious allegiance in society tends to leave a moral vacuum which, for many, became filled by socialism. But with the demise of socialism all that is left is anger: "The rhetoric of hatred in the last election surpasses anything we've seen." Presumably Bork was referring to the Democrats and other guilty liberals; he did not refer to the Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Karl Rove -- these people too seem quite capable of discharging volleys of hatred.

A second point he made was the intense hostility to religion shown by the liberal elites. the Jeffersonian "wall of separation" between religion and government has been carried too far in this country, and should never have been taken to mean an absolute breach. As one long critical of the Jeffersonian notion and the zeal with which it has been embraced by the ACLU and other organizations of the Left, I certainly take his point. And yet again, in today's world, it is one-sided. It is a slander against the Christian religion because it fails to note that the distinction between the worldly and the spiritual was made by Jesus Christ himself. The dynamic tension between the church and the state has been a signal aspect of Western history for the last two thousand years. Not to have mentioned this seemed to me a glaring omission and distortion of the facts.

One of the things apparently discussed in the neoconservative and Zionist circles with which Mr. Bork now consorts is how to inaugurate a moral revival of society. In his book he mentions four things that could do it: war, depression, and religious revival (there was a fourth but I can't remember what it was.) He did admit that "the war we are fighting now doesn't seem to be producing a revival... there's a great deal of anti-Americanism..."

Notice how this admission deflects any possible question concerning the justice of the American war on Iraq. There was no attempt on Judge Bork's part to encourage self-reflection in Americans, or to suggest the taking of a little humility, or to develop a capacity to see ourselves as others see us. There was nothing from the realm of thinking in that sense -- which in its genuine operation reflects a little of the realm of divine transcendence. It was all condemnation, all pointing the finger at someone else: "you, you, you..." The liberals, the leftists, the olympians, the evil ones. The mote of the liberals was certainly placed well in view.

I did, at the end, get up and ask my question. I prefaced it by saying that I had long been a supporter of his, mentioning my 1987 editorial, and decrying the feminist-abortion-lobby campaign against him. But then I said I thought this war on Iraq was "evil, wicked, brutal" -- and I was cut off by the director of the Institute, who made the glib assertion that "all wars are brutal" -- and by Bork himself, who stated that he believed the war was right. Followed by applause -- from about half the audience.

Be it said that the Director's dismissal underscored the very point I had been trying to make concerning the moral value of thinking and why I believed that the defeat of Judge Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court boded ill for this country. To refuse to think is to refuse to make distinctions. To say that "All wars are brutal" is not to make any distinction; it is only to put forward a definition or a characterization. It is also a crude dismissal of centuries of Catholic thought devoted to the problem of just wars. Granted the situation last Friday night was not favorable to a more nuanced discussion of the issue. Nevertheless, I believe I was justified in raising an objection to this war -- an objection which the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, has also made. A more gracious dismissal of my objection could have been made by the Director and by Mr. Bork himself through a simple acknowledgement of this. But Leftists are not the only olympians in our midst. The Left is not the only source of the stranglehold on debate in this country.

Everything I feared in 1987 has come to pass: mob rule and Caesarism. The Iraq War is a naked exhibition of Caesarism, and most people of goodwill who have not been lured into the neocon smug-trap can see it. And everything I wrote in my of June 8 -- "Reflections on Spiritual Evil" -- has come to pass. The evil of autonomous liberalism has now become compounded by its inverse, a deification of State power disguised as Christianity.

For it is not so much that what Judge Bork said last night was untrue. Every charge he made against autonomous liberalism was true. But it was what he did not say that was so momentous. He did not mention how the neocon foreign policy is inspired and directed by people who espouse the interests of Israel. [See note 2, below] Judge Bork thus spoke as a neocon while pretending to be a conservative -- and this was what was so odious and dishonest.

The ability of atheists, autonomists, and apostles of sexual permissiveness to wreak damage is great, but it is trifling beside the spiritual iniquity of those who claim the Gospel for the sake of carrying our their agendas and furthering their avarice. Judge Bork thus offers no alternative to autonomous liberalism -- as if being smug is better than being wrong. Sadly, what has happened seems to be that the American public, sick and disgusted with the 75% error foisted upon them by autonomous liberalism, decided to go all out for the 200% error foisted upon them by the neocons. To see the neocon standard being raised and applauded in a Catholic sanctuary was to be present at the consummation of a spiritual evil of which the stupid, short-sighted and self-destructive liberals can have no idea.

1. "The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think,namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem p. 49. Ms. Arendt asks in her later book on philosophy a question -- "Might our ability to tell right from wrong be connected with our capacity to think?" Unfortunately her philosophy fell short of giving a satisfactory answer to this question -- which may be the essential question of modernity.

2.See Juan Cole's site, "Informed Comment," (http://www.juancole.com/)Dec. 12, 2004 posting concerning the FBI's investigation of AIPAC [American Israeli Public Affairs Committee]: "AIPAC is so successful that virtually no speeches critical of Israeli policy are ever given in Congress, even though such speeches are given in most democratic parliaments of the world, and representatives and congressmen are afraid to sign letters in support of the Palestinians or even of a genuine peace process. In fact, AIPAC can arrange for representatives and ]senators to sign the most outrageous and one-sided letters to the president demanding support for virtually all Israeli military and foreign policy goals. That is how a boycott of Syria, a country that has been extremely valuable to the US in the war on terror, was passed...This level of control of Congress by what is essentially the agent of a foreign government has deeply distorted US foreign policy and made the US a dishonest broker..." Needless to say, the Israeli- neoconservative link was not something Judge Bork owned up to.

Additional Note: I wish Judge Bork the joy of his recent conversion to the Catholic faith. But I hope he will remember the words of Jesus: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24).

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"Committee decision not to support Bork nomination lacked reason"
The Birmingham News, Friday, October 9, 1987

What is the difference between ideology and reason?

This is the question we should be examining in the matter of the controversy surrounding the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Yet it is a complex, many-sided and difficult quetion, demanding much time and careful attention to words -- a task not likely to win much support in a time when public passions have been aroused to the extent that they have been. This is because reason always appears weak when confronted by its counterfeit. Yet how essential to know the false from the true! Nothing less than the future of the community of freedom depends upon it.

Judge Bork is controversial because he is reasonable. That is to say, his position transcends altogether the categories of ideological argument. For he says that a careful attention to the Constitution will sometimes result in decisions that will please the liberals, and at other times it will result in decisions pleasing to conservatives. This is not the voice of an ideologue speaking. But it suits the purposes of Judge Bork's opponents to say that he has an "ideology." Watch that. These people are saying that in effect there is no difference between ideology and reason -- which is a cardinal tenet of a shopworn Marxism.

The opponents next take a different tack. They say that careful attention to the Constitution is all well and good, but that social conditions have changed, and that reason alone is not sufficient. hence follows the second great devaluation of reason: words like "compassion" and "sensitivity" are hurled at Judge Bork like clubs, as if he were some sort of cold intellectual. That is another point to watch. Reason is not cold calculating intellect. Nor is it sentimentality. The Constitution is the most unsentimental document in the world, yet it breathes with warmth and life. That is because true reason already contains feeling and warmth within it: it is, in the words of one writer, "dignified by a concern for value." This is what distinguishes it from mere mechanical aptitude -- such as the adding machine or the computer.

Well, then, say the opponents, marshalling for yet another attack, there is no such thing as reason free from bias. Since reason and values are subjective, why should a man like Judge Bork have the final word? What makes his reasoning something we can trust? On this argument the opponents of Judge Bork admittedly have the upper hand. Everything in modern culture seems to support their contention: for everything in modern culture is bent upon destroying the idea that there are truths -- moral truths, if you will -- which have the same order of certitude as the proposition that 2 plus 2 equals 4. What person could write these words today -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."? It could not be done.

And this brings us back to Judge Bork. It is the idea of truth which, in our time, is so at odds with the idea of truth that prevailed at the time of the writing of the Constitution. Modern culture has all but lost the idea that truth functions as a corrective to human egotism. And having lost the idea of truth, it has lost the sense for the moral value of reason. But Judge Bork echoes the older idea of truth when he says that the only real limitation upon the power of judges is their own self-restraint. It is truth itself which restrains: moral reasoning already contains within itself a principle of limitation.

The same cannot be said of ideology or doctrinaire thinking. How little restraint the opponents of Judge Bork have demonstrated is evidenced by the slanderous distortions and venomous lies which they have circulated against him. They say he is against the right of privacy. It is true that Judge Bork has disagreed with the reasoning that brought us this supposed right, and he is right. The reasoning used to deduce this right is unintelligible, and therefore it is irresponsible. But Judge Bork's position on this point has been so clouded by the abortion issue that it has not even been addressed. he speaks, here, for the idea that "the intelligible is the source of the responsible" (W. Walsh) -- he speaks, in other words, for reason in human affairs. Responsibility at this level is far greater, and more accountable, than all the professions of do-goodism by small minds. But Judge Bork refused to play to small minds. He was asked, Why do you want to sit on the Supreme Court? And he said, I'd enjoy it. On a public inured to grand schemes of social reform, such a simple honest answer left not a few jaws hanging.

But people not used to the virtue of reason, must in the end play at being virtuous. The hypocrisy of virtuous ideologues has made us cynical. So finally Judge Bork was accused of shallow opportunism --(the knife never cuts the other way, of course). It is wrong, so the opponents say, for a man to desire a job that he has spent his life preparing for. Or, again they say, he has changed his mind too much. how hard it is, when reason is on trial, to distinguish the false from the true! A man can change his mind because he wants something, or he can change it because he is something. And it is this distinction -- so essential to true judgment -- which encompasses the difference between appearance and reality: all the difference in the world when it concerns the worth of a man.

"O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts. And men have lost their reason." Shakespeare's words, from Mark Antony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar, offer a sober and timely comment on these events. It is true that the Constitution will survive not having Judge Bork on the Supreme Court to defend it. But it will not survive the death of reason.

The fate of the Constitution rests with the fate of reasonable men, and even Judge Bork's thoughtful opponents -- and there are a few -- have not convinced me that their dedication to the Constitution is anything appropaching the depth and scope of his. For Judge Bork is one of the Constitution's ablest and most lucid defenders. If he is not confirmed by the full Senate it will be a great misfortune for the country. But only reason sees what reason defends. And reason, these days, is in short supply.

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To the Director if the International Institute for Culture, December 11, 2005

Thank you for your good work with the International Institute for Culture. This Institute is a great contribution, and brings a Christian impulse into society on a cultivated and intellectual level.

I attended the lecture of Judge Robert Bork, and I was the lady in the audience who brought forward the objection to the Iraq war. I prefaced my remark by saying how I had supported Judge Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court and had published an editorial to this effect. I believed Judge Bork to be a thinker, and in my view the vicious campaign mounted against him signified the real end of any understanding in American public life regarding the moral value of thinking. From then on it would be ideological war, mob rule, Caesarism, symbolism.

Everything I feared in 1987 has come to pass. I indicated in my statement, which was perhaps a bit too long and too involved for the occasion, that I believed the Iraq war was vile, wicked, evil, and brutal, to which you responded -- that "all wars are brutal." Surely you are too fine a thinker to be satisfied with your own answer. It is not the purpose of my letter to detail the lies, incompetence, and brutality of this particular war, conducted against a people who had never hurt us, and with the most shameless avarice. Your answer only underscored the very point I had been trying to make. When people refuse to think, they cease to make distinctions.

No, it is not my object to argue the Iraq war with you, although I believe that the Holy Father himself has condemned it. But I do want to say that Judge Bork tonight put forth neoconservative doctrines in the guise of conservatism, and I consider this disingenuous if not dishonest. I felt betrayed by this man who was once, to me, almost a hero.

If Judge Bork had made the faintest indication that what is going on in our government today is deserving of some attention and scrutiny, if he had indicated that a little humility, a little ability to see ourselves as others see us, would be desirable for Americans to cultivate - if he had pointed this way, I would have been able to walk away from that lecture feeling respect for him.

If Christianity does not have anything to do with the act of thinking, it is not a true Christianity. And if thinking and putting forth ideas and opinions doesn't have to do with integrity, it is not a true thinking but a counterfeit. If Christianity is dead in this country, it will be the work of Christians - far more than the work of the liberals. And when it is dead, no legalistic solution will resurrect it.

How I felt the falsehoods accumulating during Judge Bork's lecture. But I just kept my eye on the crucifix behind him.

Sincerely,[signed] ...