Human Rights, Virtue and the Common Good: Untimely Meditations on Religion and Politics (Collected Essays, Volume 3)
Ernest L. Fortin, Brian Benestad
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 2:00256760
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Author note: Brian Benestad (Editor)
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Volume Three of Ernest Fortin: Collected Essays discusses the current state of Christianity—especially twentieth-century Catholic Christianity—and the problems with which it has had to wrestle in the midst of rapid scientific progress, profound social change, and growing moral anarchy.
In this volume, Fortin discusses such topics as Christianity and the liberal democratic ethos; Christianity, science, and the arts; Ancients and Moderns; papal social thought; virtue and liberalism; pagan and Christian virtue; and the American Catholic church and politics.
tension between the two poles of human existence. We have plenty of them at home. For all the benefits that it provides and for which we can be immensely grateful, modern liberal democracy does not of itself produce a strong attachment to the common good of society and was not calculated to do so. This means that anyone in search of proper models of public-spiritedness will have to look elsewhere for them, as did our American forefathers, who sought them in classical antiquity, often naming
York: Prentice Hall Press, 1992), and D. M. Raup, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 49 This much is suggested by Aristotle, De anima II.421b16-25, which stresses the greater perfection of the sense of touch in human beings and its peculiar relation to the life of the mind. Also Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, qu. 76, a. 5, entitled: “Whether the Intellectual Soul is Conveniently United to this Kind of Body.” 50 Unlike Kant, Aristotle and his followers did
political thought, his views do not by themselves account for every aspect of that thought. The shocking character of some of these views led to their eventual modification by later theorists. For the sake of brevity, we can leave it at saying that the form in which the trend inaugurated by Machiavelli finally crystallized and gained widespread acceptance is the typically modern natural right doctrine of John Locke. The easiest way to understand Locke’s political philosophy is again to compare
consisted in giving one’s time, one’s strength, one’s life to the state. Politics and war were no longer the whole of man; all the virtues were no longer comprised in patriotism, for the soul no longer had a country. Man felt that he had other obligations besides that of living and dying for the city. Christianity distinguished the private from the public virtues. By giving less honor to the latter, it elevated the former; it placed God, the family, the human individual above country, the
suspicious, ironic, and always slightly amused. We had a common friend, Jacob Klein, who alerted me to the fact that Strauss harbored certain misgivings about me. Not that I had anything against Jews—I doubt whether he ever thought that—but he must have sensed in me the typical arrogance of a young student who is proud of his success. He was probably right. After that I was very careful not to offend him, knowing how sensitive he was. We were on good terms and talked now and then but otherwise