The unknown traveler shows up storm-tossed, naked, and hungry. He is bathed and clothed, the best wine skins are brought, a meal is laid. Beautifully depicted in Homer, hospitality is a kind of grace—a good bestowed on another outside the realm of exchange and without regard to his merit.
In due time, when every comfort has been provided, he is asked, “Where are you from, and who are your parents?” The question of the guest’s origins—what city, what clan, what far-off barbarian people, perhaps—has until now been suspended. He is received first as one human being by others, into a household.
The traveler’s qualities are ascertained. Is he of noble mien and courteous bearing? A simple but honest rustic? Does the favor of the gods shine upon his shoulders, or does he have the ways of a scoundrel? Does he carry himself like a freeborn citizen or like a slave?
Implicit in hospitality is the (rebuttable) presumption that one’s guest is not an opportunist. That is, he participates in a shared moral economy and feels a debt. Gratitude and hospitality are two expressions of the same relation, the relation that obtains among members of—let’s call it the community of the gracious, which transcends political and class divisions. Such a guest would offer hospitality of his own if the circumstances were reversed. Also, guests eventually leave. (Penelope’s suitors needed a firm reminder on this point.)
When the Argives entered Troy in a wooden horse, the Trojans were under no obligation of hospitality. War is a relation of enmity between two polities, not an encounter between a household and an individual. The polity is the locus of “the political,” and the mark of the political is the distinction between us and them, friend and foe.
To some Christian readers, that last sentence will seem shocking. Isn’t Christian politics distinguished by transcending such a distinction? Jesus taught, “Love your enemies.” The shock bespeaks a misapprehension, a confusion about what is entailed in politics, Christian or otherwise.
When Socrates asks Polemarchus to give his definition of justice at the beginning of the Republic, Polemarchus gives the pre-philosophic answer that justice consists of helping friends and harming enemies. Though crude, this answer captures something native to politics as such (however enlightened we may be). The question then arises: What is the status of “the political” among Christians? It is a question forced upon us by mass immigration.
Does the distinction between insider and outsider have standing, as it were, in Christian thought and practice? Should it? That is, does politics have its own dignity, its own categories and imperatives proper to it? Or should political life be viewed simply as personal morality in aggregate form, an answer to the question “What should I do?” (as an individual) writ large?
The latter view is implicit in the insistence of many Christians that their religion requires them to be welcoming of migrants without qualification. I believe this dismissal of the claims made on us by the bounded community, in the name of something higher and more universal, is too easy and misses the mark. There is some kind of evasion occurring.
Perhaps this void in contemporary Christian thought is inevitable. The Church is universal and addresses itself to all mankind. The relationship between man and God is personal, and takes place in the heart. Between these universal and individual perspectives, what is missing is the concrete, middle realm in which our common life is set.
The Greeks had at least two words for enemies. An echthros was someone hated, a personal enemy. Polemioi were the people of a city that one’s own community was contending against. (The root polemos means “war.”) These are two different things. I have deliberately used the singular of the first, the plural of the second. In the context of mass migration, the distinction between a personal enemy and communal adversaries matters, especially when we are talking about uncontrolled migration of young, unattached, overwhelmingly male migrants from Islamic societies into European nations.
In sufficient numbers, this pattern of migration can bear an unfortunate resemblance to colonization or conquest, especially if the new arrivals hold the native population in contempt for being too decadent, too passive, too spiritually exhausted to make a claim on their own behalf (and that of their posterity) to the inheritance their ancestors handed down to them. To the non-Western mind, this renunciation is likely to appear not as magnanimity but as simple weakness. The resulting contempt may be expressed as cultural and racial aggression, as was the case with the rape gangs in the United Kingdom. The French essayist and novelist Laurent Obertone speaks of a competition among non-assimilated migrants to inflict petty harms of domination and nuisance on the native French. That competition is matched by a moral competition among the overly “domesticated” elites to outdo one another in mandating lenience toward such harms (from which they themselves are largely insulated).
The lenience resembles Christian charity. But we would have to call it a counterfeit of charity, if we follow Max Scheler. He insists that
the paradoxical precept that one should love one’s enemy is by no means equivalent to the modern shunning of all conflict. Nor is it meant as a praise of those whose instincts are too weak for enmity . . . ! On the contrary: the precept of loving one’s enemy presupposes the existence of hostility, it accepts the fact that there are constitutive forces in human nature which sometimes necessarily lead to hostile relations and cannot be historically modified.
It may be significant that when Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he used the word for personal enemies, not communal adversaries. The Greek is Άγαπάτε τοῦς ἐχθροῦς ὑμῶν. The verb form is second-person imperative. Unlike English, Greek also has a third-person imperative, which is awkward to translate. If Jesus had used it, one might translate this commandment as “Let them love enemies,” or passively as “Let enemies be loved.” But the commandment is addressed to you. This is reinforced by the second person possessive pronoun ὑμῶν: You love your enemies. One by one.
We are commanded to love our personal enemies. We are also commanded to love our neighbors. Conveniently, these are often the same people. The neighbor, like the personal enemy, is someone specific and concrete, someone known. He is therefore someone one could love. But for the same reason, he is someone who is difficult to love. (My actual neighbor, Bob—are you kidding me?!) Such love is never fully accomplished but an ongoing spiritual discipline through which we imitate God’s love for us, who are unworthy of it. In this imitation, we must continually forgive those who trespass against us: another act of the spirit that requires strength. On the other side of such strength may lie actual affection, but usually not.
By contrast, “the other” as he appears in the liberal imagination is an abstraction. To love the other, in the manner of a yard sign pronouncement, costs me nothing. That is what makes it sentimentalism. To maintain the sentiment, and with it a certain view of myself as magnanimous, I need the other to remain an abstraction. Hence my need not to notice concrete sociological facts about the objects of my solicitude, and the moratorium against speaking in detail about the social realities that attend a massive influx of people from very different societies.
Some of these societies have little tradition of the rule of law or of self-government. Or they may have a strong tendency toward clannishness, that is, the extension of social trust only to one’s in-group and a corresponding readiness to exploit the wider trust of the host society, as happened in the case of Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota. The males may not have been socialized into that discipline of the eyes, to say nothing of the hands, that marks a significant accomplishment of the West and allows women to occupy public space without discomfort or fear.
In welcoming “the other” without qualification, I love neither my neighbor nor my personal enemy, but an emblem. Further, in declaring that “No human is illegal,” I announce that my conscience is self-certifying. It stands apart from and above the law of my community. A person of this mindset doesn’t want to be tainted by association with the enforcement of positive law, which enacts a merely political form of authority: “Not in my name,” as the protest placard reads. By my gestures of disaffiliation from immigration enforcement, I let it be known that I answer to a higher authority, one that happens to bathe me in the flattering light of empathy and hospitality while asking little of me. I sustain the purity of my conscience by averting my gaze from the follow-on effects of such welcoming, which are likely to appear somewhere on the less prosperous side of town.
Humanitarianism is the impulse to dissolve all political divides. As Max Scheler noted, it regards love for some part of mankind as an unjust deprivation of what is owed to all without distinction. More than that, it may become an affirmative preference for the other: a perfect inversion of the in-group preference that prevails everywhere outside the West. This can become a point of pride for the progressive—call it an inverted form of ethnocentrism. It demands a sacrifice. But not a personal sacrifice. It enjoins the progressive to a civilizational potlatch of self-erasure, performed with a flourish of empathy. The price will be paid by future generations.
Humanitarianism would seem to count as a “luxury belief,” meaning that it can be sustained only through insulation from its effects. Christianity is, or can be, the opposite of a luxury belief. If humanitarianism tends to off-load its costs as externalities, Christian love requires taking up the internalities of spiritual labor. It is not at all apparent to me that this labor requires the Christian to abandon partiality for his own, or the corresponding ethic of care for what is close to hand.
This returns us to the question of what status “the political” ought to have for Christians.
The word “tribalism” is frequently used to dismiss any insistence on political boundaries as a hangover from a less enlightened stage of human development. In a similar vein, any discussion of the nation will become a discussion of nationalism, with the latter taken to be a revanchist tendency that tends inherently toward war. But with this quick elision, vigilance against nationalism is purchased at the price of willful obtuseness about differences in national character.
Recall the familiar joke:
Heaven is where the chefs are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, the police British, and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and it is all organized by the Italians.
The human race has been articulated into parts, each with its own genius. If we permit ourselves to drop the punitive stance toward the nation that sees only nationalism, we see what should be obvious, namely that the variety of national characters can be a source of delight as well as of mutual annoyance. When the Italian sees the Swiss as too cold to be an adequate lover, he is seeing something real, just as the Swiss is seeing something real when he notices the Italian incapacity to order things to his standards. Both will choose a French chef over a British one and be made more nervous by the presence of German police than by the Bobbies of old.
The best ethnography (often written by missionaries or unenlightened adventurers) tends to be at once critical and affectionate. To see any people clearly is not achieved by suspending one’s evaluative outlook and straining toward some “objective” or nonjudgmental view from nowhere, but by looking upon them from within the human world as one knows it, inflected by one’s formation among one’s own people, as inheritor of a tradition. Being situated in this way makes one more akin to the natives, paradoxically: capable both of being scandalized and of admiring their qualities.
National character grows among a people from shared experience. They speak the same language and pray to the same gods; their fathers fought in the same wars; their grandmothers tell stories that convey how one ought to feel about familiar things. They are likely to have a persistent stock of nursery rhymes and drinking songs, a repertoire of gestures, facial inflections, and emotional tones peculiar to them. Mutually recognizable to one another, they enjoy a form of social wealth that accumulates among inhabitants of a bounded territory that has been inhabited continuously for generations by the same people. Such an inheritance is far from universal; it is enjoyed by peoples who, often for reasons of geographical accident, have been spared conquest, colonization, and dispersal long enough to form a nation. The word “nation” shares its root with “native” and “natural” and suggests shared natality. In its myths, a nation may claim an autochthonous origin for its ancestors—as though the earth itself, or rather a people’s small part of it, were the original mother or father of their common lineage. The fact that such stories are mythical does not discredit the need they express. As the Marxist political scientist Benedict Anderson rightly said, the nation is an “imagined community.” And it is no less real for being imagined.
Humanitarianism, by contrast, regards the existence of distinct communities as a condition of disintegration. As Pierre Manent writes in his preface to Daniel Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age, this “fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence” is thought to be “the toxic fountainhead of all that is wrong in human circumstances.” To look at human things through the lens provided by one’s own community—“its common good and the peculiar content and quality of its education and way of life”—amounts to turning one’s back on the rest of mankind. The humanitarian places himself under a highly ascetic morality that requires him to look at human things “without the least preference (and even with a tad of healthy dislike) for what is ours.” But in this rush to skip over what is ours toward a posited universal, we find we have to turn off those faculties of social perception that we acquired among our own. Humanitarianism, Manent writes, involves “a general scrambling of the reference points from which human beings, as moral agents and free citizens, take their bearings.”
If we find less and less to love and admire, even to understand, in the human associations to which we belong and from which we draw the greatest part of our moral and intellectual resources, and instead entertain a principled preference for what is foreign, far off, in general “other”—that is, what is beyond the range of our practical knowledge and real experience—then what Professor Mahoney calls our “moral cognition” is impaired, indeed gravely warped.
We feel enjoined to extend equal respect to all cultures, but “there is no real and sincere experience behind this declamatory respect,” Manent writes.
Liberalism and nationalism grew out of the same soil in the nineteenth century, as mutually supporting repudiations of dynastic empire. The Hapsburgs, the Romanovs, and others had long ruled over motley groups of distinct peoples, who now wanted their own states. It was an aspiration to self-government that took inspiration from liberal ideals. But at some point, the term “liberal” came to stand for an anthropology that places the abstract individual, denuded of communal ties, at the center of its concern. Above him stands a numinous realm of Kantian principles. About concrete, mediating realities such as family and nation, this form of liberalism can speak only polemically. They show up, not as formative of the individual, but as distorting influences that compromise his freedom for self-making. The otherworldliness of Kantian liberalism dovetails perfectly with the otherworldliness to which much Christian thinking is prone, if it is not indeed a thinly secularized version of that tendency.
Accordingly, some churches seem merely to replicate the ambient liberal moralism. In Protestant traditions, perhaps, the lack of a clear teaching authority, a recognized magisterium, has sometimes left the churches looking to what everyone else thinks. But the Catholic Church, too, has come to share the liberal tendency to denigrate the political form we happen to live under, that of the nation-state. As the theologian Thomas Harmon has pointed out, the European revolutions, from 1789 onward, opened hostilities between the revolutionary nation-state and the Church, making Catholics permanently suspicious of the nation.
This is a consequential fact. Man is the political animal, in Aristotle’s phrase, meaning that he becomes what he properly is, fully, only in a communal setting. There is nothing mysterious in this. Consider the place of language in childhood development. One necessarily learns a particular language, spoken by a particular people. Each language carries its own affective and cognitive circuits of response to the world, its own idiom of world-building. Only as the speaker of one’s native tongue can one learn other languages and perceive other worlds. Our access to the universal is by means of the particular.
Classical political thought concerns itself with the question of political form (city, nation, empire). Each form has goods that are proper to it. Harmon points out that popular contemporary articulations of Catholic Social Teaching tend not to list or develop “the proper goods of a nation as a nation,” yet they list rights (which attach to individuals) “in granular detail.”
The disproportion matters: the Church’s clarity on rights, absent articulation of a nation’s propria, risks dissolving the nation conceptually, then substantially, along with the goods a nation secures. If a nation’s right to regulate its borders should be exercised for its good, but the Church never articulates the goods proper to national life, prudential judgment is at a decided disadvantage to abstract humanitarianism and unhinged rights-assertions.
The pronouncements of churchmen on matters such as immigration leave many citizens with the impression, says Harmon, that “the Church has no care for the concrete goods secured by the national form.”
And indeed it is from Pope Leo XIV and his predecessor Francis that some of the more uncompromising statements on the necessity of welcoming migrants into Europe have come. Rod Dreher, the ex-Catholic American writer who now lives in Budapest, writes about how the Church, whether wittingly or not, advances the nation-dissolving program of the EU and the NGO-plex. Here he speaks sardonically on behalf of a concrete social good that is evidently beneath the notice of the high-minded churchmen who urge the Western nations to welcome migrants without qualification:
In Budapest, rare among European cities, women can walk alone, even at night, without having the opportunity to offer welcome, respect, and love to male migrants eager to get to know them. Alas for the Hungarians, the exuberant love shown by male migrants towards women in other European countries is not an experience open to Budapesters, owing to the anti-migrant policies of the Orban government.
One can come away with the impression that the Church is indifferent to reality and to life, insofar as this life is ordered politically, mediated by the finite and distinct. The entirely predictable result of such indifference is the destruction of social order. This is the accusation against Christianity that was articulated in pagan antiquity and revived by Machiavelli, and has become plausible once again in the twenty-first century. Through neglect of the goods secured through the national form, and more broadly of the goods realized in peoplehood, Christians become the allies of amoral and fundamentally placeless economic actors, from human traffickers to globe-spanning corporations.
Yet this needn’t be the case. The operation of the faith in the West (and beyond) has in crucial ways been generative of peoplehood, not a solvent of it.
The European nations—I mean not the Westphalian political units, but the anthropological realities—emerged from the uniform barbarism that followed the collapse of the Roman empire. The historian Christopher Dawson set himself the task of explaining “the magnificence of the European achievement” and found that the secret of the West’s fertile dynamism in the early Middle Ages lay in a set of overlapping tensions: between the universal and the particular, and between the temporal and the eternal. The intrusion of the divine into the human world happened in history, at a particular time, in a particular place called Bethlehem. The local was also preserved, for example, in the cults of the saints, “by which every age and every people and indeed every city found its liturgical representative and patron.” Dawson continues: “Since the Incarnation and the whole redemptive process were historically situated, the Christian mystery was also an historical mystery.”
The theologian D. C. Schindler suggests that the “mediation” between man and God by particular traditions is the distinguishing mark of Christianity. He repeats a point made by Rémi Brague, namely, that Christianity is not a “religion of the book” in the way that Judaism and Islam are. For Christians, the Word of God became living flesh. The universal truth has a frail and distinct human body. Schindler frames a crucial difference:
In contrast to Islam, for example, according to which the Koran was immediately dictated to the prophet Muhammad, and so can never be properly translated into any other language without compromising its theological legitimacy, the Christian Scriptures were mediated through the “instrument” of inspired human authors, with their natural capacities and interests, along with their own histories and cultural backgrounds. And the further mediation of translation into other languages is permitted thus in principle.
The possibility of translation to all peoples begins with a first articulation by inspired individuals. Here we see how the authentically universal is fully entangled with the concrete and embodied. In a similar vein, each nation has its characteristic liturgical forms, and there is no demand or expectation in the tradition that these should converge into a liturgical Esperanto.
God’s love for man is love for actual men, each of whom is born into a people: the political animal. In the Book of Revelation, at the final hour, a great multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples” will stand before the throne (7:9). By the light of God “the nations will walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” “They will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations” (21:26).
Historically Christianity has not entailed, and theologically it does not seem to demand, the erasure of peoples in the name of universal brotherhood, which in practice would mean an undifferentiated mass of “human resources.” The societies of the West, no less than others, are the fruit of long spiritual and physical labors, which the peoples have passed on to their posterity through the vessel of the bounded nation. These societies are irreplaceable, and they are common goods. They are not ours to dispose of in a fit of moralism, but are to be stewarded for future generations.
