A Presidential Lenten Valentine…

This month provides a number of themes for reflection, our national holiday honoring Presidents (specifically the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln – on the 12th, and George Washington – on the 22nd), the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday and coincidentally the rare juxtaposition of Valentine’s Day on the 14th. Gil Bailie, below, offers some thoughts on the latter two, while I have been pondering the former.

George Washington, in his first inaugural, declared that “the foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.” To this he added that “there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union of virtue and happiness.”

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If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. —A. Lincoln

These quotes were taken from the late Harry V. Jaffa’s long essay, “False Prophets of American Conservatisim ” published in 1998. This essay discusses arguments Abraham Lincoln made in his debates with Stephen Douglas in the mid-nineteenth century where Lincoln challenged the moral relativism of Douglas with respect to slavery. Jaffa uses this example to challenge the moral relativism of conservatives of his own day, much as others like Hadley Arkes and John Noonan have argued on behalf of legal protections for the unborn in the late twentieth century. While Jaffa’s aim in his essay is at the political conservatives who had compromised principles which rationally and logically are either true or false, and so can only be bargained away at the cost of their essential truth – thus giving way to relativism; our current false prophets in influential positions from media, education, politics, and even religion elide the connection between morality and truth leaving our culture unmoored from the Biblical principles which Washington and Lincoln understood the American social and political framework to be based upon.

A larger but less emphasized point that struck me in this piece was a deeper correspondence with René Girard’s understanding of the fundamental religious grounding of all human cultures. Gil Bailie spent much of his post-Violence Unveiled career unpacking Girard’s mimetic hypothesis through talks like the Famished Craving series (available on The Cornerstone Forum’s “Keeping Faith & Breaking Ground” podcast and website streaming audio) where this connection was examined through numerous examples from literature, history, and anthropology.

Early in Jaffa’s essay he quotes parts of a speech Pope John Paul II gave welcoming a new US ambassador to the Holy See in which the Pope provides an encomium to the work of the American founders and praying that we might “experience a new birth of freedom, freedom grounded in truth and ordered to goodness….” Such a renewal is something we should all be praying for in this Lent

The coincidence of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday will have elicited considerable comment–some mocking, some maudlin. But the coincidence deserves to be pondered. The love typically associated with Valentine’s Day is romantic love, usually of the more sentimental or erotic type. But true love deserves the adjective to the extent that it bespeaks a willingness to suffer on behalf of, or, if need be, in defense of the beloved. Even this rather specific form of love is a species of the Love that is necessarily , and not merely circumstantially, self-sacrificial. Christian love–whether love of one’s spouse, children, neighbor, or fellow fallen and sinful creature–is lived out in an always imperfect emulation of the redeeming love of Christ. A natural affinity for one of God’s creatures is thus transformed into a faint anticipation of “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” when the opportunity to suffer on the beloved’s behalf arises and is embraced. The Lenten season is an opportunity to ponder this mystery of our redemption.

Gratefully,