For the truth of knowledge is measured by the knowable object. For it is because a thing is so or is not so that a statement is known to be true or false, and not the reverse.

—Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book 5,1. 17, #1003

A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.

—Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?,” June 1948¹

I’ve come to the damndest watershed in my life—done what I wanted to do in the novel, with linguistics, children grown, sitting down here in the Louisiana autumn. Everything quiet. What now? It would be a good time to die, but on the other hand, I’d as soon not. It’s all very spooky. Life is much stranger than art. . . .

Human things are not divine things. Feuerbach says, brashly, that divine things are the product of human things. Plato and Aristotle describe human things as open to, but not identical with, divine things. They also intimate that it is human, as much as we can, to seek divine things. Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est. The man who sets out only to be human somehow becomes less than human. We ignore the highest things at our peril. Human things are finite, incomplete; nonetheless, they are real and worthy. They are worth keeping. Their very imperfection, indeed their perfection, implies something beyond themselves, some abiding unsettlement or restlessness, as Augustine reminds us. Though we have here no “lasting city,” we still found cities, preserve them, refashion them, sometimes destroy or abandon them. We are often, as Chesterton said, “homesick at home.” Still we first need homes that abide so that we might know what this curious homesickness might indicate about our human condition.

But human beings can do unworthy things, things both against human things and against divine things. To be unable, in principle, to choose and to do evil things, however, would necessitate a contrary incapacity to do gracious things. The drama of human existence would disappear if either of these peculiar capacities were lacking to us. We would, compared to what we are, be dull, bored beings. Our contentment would be like that of the animals, whereas our actual discontents point beyond us, to the gods. Rewards and punishments have their basis in human reality, in the consequences of exercised freedom.

The cities of men are set up to reflect the souls of men who compose them. If there can be disordered souls, there can be disordered cities. In fact, the maximum disorder in human things reflects itself most clearly and most dangerously in the worst regime. But the origin of this disorder is not in the city itself; it remains in the soul, in that part of the soul that can do “otherwise.” Reforms of cities, both for better and for worse, begin and end in reforms of souls. Much of modern political thought has been a deliberate effort to avoid, to obscure, or to deny this truth. Unless we conserve this same truth, however, we will not know what we are. Knowing what we are is the first thing we must keep. To love is to keep.

A city that is disordered, however, implies the existence, at least in speech, of a city that is not disordered. “Fraud,” a disorder, means that we recognize what is not fraud, that it need not have been, but is. The city that is completely ordered, the best regime, is the main “philosophic” concern of politics insofar as it reflects on its own experience, on its own unique activities. The exact location of the best regime is the true mystery of political things. Politics, by being politics, brings us to things that are not merely political, to things in the order of what is. The best regime of men, because it is rare, implies the best regime of the gods, the City of God. In revelation, God is, as it were, using Aristotle’s phrase, “a social and political being,” a Trinity. God is neither lonely nor in need either of the world or of us. “Will men be like gods?” has always been, since Genesis, a question formulated against God, a question that implied that men thought that they could make themselves better than God created or redeemed them. This claim to autonomy over what man is, in the tradition, has always been called “pride.” It means the claim that man is the cause of his own being and of all that is not his own being, including the gods.

In revelation, man is made in the “image” of this triune God. That is, he is not himself, by himself, a god. His relative perfection does not consist in becoming something else other than what he is, though what he is implies his responsibility for becoming this best. Otherwise, he would not be what he is, a being free enough either to reject or to attain what he is. Neither in the state of nature, nor in the household, nor in the polity, nor in the City of God is it “good” for man to be alone. Man comes to know what he is through reflecting on what he does. Agere sequitur esse. How we act follows from what we are. The being of man implies the good of man. His being is given, but not by himself; his goodness he must choose to bring about in himself. “Man does not make man to be man,” as Aristotle already knew, “but taking him from nature as man, makes him to be good man.”

Machiavelli, in a famous passage, asked us to pay attention not to what men “ought” to do, but to what they “do” do. We are, he advised, to reject the ancient philosophers and to listen to the modern ones, to himself. He did not flinch at describing some rather terrible things that men do to each other. Doing such things, indeed, he thought, could be “useful.” He explicitly rejects Socrates’s standard that “it is never right to do wrong.” Machiavelli is said thereby to have introduced observation and accurate foundations into politics. In other words, he made politics “scientific,” as Hobbes was to attempt to do more systematically some century and a half later. Both thought that they reduced human things to the lowest possible denominator and, on this basis, constructed political things independently of moral things. The “improvement of man’s estate,” to use Bacon’s phrase, could now be contemplated as a product of our own making if we did not expect too much, if we “lowered our sights.” We could become more democratic by becoming less noble. We could do this in the name of modern “science.” Human things were to be modeled on non-human things so that among human things we could have the certitude of natural things. This “improvement” was to be achieved at great cost.

But, paradoxically, men and Princes who “honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and even murder” not infrequently last for a longer time in power than even a scientific Einstein seems to anticipate. How is it, if these are disordered acts, that they last at all? Is time necessary that the results of our acts might become visible, even to us? Politics is the public space in which the results of our acts, good or bad, appear. Machiavelli’s Prince, to recall, was empowered with such “tools” as lies, defamation, fraud, and murder precisely so that he might be “successful,” so he and his new political regime would “last.” He was “liberated” from the restrictions of what we “ought” to do, from the bonds of virtue, so that he might be successful in staying in power. If this new Prince took the “measure” of men, it was so that he might measure and manipulate them for his own purposes. The Prince was not “measured” by anything but his own criteria. He was not only a new Prince; he was a “new man,” an unmeasured, unlimited being. Man was “for himself.” Science, when applied to politics, eliminated what politics was about because the methods of science were not proportionate to the subject matter of political things.

Can we find and remove the “causes” for such disorders as lying, defamation, fraud, and murder, assuming we agree that they are disorders? Revelation was aware of the perplexity of these matters under the rubric of “the Fall.” It implied that both politicians and scientists could themselves manifest these disorders; that is to say, there was no political or “scientific” cure for them—which did not necessarily mean, that there was no cure at all. Could there be a reality whose activities are not subject to scientific method, which sees only what such method allows it to see? “Reductionism” means, briefly, to identify all reality with what scientific methods allow to be considered. If the method does not reach something, it is assumed not to exist. This is a radical narrowing of reality. Culture, religion, philosophy, in some sense, mean the preservation both of science and, more especially, of what science cannot reach by its own peculiar methods.