Tag: Harold J. Berman

Look There For A Sign

Richard Barnes

“Without the fear of hell and the hope of the Last Judgment, the Western legal tradition could not have come into being.”– Harold J. Berman

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

“Communism begins where atheism begins.” — Karl Marx

“Every time a society finds itself in crisis it instinctively turns its eyes towards its origins and looks there for a sign.” — Octavio Paz

My boyhood years in El Pao, which I still regard as a paradisiacal jungle location in Venezuela, gifted me with wonderful, cherished moments and memories. 

One of those remembrances is sitting at the bar in the club and listening to the rambunctious, freewheeling, carefree, and often loud conversations of the men who assembled there after the 4 O’clock whistle. These men spoke of the news, of events back home in the states, of the prior night’s movie, of anything that occurred to them. And they did so without inhibitions and certainly with no concern about being “censored” or “cancelled”.

One thing that I never thought about was bad language — four-letter-words. I never thought about it because I never — not once — heard one uttered in those conversations.

This became a wonder to me as I looked back, especially after seeing the movie, The French Connection, in 1971. That was the first time I heard so much foul language in a film, in particular, the bar scene where Popeye crashes a drug scene fingered by an informant.

The wonder to me was that I had not heard such words from the rough and tough men — several of them combat veterans — who talked loudly with one another in that bar in El Pao. They knew I was there. And they checked their profanity accordingly. And this also applied when ladies were present.

Parenthetically, there were no laws then against children being in the bar in El Pao. And I never saw a single drunkard there — man or child.

How did the American men in El Pao know that profanity was not to be uttered in front of children? Undeniably this hearkens back to the colonial era, a strong echo of which is seen in George Washington’s strict orders to the Continental Army forbidding profanity — especially taking the Lord’s Name in vain — and enjoining attendance at Sunday worship services.

Any cursory reading of the era’s primary sources will readily establish that the basis for such proscriptions and prescriptions was not “custom” or “tradition” or “squeamishness”. It was the love of God and the fear of God. And that love and fear is abundantly in evidence throughout the colonial era and well into the mid 19th Century.

No doubt that genuine devotion eventually did indeed devolve into custom and tradition; so much so that European intellectuals in the 20th Century mocked the “prudish” and “Puritanical” Americans, many of whom in turn would not know how to explain the moral foundations for their behavior other than by appealing to custom and culture, not to Christianity or the Bible.

Octavio Paz’s reference above is a statement of which I am not so sure. I see precious few folks today turning their eyes to our origins in order to seek answers to the current lawlessness in our cities or to the haphazard enforcement of laws in our politics. I hear or read precious few allusions to the Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, or John Witherspoon, let alone to the Book of books, The Bible.

All of the above, and much more, would comprise a major part of our “origins”. If we are to seek a sign there, we’ve barely begun to look.

But begin to look, we must.

John Winthrop — 1587-1649

Some of the men of El Pao

It Has To Be Earned

Richard Barnes

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

Benjamin Franklin, upon being asked what sort of government the delegates to the Constitutional Convetion had created.

“A tradition cannot be inherited — it has to be earned.”

Attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Societies that are growing or strengthening are characterized by populations who not only believe in such growth and strengthening, but act upon it.

And a critical component of “acting upon our tradition” is to know it. And to know it requires that we study it.

Professor Harold Berman, in his magisterial Law and Revolution, provides the following analogy:

“From the eleventh and twelfth centuries on, monophonic music, reflected chiefly in the Gregorian chant, was gradually supplanted by polyphonic styles. Two-part, three-part, and eventually four-part music developed. The contrapuntal style exemplified in the thirteenth-century motet evolved into the harmonic style of the fourteenth century ars nova, exemplified in the ballade. Eventually, counterpoint and harmony were combined. The sixteenth century witnessed the development of the great German Protestant chorales, and these, together with Italian and English madrigals and other forms, provided a basis for opera …. Eventually Renaissance music gave way to Baroque, Baroque to Classical …. etc. No good contemporary musician, regardless of how off-beat he may be, can afford not to know this story….”

Not too long ago, American citizens, and certainly lawyers, judges, and justices were required, in a similar way, to know the story of the development of our institutions and their great debt to Christianity.

For example, about a century ago, in the early 20th Century, just about everyone in the United States understood that [church] canon law constituted the first modern Western legal system. Eventually, canon law and royal law complemented each other and formed a basis for the Western legal tradition. It was understood, at least inchoately, that rejecting the religious heritage of the West has always led to tyranny.

However, today, the above is not only generally unknown but should it be even mentioned it is only to have it dismissed outright, even by clergy who delight in writing books or preaching sermons denying our Christian legacy. In so doing, we greatly err and worse: we join forces with those who would destroy our legal and social foundations.

It is no mystery that many who most despise the American heritage have an undisguised hatred for the Christian religion because that religion places man and his institutions under an eternal, Triune God and His law. And this is unacceptable.

Once we understand this philosophical enmity, much of the violence and chaos in our era becomes intelligible.

But no need to take my word for it. I’ll conclude this post by quoting the heroes of so many of today’s usual suspects.

Engels: “We … reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatever as eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law ….”

Lenin: “We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. We say it is a deception, a fraud in the interest of the landlords and the capitalists … We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the toilers around the proletariat … We do not believe in an eternal morality.”

Marx: “Man makes religion, religion does not make man … The abolition of religion as an illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness….

Anyone who has read the execrable Communist Manifesto will recognize the above sentiments, and more.

Such sentiments, so fashionable today, are the polar opposite of those of our colonial and early republic era; i. e., our founding era. Put another way, engaging and promoting the convictions of those who hate Christianity will accelerate the undermining of our foundations, increase the overt despising of ordered liberty, and openly promote a topsy turvy view of humanity and society, which further dismantles our bedrock.

It is a vicious cycle, a circling of the drain that can only be stopped by refusing to live by lies and insisting on speaking the truth.

With God’s help we can do so.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Christendom

Richard Barnes

Our last post concluded with a rhetorical question: What is that “Western tradition”?

Although that is a mouthful, so to say, we can at least acknowledge one fact which, although incontrovertible, is ridiculously controversial today: our “Western tradition” is essentially a Christian tradition. The fact that the West used to be known and called “Christendom” is not right-wing propaganda. It is fact, as any perusal of older histories and essays makes abundantly clear. In fact, as recently as the mid-20th Century, that term, although in great decline by then, was still used by luminaries such as Winston Churchill.

Most histories of the United States practically begin with the Declaration of Independence of 1776. And such histories, in great measure, interpret the Declaration in the light of modern, Enlightenment tenets, including the oft-repeated but easily refuted axiom that our Founders were a bundle of deists straining against the constraints of organized religion and superstition.

Easily available primary sources and earlier histories demonstrate that the modern standard narratives are simply not so.

Furthermore, in past generations, our histories did not begin with the Declaration of Independence; they began with our colonial era and the background to that experience, which can only be understood by knowing what impelled our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers to come to these shores. And it was not the “1619” narrative.

In other words, our histories required an understanding of Christendom, now known as Europe, and the religious traditions which produced the legal traditions which Americans eventually inherited.

These are truths which are not only neglected but loudly disparaged and shut down today. Indeed, they are denounced as insensitive, misogynist, racist, and worse. 

But they are none of those things. Rather, they are true. And a glorious truth, at that. However, the truth requires study and effort beyond what is required to read bumper stickers and memes.

The late Harvard Professor, Harold J. Berman, wrote in his magisterial Law and Revolution (1983):

“The traditional symbols of community in the West, the traditional images and metaphors, have been above all religious and legal. In the twentieth century, however, for the first time, religion has become largely a private affair …. The connection between the religious metaphor and the legal metaphor has been broken.”

Is it any wonder that bonds of race, religion, soil, family, class, neighborhood, and work community have dissolved into abstract and superficial nationalisms? “It is impossible not to sense the social disintegration, the breakdown in communities, that has taken place in Europe, North America, and other parts of Western civilization in the twentieth century,” Berman wrote in 1983.

So when our “culture” is denounced and demands are made to toss it into the trash, such as was done by Jesse Jackson and a minority of the Stanford student body (Hey Hey, ho, ho), what is actually being called for is the abolishment of our Christian heritage. A heritage whose history includes the fact that, for example, 8 of our 13 original states had state supported churches until well after the US Constitution; all state constitutions acknowledged “Almighty God” or “God” and more.

Berman goes on to state, “For many centuries, [the West] would be identified very simply as the people of Western Christendom.” 

What does that mean with regards to our history?

Chartres Cathedral, France (1194-1220; built atop the site of four cathedrals dating to AD 400)

Published in 1983

A Nasty Business

Richard Barnes

As a matter of historical fact the legal systems of all the nations that are heirs to the Western legal tradition have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs. Today those beliefs or postulates — such as the structural integrity of law, its ongoingness, its religious roots, its transcendent qualities — are rapidly disappearing ….

The law is becoming more fragmented, more subjective, geared more to expediency and less to morality, concerned more with immediate consequences and less with consistency or continuity.

Thus the historical soil of the Western legal tradition is being washed away in the twentieth century, and the tradition itself is threatened with collapse. — Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, Harvard University Press (1983)

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Disrespecting, disregarding, dishonoring, distorting, or otherwise dismissing objective Truth in history, is a nasty business whose sequel is violence, tyranny, and death (cf, The Black Book of Communism, The Theme is Freedom, Earthly Powers, Robespierre, The Secret Six for historical proof; see 1984, Brave New World, The Hidden Strength, The Possessed, for philosophical reasoning behind the certainty of such a sequel).

In recent posts, we’ve documented very real consequences of godless philosophies and also the phenomenon of seeing the same atheistic ideologies foisted on and by our academics, our politics, our commerce, our medicine, and more as if we by some magic can escape the repercussions such beliefs have engendered throughout history on any people who have indulged in such foolishness.

This blog is entitled “The Pull of The Land” in agreement with Whittaker Chambers who said, “No land has a pull on a man as the land of his childhood.” That is certainly true for this writer. I yearn for a day, should the Lord grant it, in which I can once again see Venezuela a freer country and a happier people such as I remember in my childhood and youth. I also long to see this country — its 50 states and outlying territories — a freer and happier country such as I knew in yesteryear, a country which my own children and grandchildren can enjoy as I did.

But Chambers’ aphorism runs even beyond the land of one’s birth. I have been very fortunate in that I have been able to visit, and in some cases live in, lands on all sides of the globe. My heart holds a keen appreciation for such lands. However, eerily, should you offer me a free trip to only one of them, I’d be very hard pressed to choose between Spain and England. Why? Because they both are strongly linked to the place of my birth: an American mining camp in Venezuela. My forebears on my father’s side came to Massachussets from England, and from my mother’s side, to Venezuela from Spain.

The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.

The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.

It is that special love and appreciation which impels us to understand what has happened; to understand in order to be able to address the question, especially for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

We must return to Truth. Not my subjective truth or your subjective truth. Rather, the Objective Truth. 

And this is very difficult because we are all “men of our times” and our times are characterized by constant, endless propaganda which insists on living subjectively and questioning anyone or anything which claims to know the Truth. 

Regardless, we must press on as best we can, knowing that liberty cannot survive on subjectivity. It requires objective truth, which is the most powerful means we have at our disposal in order to push back on those who would transmogrify us into something we never agreed to or otherwise intended to be.

The late Professor Berman said that our legal systems “have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs.” 

As we see elites and mobs tear down statues of men we have historically admired, we must ask whether the presuppositions we formerly believed and acted upon were actually true. By their actions for two or three generations now the destroyers and their abetters in media, academia, entertainment, and more, have been forcefully asserting that all our presuppositions have been lies at best, evil at worst.

What is their basis for their insisting upon their infallibility? Are they speaking and writing truthfully?

A major hint that they speak lies is very easy to see: they work overtime to silence anyone who dares to challenge them on the basis of historical fact or Truth.

That should encourage us. It appears we still have a leg up on them.

But we will lose that advantage unless we get a firm grasp on Truth. 

In future posts, we hope to look at a few pivotal epochs or events in our history and seek to understand the deleterious effects the deliberate distortion of such episodes has had on the course of our history down to the present. 

Girona, Spain

English countryside

San Francisco in the 50s

San Francisco today

Caracas in the 50s

Caracas today