Legal Commentary

No Cincinnatus In Sight

A few months ago, in the heat of the contest for the Republican nomination, one of the bloggers who I love (not too mild a word for the feeling I have for her writing and for the depth of her intellect and emotion conveyed thereby) was in full partisan flight about her loathing for one contender for the crown, as opposed to another contender equally as unworthy. I crept into her comments box and laid an egg designed to make her challenge her comfortable assumptions about the merits of any of the candidates. As usual, either the medium, or more likely the messenger, proved inadequate to the task. Object lessons were not learned and, rather, the incident succeeded only in increasing the volume within the echo chamber.

As has often been the case over the last few years, I should have let G.K. Chesterton say it for me. From Orthodoxy:

Much vague and sentimental journalism has been poured out to the effect that Christianity is akin to democracy, and most of it is scarcely strong or clear enough to refute the fact that the two things have often quarrelled. The real ground upon which Christianity and democracy are one is very much deeper. The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle -- the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen. If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this -- that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule. Carlyle's hero may say, "I will be king"; but the Christian saint must say "Nolo episcopari." If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it means this -- that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it. Carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.

We don't hunt such a man do we, much less crown him? We all seem so blindered by our love or hate for a particular politician or political cause that we fail to see beyond the narrow scope of our tunnel vision. No matter who is the last "man" standing in 2008, he won't be "our man." Every man and woman running today desperately wants the crown and knows that he or she can rule. Therefore, according to Chesterton, none of them are worthy of the crown.

We recently saw a man leave our shores who prayed to a God in whom he fervently believed not to grant him his sacred crown. "Nolo episcopari." He possessed, and possesses, genuine humility. Show me his counterpart among the current crop vying for the secular crown. When you can, I'll support as passionately, and oppose as passionately, specific candidates as do you.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on April 24, 2008 (boomark / email).