From Ross McCullough’s fictional “Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster”:
Fr. Rodrigues,
… Your instincts are right that the Church must always remain in some way in the opposition; but she must also be in the opposition to the opposition, if that makes sense.
Even with all that has happened in the long train from Christendom to whatever bastard elopement of Islam and spiritualism and liberalism we have now, whatever tangle of heresy with heresy with heresy our metamodernity is, we should not expect one party to have a monopoly on the truth. Indeed, the more ambient and confused the heresies, the harder it is for one side to better the other in every significant respect. There is no Pareto optimality between the parties: to side with one is always to give up something important. It is even to give up some incommensurable good whose loss is not balanced out or outweighed by the other side; it is just lost. Our ambivalence need not be perfectly equipoised, then, but it must be truly ambivalent. And our engagement should not suffer for it: we cannot ignore the ways that the political forms us. You must share a city with these people but not a City, if that helps. (I realize in many respects it doesn’t.)
The doctrine of analogy is that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude,” and our politics is analogous in that sense too. Between the kingdom and the nations, every alignment implies an even greater misalignment. We cannot side with some secular party without implying, in how we side with them, an even greater opposition- and the closer we side with them, the stronger the implication must be.
The Innovator attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some special sense) ‘rational’ or “biological’ values. But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao. … The question therefore arises what title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither have those he retains: if what he retains is valid, what he rejects is equally valid too.
But then, in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? Again, the Innovator may place economic value first. To get people fed and clothed is the great end, and in pursuit of it scruples about justice and good faith may be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about the importance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the Innovator were himself using the Tao he could never have learned of such a duty. But side by side with it in the Tao lie those duties of justice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a Jingoist, a Racialist, an extreme nationalist, who maintains that the advancement of his own people is the object to which all else ought to yield. But no kind of factual observation and no appeal to instinct will give him a ground for this opinion. Once more, he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our own kin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers. Whence comes the Innovator’s authority to pick and choose?
