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We need to talk about "enemies" of the faith because the life of faith
is a real war. So say all the prophets, Apostles, martyrs and our Lord
Himself.
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(25
with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with
the evil spirits in the heavens" (Eph. 6:12).
But that fear is more unfounded today than ever in the past. No age
has been more suspicious of militarism, more terrified of the horrors
of physical war, than ours. And no age has been more prone to
confuse the sin with the sinner, not by hating the sinner along with
the sin but by loving the sin along with the sinner. We often use
"compassion" as an equivalent for moral relativism.
For all previous social thinkers, the goal of political life was virtue.
A good society was conceived as one in which people are good.
There was no "double standard" between individual and social
goodness-until Machiavelli. With him, politics became no longer the
art of the good but the art of the possible. His influence on this point
was enormous. All major social and political philosophers (Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey)
subsequently rejected the goal of virtue, just as Machiavelli lowered
the standard and nearly everyone began to salute the newly masted
flag.
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(25
end is worth pursuing only if there are practical means to attain it. In
other words, the new summum bonum, or greatest good is success.
(Machiavelli sounds like not only the first pragmatist but the first
American pragmatist!)
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(25
He saw his life as a spiritual warfare against the Church and its
propaganda. He believed that every religion was a piece of
propaganda whose influence lasted between 1,666 and 3,000 years.
And he thought Christianity would end long before the world did,
probably around the year 1666, destroyed either by barbarian
invasions from the East (what is now Russia) or by a softening and
weakening of the Christian West from within, or both. His allies
were all lukewarm Christians who loved their earthly fatherland
more than heaven, Caesar more than Christ, social success more
than virtue. To them he addressed his propaganda. Total candor
about his ends would have been unworkable, and confessed atheism
fatal, so he was careful to avoid explicit heresy. But his was the
destruction of "the Catholic fake" and his means was aggressive
secularist propaganda. (One might argue, perhaps peevishly, that he
was the father of the modern media establishment.)
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(25
behavior and thus to control human history: the pen and the sword,
propaganda and arms. Thus both minds and bodies could be
dominated, and domination was his goal. He saw all of human life
and history as determined by only two forces: virtu (force) and
fortuna (chance). The simple formula for success was the
maximization of virtu and the minimization of fortuna. He ends
"The Prince" with this shocking image: "Fortune is a woman, and if
she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her" (ch.
25). In other words, the secret of success is a kind of rape.
For the goal of control, arms are needed as well as propaganda, and
Machiavelli is a hawk. He believed that "you cannot have good laws
without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws
inevitably follow" (ch. 12). In other words justice "comes out of a
barrel of a gun," to adapt Mao Tse-tung's phrase. Machiavelli
believed that "all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed
prophets have come to grief" (ch. 6). Moses, then, must have used
arms which, the Bible failed to report; Jesus, the supreme unarmed
prophet, came to grief; He was crucified and not resurrected. But
His message conquered the world through propaganda, through
intellectual arms. This was the war Machiavelli set out to fight.
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(25
murder of his brother Remus. All human history begins with Cain's
murder of Abel. Therefore, the foundation of law is lawlessness.
The foundation of morality is immorality.
If a man is inherently selfish, then only fear and not love can
effectively move him. Thus Machiavelli wrote, "It is far better to be
feared than loved...[for] men worry less about doing an injury to one
who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared.
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(25
The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they
are, break when it is to their advantage to do so, but fear is
strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective"
(ch. 17).
The most amazing thing about this brutal philosophy is that it won
the modern mind, though only by watering down or covering up its
darker aspects. Machiavelli's successors toned down his attack on
morality and religion, but they did not return to the idea of a
personal God or objective and absolute morality as the foundation of
society. Machiavelli's narrowing down came to appear as a widening
out. He simply lopped off the top story of the building of life; no
God, only man; no soul, only body; no spirit, only matter; no ought,
only is. Yet this squashed building appeared (through propaganda)
as a Tower of Babel, this confinement appeared as a liberation from
the "confinements" of traditional morality, like taking your belt out a
notch.
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