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Docta Ignorantia XIX A View of the Field DIAGNOSIS The salient phenomenon today, world-wide, is that lawyers (Kshatriyas) are attempting to usurp the Magisterium from clergy (Brahmins). Rulers are attempting to confiscate the responsibility of teachers and doctors. Underneath all other activities, this is the operational character of the times. Everything -- everything -- should be viewed as an aspect of this circumstance. Several qualities deserve attention. One. The responsibilities of teacher and ruler are unique and distinct. The same person cannot embody both capacities. However, the tenor of the times is to dispute this fact, as it is to dispute so many others, as well. Our people prefer their own plans to extant circumstances. Two. Cognizant of humanity's pretensions, Church dogma since earliest times patently or latently asserted that both responsibilities, teaching and ruling, the spirituality and the temporality, are invested in bishops alone and, through them, in the lesser clergy. In other words, Church dogma resolved disharmony between clergy and lawyers by assigning plenary authority to clergy. If a dispute is entered regarding jurisdiction, clergy, alone, can resolve it because their purview, alone, encompasses both realms. The aim of the Church, of course, was to protect itself from tyrannical rulers. The extirpation of heresy was given as the reason, but survival and relief from taxation or more direct expropriation was the more fundamental motivation. Support for the assertion of clerical preeminence is gained from the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline Corpus and the Torah. In addition, a lengthy and sometimes successful track record can be adduced from the regula fidei, the Tradition, especially dating to Athanasius, Cyprian and Augustine. The record in the Latin Catholic Church (Roman and, sotto voce, Anglican) is unequivocal in support of the assertion that clergy, alone, embody plenary authority both to teach and to rule. The Church crowns the heads of state -- excepting Napoleon, who grasped the significance and the crown. Three. As strong as the tradition of clerical preeminence is, the assertion it rests on is untenable. A succession of prelates was obliged to straddle palfrey to defend it, but the successes were always short-lived. Clergy lack the police power, by innate nature. Their disposition is not for it. So they cannot sustain an assertion of temporal responsibility. Lawyers, whose personal constitution includes the relish of police power -- a relish which in them is commendable -- can sustain the assertion of temporal responsibility. Canonical materials which support the assertion of clerical preeminence can be discounted, by several courses of argument, and demonstrations of the assertion from Tradition indicate more an incapacity than a puissance, Hildebrand notwithstanding. What does not stand is not standable. What God does not approve, man may not establish. Four. The assertion of clerical preeminence does not stand because clergy do not, in fact, have the temporal responsibility. Lawyers do. To assert otherwise engenders only power politics, a thing which appeals to persons inconfident of their manhood but resolves nothing of importance. Five. But for appeal to God, clergy are without protection from rulers, from lawyers. They meddle in power politics to form this shield and that. They redact and eisegete Scripture to make protective, but insupportable, claims. But in the final analysis, clergy have God and nothing else for protection. For those who have no refuge, God is the refuge. This is the meaning of Torah's assignment of YHWH as the portion of the priesthood. It is the meaning of Luther's explicit and More's implicit, 'God help me!' Six. When there is disharmony between lawyers and clergy, as there is today, world-wide, the reason is that clergy have lost confidence in their calling. They have lost faith in the ability of God to support them. They cringe like poltroons and shrink from their responsibility to teach humanity the modes of earning peace. They lose confidence in the puissance of goodness, the very thing they are called to instill, and become, functionally or actually, apostate. To cover their disgrace, clergy charge humanity with being frightful. Then lawyers, ever alert to weakness and disposed to exploit it, become disdainful and move in to supply the need, if they take themselves for benevolent, or to appropriate the office, if they know themselves as malevolent. The underlying cause is loss of the faith by clergy. The compounding error is theft of what does not belong to them by lawyers. Seven. Today, society suffers distress because clergy -- teachers and doctors -- are enfeebled by their own infidelity. There is, however, this much truth to the assertion of clerical preeminence: that the vigor of both realms depends upon the skill and determination of clergy executing their office. Clergy are not themselves rulers. But they train the rulers. If, therefore, rulers are inept or wicked, clergy bear the shame. Eight. No failure by clergy justifies lawyers in seeking to replace them with themselves or with others who are not clergy in the operation of the Magisterium. Lawyers must be patient and do what they can to encourage clergy to regain their self-confidence without imagining that they can supply the deficiency. Such suffering and harm as occur because clergy are not doing their job has to be borne without complaint. At that point, humanity has no other go. Lawyers who seek to usurp the Magisterium produce disaster for the society. They are mutineers. They demoralize the people. They engender a confusion of mind and a bitterness of spirit which can require centuries to heal. This is the epitaph of, for example, Jim Pike. The administration currently in Washington, D.C., is a coterie of malevolent lawyers a large portion of whose plan to seize the Magisterium goes under the name of health care reform. Medical doctors are clergy. They are Brahmins. PROGNOSIS The effort of lawyers to usurp the Magisterium will not succeed. The dénouement of their struggle, however, will not occur during the lifetime of the audience of this writing. Our people need instruction, not entertainment. Lawyers must provide the opportunities and clergy must become worthy of them. This is the proper relationship of mutuality for the members of these primal professions. We may remark these aspects. One. Clergy should form support groups which shun harmful habits and encourage study. The innate impulse of clergy is to study. Study is their dharma. Composing and enforcing laws is the dharma of lawyers. Laws, incidentally, conduce to justice and to nothing else. What goes by the name of law but does not conduce to justice is, in the words of Aquinas, 'not law at all but a species of violence.' This truth is the foundation for all acts judged as civil disobedience relevant to laws which, in fact, conduce to injustice. Disobedience of such laws is not disobedience. It is discharge of the sacred responsibility to obey the law. Of course, tyrants don't see it this way .... Law conduces to justice and to nothing else. Two. Lawyers should organize and protect public venues where clergy teach the modes of earning peace. The Magisterium must be conducted in a safe and non-commercial arena. Lawyers, alone, can cause and guarantee these conditions. Engaging stand-up celebrities to entertain an audience is trivial. It derives from a usage of the days of Emerson, but these are not Emerson's days nor was the usage then mere pandering to the itch for notoriety, as it is now. Talk today is cheap, and names are common. Entertainment is an opiate. Our people require en-theos-mania, enthusiasm, God-intoxication. Three. Lawyers should foster clergy by securing the safety and comfort of their families. Clergy are not able to provide these necessary aspects of life for themselves. This requires of lawyers that they foster without seeking to control.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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