Vatican proposes EU as example of Social Doctrine

[Vouthon]

Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev, stated on April 24, 2004 that “'Azerbaijan’s current strategic choice is integration in Europe, European family and institutions" but it has very far to go, given that its government is rather autocratic.

See:

Azerbaijan–European Union relations - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It is not ‘high’ on any future enlargement agenda. Serbia, the other Balkan states, Ukraine and Georgia are all ‘ahead’:

EPP - European People's Party

The EPP is centre-right, pro-European political party which gathers over 82 parties from 43 countries.

www.epp.eu

Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova

Resolution adopted at the EPP Congress, Helsinki (Finland), 7 – 8 November
2018

Bearing in mind that

a) EU enlargement has been one of Europe’s most successful policies and has proven the attractiveness of the European model. It has served as a driving force for reforms in many non-EU countries in Europe and remains an important response to the dual challenge of consolidating Europe’s global role and confirming its responsibility for stability and security of the continent;

b) the EPP has always supported EU integration and continues to strive for the most important goal; a Europe that is “whole, free and at peace”. In 2017 the EPP Congress in Malta approved, amongst others, two strategic Resolutions: on “Western Balkans” and “On the Long-Term Support Plan for Ukraine”, which outlined a clear strategic framework with regards the next steps of EU integration;

d) Ukraine, a country on the European continent, remains under direct military and hybrid attack from Russia, its neighbour, and part of its territory remains under illegal annexation by Russia;

e) The development and security of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, immediate neighbours of the EU, have a direct impact on the EU and also wider implications for the whole European continent;

g) Russia is maintaining, and even increasing, efforts to exert influence on Ukraine and other Eastern Partnership countries, using, in particular, military, economic, political and hybrid means. Therefore, European solidarity, engagement and support are needed to counteract these threats and antidemocratic trends;

1. reiterates its support for territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova and that it will never recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia; and condemns the occupation of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region/ south Ossetia;

3. reiterates its unequivocal support for a European perspective of the Eastern Partnership countries, which signed association agreement with the EU;

4. underlines, that the European integration process has been one of the most successful and powerful EU instruments for consolidating democratic norms and principles, for establishing functioning market economies and for achieving peace and stability;

 

[Ridgerunner]

Trying to avoid being prolix, I might point out that I once saw a map showing the “dividing line” between the Latin and Orthodox worlds. It was from something like the 13th Century. It was very little different from what that “dividing line” would be today if anybody cared about such things. Protestantism, of course, is, by the Orthodox, considered a “Latin” aberration. And in a way, that’s true. It certainly isn’t Orthodox.

Possibly western Europe thinks there is little difference between it and the Byzantine world. If one spends much time in a thread with a devoted Orthodox, one is quickly disabused of that notion.

I agree with the EU’s exclusion of Turkey. It’s an Islamic state, and getting more so every day. I fear its flirtation with democracy and western-style liberalism is now on the dust heap of history.
Azerbaijan is in no way a “western” or European country.

 

[Vouthon]

Azerbaijan is in no way a “western” or European country.

It is another ‘disputed’ nation and may end up in a situation much like Turkey, I mean its not a formal candidate for membership but there is the intent to deepen ties economically.

 

[Vouthon]

Possibly western Europe thinks there is little difference between it and the Byzantine world. If one spends much time in a thread with a devoted Orthodox, one is quickly disabused of that notion.

"…If a new European order of this kind is to be adequate for the promotion of the authentic common good, it must recognize and safeguard the values that constitute the most precious heritage of European humanism, which has assured and continues to assure Europe a unique influence in the history of civilization. These values constitute the characteristic intellectual and spiritual contribution that has formed the European identity through the centuries and is part of the valuable cultural treasure of the continent.

Multiple are the cultural roots that have contributed to reinforce the values just mentioned: from the spirit of Greece to that of Roman law and virtue; from the contributions of the Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Slav and Hungarian-Finnish peoples, to those of the Jewish culture and the Islamic world. These different factors found in the Jewish-Christian tradition the power that harmonized, consolidated and promoted them…"

- Pope St. John Paul II, 2002

I think the Byzantines are given terrible short shrift by the Latin West, in traditional Western accounts. Recent academic works have done much to mitigate these misconceptions.

They were actually an intellectually fertile culture that contributed much to Europe in scholarship.

The Latin West grew out of the Frankish kingdoms that emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, while the Greek-speaking Easter Roman Empire lived on for another thousand years. Both these regions share a common heritage.

Tolkien in LoTR based the lost land of Arnor in Eriador (where the Hobbits and Rangers live) on the West that lost its portion of the Empire, and Gondor on Byzantium. LoTR ends with both kingdoms being reunited under Aragorn, which I always thought was a fitting ‘fantasy’ image.

The EU has recognised Orthodox nations including Greece, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Serbia, Georgia etc. as European countries, part of our heritage and sharing our values, and most of these have either been admitted to the Union or are on the path to joining it.

In other words, the old 'Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant’ spheres in Europe have all fallen today under the EU umbrella, save for Russia and Belarus. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Albania almost certainly become part of it too, as the indisputably ‘European’ countries with Islamic majorities.

Turkey will never and Azerbaijan likely won’t either, given that they are not culturally European in any meaningful sense and this is widely agreed.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Greece is virtually part of the Middle East. I remember commenting to a firm Orthodox on here that there is more Hellenism in Edinburgh than there is in Athens, and he agreed. Byzantine and Hellenic are different things.

Odd that you left out Croatia, the easternmost bastion of Western Culture in the Balkans…

 

[Vouthon]

Odd that you left out Croatia, the easternmost bastion of Western Culture in the Balkans…

Its Catholic and is already an EU member state.

I was rhyming off the Orthodox members and candidates.

Trump’s wife’s country, Slovenia, is also an EU member stare fyi.

 

[Vouthon]

Byzantine and Hellenic are different things.

Yes, mainly because Byzantine is Christian and Roman-greek-speaking whereas ‘Hellenic’ contributed much to Europe philosophically and politically but we derived very little of our ethical values from the generally horrendous Spartans, Athenians and others.

As it is, I reject your interpretation of Greece as ‘middle-eastern’. It is a European country speaking a European language with a European heritage and is a member state of the EU.

Its centuries-long colonisation by the Ottomans (a fate it shares with Balkan countries) and the fact that Greeks have their own “kebabs” as a result does not a middle-eastern culture make.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I guess it depends on what you think of as the “values” of Spartans, Athenians, etc. If you ignore virtually all of the classic Greek philosophers, you would have a point. You would have to ignore the Iliad as well, since it’s not just an adventure tale and is packed with philosophy and surprisingly erudite theology.

But then, I don’t know that anyone in the West really admired Sparta for anything other than steadfastness in war.

It would be nice to understand the Byzantine world better. By that, I don’t especially mean the “western” Byzantines like the Ruthenians or western Ukrainians. Various historians have opined that Byzantium became more Persian than Roman eventually.

But admittedly, my knowledge of Greece is anecdotal. Well, and for whatever reason, it always seems Germany is bailing Greece out and imposing austerity that the Greeks don’t much appreciate.

 

[Vouthon]

If you ignore virtually all of the classic Greek philosophers, you would have a point.

I have read them in detail when I studied classics and I can say with absolutely certainty that our values do not derive from there, no matter how much many moderns attribute our ethical systems to the Aristotelians, Platonists and Stoics.

It is an old-fashioned Renaissance myth that has unfortunately lingered. Very few modern Westerners are aware of just how alien classical Greece would have been to us.

“Liberty is a species of rights and a free person has this right over himself, namely of doing whatever he pleases unless prohibited by law…And so a free man has a right over his own person” Conrad Summenhart (c.1450–1502), German Catholic theologian

The aforementioned quote represents a late crystallization of medieval Christian, canonistic thought on the individual agency of the human person, from a scholastic theologian. The ancient Greek philosophers never conceived of ius naturale as meaning subjective, individual and inviolable right. For them, ius naturale was objective - about the natural ‘order of things’, everything in its place and for its due.

As an example, consider Aristotle’s Politics (350 BCE) from The Internet Classics Archive :

… The rule of a master, although the slave by nature and the master by nature have in reality the same interests, is nevertheless exercised primarily with a view to the interest of the master…

[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

… [T]he lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another’s and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend a principle; they obey their instincts. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life … It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves… [T]he slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature.

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

This was actually the conventional understanding in the classical world: that by nature, some people are innately superior to others and have the right to exploit lesser people for their own benefit or pleasure. Plato, likewise, concurred. In his Republic (375 B.C.), he theorized about his ideal state being founded on a foundation of inequality, requiring that different people assume roles appropriate to their innate level of quality, even going so far as to speak about: “ inferior members of the human race " (495c) and to “ inferior kinds of people ” (545a), arguing that if “ a small, bald metalworker ” happened to accidentally get rich and married “ his master’s daughter ,” their defective offspring would only be “ second-rate half-breeds ” (496a). Plato therefore argued that philosophy “ should only be practiced by men of true pedigree, not by b-astard-s ” (535c), which takes him to the conclusion that we should ideally prohibit the lower orders of human from reproducing: “ sex should preferably take place between men and women who are outstandingly good, and should occur as little as possible between men and women of a vastly inferior stamp. [. . .] This is how to maximize the potential of our flock ” (459d-e).

For Plato, Aristotle and their mentor Socrates, the end result was that the government should care for the health of the strong, the weak should be left to die and those with little intelligence should be killed, to quote again from Plato’s Republic :

Socrates:[9] These two practices [legal and medical] will treat the bodies and minds of those of your citizens who are naturally well endowed in these respects; as for the rest, those with a poor physical constitution will be allowed to die, and those with irredeemably rotten minds will be put to death. Right?

Glaucon: Yes, we’ve shown that this is the best course for those at the receiving end of the treatment as well as for the community. (409e-410a)

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

As the legal historian Professor H.L. Pohlman has noted in this regard:

During the age of the Greek polis the orthodox view was that humanity was naturally unequal. Non-Greeks were perceived to be “barbarians,” slavery was widespread, women were subservient, and the “aristoi” (aristocrats) of each city claimed a special birthright.

It’s undeniable that Aristotle and Plato are the pre-eminent Greek philosophers, along with Socrates. To demonstrate to you how widely shared their views were among Romans, of all philosophical schools, just consider the great Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65):

" We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason - to separate the sound from the worthless "

• (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (1995). Seneca: Moral and Political Essays . Cambridge University Press. p. 32. ISBN 0-5213-4818-8. Retrieved November 2, 2013.)

That ain’t where my values come from. If its yours, so be it.

It’s late here in Britain, but I’d be happy to discuss this with you in some depth tomorrow.

 

[Vouthon]

@Ridgerunner for your interest, here is the perspective of an English classical historian Tom Holland, himself an atheist, who writes popular works on ancient history:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politi...om-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity

It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.

The years I spent writing these studies of the classical world – living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had triumphed at Alesia – only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical inquiry, did not cease to seem possessed of the qualities of an apex predator.

Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Your exposition actually supports my contention. Do you not recognize those statements about slavery in statements as late as the American Civil War? And as to non-Greeks being regarded as barbarians, do you not remember the British assertion that “Wogs begin at Calais”?

It is almost certain that the rapid spread of Christianity in the Hellenistic world was due to the fact tht Greek philosophy had reached a “singularity” which Christianity answered. It was like someone suddenly reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics out of nowhere.

Fading Christianity in the west is not due to Christianity or the west. It’s due to nihilistic and materialistic thinking that has captured the minds of so many, including writers and academics.

And you can even thank the Romans for the fact that you shave, if you do. Nobody else of any consequence did that, and we do it still without having any good idea why. And do you not notice how Greek and Roman is our very architecture? And, of course, Aquinas himself said his purpose in writing the Summas was to demonstrate (chiefly as against the Arabs) that Christianity and “philosophy” (meaning Aristotelian philosophy) were not fundamentally inconsistent. Augustine, of course, was more oriented to Platonism.

Even in economics, we tend to accept both Aristotle and Plato as well as Aquinas and Augustine. In law cases, sometimes the courts in America even admit that debt in law. Aquinas and Augustine formulated the concept of “justice in trade” which underlies the American (and surely British) legal concept of “quantum meruit”.

The U.S. is profoundly Greco/Roman. Why goodness! When my son was in high school, he even wrestled in Greco-Roman style. (being silly there, but it’s true)

 

[Vouthon]

As I said, will get back to you at some point tomorrow on this.

Nothing you have said, much of which I agree with, rebuts my point that it is mendacious to claim that we are ethically classical or hellenistic.

Legally, politically, architecturally indebted in many areas, 100%.

But morally?

Find me one example of a liberal individualism, or the idea that all human beings possess innate, subjective and inviolable natural rights as individuals that limit executive authority, in the ancient Greek or Roman philosophers?

You won’t succeed because it isn’t there. Their understanding of ius naturale was entirely different, their moral universe was fundamentally alien to ours.

And I’ll inundate you tommorrow with primary references to prove it, if need be.

 

[Vouthon]

The U.S. is profoundly Greco/Roman.

Gosh, perhaps that finally explains it all then

 

[Ridgerunner]

Find me one example of a liberal individualism, or the idea that all human beings possess innate, subjective and inviolable natural rights as individuals that limit executive authority, in the ancient Greek or Roman philosophers?

You won’t succeed because it isn’t there. Their understanding of ius naturale was entirely different.

And I’ll inundate you tommorrow with primary references to prove it, if need be

Not the greatest source below, but quick because I have to go.

The concept of natural law was documented in ancient Greek philosophy, including Aristotle,[2] and was referred to in Roman philosophy by Cicero. References to natural law are also found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, later expounded upon in the Middle Ages by Christian philosophers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas

Natural law - Wikipedia

No point in cluttering up the space with a zillion sources. Give us one or two at most.

 

[Vouthon]

I’m not talking about natural law itself but rather natural law understood in the objective sense (ancient Greek and Roman) and in the individual subjective (medieval canonistic) as inviolable, natural and individual rights.

The latter is foundational to modern liberal theory and human rights, but it’s entirely absent from the classics. They had a very different conception of ius naturale from that of the Declaration of Independence.

I will explain what I’m saying tommorrow but I reckon we should move our discussion over to the philosophy forum.

I’ll make a thread on it.

Way off topic.

 

[Vouthon]

And as to non-Greeks being regarded as barbarians, do you not remember the British assertion that “Wogs begin at Calais”?

Colonial prejudice doesn’t change the fact that the Enlightenment philosophy then in vogue in Britain, paid lip-service to the universality of natural rights, whereas the hellenistic philosophies in vogue at the time of Leonidas, Cicero and Caesar didn’t (with the exception of the Stoics, but again they lacked any conception of subjective and inviolable natural rights on the part of individuals, everything was about the cosmos, determinism and logos for them).

When the New Testament uttered the words, “there are no Greeks and Jews…barbarians, Scythians, slave or free; but Christ is all” (Colossians 3:11) it had an incendiary significance in St. Paul’s cultural context that was deeply subversive of the Aristotelian-Platonist orthodoxy I’ve already referenced from Politics and The Republic.

The word “barbarian” was used by the author of Colossians for a reason. It wasn’t accidental. The “barbarian” to ancient Greeks was simply the uncivilised enemy foreigner; the “Scythian” was the savage, towards whom the contempt implied for the “barbarian” reached its climax.

To deny the intrinsic moral reality of these exclusive categirizations of human worth was to pull the rug out from under the presumptions of the classical ethical worldview.

 

[PickyPicky]

It’s perfectly true, at least of England. But that horrified look would be even more horrified if you asked them how much they earn. It’s a cultural thing. The English don’t reveal personal details at the drop of a hat.

If you like. Certainly the English conquest of Wales was imperialism, as was the British conquest of Ireland.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Not kidding at all. I will grant that men wear trousers, which is Teutonic, instead of togas. But as I mentioned before, we shave. Our close-cropped hair on men is Roman. Our laws are very affected by Roman law, our appreciation of the “practical” as opposed to the “mystical” which prevails in the east. We are as addicted to straight architectural lines and straight roads as the Romans were. (Much of the world is not.) One-third of our language is Latinate in origin, and another third is partially so, being derived from
French. Our months of the year are largely of Roman origin. Our very lettering, including this post, is Roman. The very elements in the periodic chart are largely Latin. Medical terminology is largely Latin. There’s a whole “sub-language” of important terminology referred to as “Lawyer Latin”. Our priests’ vestments are Roman. Many of our names are Roman in origin. Our names for the constellations are either Latin or Greek in origin. The “official” terminology of plants and animals is all Latin.

Is it the failure to wear togas that makes you think we’re not strongly influenced by Greco/Roman culture? In the waning days of the Empire, the young took to trousers adopted from Teutons, to look scary. So even the Romans sometimes wore trousers.