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'Dedicated to a Universal Purpose': The Antiquity of the New World
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19920 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
6,725 Words |
| Author
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James V. Schall, S.J.
James V. Schall, S.J., is associate professor of government at
Georgetown University. His most recent work is entitled the
Politics of Heaven and Hell. |
Benjamin Franklin was the American emissary to the court of Versailles in the late 1770s. At a state dinner, he listened attentively to the toasts of the leading dignitaries present. The British ambassador proposed: "To George the Third, who, like the sun in its meridian, spreads a luster throughout and enlightens the world." Responding to this elaborate conception, the French minister countered, "To the illustrious Louis the Sixteenth, who, like the moon, sheds his mild and benignant rays on and influences the globe." The sharp Franklin, amused by the pretensions of these toasts, in turn rose to offer his own: "To George Washington, who, like Joshua of old, commanded the sun and the moon to stand still, and they obeyed him."
The ways of understanding our relationships to ultimate things are indeed varied. Yet, did we not stand with the British ambassador and the French minister under the same sun and moon on this very globe, we should not be delighted when a Benjamin Franklin, at a banquet of state, recalls the vanity to which we are all so often subject. Franklin, with his kite, was at home with the symbolism of the sun and the moon. The European diplomats knew about Joshua and the commanding of the sun to stand still. All three, whose combined domains already in their time were touching all the known continents, knew of political power, of universal kingdoms, and of the transcendent limits of rule.
The contemporary world, following a pattern the English ambassador, the French minister, and Benjamin Franklin himself all would have understood because already in their own day they each were representatives of it, is divided politically into some 160 territorial units, usually called nation-states. They each have flags, laws, songs, monuments to their noble deeds and their dead, institutions, police, poems, armies, and bureaucracies that prove and define their moral reality as well as their taxing powers. Interestingly, 160 is about the same number of constitutions that Aristotle, who, for philosophical reasons, did not like large civic bodies, is said to have collected for his study of politics.
Some of these modern nation-states are roughly equivalent in size to Aristotle's city-states; others are about the area of the Alexandrine or Roman empires. The original nation-states from the early modern period-Portugal, Spain, England, France, and Holland--remain in area more or less about the same size. The collapse of Marxist hegemony has, apparently, allowed the older central European political entities from even before the territorial nation-state--the Bohemians, the Slovakians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the
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