Thinking About Sr. Forscades' Insight

The idea of Sr.Teresa Forscades that unlike "modernity," which she defines as the dominant intellectual framing that first started towards hegemony in the renaissance, Christianity had sanctity as the goal of human beings instead of ever higher forms of human reasoning, has stuck in my mind since I first read about it at Mary Bridget Meehan's blog.   Especially this sentence, "Modernity began with the exclusion of women,"  who, she notes, were, for the largest part of the modern period, even up to the 20th century and to an extent, today are excluded from a university education.  Though women have made great strides in entering many fields, notably not so successful in those most emblematic of such modernism, the STEM departments, they are not the only group of people for whom who modernism has not been such a great deal.  

What interested me most is that under the Christian assumption that Sr. Forscades* the great issue that leads to the elite and sciency to deny that people are equal on the basis of biological difference, disappears, for the most part.  If you measure equality from the standard of holiness instead of in intellectual (actually material**) success, then it is far less problematic to hold that all people are created equal by God.  That erases the basis of political inequality as held by such men (almost always it's affluent, white, men) who are held in such esteem even as they despised People of Color, Women, other nationalities, etc.  I will admit that those things existed and exist within the churches - Sisters Forscades and Chittister were speaking at the Women's Ordination Conference, after all - but if you start by holding sanctity as the goal of life instead of material or intellectual position then you're a lot more likely to abandon that evil.  The egalitarianism that is inherent to that framing, like the ideal of any framing, is still more of a potential than it is a reality.  But that is far more true for a framing that holds intellectual and, especially, material attainment as the most worthy goal because no matter what you do by way of schooling, those things are not going to be equally distributed among people. 

I have said a number of times that one of the turning points of my life was, while thinking about Henry Kissinger - I seem to recall it was in the context of his post-government career selling guns in Africa, I realized there were hundreds, thousands, . . . of smart people the world would probably be better off without, there are no good people I could say that about.  

Trying to find the ideals of egalitarian democracy in materialism and in intellectual manipulations on behalf of that is guaranteed to fail.  It will always work the other way.  

*  Who has had what would conventionally be seen as a top-rate education,  Harvard for the love of Mike!   I think she is unusually unimpressed with her credentials.  The more I read about her and hear her (her English is extremely good) the more impressed I am. 

** The extent to which the Ivy and Might As Well be Ivys have proven to be intellectual brothels, and how the far from intellectually endowed rich and famous have used them erases the distinction between the two.  Oxford and Cambridge and other elite universities and the jr. levels of those, the elite preps (Catholic no less than any others) display a similar blending of the intellectual and the material.

I haven't thought it out very far but I wonder if that has something to do with the deep suspicion that St. Francis had about educational distinction and discouraged its elevation in the early years of his order.  His radical sanctity, based not in material possessions but in poverty and service to the least among us was something that the powerful members of the hierarchy moved, even during his lifetime, to destroy.   It is something that in the next generation led to the interesting fact that the great philosopher William of Ockham had to take it on the lam because as a devotee of the strict observance Franciscans, he was on the outs with the rich and famous in the degenerate papal court of John XXII.   It's a long, long time since I have read any of him but I seem to recall that a lot of Ockham's political ideas, formulated in defense of the original Rule of Francis, anticipate a good deal of democratic political theory.   The basis of that was in defense of refusal to own property as part of Franciscan sanctity.   I seem to recall part of that was an early form of the separation of church and state, but it also contained a limit of the rights of earthly power to rule.   Maybe I'll get around to reviewing that.