Shaybani's peace

Lots of locals have free-library boxes outside their homes and someone of them - not tellin' who - had Yoram Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism in it. Brave choice for this "anti-fascist" town . . .

This book argues for the nation-state as against international empire. The ideal state would be bound by the laws of G-d as laid out in Torah. Westphalia is the model; and not the Holy Roman Empire, and not the Church to which end Innocent X (meaning: Zelo Domus Dei) gets an ill mention.

It is, thereby, from a different angle of attack that John Locke gets smacked around too. Nations are familial connexions, as per Burke (and maybe Mussolini) against Locke's pure voluntarism. You can get adopted but that's not your right as a human. Yes, Karen; a person can be illegal, if he's trespassed here.

I haven't been a Lockebro since the late 2000s when I discovered Moldbug, so I'm fine with that pile-on against Locke. I'm less fine with the pile-on against the seventeenth century Church. And since I'm now aware that the Peace was once anathema to my tradition, which I didn't know, I have to say something.

Westphalia did, 'tis true, straiten the common ground between men, which straits had to be recarved - on the Bible, first, and then on science. Hazony here prefigures The Knowledge Machine. To all that I restate that this would have happened anyway, and maybe sooner on account a Christianity based on Tradition is inherently more open-minded than one based on an infallible Text. Wasn't Prots who discovered the West Indies, lads.

I'd wonder if this is a particularly Jewish blindspot, failing to see the difference between the martial Christianity of the Late Roman Empire and the insistently dyotheletic Christianity of the Roman and Iraqi bishops; but since a Pope made the same conflation I am forced to spot Hazony this one. Against both: it was Catholicism which allowed a (say) France to exist in the first place; Catholicism got us the Tournament. In the East, the Church being based in the very capital city meant no third-party honest broker who could mediate the dispute according to a common standard. This lack of a common ground got only worse when most of those lands fell under Islamic rule.

All this said, Innocent were better not to have issued his famously-petulant rant. Westphalia proved that a peace between nations is possible outside the Church. Muslims already knew this from Shaybani's Siyâr which Khadduri calls the "Islamic Law of Nations". It might not be a permanent peace; the two nations are still going to maintain their own interests which may well come into conflict again. But almost any peace not based on subjugation is good. Unless you're fighting Crusade. And Crusades are mostly invalid and stupid anyway.

If the Church hierarchy cannot lead an equitable peace then at least it can endorse such, and if not then individual Catholics will have to work around it. Ah well, as in the papacy of Honorius, and in that of Francis for that matter, we're used to that.