GRAFTED IN: On What Makes Us Who We Are
Birth, Papers, and the Slow Making of a People — St. Paul, Aristotle, Augustine,
and the Social Sciences against the Thin Self
οὐ σὺ τὴν ῥίζαν βαστάζεις ἀλλὰ ἡ ῥίζα σέ.
It is not you that bear the root, but the root that bears you.
Rom. 11:18 (NA28)
The previous essay in this journal asked where the rule of British membership ought to live, and answered: in statute, openly enacted, not in a guidance document a minister may rewrite on a Tuesday. This essay asks a prior question, which that one left standing: what is membership supposed to track? Its answer is not neutral and does not pretend to be. A passport records a legal fact. It does not tell a man who he is. Who we are is given to us by what has formed us — faith, tongue, memory, manners, the dead we honour and the things we have been taught to love — and that formation is received before it is chosen, particular rather than generic, and measured in generations rather than in qualifying periods. What follows argues that case as strongly as I am able, and answers the theories that run against it on their own ground.
I
A Man Born in Tarsus
When the tribune Claudius Lysias allowed his prisoner to address the crowd from the steps of the barracks, St. Paul began, as men under accusation generally do, by saying who he was.[1]
ἐγώ εἰμι ἀνὴρ Ἰουδαῖος, γεγεννημένος ἐν Ταρσῷ τῆς Κιλικίας, ἀνατεθραμμένος δὲ ἐν τῇ πόλει ταύτῃ, παρὰ τοὺς πόδας Γαμαλιὴλ. πεπαιδευμένος κατὰ ἀκρίβειαν τοῦ πατρῴου νόμου, ζηλωτὴς ὑπάρχων τοῦ θεοῦ.
I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel, according to the strictness of the ancestral law, being zealous for God.
Acts 22:3 (NA28)
The sentence is built with care, and its order is the argument of this essay in miniature. The birthplace is given once, in a participle, and at once qualified: born in Tarsus of Cilicia — but (δέ) brought up here, formed at the feet of Gamaliel, trained in the strictness of the πατρῷος νόμος, the law of the fathers. Tarsus is a fact about Paul. The law of the fathers is who he is. He is not ashamed of his birthplace; a few verses earlier he has called it, with a certain civic pride, “no mean city.”[2] But when he wishes to tell a hostile crowd what kind of man stands before it, the place of his birth is the first thing he mentions and the first thing he subordinates.[3]
Writing to the Philippians, where he has no crowd to placate, he leaves Tarsus out altogether:
περιτομῇ ὀκταήμερος, ἐκ γένους Ἰσραήλ, φυλῆς Βενιαμίν, Ἑβραῖος ἐξ Ἑβραίων, κατὰ νόμον Φαρισαῖος.
Circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee.
Phil. 3:5 (NA28)
Every term in that list names a covenant, a lineage, a household, or a discipline. Not one names a soil. This is a man born outside the land of Israel, in a Hellenistic city of the diaspora, who knows with perfect precision what he is, and who does not think that the accident of a delivery in Cilicia has the least bearing on the question.
Then comes the exchange which gives this essay its first and sharpest distinction. Paul, stretched out for the lash, asks whether it is lawful to scourge a Roman uncondemned. The tribune hurries over:
λέγε μοι, σὺ Ῥωμαῖος εἶ; ὁ δὲ ἔφη· ναί. ἀπεκρίθη δὲ ὁ χιλίαρχος· ἐγὼ πολλοῦ κεφαλαίου τὴν πολιτείαν ταύτην ἐκτησάμην. ὁ δὲ Παῦλος ἔφη· ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ γεγέννημαι.
“Tell me, are you a Roman?” And he said, “Yes.”. The tribune answered, “I acquired this citizenship for a great sum.” Paul said, “But I was born to it.”
Acts 22:27–28 (NA28)
Two men stand in the courtyard holding the same legal status. One bought it; the other inherited it. Luke records the difference, and records that the tribune was afraid (22:29). It is worth noticing, too, how Paul inherited it. Roman citizenship did not attach to birth in Tarsus, which was a free city with its own franchise; it descended to Paul through his father. His birthright was a matter of lineage, not of soil.[4]
The passport is Lysias’s citizenship: real, legal, enforceable, and — in our own day as in his — obtainable by fee and procedure. Who Paul is lies elsewhere: in what he received from his fathers, in what Gamaliel made of him, in the God for whom he was zealous, and finally in the Christ who seized him on the Damascus road and reordered all the rest. The argument of this essay is that this distinction is not a pious decoration but the truth about human beings; that the best of the social sciences confirm it; that the theories which deny it fail on their own terms; and that the Catholic tradition both affirms it and rescues it from its counterfeit.
II
The Passport and the Person
The oldest systematic treatment of citizenship in the Western tradition opens by denying that residence makes the citizen. Let’s look into it:
ὁ δὲ πολίτης οὐ τῷ οἰκεῖν που πολίτης ἐστίν (καὶ γὰρ μέτοικοι καὶ δοῦλοι κοινωνοῦσι τῆς οἰκήσεως).
The citizen is not a citizen by dwelling in a place, for resident aliens and slaves also share in the dwelling.
Aristotle, Politics III.1, 1275a7–8
Aristotle wrote that sentence as a man in precisely the condition he describes. Born at Stagira, he spent the greater part of his adult life in Athens as a μέτοικος, a resident alien, teaching the sons of citizens, and never became one. He knew exactly what he was and what he was not, and he did not confuse the two.[5] The modern State has made his distinction harder to see, because it has collapsed both of his categories into a single administrative one. Residence, if long enough and lawful enough, ripens into status, and status is then spoken of as though it were identity.
The Latin tradition gives us the same distinction in a more theological key. Cicero, through the mouth of Scipio, offers what became the classical definition of a people:
Populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.
A people is not every assembly of men gathered together in any manner whatever, but an assembly of a multitude associated by consent to law and a community of interest.
Cicero, De re publica I.25.39
That is a juridical definition, and a noble one. It is also, give or take the community of interest, roughly all that a modern nationality statute knows: consent to law, verified by a clean record; a share in the common interest, verified by residence, tax and a test of facts about public life.[6] Augustine took the definition apart. By Cicero’s own standard, he argues in Book XIX of the City of God, Rome was never a people at all, since a consent to law without true justice is not a consent to ius. He then proposes another:
Populus est coetus multitudinis rationalis, rerum quas diligit concordi communione sociatus.
… profecto, ut videatur qualis quisque populus sit, illa sunt intuenda, quae diligit.
A people is an assembly of a rational multitude, associated by a common agreement about the things it loves.
… Surely, then, to see what kind of people any people is, we must look at the things it loves.
Augustine, De civitate Dei XIX.24
This is the hinge of the whole question, and it repays slow reading. Augustine does not abolish law; he displaces it from the centre. What makes a people a people is not, in the first place, what it has agreed to obey, but what it loves together. And he adds at once the corollary which a Christian ought never to forget: the better the things it loves, the better the people; the baser, the baser.[7] The same Augustine, describing his own soul, says that love is its gravity — pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror, “my love is my weight; by it I am carried wherever I am carried.”[8] A person is what he loves; a people is what it loves in common.
Now set that definition beside the procedures of naturalisation. A statute can verify residence. It can verify a language certificate, the absence of a criminal record, a pass mark in a test about the composition of Parliament. It cannot verify love. It cannot certify that a man would grieve to see the cathedral fall; that he knows what the bells mean on a Sunday morning and on the morning of a funeral; that he has a sense, however inarticulate, of standing in a line that runs back through his grandfather’s war and forward to his grandchildren’s; that his dead lie in this soil and he expects to lie beside them. These are the things Augustine says make a people. None of them can be issued.
The point is not merely theological. Fifty years before the current quarrel, the American sociologist Milton Gordon, studying a nation of immigrants with more sympathy than most, broke “assimilation” into distinct processes and observed that they come apart. Cultural assimilation — the acquisition of language, dress and habits — can be rapid. Structural assimilation, entry into the primary groups and institutions of the receiving society, is slower. What Gordon called identificational assimilation — a sense of peoplehood based on the receiving society — comes last, and does not follow automatically from the others.[9] Legal admission does not even appear on his list. It was obvious to him, as it was to Aristotle and Augustine, that being admitted and belonging are different things, and that the second is the work of time and formation rather than of decree.
III
Formed Before We Choose
If belonging is not conferred by papers, what does confer it? Here the social sciences, read at their best, say more clearly than most theologians have dared what the Christian anthropologist already believes: that we are formed before we choose, and that the forming goes all the way down.
Marcel Mauss, lying in a New York hospital, noticed that the nurses walked in a particular way; returning to Paris, he noticed young Frenchwomen walking in the same way, and realised that they had learned it from American films. From that small observation he built his account of the techniques du corps: the ways of walking, swimming, sitting, sleeping, digging and giving birth that differ from one society to another and that are transmitted not by instruction but by imitation and authority, below the level of reflection.[10] Pierre Bourdieu generalised the point in his concept of the habitus: a society’s history deposited in the body as a second nature, and so forgotten as history.[11] We do not decide to stand at a certain distance from a stranger, to lower our voices in a church, to find one joke funny and another obscene. We have been made into people who do these things, and we discover it only when we meet someone who has been made otherwise.
Clifford Geertz, the most influential cultural anthropologist of the last century and no friend of national romanticism, put the matter in a sentence which deserves to be better known among those who imagine that human beings are interchangeable units with portable “values”:
We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture — and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
“Not through culture in general.” That clause is the death of the thin self. There is no such thing as a generic human being who subsequently acquires a culture as one might acquire a coat. There are only Dobuans and Javanese, Hopi and Italians — Geertz’s own examples — and, we may add, Durham pitmen’s grandsons and Lisbon fishwives’ daughters, each finished, made whole, by a particular inheritance.[12] Charles Taylor, from the side of philosophy, reaches the same conclusion: one is a self only among other selves, and to know who I am is to know where I stand within a framework of goods and loyalties that I did not invent and could not have invented alone.[13]
Simone Weil, writing in London in the last months of her life for a France she would not see liberated, gave the matter its spiritual name:
L’enracinement est peut-être le besoin le plus important et le plus méconnu de l’âme humaine.
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognised need of the human soul.
Simone Weil, L'Enracinement
A human being, she goes on, has roots by virtue of a real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which keeps alive certain treasures of the past and certain expectations for the future.[14] She names place and birth among the ordinary channels of that participation, and an honest advocate should say so, because it sharpens rather than weakens the case. Place and birth matter because they are normally the hands by which the treasure is passed. A child born in a parish, baptised at its font, taught its prayers and its songs, buried at last in its churchyard, has been rooted through his birthplace. A child delivered in a maternity ward to parents who carry another inheritance entirely, raised within that other inheritance, has been born in the place without having been rooted in it. The soil is a medium of formation, not a substitute for it. That is exactly why the accident of a birth certificate cannot, by itself, tell us who anyone is.
Put these witnesses together and four marks of real identity emerge:
It is prior to choice: we receive it before we can assess it.
It is particular: we are formed into this people, not into humanity in the abstract.
It is bodily and moral as well as intellectual: it lives in gesture, taste, reverence and shame, not merely in propositions one can affirm at a ceremony.
And it is slow: it is laid down over a childhood and a lifetime, and handed on across generations.
None of these four can be produced by an Act of Parliament. A citizenship ceremony may be a real and honourable beginning. It is not a birth.
IV
Against the Inventors
The most serious academic objection to all this comes from what is called the “modernist” school in the study of nations, and it would be dishonest to pretend that it is not, at present, the dominant view in the universities. Its classic statement belongs to Ernest Gellner: nationalism, he wrote, is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.[15] Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger collected a famous volume of “invented traditions,” from the Highland kilt to the ceremonial of the British monarchy.[16] Benedict Anderson described the nation as an “imagined community,” brought into being by print capitalism and the newspaper.[17] If the nation is a recent artefact of industry, schooling and the press, the argument runs, then talk of a deep inherited identity is a myth, and the passport is as deep as it goes.
There are five answers, and together I think they are decisive:
First, the modernists do not agree with one another about what “invention” means, and the most careful of them concedes the decisive point. Anderson himself rebuked Gellner for treating invention as though it meant “fabrication” and “falsity,” rather than imagining and creation.[18] An imagined community is not an imaginary one. Every community larger than a village is held together by imagination — by a shared picture of who “we” are — and the Church herself, the communion of saints across centuries and continents, is the supreme instance. To say that a people exists in its members’ shared imagination is not to say it is unreal. It is to say where it is real.
Second, the history will not bear the modernist chronology, least of all in England. Adrian Hastings — a Catholic priest, a historian of African Christianity, and a scholar the modernists could not dismiss as a sentimentalist — devoted his Wiles Lectures to showing that the English nation existed, recognisably, long before the printing press, and that it was formed above all by vernacular Christianity: the Bible, the liturgy and the preaching of the Church in the people’s own tongue.[19] The first great book about the English as a people is not a work of political theory but a history of the Church: Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, completed in 731, two centuries before there was a single kingdom of England. And in that book the English enter history as the object of a pope’s missionary love. Bede tells how Gregory, seeing fair-haired slave boys in the Roman market and hearing that they were called Angli, replied:
Bene, nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse coheredes.
Good — for they have the faces of angels, and such men ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica II.1
The English were a gens of the Church before they were a realm of a king. They were made a people at the font.[20] Whatever may be said of nineteenth-century Balkan nationalisms or twentieth-century African ones, the modernist chronology simply does not describe the people among whom this journal is written.
Third, invention requires material. When Gellner and Anthony D. Smith debated at Warwick in 1995, Gellner put his question memorably: do nations have navels? Like Adam, might they have been created without any real ancestral past at all? Smith’s answer was that many nations demonstrably do have navels — older ethnic communities with their own myths, memories, symbols and values — and that even where nationalists invent, they must work with what the people already recognise, or the invention fails.[21] The twentieth century ran the experiment. The most ambitious attempt in history to invent a new man and a new people from the top down, without regard to their inheritance — the Soviet man — produced seventy years of coercion, and when the coercion lifted, the older peoples, languages and churches were found waiting underneath, battered but alive. Inventions that find nothing to work upon do not take.
Fourth, the modernist account, followed honestly, concedes the religious substratum. Anderson opens his book at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and argues that nationalism arose in the cultural space left by the decline of the great religious communities and the dynastic realms, inheriting their concern with death, continuity and the meaning of suffering.[22] If that is right, then the nation is a religious imagination translated into a secular key. But then a people’s religion is not an optional accessory to its identity, removable without loss. It is the original of which the nation is the copy. The modernist, pressed, ends by confirming the claim with which this essay began: that what forms a people most deeply is civilisational and religious.
Fifth, and most simply: constructed is not the same as shallow. Durham Cathedral was constructed. No one infers that it is therefore unreal, or that something equivalent could be run up in a decade. Things that are made by many hands over many centuries are precisely the things that cannot be made again quickly, and whose loss is irreparable. The constructivist, in showing that national identity was built, has not shown that it is thin. He has shown that it is an edifice — and edifices are what wise men take care not to demolish.
A word, finally, on Fredrik Barth, whose influential essay on ethnic boundaries is often cited to show that the cultural “content” of a group does not matter, only the boundary it maintains.[23] Barth’s own central finding cuts the other way. He observed that ethnic boundaries persist despite a continual flow of persons across them: individuals move, and the distinction remains. That is the opposite of the claim that presence dissolves difference. It is strong empirical support for the claim that belonging is something other than being there. And a boundary is always a boundary around something. Smith’s objection to Barth — that he emptied the container in order to describe its walls — has never been satisfactorily answered.
V
Against the Self-Made Self
The popular form of the opposing view is less sophisticated than the academic one, and more pervasive. It holds that identity is whatever one chooses it to be; that a person is British if he affirms “British values”; and that those values — democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance — are open to anyone who will sign up to them.
The first difficulty is that those values cannot distinguish a people, because they are claimed with equal sincerity in Ottawa, Berlin and Canberra. A definition of Britishness which fits Canadians equally well is not a definition of Britishness.
The second difficulty is far more serious. Those values have a genealogy, and it is not neutral. Historians of very different sympathies have argued that the moral equality of persons, the dignity of conscience, and the limitation of power by law grew out of a particular inheritance — Christian, and in its institutional form Latin and Catholic — over a millennium and more.[24] Cut from that root, the values are cut flowers: they will look well in a vase for a season. To make them the whole of national identity is to keep the fruit and saw through the trunk.
Michael Sandel named the underlying error the “unencumbered self”: the self imagined as prior to all its ends and attachments, choosing them as a customer chooses goods.[25] Alasdair MacIntyre answered it with a question that ought to be carved over the door of every Home Office:
I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
I am born, MacIntyre goes on, with a past; I inherit debts, loyalties and expectations from my family, my city, my tribe and my nation; and to try to cut myself off from that past in the individualist mode is not liberation but deformation.[26] Burke, two centuries earlier, had said the same in the language of a statesman: society is a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”; and “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.”[27]
St. Paul had said it more sharply than any of them, and to a congregation that was rather pleased with itself:
τίς γάρ σε διακρίνει; τί δὲ ἔχεις ὃ οὐκ ἔλαβες; εἰ δὲ καὶ ἔλαβες, τί καυχᾶσαι ὡς μὴ λαβών;
For who sets you apart? What have you that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?
1 Cor. 4:7 (NA28)
The self-made self is a boast. It forgets that language, conscience, manners, faith, even the capacity to reason about values at all, were received — from mothers, from schoolmasters, from priests, from a people. The Christian cannot be a liberal individualist about identity for the same reason he cannot be a Pelagian about grace: he knows that what he is, he has been given.
VI
The Slowness of Belonging
If identity is received and formed, it follows that it takes time — and not the time of a qualifying period, but the time of generations. On this point the most ancient political science and the most recent sociology say the same thing.
στασιωτικὸν δὲ καὶ τὸ μὴ ὁμόφυλον, ἕως ἂν συμπνεύσῃ·
ὥσπερ γὰρ οὐδ᾽ ἐκ τοῦ τυχόντος πλήθους πόλις γίγνεται,
οὕτως οὐδ᾽ ἐν τῷ τυχόντι χρόνῳ.
Difference of stock is also a cause of faction, until the parts come to breathe together;
for just as a city is not formed from any chance multitude,
so neither is it formed in any chance period of time.
Aristotle, Politics V.3, 1303a25–27
The image is exact: συμπνεῖν, to breathe together, to conspire in the root sense. A city is a body that breathes with one breath, and that unity is not achieved by assembling people in a place, nor in any time one pleases. Aristotle follows the sentence with a catalogue of Greek cities that admitted co-settlers in haste and paid for it in civil conflict.[28] One need not share every judgement of a fourth-century Macedonian to recognise the observation as true.
Scripture itself writes time into admission. The law of Deuteronomy, having forbidden Israel to abhor the Edomite and the Egyptian, provides:
Non abominaberis Idumeum, quia frater tuus est, nec Aegyptium, quia advena fuisti in terra eius.
Qui nati fuerint ex eis, tertia generatione intrabunt in ecclesiam Domini.
You shall not abhor the Edomite, for he is your brother, nor the Egyptian, for you were a sojourner in his land.
Those who are born of them shall enter the assembly of the Lord in the third generation.
Deut. 23:7–8 (Vulgate)
St. Thomas Aquinas, expounding the judicial precepts of the old law, saw in these graded admissions a reasoned order:
some peoples were admitted at once,
some in the third generation because of kinship or past benefit,
some excluded because of settled hostility
All ordered to the peace of a community that could not safely absorb strangers at a stroke.[29] I said in the previous essay that this passage will bear a graduated naturalisation and will not bear a closed door. Here I want to draw out what it presupposes. The third generation is not an arbitrary number. It is the grandchild — the first person in the family who has known no other home, whose parents were themselves raised within the people, who has been formed from the cradle by its language, worship and memory.
Deuteronomy and Aquinas both assume what the modern statute forgets:
That belonging is a matter of formation, and formation is a matter of generations.
The sociologists, without knowing it, have rediscovered Deuteronomy. In 1938 the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, himself the son of immigrants, formulated what came to be called Hansen’s law: “what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.”[30] Identity among the descendants of migrants does not move in a straight line toward the receiving society; it moves across generations, and the third generation is where it is settled, one way or the other. Robert Putnam’s large American studies found that in the short run increased diversity is associated with lower social trust, not only between groups but within them — people “hunker down” — and that the forging of new, broader solidarities is the work of the long run.[31]
And Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, studying the children of immigrants, found that assimilation is not a single road but several. The second generation may assimilate upward into the mainstream; it may preserve a strong ethnic community while advancing; or it may assimilate downward, into an adversarial subculture that rejects both the parents’ inheritance and the receiving society’s.[32] Which road is taken depends in large part on what the receiving society offers to be assimilated into.
That last finding is the hinge on which this essay turns from critique to charge, and it is the point at which a Christian advocate must turn his fire on his own side. Time alone does not make a people. Time plus an inheritance that is actually handed on makes a people. A nation that has stopped teaching its own children its faith, its history, its poetry and its hymns — that is embarrassed by its churches and silent about its dead — has nothing to offer the newcomer’s grandchildren except its shopping centres and its grievances. The failure of integration which so many now lament is, in large part, a failure of transmission, and the failure of transmission began at home, among the native-born, a long time before the present arrivals.
VII
Ruth, and the Graft
The objection will be made — it is always made — that all this is blood and soil in clerical dress. It is not, and the Old Testament itself supplies the proof.
The same chapter of Deuteronomy that admits the Egyptian in the third generation excludes the Moabite “even to the tenth generation,” which is to say for ever (Deut. 23:3). Yet the book of Ruth tells of a Moabite widow who refused to go home:
כִּי אֶל־אֲשֶׁר תֵּלְכִי אֵלֵךְ וּבַאֲשֶׁר תָּלִינִי אָלִין עַמֵּךְ עַמִּי וֵאלֹהַיִךְ אֱלֹהָי׃
בַּאֲשֶׁר תָּמוּתִי אָמוּת וְשָׁם אֶקָּבֵר
For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.
Ruth 1:16–17 (BHS)
Read the oath for what it contains. Ruth asks for no status. She binds herself to a people, to a God, to a place of death and a place of burial. She does not acquire Israel; she gives herself to it, and she includes her own grave in the gift. That is what entering a people looks like. And notice how the book treats her afterwards. Even after the oath, even in Bethlehem, even at her marriage, she is called “Ruth the Moabitess” (1:22; 2:2, 21; 4:5, 10). The community receives her and remembers where she came from, both at once. Only in the genealogy that closes the book is the graft complete: she is the great-grandmother of David (4:17), and St. Matthew writes her into the genealogy of Christ (Matt. 1:5).[33] It took three generations from the oath at the crossroads of Moab to the shepherd-king. That is the pattern this essay defends: belonging is enterable — by love, by oath, by fidelity unto death — and it is completed slowly.
The New Testament gives the pattern its theological form. St. Paul, explaining to Gentile Christians in Rome how they come to belong to the people of God, reaches for an image from the olive grove:
σὺ δὲ ἀγριέλαιος ὢν ἐνεκεντρίσθης ἐν αὐτοῖς καὶ συγκοινωνὸς τῆς ῥίζης τῆς πιότητος τῆς ἐλαίας ἐγένου,
μὴ κατακαυχῶ τῶν κλάδων· εἰ δὲ κατακαυχᾶσαι οὐ σὺ τὴν ῥίζαν βαστάζεις ἀλλὰ ἡ ῥίζα σέ.
You, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became a sharer in the rich root of the olive tree;
do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember: it is not you that bear the root, but the root that bears you.
Rom. 11:17–18 (NA28)
Every Gentile Christian is an adoptee into a people not his by birth. The graft is real; the wild shoot genuinely becomes a branch of the cultivated tree, nourished by its sap. But it is grafted in: into a tree that was there before it, with a root it did not grow and a shape it did not design. It is grafted “contrary to nature,” παρὰ φύσιν (11:24), which is to say by an act of grace and husbandry, not by spontaneous growth. And the condition of the graft is humility toward the root.[34]
Here is the Christian model of belonging, and it answers both of the errors that dominate our public argument:
Against the liberal who says that belonging is a matter of signing a form, it says: no — a graft must take, it must draw on a root, and it takes time and care.
Against the racialist who says that belonging is a matter of blood, it says: no — the wild olive can become a true branch, and some of the noblest branches in the tree were once wild. Pius XI, in the encyclical he had smuggled into Germany and read from its pulpits, condemned those who exalt race or people to the supreme norm of all values, deifying them with an idolatrous worship.[35]
The racialist and the passport-liberal make, in the end, the same mistake. Both locate identity in something conferred without formation — the one in blood, the other in paper. The Christian locates it in what forms the soul: what it has received, what it loves, and the people within whose life it has learned to love.
VIII
Against a Universalism That Unmakes
The last objection comes from within the Church, and it is the one most often heard from the pulpit. In Christ, it is said, there is neither Jew nor Greek; Christians are citizens of heaven and sojourners everywhere; to speak of particular identities is to speak against the Gospel’s universality.
οὐκ ἔνι Ἰουδαῖος οὐδὲ Ἕλλην, οὐκ ἔνι δοῦλος οὐδὲ ἐλεύθερος, οὐκ ἔνι ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ·
πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female;
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Gal. 3:28 (NA28)
The verse is regularly cited to dissolve nations. It proves too much. The same verse, read the same way, would dissolve male and female, which no one who cites it for the first purpose consistently accepts. And Paul, after writing it, went on calling himself a Hebrew of Hebrews; had Timothy circumcised “because of the Jews who were in those places” (Acts 16:3); and claimed his Roman citizenship under the lash (Acts 22:25). The unity of Galatians 3:28 is a unity in Christ — an equality of access to the one inheritance of Abraham’s blessing — not the erasure of what grace finds in us. Grace, as St. Thomas puts it in a phrase the whole tradition has made its own, does not destroy nature but perfects it:
Cum enim gratia non tollat naturam, sed perficiat …
For since grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it …
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2
The Scriptures show that perfecting at every decisive moment.[36] St. Paul at the Areopagus holds the unity of mankind and the particularity of nations in a single breath:
ἐποίησέν τε ἐξ ἑνὸς πᾶν ἔθνος ἀνθρώπων κατοικεῖν ἐπὶ παντὸς προσώπου τῆς γῆς,
ὁρίσας προστεταγμένους καιροὺς καὶ τὰς ὁροθεσίας τῆς κατοικίας αὐτῶν.
He made from one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth,
having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation.
Acts 17:26 (NA28)
From one, every nation; and to the nations, their seasons and their bounds. At Pentecost, the reversal of Babel is not the abolition of languages but their sanctification: the Spirit does not make the crowd speak one tongue; each man hears the apostles “in his own dialect,” τῇ ἰδίᾳ διαλέκτῳ (Acts 2:6). And at the end, when the seer of Patmos is shown the multitude before the throne, the distinctions are still there:
ὄχλος πολύς, ὃν ἀριθμῆσαι αὐτὸν οὐδεὶς ἐδύνατο,
ἐκ παντὸς ἔθνους καὶ φυλῶν καὶ λαῶν καὶ γλωσσῶν.
A great multitude, which no one could number,
from every nation and tribe and people and tongue.
Rev. 7:9 (NA28)
καὶ περιπατήσουσιν τὰ ἔθνη διὰ τοῦ φωτὸς αὐτῆς, καὶ οἱ βασιλεῖς τῆς γῆς φέρουσιν τὴν δόξαν αὐτῶν εἰς αὐτήν …
καὶ οἴσουσιν τὴν δόξαν καὶ τὴν τιμὴν τῶν ἐθνῶν εἰς αὐτήν.
And the nations shall walk by its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it …
and they shall bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations.
Rev. 21:24, 26 (NA28)
The glory and honour of the nations — not of humanity in the abstract — is carried into the heavenly city. Particularity is not a stage the redeemed outgrow. It is part of what is redeemed. The universalism that dissolves peoples is not the universalism of the Apocalypse; it is closer to the universalism of Babel, which wished to make one name and one tongue for itself.
The tradition is of one mind on this. St. Thomas places the love of country under the virtue of pietas, the same virtue by which we honour our parents, because both are, after God, principles of our being:
Secundario vero nostri esse et gubernationis principium sunt parentes et patria, a quibus et in qua et nati et nutriti sumus.
Et ideo post Deum, maxime est homo debitor parentibus et patriae.
Secondarily, the principles of our being and governance are our parents and our country, of whom and in which we were born and nourished.
And therefore, after God, man is most of all a debtor to his parents and his country.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 101, a. 1
Note the pairing, nati et nutriti: born and nourished. The patria to which we owe piety is not merely the place where we were delivered, but the place where we were fed, taught and formed — which is this essay’s thesis in two words.[37] Leo XIII taught that we are bound to love the country from which we have received the means of this mortal life, though we owe a still more urgent love to the Church from which we receive the life of the soul.[38] The Second Vatican Council affirmed that man comes to a true and full humanity only through culture, and asked citizens to cultivate a generous and loyal patriotism without narrowness of mind.[39] The Catechism places the love and service of one’s country within the order of charity, as a duty of gratitude; and — decisively for our question — it tells the immigrant that he is bound to respect with gratitude “the material and spiritual heritage” of the country that receives him.[40] A country that has a spiritual heritage to be respected has an identity that is more than a legal status. The Catechism presupposes exactly what this essay argues.
Pope St. John Paul II, who had lived through the attempt of two totalitarian systems to unmake his nation, told UNESCO in 1980 that he was the son of a nation which its neighbours had several times condemned to death, but which had survived and remained itself, keeping its identity “not by relying on the resources of physical force, but solely by relying on its culture.”[41] Poland had no State for over a century. It remained a people, because a people is not a State.
Even Pope Francis, whose writings are most often enlisted on the other side of this argument, says plainly that there can be no openness between peoples except on the basis of love for one’s own land, one’s own people and one’s own cultural roots, and warns against a false openness to the universal born of the shallowness of those who do not understand the genius of their own homeland.[42] And the Letter to Diognetus, so often quoted to make Christians sit lightly to their nations, presupposes, as I noted in the previous essay, that they live in fatherlands of their own — πατρίδας οἰκοῦσιν ἰδίας (“they dwell in their own fatherlands”) — sharing in everything as citizens.[43] Our citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). That is why we can love our earthly patria without idolising it — not why we may treat it as a matter of indifference.
IX
Who We Are
Gather the argument together. A passport records a legal relation between a person and a State. It is real, it is important, and it matters very much who gets one and on what terms; the previous essay was devoted to that question, and I do not retract a word of it. But it is not identity. Who we are is given by what has formed us: the faith in which we were baptised, the tongue in which we first prayed, the manners and reverences laid down in us before we could reason, the memory of a people whose dead we honour and whose future we expect to share. That formation is prior to choice, particular, bodily and moral as well as intellectual, and slow. It is handed on, normally, through birth and place — but birth and place are its channels, not its substance, and where the channel carries nothing, a birth certificate certifies nothing.
The theories which deny this fail on their own terms. The modernist concedes, when pressed, that “imagined” is not “false,” that inventions need material, and that the nation inherits its depth from religion. The individualist forgets that everything he values was received. The sociologist of migration, observing the long arc of the generations, rediscovers what Deuteronomy, Aristotle and Aquinas already knew: that a people is not made from any chance multitude, nor in any chance time. And the Christian universalist, when he reads his Scriptures to the end, finds the nations still there before the throne, bringing in their glory.
Nor is this a doctrine of exclusion. Ruth the Moabitess became the mother of kings. The wild olive becomes a branch. Belonging can be entered — by love, by oath, by fidelity unto death, and by the patient work of generations — and when it is, the grafted branch is as truly part of the tree as any other. What it cannot be is issued. And it cannot be entered at all if the tree has stopped producing sap.
Which brings the argument home. If identity is formed rather than conferred, then the defence of who we are is not chiefly a matter for the Home Office, however much the Home Office may matter. It is a matter for the altar, the school and the hearth. The English were a people of the Church before they were a realm, made a gens at the font in the age of Gregory and Augustine of Canterbury and Bede. A people that ceases to hand on what it loves — that stops baptising its children, stops teaching them the faith and the history and the hymns, stops burying its dead in hope — will discover that no statute, however strict or however generous, can make anyone one of its own: neither the newcomer’s grandchild nor its own. Augustine told us how to judge any people: look at what it loves. The question this essay leaves with its readers is therefore not, in the end, about migrants at all. It is whether we still love, and still hand on, the things that made us who we are.
It is not you that bear the root, says the Apostle. The root bears you. The task of this generation is to make sure that there is still a root to bear anyone at all. 🟥
[1]Acts 21:37–40; the tribune is named at 23:26. Greek text from Novum Testamentum Graece, ed. Barbara and Kurt Aland et al., 28th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), ad loc. English renderings throughout are my own unless otherwise noted.
[2]Acts 21:39: Ταρσεὺς τῆς Κιλικίας, οὐκ ἀσήμου πόλεως πολίτης (“a man of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no undistinguished city”).
[3]C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994–98), ad loc., on the familiar ancient triad of birth, upbringing and education (γεγεννημένος, ἀνατεθραμμένος, πεπαιδευμένος), in which the second and third terms carry the weight.
[4]A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), on the Roman citizenship of St. Paul and the distinction between local and Roman franchise in the cities of the East; Barrett, Acts, ad 22:28.
[5]Aristotle, Politica III.1, 1275a7–8, ed. W. D. Ross, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).
[6]Cicero, De re publica I.25.39, ed. K. Ziegler, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1969).
[7]Augustine, De civitate Dei XIX.21, 24, in CCSL 48, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955).
[8]Augustine, Confessiones XIII.9.10, in CCSL 27, ed. L. Verheijen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981).
[9]Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), ch. 3.
[10]Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 32, nos. 3–4 (1936): 271–93; ET “Techniques of the Body,” trans. Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88.
[11]Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 56.
[12]Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 49.
[13]Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 27, 35–36.
[14]Simone Weil, L’Enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), opening of pt. 2, “Le déracinement”; ET The Need for Roots, trans. A. F. Wills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), pt. 2, “Uprootedness,” opening paragraphs.
[15]Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), 168; developed in Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
[16]Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
[17]Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
[18]Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
[19]Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. chs. 1–2.
[20]Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum II.1, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). The pithier “non Angli sed angeli” is a later compression of Bede’s narrative.
[21]Ernest Gellner, “Do Nations Have Navels?,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (1996): 366–70; Anthony D. Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (1996): 371–88. See further Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
[22]Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 2, “Cultural Roots.” Smith pressed the point further, arguing that national identities draw on sacred sources — chosenness, covenant, sacred territory, the cult of the fallen: Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[23]Fredrik Barth, introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 9–38.
[24]Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019).
[25]Michael J. Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 81–96; developed in Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[26]Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 216, 220–21.
[27]Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). On “oikophilia,” the love of home as the root of civic loyalty, see Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000); and Scruton, The Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2004).
[28]Aristotle, Politica V.3, 1303a25–b3, ed. Ross.
[29]Deut. 23:7–8 (= 23:8–9 in the Hebrew numbering), Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. R. Weber and R. Gryson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007); Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 105, a. 3, in Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 7 (Rome, 1892).
[30]Marcus Lee Hansen, The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society, 1938).
[31]Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–74. Putnam himself emphasises the long-run possibility of a wider “we,” which is my point: the long run is long.
[32]Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74–96.
[33]Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, ed. K. Elliger and W. Rudolph, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1997), ad loc. The tension between Deut. 23:3 and Ruth was felt in antiquity; the Mishnah resolves it by confining the exclusion to males: “an Ammonite and a Moabite are forbidden, but their women are permitted at once” (m. Yevamot 8:3; Herbert Danby, trans., The Mishnah [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933]). I note the tension rather than claim the narrative simply overrides the law.
[34]C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975–79), ad loc.
[35]Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge (14 March 1937), § 8, AAS 29 (1937): 145–67.
[36]Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2, in Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 4 (Rome, 1888).
[37]Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 101, a. 1, in Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 9 (Rome, 1897).
[38]Leo XIII, Sapientiae christianae (10 January 1890), ASS 22 (1889–90): 385–404.
[39]Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes (7 December 1965), §§ 53, 75, AAS 58 (1966): 1025–1120.
[40]Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §§ 2199, 2239, 2241.
[41]John Paul II, Address to UNESCO, Paris, 2 June 1980, §§ 6, 14, AAS 72 (1980): 735–52. See further John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).
[42]Francis, Fratelli tutti (3 October 2020), §§ 143, 145 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2020).
[43]Ad Diognetum 5.5, in Sources Chrétiennes 33bis, ed. H.-I. Marrou (Paris: Cerf, 1965).
