Ernest Fortin - Scholarship

Scholarship

Father Fortin's work in the realm of political philosophy takes place in two camps.

In one camp, he examines and wrestles with political philosophy as done within the Christian tradition. Here, he contrasts Christianity with both Judaism and Islam, for whom revelation provided a law that would provide the basis for political life.

If Augustine can be said to have any concerns for politics at all, it is not for its own sake but because of the moral problems that it poses for Christians who, as citizens, are willy-nilly caught up in it. These problems have their common root in the nature of Christianity itself, which is essentially a nonpolitical religion. Unlike Judaism and Islam, the two other great monotheistic religions of the West, it does not call for the formation of a separate community or provide a code of laws by which that community might be governed. It takes it for granted that its followers will continue to live as full-fledged citizens of the political society to which they belong and share its way of life as long as they are not forced to indulge in practices that are directly at odds with their basic beliefs, as were, for example, idolatry and emperor worship.

In the second camp he examines political philosophy in itself. In the foreword that he wrote to the first volume of his collected essays, Fortin wrote:

Political philosophy is that part of the philosophical enterprise in which philosophy comes to its own defense and, instead of taking itself for granted, makes a concerted effort to justify itself before the tribunal of the city. By situating itself within the context of human life as a whole, it discloses the full range of human possibilities and thus reveals human beings to themselves as no other science is capable of doing. In it, philosophy, politics, and theology come together to thresh out all of the fundamental problems of human life.

His work in those camps covers the history of the west, but makes significant contributions in three periods. The first period is the encounter of Christian faith with the philosophical tradition of pagan Greece and Rome. Fortin was an accomplished patristics scholar, who wrote extensively on St. Augustine. The second period is the medieval period. Fortin made particular contributions with his study of Dante. He also held the Straussian position that the doctrine of natural human rights was a distinctively modern idea, and did not have backing in classical or medieval thought. This set him against the camp that taught that idea of natural human rights had medieval roots, most associated with the Cornell medievalist Brian Tierney and his students. Finally, the third period in which he made significant contribution was his perceptive reading, commentary and more-or-less blunt criticism of the 20th century social teaching of the Catholic Church. Here, particularly with respect to the statements of American Catholic bishops, he questioned the degree to which their statements were in conformity with the classical Christian heritage.