To the Editors of the Yale Daily News:

I read with interest the recent exchange between Vice President Vance LAW ’13 and Professor Rory Stewart. In their quarrel over who can claim the high ground of Christian belief, each has something to say. Professor Stewart invokes scripture. Jesus is his hero. Jesus counsels universal love. His love knows no bounds — certainly not national ones. The idea that we should favor some because they are close in blood or history runs against the grain of Jesus’s teachings. It was Jesus, after all, who said, “If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters,” Luke 14:25-27. The gospel according to Jesus is the nursery bed of all cosmopolitan morality. 

The Vice President, for his part, draws on the immense authority of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the European Middle Ages, certainly in the rationalist — as opposed to voluntarist — tradition. Aquinas’ theology draws heavily on Aristotle’s pagan wisdom philosophy — here — in the passage to which the Vice-President refers — on Aristotle’s commonsense, pre-Christian belief that our loyalties are arranged — “ordered” — in a hierarchy of responsibilities, with those we owe to our family, friends and fellow-citizens coming before any duties we may have to humanity in general. That may be, as the Professor retorts, a “pagan” belief, but it is today, as in the past, the sound, indeed necessary premise on which every political community depends: every community that has and wishes to keep its borders. 

If America is a Christian country — the proposition is obscure and highly debatable — its religious foundations lie not in the Catholic but the Protestant tradition, which affirmed — the story is very complicated, of course — a biblical ideal of law and morality against what Luther and others regarded as the excrescences of the Catholic Church, especially those deformed by Aristotelian philosophy. If one wishes to approach the current debate over immigration in high intellectual terms, it is wiser, I think, to do so from the vantage point of Aristotle’s common sense, pagan though it be, rather than to try to settle the matter on intra-mural Christian grounds. When it comes to questions such as these, I prefer Aristotle both to scripture and to Aquinas’ valiant if ultimately unsuccessful effort to reconcile the two. 

Anthony T. Kronman, PhD (Philosophy) ’72, YLS ’75

Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School