The Conclusion of a Five Part Series based on a 11/06 ETS paper. (This section contains work also found in a paper on Mozart given to THI two yeas ago.)
West ends up taking young artists too seriously, empowering, hip-hop 
artists instead of educating them in better things. However, a “conservative” retreat from education and listening to the many, the heavy duties of servant-leadership, can amount to the same thing.
A great artist, Mozart, saw what Cornel West does not.
Failure to act ends up empowering the moral nihilism portrayed in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The role of a gentleman in society is central to the opera. Many of the Don’s victims cannot understand how a “nobleman” could be ignoble. Surely they are safe with such a great man! Both the noble ladies and the peasant women cannot understand how the Don could betray the Christian social order. Such a man either cannot really exist, surely the tales about him are rumors, or he must somehow be a great man in order to defy convention. Just as Milton’s Satan can appear to be a hero by the very boldness of his rebellion, so Giovanni is given undeserved admiration for the vastness of his crimes.
And yet, the Don can only function if the society retains its traditional moral code. The women of Europe are particularly vulnerable to the Don, because he stands at the transition point between the Medieval of Dante and the Modern. He exploits the traditional respect for the lord while encouraging talk of “liberty.” He snakes between the cracks of the transition to become an epic libertine. As culture wobbles between Christian and secular values, there is once again room for a man of no convictions beyond his own personal pleasure to gain power to harm others if Christians allow such behavior.
At the very center of the opera is a scene where the Don and the crowd sing of “liberty.” First the Don hails liberty and then the crowd, but they are singing of two very different things. The peasants and even the gentry at a great party become drunk with the promise of political freedom. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth were times of great political optimism. For most people, this liberty meant the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This pursuit centered in the ability for free men to own private property. For the Don such talk was music indeed, for he could exploit this quest for personal happiness to his own ends. Libertarian ideas would degenerate in his hands to mere licentiousness. The crowd imagined Christian men being set free from all unnecessary restraints. Good men could be trusted with more liberty than the polity of the Middle Ages had given them. The Don wished to be set free from Christian restraints to do harm.
In this, the Don has more in common with the French Revolutionary than with the citizen soldier of the American Revolution. In America, the cry for liberty was modified by the slogan, “No king, but King Jesus.” Liberty did not mean equality nor did it mean the freedom to do whatever one pleased. It meant the ability to choose any good, without the prodding of the restraint, that a man might wish. Liberty was understood within the context of Christian church membership and morality.
In Revolutionary France, however, the cry was for secularization and this is a cry that Cornel West takes up allowing religion only the role of cheer leader or emotional conscience for the secular state.
Liberty in Revolutionary France was modified by demands for equality as it is in West, but as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues in his seminal Liberty or Equality, one cannot have both liberty and equality. Men gained the freedom to place prostitutes on the alter of Notre Dame, but lost the ability to hold hereditary wealth. The “brotherhood” of the French Revolution was not the Christian common wealth of the American Puritans, but more like the secular brotherhood amongst thieves. Secularism proved unable to restrain the “great man” and his pursuit of power and pleasure. The American Revolution ended with the moderate man, George Washington, under the rule of law. The French Revolution moved from type of Don to another: first Robespierre and then Napoleon.
It is no accident that the sexually perverse Marquis de Sade became a sort of hero in this era. A vast literature still exists attempting to understand this monstrous man. The fascination with him in modern culture, which is very real, is a measure of how far America has moved from its Puritan roots, at least in its ruling class, to adopt a more French notion of liberty. The libertine is now to be understood and not condemned, since he represents another aspect of “modern” liberty.
Against this terrible madness, Edmund Burke, the great English parliamentarian, raged. He did so effectively, creating in England an alternative vision of liberty. It is no accident that he sided in Parliament with the American Revolutionaries, whom he saw defending Englishmen’s rights while he assaulted the Revolution in France. In his On the Revolution in France, Burke defended a freedom that began in God and the community. He cast derision on the noble man who would betray his class for personal gain. Burke with the American federalists created a Christian tradition that could be open to the expansion of individual liberties to the greatest extent possible.
His passion and reason prevailed in English society. Combined with the great Wesleyan revivals, England was saved a French Revolution and acted as the bulwark against the tyranny of Napoleon. True liberty was saved for one hundred years. Eventually, under the reign of good Queen Victoria and her pious consort Prince Albert even the English upper class felt a touch of this “libertarian conservatism.” However, in America and England, the ideas of the Don were not silenced only forced into abeyance.
Lost to the Don is the community ethic of Dante’s Middle Ages that still lingered in the rural parts of Europe. Instead, he replaced it with the individualism of the Modern Man unconstrained by Christianity. This, in the end, is where Cornel West’s idealism will lead. There will be no justice, but there will be sexual license.
So long as an evangelical Christianity dominated, this vision was unappealing. The English speaking peoples, blessed by immigration with ethnic diversity, were free to pursue liberty under the law. However, the blows on traditional Christianity from Darwin and higher criticism of the Bible began to undo this happy situation. Secularism was connected in the public mind with French notions of liberty, even if not connected by any absolute logic. The decline of Christianity meant the rise in the ethics of the Don. An enforced equality, sold as liberty, allows the Don to exploit more people. It destroys the traditional barriers of class, Church, and family that would bring his career to an end.
Modern society shorn of Christianity cannot stop the Don. To his credit, Cornel West attempts to relate to the hip-hop artist and others who argue for moral nihilism in music. It is obvious what attracts West to the modern Don Giovanni. West and other well meaning men of the left have no real impact on the culture of the modern Don.
The hip-hop artist speaks the language of liberty, but it is really only his liberty that concerns him. Because he acts in the best short term interest of the powerful men, he has appeal. He combines his evil with celebrity. Because he is “interesting” and “amuses,” he is allowed to thrive. Many individuals are hurt and thus deprived of their liberty, but the Don is free, at least momentarily, free as Satan in the Garden of Eden.
Too many conservatives are afraid to factor the reality of hell into our discussions. Don Giovanna fears hell and so discourages all talk of it. Our secular Dons pretend to be sure it does not exist. If there is an afterlife, it is surely governed by a jolly old Santa who will wink at our faults or a bright light that cannot know them. Everyone will get to go to heaven on their own Giovanni like terms. But even Plato was willing to note the importance of eternal punishment for the man captivated by his erotic nature. Having rightly argued that evil is bad for a man regardless of the judgment of God, in Book X of Republic; Plato adds that the tyrant also faces an eternity of torment from God. In the end, Don Giovanni is damned. His soul is carried to hell where no roughish grin will end the torment. The lord who betrays his calling will become miserable in his soul and be damned. This is a fact of human nature, captured by Mozart, as sure as any law of science.
The problem with Cornel West is that his message will send his followers to Hell. He has no place for the atonement, no message of repentance from sin, and no belief in the resurrection. If traditional Christianity is true, then West is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. His attacks on the religious right are the product of his rebellion against divine order. The difficulty for those who counsel a retreat from the temptations of power is that it leaves the Don Giovanni-types to harm the innocent and themselves.
Attacks on Constantine and Constantinianism never mention such great Christian monarchs as Saint King Edmund of England, Saint Queen Margret of Scotland, Saint Louis of France, and Saint Duke Wenceslas of Bohemia. Each was local, not imperial, monarchs who left behind a heritage of justice, faithfulness to traditional Christianity, and engagement with the problems of their day. Some were successful and others were martyred for their efforts, but they were born, as each American citizen is, into a duty they could not escape.
The good Duke’s life is not just stuff fit for a carol, but also a model for Christian civic engagement. He was a friend to the poor (“to the orphan and widow he was very charitable”), a defender of Christian life and property, and a just judge loath to sentence anyone to death. By the standards of the time, he walked humbly before His God. As the Anglican breviary states, “he was called to the hard task of defending Christianity when his subjects were just learning the faith.” He hated warfare and risked his life in single combat in order to avoid blood shed.
Dante would argue that contemporary attacks on Constantine and Constantinianism are part of a defective and sub-Christian view of man. Man is a creature of Middle Earth who will never live in Heaven, but in a restored and heavenly City. Part of human flourishing, the human design plan, is create civilization which allows the arts and sciences to flourish.
Christians should be on guard against the temptations of power and wealth, but should also fear the covetousness and rebellion that can exist in poverty. The problem, as always, for Christians is not the external station to which a man is called, whether Emperor or worker, but the heart. Attacks on Constantinianism are either fruitless ways of name calling against Christians with whom we disagree or an excuse to retreat. Christians in this age must take the harder path of ruling when they are called to rule as best they can . . . knowing utopia is impossible and following the good examples of men such as Good Duke Wenceslas.