It may seem absurd to put County Clerk Kim Davis in the same sentence with the political philosopher Nico Machiavelli, but stay with me.
Davis, as the world knows, went to jail rather than issue marriage licenses to gay couples in Rowan County, Kentucky. She based her refusal on "God's authority," which she found in the teachings of the Apostolic Christian Church she attends.
Machiavelli, who died in 1527, was a renaissance Italian with a classical education. Born in the city-state of Florence, he lived in an era when the separation of church and state was yet unknown, and the Bible was a primary source of not just theological but political wisdom. Machiavelli could not envision a county clerk at the center of an American gay rights controversy. Nevertheless, he was well aware of conflicts between professing Christians and the state. As philosopher Isaiah Berlin explains in his essay, "The Originality of Machiavelli," such conflict was at the center of the statecraft Machiavelli advocated in his treatise for the education of those who rule, "The Prince."
Berlin, whose writing career spanned most of the 20th century, concluded Machiavelli has been profoundly disturbing to Western civilization since "The Prince" appeared. And Machiavelli has been disturbing not just because he advocated realpolitik, which he believed should be brutal and unscrupulous if necessary, Berlin said.
Many people have advocated a tough-minded approach to government but for Berlin "something else" is needed to account for the "continuing horror" philosophers, historians and political theorists feel in response to Machiavelli's contention a successful prince will use the lash and the lie. "The fact that the wicked are seen to flourish or that immoral courses appear to pay has never been very remote from the consciousness of mankind," Berlin noted, citing The Bible, Herodotus, Aristotle and Plato for starters. Machiavelli's realpolitik was not original -- except in one sense.
Machiavelli, Berlin says, challenged the belief shared throughout Europe that proper statecraft and Christianity were compatible. For Machiavelli, a prince inevitably had to employ means and methods no Christian would use. If you believe the meek shall inherit the earth, Machiavelli concluded, you have no business directing a state. A meek ruler will become a failed ruler.
Machiavelli presents a choice. You can be a prince or a Christian but you are fooling yourself if you think you can be both. A prince -- to protect his people -- must do things no Christian would do. Machiavelli's conclusion, disturbing as it may be, seems obvious. How can the president of the United States go to a prayer breakfast in the morning and authorize drone attacks that he knows inevitably will kill innocents -- "collateral damage" -- in the afternoon? The obvious has been rejected for five hundred years.
For Machiavelli, the values necessary to statecraft and Christian values cannot be reconciled. "Machiavelli's cardinal achievement," Berlin says, "is... his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma.... It stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality or accident or error...."
If the Christian wants to save his own soul through piety or good works he or she should do so -- and leave the government in the hands of those dedicated to preserving the state, not ascending to the right hand of God.
Kim Davis is in no way representative of the prince Machiavelli envisioned. But she was faced with the fundamental dilemma he saw. How does someone reconcile Christian beliefs with responsibilities as a government official? Machiavelli would call this an impossible task -- squaring the circle -- and would argue that while there will be some who admire a woman willing to go to jail for her Christian beliefs, acting on those beliefs threatened the state with chaos.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.