For Karen, As Two Years Arrive

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As two years arrive before your anniversary Mostly I think of you, my darling, With love and gratitude Yet sometimes I am overwhelmed with sorrow. I am so sorry, darling. I am so sorry. I regret every word that caused you pain. I know I did. Three times those last few years you dissolved In desperate tears.

I regret the full weight of my personality That sometimes fell on you My moods, my melancholy, silence, and withdrawal, Sometimes preoccupation, dark concern. You knew sometimes what I was feeling But sometimes not And you always blamed yourself For everything. All things wrong under the fierce and burning sun (As in your prints “Ash Wednesday”) You took upon yourself. Yet it was I so often wrong.

While you – You so successfully kept from me your sufferings Your “bleak clouds,” your dark discouragements, Your self-blame. You never wanted me to feel the slightest weight, You tried so hard never to complain Never to burden any other with your inner pain. You almost never did. And then you blamed yourself for that.

Regrets are useless, dear, I know, You can no longer brush away my own With warm and living fingers I cannot kiss away your salty tears. And yet I remember all the shy smiles you gave to me The awe you sometimes showed in coming to me The way you held me close.

I used to love so much the ducking of your chin When you spoke to others fondly Of me You tried to hide that sly smile of yours. Sometimes then your head tilted back upon my shoulder.

Two years! It cannot be that long, it can’t!

Will you wait for me, my love? Will you wait?

How long it is, How far the road Stretches out ahead.

—Michael (April 13, 2011) Published in First Thoughts July 27, 2011

Without Secure Moral Identities No Democratic Republics Will Survive

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Remarks prepared for Hudson Insitute/Bradley Foundation conference on "Democracy, Identity and the Nation State" See full video of the conference here. June 2, 2011

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Democratic republics with creative economies have not proved easy to defeat in war. But more than any other regime they are vulnerable to internal self-destruction. The entire foundation of a republic is moral or not at all.

Republics of the American type depend upon citizens who maintain a firm understanding of certain foundational ideas – “a frequent recurrence to first principles,” as various of our framers put it.

They simultaneously depend upon citizens who maintain a certain rigorous moral character, citizens well aware of things the law permits them to do but which on account of their own moral commitments they will not do: they will not lie, nor betray their friends, nor abandon their stated moral principles, nor shirk their duties. They will try to live worthy of the freedom endowed in their own souls, and entrusted to their own responsibility – inalienably. One of the foundational principles required for the survival of republics is the clear recognition that there is enough good in human beings to allow republics to work, and also enough evil in human beings to make republics necessary. In one dimension, republics depend on the ability of citizens to trust one another to hold firm to moral principles. In another dimension, republics dare not trust in perfect moral probity, for every man sometimes sins against his own principles, and for this basic reason all public powers must be divided, and all exercises of public power in the republic must be checked and balanced by other powers, as well as by other auxiliary methods. “In God we trust,” yes, but for all human beings there must be checks and balances.

There are at least a dozen other foundational principles that citizens must understand and give flesh to in daily practice, to allow republics to function at all. So far as I know there is no single book listing and explaining each of these indispensable ideas. It would seem highly useful for republics to prepare many such books. Let even one single generation forget, or turn its back on first principles, and a republic turns out its own lights. That is why of all regimes the regime of liberty is most precarious, and requires eternal vigilance. Its transmission from one generation to another is fraught with peril. This transmission dare not be taken lightly, as it has been in this country since the 1960s. You cannot teach two generations to be ashamed of their own national principles, and expect those principles to endure. Principles do not endure in some empyrean, but in fleeting, historical human persons of flesh and blood, with all their frailties and still their capacity for noble action. You cannot teach youngsters to delight in vulgar, uncouth, and violent language, without reaping a whirlwind of domestic mutual contempt and violence. The connection between speech and action, gentleness of soul and gentleness of action, is precious.

Natan Sharansky hits the bull’s-eye when he points out that a collection of personal relativists dissolves instantly into individual atoms, each of whom is enormously outmatched by totalitarian power. This is particularly true of those dictated to by rulers who declare themselves atheists, because they have turned their backs on their own civilization (Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Chairman Mao). Such rulers enforce atheism coercively, and soon produce many specialists highly skilled in breaking down the logic and psychology of atomized individuals whom they hold in isolation.

The difference between a mob and a people is that a mob is composed of a multitude of atomized individuals, whereas a people is composed of persons who have roots and connections with many associations that are intermediary between the state and the individual. A people is composed of persons who have social identity. [See Tocqueville on the French before the Revolution as a mob, without associations.] A person who has a firm identity does not sit before an interrogator as a lonely subject, stripped naked and shivering with fear. A person belongs to a proud people with a sometimes heroic (sometimes not so heroic) past, and sits before his interrogator not alone but in a communion of souls stretching back far into antiquity and far ahead into a potentially better future – when his interrogator will have been swept into the dustbin of ugly history. Sharansky’s pages on this fact of experience are luminous, among the greatest in world literature.

Not only do republics rest on many communions of souls among their people – upon peoples, not upon naked individuals in mobs – but they each also have an identity of their own, different from that of other republics. John Paul II often concentrated on this characteristic of peoplehood, with its concrete historical destiny. Communism tried to isolate all individuals into sealed compartments, unable to trust even members of their own families, even their own beloved children. The overcoming of fear required that such individuals remember their own peoplehood, their own concrete history, their own quiver of arrows of strength and of weakness. In nine days in 1978 that changed history, he awakened the people of Poland to the memory of their own particular past and future destiny, and allowed them to see that there were many more of them than there were Communist apparatchiks. In Cuba, he again stressed the Cuba of history and particular future calling. Wherever he went, he first knelt and kissed that particular soil. He reminded the world that in identity there is strength, there is communion, there is a record of heroic actions to inspire one’s own soul and hold it firm. Such an identity forbids anyone from feeling alone and ungrounded and weak. Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, called this phenomenon the subjectivity of societies and made it a first principle of Catholic social thought.

There he paired it with that other foundational principle: the responsibility of each person to reflect and to choose, to appropriate (to make his own) his own personal future, to take up responsibility for his own destiny. Each person is made in the image of God, not only called to understand and to choose and to act in history, but to become provident for his own future. Wojtyla called this principle the subjectivity of the human person. It is the foundation of republics, the seat of individual rights and dignity and responsibility. The subjectivity of the human person, the subjectivity of societies – they go together.

It might be nice if human ethical life dwelt in an empyrean of abstract universal principles, as in some empty-headed song by John Lennon. In fact, human ethical life is always incarnated in living persons, who are nourished by different historical communions. Human babies are not dropped down chimneys by some Universal Stork who has no particular history. No, each is born from the womb of one concrete woman, one “mother,” with one pair of radiant eyes brimming with love. One woman, nourished in one people, in one primary language, in one set of stories told again and again, to inspire both whole peoples and noble individuals in every generation. It is an essential part of human nature, like it or not, to be finite, rooted, non-universal, formed in one particular primary communion of souls. That is why individuals not knowing their own actual identity seem shallow, weak, unreliable in a crisis – they are all alone, pretending to be universal, but full of hot air, in balloons easily popped by skillful interrogators, who show them how they are trapped in webs of their own easily confused, ungrounded logic.

2. The Identity of Citizens of the United States

Alexis de Tocqueville, like any other visitor from abroad, could not help noting how different America is from Europe along the fault-line of religion. In America, he wrote, religion and liberty go together. There was no ancien regime to overthrow, no need to jettison religion in order to make room for freedom. On the contrary, Benjamin Franklin proposed as the motto of the United States this maxim: “To rebel against tyrants is obedience to God.” Thomas Jefferson knew that to express the full sentiment of the American people he needed to word the section of the Declaration of Independence dealing with rights in this way: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...” The authors of the French Declaration of Human Rights thirteen years later, by contrast, abjured any connection between rights and the Creator; rather, they defined rights in opposition to any belief in a Creator. Well, that is the subjectivity of French society, and the firm connection between religion and liberty is the subjectivity of the United States. To understand either nation fairly is to understand this radical difference, and to grasp this strong identity of Americans as committed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the God our founders so clearly appealed to. For good reasons, as I explain in On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, they wrote and spoke of “the Creator,” not “the Redeemer.”

Of course, no American citizen has to profess faith in this Creator, or to belong to a synagogue or church professing such faith. The public self-understanding of America affirms (look at the documents, particularly Jefferson's Bill for Religious Liberty and Madison's Remonstrance) that to choose whether or not to do that is one of the inalienable rights this particular Creator has endowed in us. One does not have to profess this express sense of identity for oneself, but one does have to understand that this connection between the Creator as described by Judaism and the American conception of liberty is part of the American identity. It is part of the identity even of the unbeliever, not as a personal commitment but at least as a historical reality locked in the identity of being an American. One might think of it as mythical, and as a quaint way of speaking of the simple, plain “reality” of individual autonomy. But it would be a self-mutilating denial if one were to deny that this way of identifying the American community is firmly embedded in countless official, public, founding documents (and in statements expressing a virtually unbroken public self-understanding right into our own time).

An authentic American identity does not command a personal affirmation of a faith one does not hold. All that it asks is intellectual honesty about one’s own public history. One may find a different, perhaps unique, way of explaining this history, or even explaining it away. But there it is. Eppur, si muove.

Moreover, this “self-evident truth” put into a credible Declaration by Jefferson (and many writers of earlier local Declarations around the nation) carries with it a coherent vision of the human being, his or her relation to the Creator, and his or her relation to all other civilizations, peoples, and individuals. “One” Creator means one whole human family, in which every human person without exception is worthy of respect. Before time was, that individual person was known to the Creator, and allowed to be born among the particular people and in the distinctive civilization in which she now lives and moves and has her being. The narrative of the Jewish God offers a coherent vision of individual rights, honorable and plural social subjectivities, a whole universe of free societies mutually appreciative of each other, and yet each committed to arguing its own vision in the public square, and competing to generate humane cultures worthy of the greatness and goodness of the Creator who envisioned them from all eternity.

It is one of the virtues of the Jewish view of human nature and destiny (which is also in crucial respects the Christian view) that it ties together both the subjectivity of each human person and the subjectivity of societies. Moreover, it does not command homogenization, and certainly not coercion. On the contrary, its intellectual leitmotif (if not its constant historical practice) is the primacy of human liberty. “The God who made us, made us free at the same time,” Jefferson wrote. Exactly right. And therein lies both the tragedy and the glory of human life, and the amazingly rich variegation of human history.

To deny the creative power and rock-bottom truth of human identity, and to see it outside the context of the one Creator who made us to be free, are both great errors in human self-understanding. The Creator made the whole human race at one and the same time both different from each other (in our individual persons and in our social identities) and yet participants in the common human destiny of liberty.

Sharansky avers that he trusts enemies self-consciously secure in their own identity more than he trusts those riddled with confusion and a muddled self-understanding. He finds more in common with persons whose views are radically different from his, but who try to live worthy of their own identity, with fidelity and courage, than with those who know not who they are, nor what their foundational commitment is. The latter are infinitely manipulable. The former have a compass, and between him and them there is an analogous story of fidelity and courage worthy of admiration.

Without strong moral identities, no republics will long stand. For if any republic is muddled about its own identity, or caught in paroxysms of self-hatred, its individual citizens will come to pieces, both with one another and deep in their own self-consciousness. Neither the republic nor its citizens have anything morally firm on which to stand. They are begging the strong to come and abuse them.

Development of Doctrine in Islam

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Development of Doctrine in IslamAfter-Dinner Remarks at the Witherspoon Institute Princeton, New Jersey May 6, 2011

After-dinner talk must be lighter, especially after so rich, deep, and complex a conference. Congratulations to our leaders. It has been wonderful.

Still we need a breather, no? ... Well, wise men say that in Japan every talk must begin with an apology, but in the United States every talk must begin with a joke. Tonight I have to begin with an apology, because I do not have a joke. Well, yes, there is actually a good one.

Have you heard the story about Bin Laden’s three surprises on arriving at the Gate of Paradise? Alas, the surprise was not that he was not met by seventy-two sloe-eyed virgins; he had had his suspicions about that for a long time. Rather, his first surprise was that the Gatekeeper of Paradise was St. Peter. His second was that Peter cleared Bin Laden for immediate entrance into Paradise.

The third surprise awaiting him was an impressive but angry man with a powdered white wig, 6’4” tall, with long arms and large hands, who took Bin Laden by the throat and said, “I am the father of this country – and those Twin Towers you ignited in a great orange flame – you can’t do that to my people!” Lanky, auburn-haired Tom Jefferson knelt down behind Bin Laden, then Washington pushed Bin Laden over him.

Heavy little Jimmy Madison sat on Bin Laden’s belly, and pounded him with two hands. Patrick Henry stepped up and beat Bin Laden’s face with the leafy branch of a willow tree. George Mason and John Randolph joined in. James Monroe spat on Bin Laden.

Bin Laden staggered away. “Allah, Allah! This is not what you promised me at all!” Then a voice from the heavens boomed, “I said, seventy-two sloe-eyed Virginians. What did you think I said?”

I have chosen for tonight’s talk one of the most important themes of this new century, Religious Liberty – in particular, the Development of Doctrine in Islam. For this theme, it would be much better to hear from a deep, learned, widely experienced and wise scholar-statesman. But our organizers made one little mistake. For this dinner, they invited someone who is, let alone on Islam, not an expert in anything. You all know that I have written a lot of books and papers on a lot of subjects having to do with culture, politics, and economics. You know I have a wee bit of experience, too, in getting a declaration on religious liberty through the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in 1981, after 37 years of futile attempts.

My one claim to a tiny bit of fame is that over the last 50 years I have made a few discoveries in several fields that much better scholars had missed, from “nonhistorical orthodoxy” at the Second Vatican to a theology of sports, and the creative role to be assigned to capitalism in Catholic social doctrine. You can see from the record that it has been hard for me to concentrate in any one area.

Ever since my first years in college, the vocation that seemed to be handed to me was to be a kind of pioneer, an explorer, in many fields on the boundaries of (Jewish and) Christian faith and reason, on the darkness of the experience of nothingness, and the joy in helping at least a little to build up a new civilization on the ashes left by World War II. And so it is with tonight’s topic: No expert, but with a tiny bit of experience in several fields.

At Catholic University in grad school I had the privilege of taking a course from Msgr. Joseph Fenton, the tough but unpopular antagonist to John Courtney Murray on religious liberty, one of those who alerted Rome of the “dangers” of Murray’s teachings. Msgr. Fenton knew I sided with Murray – I had already published on that. But he enjoyed repartee with me, and rather favored me in class, even giving me a book to review for the journal he edited on pastoral theology. So I was very early at the center of the American Catholic argument on religious liberty.

Reporting from Rome during the Second Vatican Council, I recorded the first passionate stirrings of the discussion of religious liberty at the Council, and followed the backstage private debates at individual episcopal conferences. That is where I first heard the name Karol Wojtyla, the new and youngest ever cardinal of Krakow, and his fresh insistence that the episcopal conferences of Central and Eastern Europe must have a declaration of religious liberty from the Council. Some say his cool intellectual passion did more than anything else to sway Paul VI to throw his weight in favor of bringing that issue to a vote, even though powerful forces (especially but not only) in the Latin world feared greatly that it would lead to relativism and religious indifferentism.

In a word, I saw firsthand how the Catholic Church needed a “development of doctrine” – and quickly – on religious liberty. As an American, I was acutely aware of how late it was in coming. I could not help rejoicing, later, at the powerful similarities between key passages of the Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty and central lines of argument in James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. A line-by-line comparison makes stunning reading.[1]

1. A Not-So-Bold Prediction

Tonight, however, my brief talk is about an analogous development of doctrine. This is the development that is already happening in the dozens of Islamic countries, especially in the 18 key ones of the Middle East. We watch the news and see it happening – every night since January in Egypt, then exploding in Libya, and then back the other way into bloody Syria. And who can forget last autumn’s heroic rebellion in Iran, in the name of liberation from the cruel tyranny of the Mullahs, a rebellion crushed without mercy.

So far in 2011, we have lived through a sudden and startling rebellion against tyranny all along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, once the stronghold of the early Christian church from Antioch to Alexandria to Hippo. Some have objected that these battles today are rebellions against tyranny, but so far not for democracy nor human rights nor religious liberty. That may be true.

Yet Benjamin Franklin did say in 1776, “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.” Rebellion against tyrants is not a sufficient vision, but it is a necessary and even great step on the way – the positive way toward religious liberty and respect for all other human rights. And this small step, combined with other background factors, does allow us to make what some will regard as a bold prediction, although I do not consider it bold at all.

My prediction is this: By the year 2020, rough and painful human experience will lead the Islamic nations of the Mediterranean Basin to resound with positive cries for Democracy, Human Rights, Individual Liberty, and the Dignity of Every Muslim Man, Woman, and Child. By 2020, Islamic peoples will be crying out publicly in favor of regimes that allow men and women to act from reflection and choice, and to live as peoples who are free and adult and responsible, and are eager to show initiative and unprecedented creativity.

Even if you don’t believe me, mark my words, please. There are a great many reasons, not often brought to light, that suggest that this prediction is likely to come true. “Come on!” some of you may say. “There is no tradition for these developments in the Islamic Middle East.” In Islam, it is true, there are only weak traditions about the very possibility of a “development of doctrine.” Still…

Ever since 1991, a large number of shrewd Arab observers have noted that the progress of one partially successful election after another, and the quick and successful removal of Saddam Hussein, the megalomaniac and sadistic tyrant of Iraq, stimulated the publication of far more books and articles published in the Arab world on freedom, human rights, and democracy than during the preceding five hundred years. It is as if millions, watching these events unfold on television, suddenly asked themselves, why can’t we govern ourselves by our own consent? Why can’t we reach our own constitutional accommodation between Islam and the state, each one preventing the other from totally dominating our societies?

Further, I want to predict two broad paths up which this development of doctrine, both in religious and in political thinking, will slowly but inexorably gain power in the Arab states. The first path is the long, slow development of five or more principles rooted deep in Islamic theology and concrete practice for many centuries now.

2. The First Path Propelling Development

Since tonight’s occasion is an after-dinner talk, it would be wrong to develop in detail the many factors operating in the faith and practice of Islam today. These political and historical experiences have unfolded across three great continents from the Far East to the Middle East to Africa, in dozens of different Muslim lands, in many climates, in a rich geographical and topographical variety, within vastly different cultural and political histories. The body of practical experience lived through by Islamic cultures for more than a millennium is vast and diverse. Whoever speaks today of Islamic culture as though it is only one thing is committing an enormous intellectual error.

Although briefly, I have treated of many of these differences in The Universal Hunger for Liberty. [2] Please allow me to paraphrase or quote from two or three passages from that book, through which I must linger on two abiding characteristics of Muslim thought. The first is the unusually high version of transcendence which Muslim theology has long reverenced in Allah; and, second, is the profound assumption buried in the ethic of Islam: the assumption that the fundamental fact in Islamic religious and moral life is personal liberty.

On the first characteristic: Allah is so great, so beyond measure, so beyond compare, that his greatness is a warning to any mere mortal spokesman about his own shortsightedness and inadequacy in the face of Allah. The greatness of Allah relativizes all human pretensions. No matter how wealthy or powerful a human being is, in comparison with Allah, this is as nothing. “Allahu Akbar!” opens the mind to the possibility that only Allah knows all the paths that lead to him, and that women and men would do well to respect the freedom of religious conscience of all persons. For Muslims, Islam is the one true religion, but no single Muslim can claim to know all the mysterious paths along which Allah leads all the other peoples of the earth. Historically, the super-transcendence of the Islamic doctrine of God has not been made as prominent as it might be. But perhaps it has lain fallow these many years so that its true beauty might flower in, as it were, a delayed springtime for Islam worldwide.

In this respect, let me cite just one impressive scholarly observation:

If God had willed, He could surely have made you one people, professing one faith, but He did not do so. He wished to try and test you. So try to compete with one another in good deeds. Unto God you shall return, all together. And He will tell you the truth about what you have been disputing.[3]

Islam speaks constantly of rewards and punishments not only after death but also in this life. Such assertions make no sense at all if Muslim theology does not assume personal choice, on which such rewards and punishments are meted out. The doctrine of personal liberty and responsibility may remain largely implicit, not nearly often enough explicit, in Muslim tradition and catechesis. But without it as a foundation, the central preaching of Islam about reward versus punishment makes no sense whatever. For example, as Ismail al-Faruqi wrote in 1992:

Fulfillment of his vocation is the only condition Islam knows for man’s salvation. Either it is his own doing or it is worthless. Nobody can do the job for him, not even God, without rendering him a puppet. This follows from the nature of moral action, namely, it is not itself moral unless it is freely willed and undertaken to completion by a free agent. Without the initiative and effort of man, all moral worth or value falls to the ground.[4]

Though they are diverse, Muslim cultures worldwide share a dozen or so characteristics rooted in their theological and scriptural tradition – cultural resources that make these settings hospitable to democratic transformations. A number of scholars have identified and written on these.

Bernard Lewis, for example, points to five features of the Muslim culture. First: “Islamic tradition strongly disapproves of arbitrary rule.” Lewis adds that in Islamic tradition the exercise of political power is conceived of “as a contract, creating bonds of mutual obligation between the ruler and the ruled.” Other writers emphasize at this point the great efforts that Muslim rulers are expected to go through to achieve consensus among all branches of society.[5]

The second resource Lewis notes is the need for continuing consent: “The contract can be dissolved if the ruler fails to fulfill or ceases to be capable of fulfilling his obligations.”

The third is the Islamic notion of civil disobedience, namely, that “if the sovereign commands something that is sinful, the duty of obedience lapses.” One Hadith says: “Do not obey a creature against his Creator.” Another adds: “There is no duty to obedience in sin.”

The fourth resource is the principle of accepting diversity. As the Prophet says, “Difference of opinion within my community is a sign of God’s mercy.”

The fifth resource is the traditional stress on the dignity and humility of all citizens. Dignity gives all citizens a place and a right to be taken seriously. Humility applies to the great and the mighty as well as to the ordinary person. The transcendence of the Almighty Creator is an efficient equalizer.

Similarly, in an essay on “Reviving Middle Eastern Liberalism,” Saad Eddin Ibrahim points to a hundred-year period between 1850 and 1952, when there flourished in Egypt a liberal age that was the light of the modern Muslim world. During that time, civil society was defined as “a free space within which people can assemble, work together, express themselves, organize, and pursue shared interests in an open and peaceful manner.”[6]

Finally, one of the most important of the young Muslim scholars in the United States, Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl of the UCLA School of Law, has summarized many of his writings on Muslim developments in religious liberty, democracy, and human rights in a fairly succinct paragraph that deserves quoting in full:

My argument for democracy draws on six basic ideas: 1) Human beings are God’s vicegerents on earth; 2) this vicegerency is the basis of individual responsibility; 3) individual responsibility and vicegerency provide the basis for human rights and equality; 4) human beings in general, and Muslims specifically, have a fundamental obligation to foster justice (and more generally to command right and forbid wrong), and to preserve and promote God’s law; 5) divine law must be distinguished from fallible human interpretations; and 6) the state should not pretend to embody divine sovereignty and majesty.[7]

The materials embodied so briefly here are very rich, and largely unplumbed by thematization and careful theoretical development. A huge amount of work in accomplishing this theoretical exploration and formulation lies before this and the next generation. But let us now return to the second propellant of a rapid development of doctrine.

3. The Second and Overwhelming Propellant: the Via Negativa

The second path is what I call the Via Negativa, which is constituted by intense persecution, violence, and suffering. It is probably true that during the last 60 years, ever since the end of World War II, the human rights of few peoples on earth have been so neglected by the larger world as those of the Muslim Middle East. The Soviets could not credibly defend the rights of the peoples of the Middle East, while abusing so badly the rights of their own people. The Western nations did not wish to create social and political turmoil in a region whose oil and strategic position at the crossroads of three great continents were of such delicate importance to free societies. The peoples of the Arab societies were left to suffer alone from cruel and merciless leaders, close scrutiny of their private persons by the secret police of the regime, the security agents of local jurisdictions, and the religious police. The liberties of whole peoples were tightly restrained. Muslim suffering went without empathy, without notice, and above all without relief from outside.

To be yet more specific, millions of Arabs have died by violence (mostly at each other’s hands) during the last 60 years. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands have rotted in ghastly jails. In some places, nearly all signs of independent civic life have been smothered out.

The pressure of this intense suffering will probably be the most powerful incentive for finding a new politics of liberty and dignity in the Middle East. The Via Negativa will teach irresistible lessons that no development of abstract doctrine can match, just as often before in history, intense suffering has led to rapid development of religious and political doctrine. So it will here. Human nature itself will support it.

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[1] Alongside Dignitatis Humanae, see the texts from Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance against Religions Assessments and Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. See Appendix I.

For some official Declarations issued by the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States, which exemplify how religious the official reasoning of U.S. political authorities at the Founding were, see Appendix II.

[2] See chapter 9, “Can Islam Come to Terms with Democracy?” in The Universal Hunger for Liberty (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

[3] Mumtaz Ahmad, “Islam and Religious Liberty,” quoted in The Universal Hunger for Liberty, 212.

[4] Ismail al-Faruqi, Al Tawhid: Its Implication for Thought and Life (Herndon, Va.: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992), 7.

[5] Cf. David Smock, “Islam & Democracy,” Special Report 93 (Washington: D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2002), 4.

[6] Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Reviving Middle Eastern Liberalism,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 4 (October 2003): 8.

[7] Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islam and the Challenge of Democracy,” Boston Review (April/May 2003). http://bostonreview.net/BR26.6/elfadl.html (accessed April 29, 2011).

The Desire for Liberty Is Universal

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Do Americans believe in natural rights? Do they hold that all men are created equal—in the sight of God, but obviously not in terms of talent, application, industry or zest—and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights? Then what on Earth is the puzzle about the sudden outburst of huge throngs demanding respect for their rights throughout the Middle East? It seems to me that we went through this argument before the second Iraq war, in early 2003.

The stated premise was that throughout the Middle East millions of young males—especially the males—had very little to live for: dismal prospects for employment; almost no hope of getting respect from the national police, the intelligence services and the religious police; and only slim hopes for marriage in a polygamous culture in which the powerful might have three or four wives while the powerless have none.

Life for women under extremist authorities is, of course, even more severe than for men. Yet it is in almost all societies the restless young men who are the tinderboxes of violence. The liberation of women may have been a more noble motive for going to war, but the diversion of the energies of young males from sheer destruction into creative pursuits—into the rule of law, respect for individual rights, and prosperity—was the underlying one.

The rising extremist ideology of the region offered nothing hopeful, neither prosperity nor basic human respect nor greater personal liberty (to the contrary, far less). The revolution promised by the small but potent faction of radical Islamists was rather destructionist. It sought only to destroy the rivals of Islam.

To argue that the Middle East has experienced such oppression for centuries, and its people would for many future centuries passively accept it, was contrary to every basic tenet of the founding philosophy of the United States—the philosophy of natural rights and natural law.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the great Cambridge historian of liberty, Lord Acton, observed that the hunger for liberty was not equally distributed throughout the human race. The rise of institutions of liberty (personal, civic, national and international) was in point of fact "coincident" with the rise of Christianity and Judaism.

Every story in the Bible, Hebrew and Christian, is the story of a choice to be made freely in the often hidden will of each individual. From Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden choosing whether or not to pick and eat of the apple on the one tree reserved to God, to King David choosing in one chapter to be faithful to his Lord, and in another not to be, the suspense in every book of the Bible is: What will the individual choose next? In other words, in the mind of the Creator, the arena that matters is within the human will. Lord Acton used his own metaphor: The pursuit of liberty is the golden thread that ties together all human history.

It may be that countries steeped in Judaism and Christianity were the first to feel the imperatives of liberty beating heavily against their chests. But their human nature and natural rights and relation as creature to Creator was not theirs alone. They belong to all human creatures. There is one Creator of all humans in all past and future time. Christianity may have been, in particular, the first global religion, its imperative being: "Go, teach all nations." Not just one people, but all peoples. But an analogous imperative informs Judaism: There is but one Creator of all things and all peoples.

James Madison, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution and father of our Bill of Rights, defined religion as "the duty we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it," which "can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." This duty is inalienable—no one else can fulfill it, not one's family nor civil society nor state—and grounded in the singular conscience of each individual. In that duty is the basis of individual human rights.

Six years ago, when I first wrote of the "universal hunger for liberty"—deeply implanted in every single human being by the Creator, like a seed awaiting favorable environmental conditions for its flowering—I had in mind especially the slumbering yet restless desire for liberty in the Muslim world. I did not doubt for an instant that one-sixth of the human race would one day be awakened, even with an awful suddenness.

It may be that this is what we are seeing today, if only in a promissory note to be fully cashed in years to come. A rebellion against a cruel dictator is not the same long step as a choice for a polity of law and rights; it is only a step.

Yet it took the Jewish and Christian worlds centuries to begin cashing in their own longings for liberty. And so also it took the consciences of nonbelievers from the slave society of Aristotle and Plato until the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The universal hunger for liberty is not satisfied in any one generation, or in all the generations put together. It is an unlimited desire.

But now let us rejoice that in our time we have lived to see one of liberty's most fertile and widespread explosions. Islam, a religion of rewards and punishments, is—like Christianity and Judaism—a religion of liberty. History will bear this out.

Mr. Novak is the author of "The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable" (Basic Books, paperback, 2006).

Published in the Wall Street Journal March 4, 2011

The Myth of Romantic Love

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A young Catholic today inherits a long, long tradition of reflection on love that is unmatched in any other culture in the world, beginning with the sublime “Song of Songs” of the Jewish Testament, and the many sections of the Christian Testament dedicated to the theme. In more recent times, if I may include that great writer in the English Catholic tradition, The Allegory of Love (1936) by C.S. Lewis. In that dazzling history Lewis traces the invention of the story of romantic love—now the most standard of all loves recognized in the Western world. Romantic love is a Western invention, a near-obsession, supposedly the key to all happiness. For Lewis, the invention of romantic love in the age of the troubadours (the age of the Crusades) was far more momentous for the development of the West, and far more broadly influential than, say, the Protestant Reformation. Lewis compares the Reformation to a ripple on the vast ocean of romantic love. As a result of this invention, we Westerners have come to think that the central fire of human happiness is romantic love, love forever and ever (love “happily ever after”). Imagination ends with the romantic couple walking hand in hand across the fields toward the sunlight. Many people spend their entire lives looking for such love, wanting to feel such love, wondering, when they are first attracted to another, if that’s what they’re now feeling. Above all, most people love being in love, love the feeling of loving, love even the mad passion of being in love.

Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1940) first opened my eyes to the phenomenon of romantic love. In pointing out several features of romantic love he offered a useful vocabulary for analyzing the meaning most often attached to the term “love” in literature, theatre, and cinema today. Central among these is the fact that it consists in falling in love with love, not with a concrete person. In its pure form it scorns mere bodily, erotic, sexual love. It prides itself on being “above” the biological love that is satisfied by pornography or by groping interaction with another human being. This ill-starred higher love entails

a factor having the power to make instinct turn away from its natural goal and to transform desire into limitless aspiration, into something, that is to say, which does not serve, and indeed operates against, biological ends.

Romantic love loves the higher passion, the spiritual ecstasy of love, not the body. A woman in romantic love loves being swept off her feet, longing for more, to the point of death. “I would rather die” than lose the feeling of loving him and being loved by him.

Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person. To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to love to suffer and to court suffering, all the way from Augustine's amabam amare down to modern romanticism.

To feel the ecstasy of passion, romantic love entails a boundless desire, a longing for the infinite, a longing to “slip the surly bonds of Time,” to escape from bodily limitations into the realm of the forever and the infinite. De Rougemont describes it as “complete Desire, luminous Aspiration, the primitive religious soaring carried to its loftiest perch. . . . a desire that never relapses, that nothing can satisfy, that even rejects and flees the temptation to obtain its fulfillment in the world.” It is a revolt against mere flesh, against the limits of the human condition. The body, it finds gross. What it loves is the rarefied spiritual passion that only romantic lovers know. It loves feeling lifted “above the herd,” into a higher sphere. Romantic love is “a transfiguring force, something beyond delight and pain, an ardent beatitude,” purer, more spiritual, more uplifting than physical “hooking up.” It is not a sated appetite, but in fact quite the opposite. It loves the feeling of never being satisfied, of being always caught up in the longing, of dwelling in the sweetness of desire. It feels a kind of murderous hostility toward rude awakenings.

This is why romantic love desperately needs obstacles. If romantic love were to lead too quickly to physical consummation, it would cease being romantic. For then it would require dealing with clothing in disarray, a mess to clean up, bad breath, and hair all disheveled. Then there would be a meal to fix, and—bump!—romance has fallen back to the lumpen earth. No, for the sake of romantic love, it is much better for fulfillment to be delayed, for obstacles to be put up, for a sword to be laid down between the longing couple, or a curtain drawn between them. For their romantic passion to persist, lovers must be kept away from one another. De Rougemont comments on romantic lovers: “Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence.” This is the story of love perennially facing obstacles, never having to get down to the nitty-gritty of daily life.

If and when eros does vanquish all obstacles, it ceases to be romantic love. It now must choose between commitment to a concrete other with all the limitations of that other, or a once-and-for-all break-up. For with consummation, illusion is shattered. Flesh meets flesh. The reality of the human condition sets in. As a result, the most satisfactory ending for the tale of romantic love is not, as one would think, physical consummation or even “growing old together.” It is, actually, death, while longing still pierces the heart. For then the living member of the couple can go on loving infinitely, forever, above the ordinariness of mere earth. Or else, if that empty fate is simply unbearable, the remaining beloved can also meet a tragic death. Now that is really satisfying: when a man and a woman continue in romantic love eternally, by means of the untimely death of both. That is real tragedy, a real arrow of love to the heart, the best of all Western tales.

Do not too many of the young persons you know believe that true happiness is to be found in true romantic love? (They may not know how to distinguish true romantic love, but they seek desperately to try it out, so that at last they can become “happy.” For so many, “happiness” means romantic love.) Do not many long to be “swept off their feet”? Be honest, you almost certainly remember this wistfulness in yourself, long ago. Perhaps, still, even at your present age, you tend to think that romantic love, a true passion as the French used to call it, was once, or still is, the highest, sweetest peak in your life. We all know people who refuse to be bound by an earthly commitment to any one concrete, imperfect human being. Instead, they fall in love with love, over and over again. Until death brings them rest.

Romantic love is to be contrasted with the Christian vision of human love. Unlike romantic love, it is plain from scripture that God expected—nay, commanded—his followers to consummate their relationships: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” Sexuality is a crucial part of human life, both for deeply personal growth and, second, for the continuance and prospering of the human community as a whole. The Christian (and emphatically the Catholic) view of the human being is that sex is a natural expression, not only of the body, but of the soul. In fact, the Christian faith does not hold to the view that the body is separate from the soul. On the contrary, in the Christian view, the human person is one, not two: an embodied spirit, a spirited body—one. The notion that there is an errant body (like a wild steed) to be disciplined by a superior soul (the charioteer) is from Plato, not from Judaism and Christianity.

A very good recent study of love in all its many different varieties has been bequeathed to us by Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love. Von Hildebrand sees all the many varieties of human love—he distinguishes eight or nine different loves, each with its own proper name—as designed to fold into each other, all converging upwards into a rich, symphonic unity. This unity culminates in that greatest of all gifts, the caritas which is proper only and solely to the Persons of the Trinity for one another. The caritas that makes them one. This caritas is also the force which impels the Lord to overflow his identity, diffusing caritas throughout the human race, inspiriting the race, raising its sights and aspirations, transforming the world like yeast in dough, or the heat of white-hot ingots glowing in the night.

Von Hildebrand’s distinctions between agape and caritas are especially brilliant. His vision of the love of a man and woman bounded in matrimony is both very high and beautiful, and quite down to earth. Married love is not that of angels. It is that of sweating bodies, disheveled sheets, unruly hair, bad breath, scraggly beards, dirty diapers, and, outside the door, clamoring little ones hollering for their breakfast. Christian love is this worldly and realistic. Resistant to romantic illusions, feet-on-the-ground. Realism supreme. Reality is always better than illusion. And in regard to marriage, especially so.

But the love of man and wife is also very high and beautiful, precisely insofar as it may be penetrated by supernatural caritas. As Von Hildebrand writes: “It is caritas that empowers those who are animated by it to enter the kingdom of holy goodness, and it is caritas that brings about the dominion of the humble, reverent, and loving center in them over the center of pride and concupiscence.” Not a bad statement of the fulfillment of spousal love.

Michael Novak has recently retired from the George Frederick Jewett chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and is a member of the editorial board of First Things.

Publisned on First Things On the Square February 14, 2011

Postcard From Florida

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First the great news. On January 14, the last block of Carrara marble — from the same vein from which Michelangelo carved David — was lifted into place by huge cranes (cost: $300 per hour, over three weeks of herculean overtime work) onto the façade of the Oratory at Ave Maria University in Florida. miniature_of_sculpture_in_foreground

Only a little more often than once per century are high-relief marble sculptures hoisted onto the façades of large-scale cathedrals and oratories. The last such façade installed in the United States was Frederick Hart’s magnificent Ex Nihilo at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Ave Maria’s new marble — the archangel Gabriel announcing the forming of Jesus in embryo in Mary’s womb — now takes its place with Hart’s as one of the most arresting and beautiful in the New World. Its lines are as clear and simple as the lovely face of the 16-year-old Mary. Its quiet majesty induces awe. It forces onlookers to linger over that moment in history when God became Man, in the flesh of the Blessed Virgin.

Throughout the long centuries of Christian history, the Annunciation has been the most often carved and painted scene from the Bible. Everything else in Christian history follows from it. Here it is that God first takes flesh in man, by an act of humble obedience on Mary’s part. His time in Mary’s womb is proof that Jesus Christ is man, just as his love, miracles, death, and resurrection prove that he is God. Thus it is that whenever the Creed is recited at Mass, all heads are bowed at the line: “By the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

Trumpets! Jubilation! That is the mood I felt on watching the last few large blocks of heavy marble being lifted into place on the gothic archway, as the light of the fading sunset reddened the pure white stone, and bystanders and workers cheered in relief after days and days of suspense. The total weight of the marble exceeds 60 tons. One mistake, one sagging line, and the whole project might have been ruined for a long time.

Thus does Ave Maria continue its strides toward becoming the center of sculpture, sacred music, painting, prints, and other arts in southwest Florida. Coming next: Verdi’s lovely Requiem, recently performed before Pope Benedict in Rome, will soon be performed by the Naples Opera Company at Ave Maria University’s new Golisano Field House (with far more seating than the Oratory).

Now for the high praise. It came from a recent issue of First Things reporting on Catholic higher education in America. This fresh survey ranked young Ave Maria as third among all Catholic schools in academic quality, behind only Notre Dame and Georgetown. More centrally than that, First Things ranked Ave Maria first in Catholic character and culture. On that count, Georgetown ranked among the last, and Notre Dame received a mixed review. First Things quoted one Ave Maria student who said (properly, in my observation) that some students there, upon entering, are not Catholic, or not very seriously so; but by the end of four years, virtually every student has become more religious.

Almost at the same time, in surveying all the colleges and universities of the United States that are found in rural environments, Newsweek placed Ave Maria 16th, in the company of such luminaries as Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, St. Olaf, Colgate, Carleton, and Bucknell.

That was the high praise — the really great news — for a campus only seven years old. And that’s only the beginning of what AMU is working to build. Its faculty and administration view Ave Maria as an Explorer of the Future, striving to outline a new future for American education and indeed for the culture of the West. Exactly in this vein, however, the university has lost an enormous opportunity.

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The great research company and network Jackson Labs has been much wooed by developers around the United States during its search for a location to build a new campus for computer-based research. There was for a time a good chance that Jackson Labs would locate close to Ave Maria, and that the university community would receive this huge intellectual lift, however controversial the coming of Jackson Labs was deemed by some. But as of the last few days, it appears that the company has agreed to an offer from a developer in a different part of southwest Florida, to the north in Sarasota.

AMU’s Department of Theology is fortunate in the presence of the distinguished theologian from Cardinal Schönborn’s Vienna, Michael Waldstein, certainly one of the theologians most highly sought by the major universities. Waldstein recently delivered a stirring public defense of the great good fortune of having a frontline technology company settle just four miles from AMU’s campus.

Waldstein bewailed the too frequent Catholic habit in recent centuries of bemoaning secular scholarship, while hiding one’s head from it, not engaging it, attempting to wish it away. That is the way, he argued, to fall farther and farther behind.

Waldstein welcomed the near-coming of Jackson Labs to the university area as a dream he had long devoutly prayed for — a chance to engage with cutting-edge explorers on the frontiers of new knowledge, learning from them and raising new questions that might not normally come into their view. The results of this engagement, he argued, would be enormously advantageous to him, in bringing him new knowledge immediately and at first hand, not as later reported in distant, and possibly polemical, journals. It would make him and other fortunate theologians much more sharply versed in the leading methods and findings of contemporary research, as well as in its assumptions, some of them perhaps dubious. The presence of Jackson Labs would force theologians like himself to design sharper statements of more appropriate basic assumptions.

For others at Ave Maria who opposed the coming of Jackson Labs, the fear was that while Jackson Labs does not currently conduct human-embryonic-stem-cell research, it has not ruled out the possibility of doing so in the future. The local Ordinary, Bishop Frank Dewane, took this approach, and there is merit in these concerns, however speculative they are at this time. This concern is shared by Waldstein and others at AMU.

No doubt, the leaders of Jackson Labs quickly learned of the strong moral convictions of the university; they needed only to look at its clear mission statement. Furthermore, the faculty, staff, and students at AMU, not to mention the vast majority of those attracted to the town of Ave Maria, are vehemently opposed to human-embryonic-stem-cell research. In fact, one could argue that in the spirit of mutual inquiry and frank discussion, those at Jackson Labs might have been challenged to consider some moral points they had not thought of, just as the ethicists of AMU would likewise have been challenged to sharpen their concrete knowledge of fast-arising developments in the field of bioethics.

But all this, it now appears, is not to be. Jackson Labs seems to be moving elsewhere. Some of the faculty here regard this as a great opportunity lost. These visionaries are longing for opportunities to pioneer a new way of addressing new technologies and new empirical methods of inquiry. They hope not to bury their heads in the sand regarding these questions, and not to avoid them, but to study the issues from a fresh Catholic point of view. Indeed, most of those at AMU hope to make the university an institution of exploration and creativity, not simply an institution of retreat from the world.

For Ave Maria University, there is no doubt about the central moral imperative in this debate: Human-embryonic-stem-cell research is objectively immoral, since it depends on the destruction of a live human individual (with her or his own individual genetic code).

On that moral principle, Ave Maria University stands foursquare with the Pope, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and its local Ordinary.

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But so saying does not alone heal the three-century rupture between secular scientists, some with obviously atheistic and materialistic assumptions about the nature of reality, and serious religious thinkers who are not afraid to face such questions head-on. Ave Maria wants to be a new sort of Catholic institution — one not without precedent in the past, but urgently needed now and in the future.

For now we are grateful for our great new sculpture by Martón Váró, and the high praise from First Things and Newsweek. On the scientific front, let us hope we shall have another opportunity to engage the best scientific explorers in the nation “up close and personal.”

Michael Novak sits on the Ave Maria University board of trustees. His latest book is No One Sees God. His website is www.michaelnovak.net.

Published in National Review Oniine January 31, 2011