The First Enlightenment

Those of us who are of Catholic mind do not believe that the Enlightenment began with Kant (“What is Enlightenment?”), or Locke or Newton, or even with Descartes. We cherish Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. But the first Enlightenment began with Christ Our Lord. It was only with the Christ that EQUALITY meant every human being, barring none. From then on, no one was “barbarian.” Each bore in his own soul the mark of being called to be a dwelling of the Father and the Son — being called beyond all other calls a son of God. Neither mother nor father, neither civil society nor state, can answer to this call for you or me. None has any deeper bond or precedence than the relation of Creator and human creature. It is a bond of Spirit and Truth.

Thus was revealed each human's LIBERTY primordial, and in that liberty, EQUALITY with all. No other but self can say to the the Father “No,” or “Yes.” That choice is for each single one of us inalienable. That choice brings each into the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of all who are equal in the sight of God.

And that is how universal FRATERNITY became a human principle and an object of our striving.

Moreover, a singular feature of the coming of the Christ is that all have access to him — rich pagan kings riding from the East, Roman centurions (those who would put him to death, even they), Jew and Greek, and those of every nation, station, and state of virtue or of sin. From Bethlehem went out the message of the First Globalization — the global call to become one human family. But only by the narrow path of the free choice of each.

This was the First Enlightenment. There has been no deeper nor more all-embracing since.

From the streaming light of the marks of Christ's coming — LIBERTY, FRATERNITY, EQUALITY — the Second Enlightenment (of Newton, Locke, Kant, Voltaire, and all the others) is derivative. Except that the second one would like to have these ideals, this vision, without God. And, if possible, while destroying the Christian Church. “Strangling the last king with the intestines of the last pope.” A dream of bloodshed. Christophobia.

And now we enter a period in the United States in which it is no longer true that our courts and laws consider ours a civilization uplifted by Christianity. Hatred for Christianity is running deeper, swifter. The day is upon us in which priests, bishops, evangelicals of all kinds, lay and clerical and of all Christian communities will be sent to jail.

To vote one's conscience, or even to speak one's conscience, on the matter of homosexual “marriage” more and more brings torrents of abuse.

The day has come, in the minds of some in power, that it is an abuse of human rights to hold abortion wrong. One would have thought that cutting short a life violates the natural right of the independent human being in the womb, just as surely as enslavement used to do. Turning things the other way, today some hold that for a doctor to refuse to take part in the abortion of a living child is to violate a woman's right to kill the living one she carries.

If Christians must suffer even for the truths of reason that they hold, how will that be different from the first century after Christ was born, and many more? The world became Christian once by the hearing of the word. That did not prevent every one of the first apostles from being thrown in jail. The tradition may be coming back.

Published in National Review Online's The Corner December 25, 2009

On Christmas, For Karen

Full of grace!Full of grace. Full of grace... !

Mother, who this day brought us Our Love and our Redeemer Take into your care a mother like yourself, Our much loved, so-loved Karen. Honor her for her self-sacrifice Who gave her life for us And especially for me She gave up too much art So dear to her for mine She did not count on dying first But left so much she longed to do unfinished.

Please embrace her and comfort her And speak to her with love Remind her of her words of you As she watched “The Passion,” Scrubbing harder with her tears The dearest blood of your dear Son. And how she loved your “Magnificat.”

Please, Good Lady, Mother, Speak to her with tender love As for ages you have been known to do, Take her by the hand to those she loves, John Paul the Second, Father Richard, Irving, Bill, Clare, Avery and Eunice, And, God willing that he’s there, Oskar Kokoschka, who called her “My little darling Karen,” and singled out Her talent and her promise for all to hear.

Take her, too, to all the others whom she loved. Sts. Thomas, Teresa, John o’ the Cross, And John of the Apocalypse, T.S. Eliot, Rilke, Dostoevsky, And all of those with whom she long communed. Take her around, dear Mother, honor Her self-sacrifice.

If Heaven is a conversation, dearest Hostess, Take her kindly where she will be happiest – For her, that is, where she can learn the most. Shepherd her, protect her, But do not think she is too shy– Give her your smile and let her go her way.

Published in First Things Online January 13, 2010

The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part III: 'Confirm Thy Soul in Self-Control'

The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project recently sponsored an extraordinary conference on philanthropy and the importance of fundamental ideas. In the keynote address, Michael Novak urged the many philanthropists present to attend urgently to the grievous failure of our cultural institutions to teach the young (for the first time in American history) the basic principles of the American Republic—the ten, twelve, fifteen new propositions without which American Exceptionalism cannot be understood and without whose personal appropriation by each generation in succession this exceptional republic cannot stand. That Dietrich von Hildebrand was held up as a model for this conference seemed appropriate. He was a young man so grounded in “first things” that he was one of the very first—often alone—to stand publicly against the Nazi movement. If ever a demonstration were needed of the importance of rock-bottom ideas in times of ideological confusion, hardly a better model that von Hildebrand can be found. Here, in the third of three installments, Novak reflects on “The Truths Americans Used to Hold”—and why it is crucial now to take emergency steps to teach them to the young. Several of the founders, most notably Benjamin Rush, were fond of displaying the interdependence of liberty and virtue and the interdependence of virtue (at least in most people) and religion (or at least such a religion as Judaism and Christianity) that nourished America’s new conception of liberty. Here, in essence, is the way the maxim went: There can be no liberty without virtue, and no virtue (at least for most people, most of the time) without God. George Washington picked up this familiar theme in his Farewell Address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?

The underlying idea here is that to act as a free woman or man, a person must have several antecedent capacities. He or she must have some governance over the passions of desire, on the one side, and fear, on the other, so as to be able to reflect calmly and make good practical judgments with clear-eyed deliberation. Thus the need for such classical virtues as temperance and courage, practical wisdom and judiciousness. To be free as a human being ought to be is to be able to discern, not only what one desires to do or is impelled by passion to do, but also, and even more clearly, what one ought to do. To be free in this way is to have the honor guard of virtues that are necessary to bring such a choice into clear focus and give one the courage to act on such discernment. In short, in the American ideal—which is modeled, to some degree, on the ancient and medieval ideal—liberty is not the capacity to do what one wishes but the capacity to do what one ought. It is, in short, to be capable of self-government, self-mastery, and self-control.

A very good image of this liberty was fashioned by the small band of French liberals who designed the Statue of Liberty that was put up in New York Harbor in 1886. This image was intended as a rebuke to the image of liberty put forward in the French Revolution of 1789: a prostitute atop the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. This new symbol of liberty is far from that of the prostitute. It is a statue of a woman of stern features, gazing ahead purposefully as if she knows where she is going (and maybe where you are going; the face is that of a second-grade teacher). In her right hand is a torch, held aloft against the darkness of passion and ignorance. In her left arm, clutched to her breast, is the book of the law. And there she stands today: Liberty under the light of reason and under law, just as in the memorable lines from “America the Beautiful”:

America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!

Or, as James Madison asked, many decades earlier, How can a people who do not practice self-government in private life possibly practice it in their public life? The particular kind of liberty required for republican self-government requires a fairly high degree of virtue in at least a critical mass of a nation’s citizens. A democratic republic is moral, or it is not at all. The citizens of a vital republic do not have to be saints. In fact, any practical design of government ought to anticipate many moral failures and weaknesses and against them provide such safeguards as divided government, checks and balances, and many other auxiliary precautions. A democracy that relies on “a new type of man,” wholly virtuous and unlike the men of the past, will sink into tyranny.

Thus, it is not so difficult to see how liberty in a republic requires moral self-government. But why does virtue require God? As George Washington pointed out, it may be true that an educated mind “of a peculiar structure” does not need religion (editorialists at the time suggested that he meant Jefferson), but “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Washington even suggested that a person who tries to subvert these necessary props of government ought to be regarded as treasonous. The question becomes, then, Why did virtually all of the founders hold that God is necessary for morality—not strictly necessary, but necessary for most people, most of the time?

First, it is through the stories of the Bible and the history of reflection on them that most Americans learned—and still learn—ethics. Besides, mere philosophers always disagree. Very few citizens, if any, learn ethics from philosophy. Second, religions such as Judaism and Christianity teach people that sin is not simply a matter of not following rules, nor of erroneously calculating utilitarian costs and benefits. To sin is to disappoint the creator and to wound the father to whom one owes everything. He has proffered his friendship freely; he has not imposed it, and he knows that some large number may reject it. As leaders such as William Penn often observed, without liberty there can be no friendship. Our creator did not want the subservience of coercion, but the friendship of free women and free men, freely responding to his invitation.

This sort of background vision provides the strongest motive for moral conduct—the conduct becoming one who is made in the image of God. General Washington often challenged his army: How could they have confidence in a good Providence if they did not live in a manner worthy of the protection of that Providence?

God affects moral behavior further by supplying an additional motive. Why should one paint the bottom of a chair? No one else may ever see it, and perhaps the paint provides no utilitarian benefit. But God sees it. Many people will want to do the job as perfectly as they can just for that reason. Because a republic depends on its citizens’ many acts of fidelity in even the smallest things, having this motive available to large numbers of citizens strengthens the moral coherence and cohesion of the republic.

One example: One night in 1972 a guard at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., alertly detected a bit of tape that had been placed over the latch of a door that ought to have been locked. It would have been easy for the weary guard to shrug, forget about it, and not trouble himself to report it. But he didn’t take this easy route. Instead, he did his duty, with momentous consequences for the United States, its government, and its laws.

Another example of fidelity in small things—and immense bravery—occurred in 1942 at the Battle of Midway, a decisive naval engagement of the Second World War. The clouds parted around some American bombers just as their fuel tanks reached the point at which the aviators knew they had to turn back or else almost certainly run out of fuel on the return to their carriers. There below, aircraft carriers and other vessels of the Japanese fleet sat serenely in the water, their protective airplanes out on bombing missions of their own. To attack meant highly probable death for the Americans. But not to attack would be to let down their nation terribly, to fail to give the last full measure of devotion, and—at least for some—to refuse to lay down their lives for others. Without exception, each of the aviators made his decision, dived down, and bombed the carriers—and with devastating effect. The attack altered the balance of naval power in the Pacific and changed the outcome of the war. The men had made their fateful decisions in a few short moments of extraordinary fidelity.

A problem for all democracies is the passage of time from generation to generation, as personal ardor for the nation inevitably cools and the zest for heroic virtue flees. Moral relativism slowly seeps into private conduct and then into the wider drift of things. The only known force for countering this predictable path of decadence is a perennial conversion of heart among the nation’s citizens—an awakening of conscience and moral striving.

Against the tide of moral relativism, the one God—he who has total insight into all the details of all that he has created—stands like a mighty fortress, a mountain, a rock. A name for that rock is the regulative principle of truth. No one human being anywhere can grasp the exact contours of truth even in little things—and certainly cannot in the totality of things. But issuing forth from the creator there is truth, howsoever unknown today, to be eagerly sought. Each human being can have confidence that matters obscure to him or her may be clearer to others. Thus, there is much to be gained in conversation with others. Much is also to be gained by conceiving of the political city as a continuous public conversation about what is actually happening now and what citizens ought to do.

For reasons such as this, Thomas Aquinas wrote that civilization is constituted by conversation. That is to say, civilized peoples persuade one another, and argue about what is true, in the conviction that there is truth in every little event and detail, even though the whole truth is not yet known by any one human being. This belief is the root of intellectual and scientific inquiry and provides the strong motive for enduring many hardships to encounter as much of the truth as one possibly can.

To summarize, religious convictions and metaphysical principles radiate all the way through the founding of our republic, and they will never cease to be the crucial sources for sustaining it. America’s founders (and others, including Alexis de Tocqueville) advanced many other reasons for honoring religion (at least, religion of certain kinds) as the armor and internal dynamism of a free society. Perhaps these four powerful motives, observed by the Founders, that religion adds to mere philosophy are sufficient. For those who seek still other reasons, I have recorded some of them in On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (2002), and in the book I wrote with my daughter Jana, Washington’s God (2006).

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God.

Published in First Things Online December 18, 2009

The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part II: A Metaphysics of American Ideas

The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project recently sponsored a conference on philanthropy and the importance of fundamental ideas. In the keynote address, Michael Novak urged the many philanthropists present to attend urgently to the failure of our cultural institutions to teach the young (for the first time in American history) the basic principles of the American Republic—the ten, twelve, fifteen new propositions without which American Exceptionalism cannot be understood and without whose personal appropriation by each generation in succession this exceptional republic cannot stand. That Dietrich von Hildebrand was held up as a model for this conference seemed appropriate. He was a young man so grounded in “first things” that he was one of the very first—often alone—to stand publicly against the Nazi movement. If ever a demonstration were needed of the importance of rock-bottom ideas in times of ideological confusion, hardly a better model that von Hildebrand can be found. Here, in the second of three installments, Novak reflects on “The Truths Americans Used to Hold”—and why it is crucial now to take emergency steps to teach them to the young. There’s a joke going around among American ninth graders: Want to scare your parents? Tell them the teacher put up a map of the Western Hemisphere and called on you to point to Mexico, and you couldn’t find it. Among young Americans, ignorance of basic facts about our nation’s geography, history, and principles has become legendary. Many cannot locate New York on a map of the United States or place the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.

Yet it is young Americans’ ignorance of the founding ideas of our republic that is most disturbing. The vast majority of college students have never read The Federalist, the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence. No one has taught them the basic convictions about the real world without which the American republic cannot be understood. No one has taught them—to borrow that ancient, but newly serviceable word—the metaphysics behind the truths Americans used to hold. Our generation is the first in history to leave its children ignorant of their intellectual patrimony. How long can a nation based on unique ideas survive not only its citizens’ ignorance of these ideas, but also their neglect and disparagement?

To speak of the “metaphysics” of American ideas is already to be more concrete and limited than in the traditional uses of the term. Metaphysics proper requires the study of being in all its generality, encompassing necessary beings and contingent beings, timeless beings and historical beings, possible beings and existing beings. But to enter the world of American principles is to enter the world of actual history, contingency, experiment, and advances (and possible setbacks) in political, economic, and moral consciousness.

Thus, a metaphysics of American ideas is a departure from traditional metaphysics, but it is also a needed one. This is because a merely pragmatic or utilitarian account of American historical consciousness tends to overlook its profound, usually unspoken presuppositions. It is precisely these presuppositions that we need to bring out if we wish to understand American exceptionalism, which itself is no merely superficial matter. The historical nature and causes of American exceptionalism run deep in philosophical turns of thought.

To begin with, we must point out that the fundamental philosophical principles of the American founding spring from a particular “biblical metaphysics.” The operating presupposition is, first, that there is a creator who, at a point in time, brought into being everything that is. This creator understands his creation in all its detail, down to the condition of each lily in every field. This creator also is, in the main, beneficent to humans, although not without expecting them to be sorely tried by adversities, defeats, irrational happenings, and temptations to despair. A great symbol of this is the absurdity of the cross and the cruel irrationality of what was done to God’s son: If this is the way the creator allows his own son to be treated, as the way to our healing and fulfillment, how can we expect to be made to bear less? Trial and suffering are the fire though which a loving creator wishes his people to pass.

The grace the creator offers does not come cheap. Similarly, American independence was not won without a great many humiliating defeats, rampaging illnesses, sufferings in the cold of Valley Forge, and woundings, maimings, and poolings of blood on American snow and grass. From such background convictions came the trust of General Washington and his troops, despite the long years of suffering they manfully bore, in an ultimately benign and beneficent Providence.

Our founders shared in other background convictions as well, including the belief that history is not meaningless: It issued forth from its creator in a conscious and loving act during which God endowed every human being with certain natural rights, and it moves events forward like an arrow of time toward a new world of justice, independence, self-government, liberty, brotherhood, and equality.

Our forebears were convinced that this world’s foundations are so structured that a “New World” might take shape—a world where great progress could occur and in which many new things could emerge from honest suffering and toil. Among these new things were a Novus Ordo Seclorum (a new order for the ages), a “new science of politics,” and a “new model of government never seen before on the face of the globe.” Lest this ontological principle of originality and emergent new creations be overlooked, James Madison wrote of it eloquently in Federalist #14:

Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness. Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind. Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate. If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the Union, this was the work most difficult to be executed; this is the work which has been new modelled by the act of your convention, and it is that act on which you are now to deliberate and to decide.

The world-structure required for an era of progress, originality, and invention differs enormously from that of the recurrent cycles of fate and changelessness that the ancient Greeks and Romans felt controlled by just as it differs from the imprisoning dialectic of materialism, which separates “being on the side of history” from reaction, deviance, and pointless resistance. Such a world-structure differs, as well, from the mere pragmatism of “muddling through.” It gives a much stronger role to the initiative, inventiveness, creativity, and responsibility of individuals acting in history to change the world. Americans, in fact, do come to believe that women and men can become different from what they were in the past and, within commonsense limits, be all they can be—if they work hard enough at it. Every person can do new things, and people should not merely accept things as they are; they should take responsibility for changing things for the better wherever and whenever they can.

Thus, the principles of biblical metaphysics that are the fundamental philosophical principles of the American founding presuppose a particular structure of being—a structure of progress; of the ultimate beneficence of the Lord of history; and of human responsibility for initiative, stick-to-it-iveness (such a perfectly American word!), and creativity. This newly conceived structure is characterized by contingency, openness, and the emergence of the new, but it also ushers in a new conception of liberty. It is a biblical conception, as opposed to a Greek and Roman one, and it places new responsibilities on Americans to make creative use of human liberty to help God’s creation flower into its intended growth of justice and truth, liberty and brotherhood.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God.

Published in First Things Online December 17, 2009

The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part I: Where’s the Yeast?

The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project recently sponsored a conference on philanthropy and the importance of fundamental ideas. In the keynote address, Michael Novak urged the many philanthropists present to attend urgently to the failure of our cultural institutions to teach the young (for the first time in American history) the basic principles of the American Republic—the ten, twelve, fifteen new propositions without which American Exceptionalism cannot be understood and without whose personal appropriation by each generation in succession this exceptional republic cannot stand. That Dietrich von Hildebrand was held up as a model for this conference seemed appropriate. He was a young man so grounded in “first things” that he was one of the very first—often alone—to stand publicly against the Nazi movement. If ever a demonstration were needed of the importance of rock-bottom ideas in times of ideological confusion, hardly a better model that von Hildebrand can be found. Here, in the first of three installments, Novak reflects on “The Truths Americans Used to Hold”—and why it is crucial now to take emergency steps to teach them to the young. Yeast in dough. That is the image our American ancestors saw when they thought about planting the germs of beauty and nobility in their new culture. One only has to look at L’Enfant's original plan for the buildings and parks of Washington, D.C., to grasp how much attention our nation’s founders paid to splendor and simplicity, to virtue and nobility and beauty. The founders’ dream was to build a republic that would live long, prosper, and inspire a noble spirit in its citizens. The public buildings of the capital city as built solidly lift up this dream.

A republic is not worth dying for just because it is prosperous—not if its self-satisfied citizens live like pigs. Nor is a republic worthy just because its citizens enjoy political freedom—not if those citizens dissipate their freedom in decadence, promiscuousness, and self-centeredness. Indeed, no republic will last long that ceases to strive for nobility of spirit, virtue, and self-sacrifice. Put another way, tyranny begins within the mind and the soul. If in that mind and soul there is no moral difference between the truth and the lie, and no moral difference between deeds good in themselves and deeds evil in themselves, then what is the argument for preferring liberty to tyranny? Opinion soundings show that a great many Americans no longer can express, or even recall, the ideas, specific virtues, and moral strivings on the embodiment of which this republic depends for its continuance.

The republic of the United States of America is not just a large bit of real estate, a sweep of territory. It is an idea lived out in real lives. It is a vision of beauty and virtue. This republic is capable of inspiring great love, great inner discipline, and the sacrifice of life itself. America makes one feel that no matter how noble we try to be, there were greater men and women who preceded us and laid out the way. Yet because it depends—to an extraordinary degree—on certain classical virtues, ours is also a republic exceedingly fragile and easy to lose. A single generation that chooses to turn away from freedom’s internal disciplines can, by doing so, blow out the lights and exit from the republican form of government. The price of our freedom is generation-by-generation vigilance and the renewal of intellectual commitment by each successive American daughter and son.

The culture of this republic was born around unusual understandings of what is noble and worth striving for. Our present age seems to have lost—or almost to have lost—those understandings. If we do not regain them, our culture will prove to be a cracked cistern and may run dry. The problem is that the cause of intellectual and cultural renewal is far less clear than the causes of the wealth of nations and political renewal. Less clear, but more important. How can one identify the sources of the beautiful, the worthy, and the noble—the inner secrets of the admirable human life?

A culture grows organically, one person at a time. A culture is not a mechanical contrivance; it is a life-form. Individuals need to be captivated by it and pledged to it, and they need to accept its hard demands, one person at a time. If that culture is lucky, it will produce a few exemplars who will inspire thousands of others by their words, deeds, or public creations. A culture needs individuals who show a particular promise—the promise of helping to revivify the key ideas, virtues, and visions of nobility that, in the first place, generated Western culture and, in due time (as Hannah Arendt dared to affirm), generated Western culture’s most noble experiment, the republic of the United States of America.

In an age torn by rival ideologies—an age in which passions run high, commitments are made that can reach as far as life and death, and a maelstrom of ideas about the future, visions, symbols, and even secular liturgies in vast public places compete for attention—for those who keep their heads, two questions are paramount: Amid all these visions, what is real? And what is true?

These are what the ancients called “the question of being.” The ancients spoke of the convertibility of the true, the real—and also the beautiful: Find one of these, and you begin to touch the other two. These questions also frame what the ancients called metaphysics—an interest not much honored today. Still, the questions remain as urgent as ever: What is real? What is true? Which is the beauty worth clinging to? There also are other questions—not quite questions of metaphysics in the older sense, but related to it—about what is real for a human life and the criteria for sorting out the true from the false and reality from ideology.

For young people, Dietrich von Hildebrand put the question quite sharply: If, as in 1933 or 1938, you are in danger of dying before you become old, what is worth giving your life to?

That is a metaphysics for living, not simply for knowing. Perhaps more exactly, it is ethics—but not in the modern, post-Kantian sense. Because it is not exactly the more limited modern brand of ethics, perhaps I will be forgiven for also calling it metaphysics, although in a large, extended sense. A trustworthy ethics for human living is, in fact, a fairly good entranceway to metaphysics and its more profound questions about being and truth.

Under the marching passions of Nazism and Communism, the young professor von Hildebrand was one of the few men who kept a cool head from the very first—and an anchor buried deep in reality. With his life in the balance, he edited an anti-Nazi newspaper in Vienna and taught and wrote until the Anschluss drove him out—out of the Third Reich, but not out of his beloved metaphysics. Looking at these searing experiences, one understands why von Hildebrand always engaged in a metaphysics for living. For him, in his time, it was a matter of moral survival.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God.

Published in First Things Online December 16, 2009

Three Precisions: Personal Liberty

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless. I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.

In this, my final essay, I will examine personal liberty.

What Is Personal Liberty?

“By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature,” Jacques Maritain once wrote. No one has reflected more deeply on the phenomenology of the human person than Karol Wojtyla—John Paul II. The person, in his view, is an originating source of creative action in the world. The human person is able to reflect on his or her own past, find it wanting, repent, and change direction. He or she is able to reflect on possible courses of action in the future, to deliberate among them, and to choose to commit to—and take responsibility for—one among those courses.

Only the human person is free to choose which among his or her many impulses to follow. An animal’s freedom is to do what simple instinct impels. A human’s freedom is to discern a higher, more complex, and more demanding rationality in the field of action. A human person is free to become a gentle master of all his or her instincts, so as to choose appropriately among them. He or she is free, in short, to do what a person ought to do.

In our time, alas, many people have come to think of human liberty as the ability to flow with their instincts, let go of restraint, and do what they feel like doing. Such people like to invoke animal images of their dream of liberty: They are “born free” like a lioness on the African plains or “free as a bird.” They look on animal nature as innocent and unrestrained, separated from social customs, traditions, mores, and moral rules imposed from outside the animals’ own instincts, urgings, and longings. Woody Allen very neatly expressed this sort of impulsiveness when he said, “The heart wants what the heart wants.”

But is this not a paradoxical claim? Some people claim to be compelled to follow instinct. They claim to have lost the liberty to persuade their hearts, lost all will to resist, lost all ability to do anything other than what the heart wants. We all know that pull of the heart. But true liberty demands that we open ourselves to other pulls and other persuasions, while listening to the calming voice of wisdom. Experience teaches us, in this way, that human liberty is not constituted by bondage to impulse, even to prolonged and seemingly irresistible impulse. Such bondage describes the liberty of wild animals, but it does not describe the liberty available only to the fully developed human animal—the free person.

Another way of describing this difference is to say that animal freedom is given to us with our instincts. But human freedom must be wrested from our instincts—cultivated, learned by practice, gained slowly by trial and error. For the most part, human freedom is taught to us by spiritual guides, by favorite teachers, by historical narratives, and by the moral example of our parents or loved ones. Animal freedom, with its contradictory impulses, often generates war within the breast. Human freedom derives slowly as we learn to find, within a large number of instincts, the most fruitful inner order that brings not only peace, but also wisdom.

It is not easy, for instance, to learn how to reflect, to gain the inner calm necessary to deliberate, and to find the courage to choose the more difficult path, the more demanding way. To achieve this inner order and (relative) harmony, we need, as it were, bodyguards of the soul: certain firm habits that protect various capabilities of the self.

Let me elaborate. Liberty consists in an act of self-government by which we restrain our desires by temperance and self-control and curb our fears by courage, steadfastness, and steadiness. We do so in order to reflect soberly, deliberate well, and choose dispassionately and justly based on the merits of the case under consideration. Moreover, we seek to act in such a way that others can count on our commitment and our long-term purpose. Such practices of self-government are found in a recurrent and habitual way only in persons of considerable character.

It is the great fortune of the United States that our first president, George Washington, was understood by all who knew him to be the prototype of this sort of liberty. He was a man of character and a man one could count on. He was decisive and self-starting—a leader who, by his very virtues, was worthy of the admiration and affection of his countrymen. He was a model for the liberty the nation promised to all who wished to earn it.

Liberty of this sort does not come from either the positive or the negative actions of the state. Rather, the Constitution of the American republic deliberately allows this liberty scope and clearly depends on its widespread realization. The liberty of self-government must be acquired one person at a time. This personal task is rendered easier when the surrounding public ethos not only teaches it, encourages it, and proffers many examples of it, but also proffers examples of the self-destruction wrought by its absence. In this sense, personal liberty is much favored or much impeded depending on the social ecology of liberty. In any case, the American conception of liberty is one of “ordered liberty”—a liberty of self-mastery, self-discipline, and self-government.

Personal liberty is not well described as “unencumbered” liberty or “rugged individualism,” as “libertinism” or “hedonism” or “egoism,” or as “letting go” or “going with the flow.” Personal liberty is not the liberty of doing whatever one wishes. It is the liberty to reflect on what one ought to do and the liberty to choose to take responsibility for doing it. Here in America, it is the liberty our forebears taught us. John Paul II, speaking of America, referred to this country’s historic contribution of the social ideal of “ordered liberty.”

This is the liberty to which certain liberals in nineteenth-century France looked when they suggested the design for the Statue of Liberty. They meant this statue to stand in contrast with the image of 1789: the prostitute on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. They decided on a woman as the symbol of liberty (they were, after all, French), but not the loose courtesan of Paris. This Liberty is a sober, serious woman, with one arm raised to hold aloft the torch of light and reason and her other arm cradling a tablet representing the book of the law.

My own favorite expression of this liberty is by Katharine Lee Bates, in the third verse of “America the Beautiful”:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassion’d stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness.

America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.

The United States of America has given many bad lessons to the world, and as a nation and a culture it has many tragic flaws. But one good thing it has brought into the world is the reborn ideal of ordered liberty: the ideal of republican civic virtue and the idea of freedom as the capacity of women and men, whatever may befall them, to do as they ought. American history has brought us many stories of courage and self-control.

Personal liberty, then, is not an intuitive, but a learned concept—a socially learned concept. It is not so much a personal achievement (although it is that, too; one’s mother or father cannot stand in one’s place) as it is a social achievement—a cultural achievement. It requires an entire cultural ecology to support it, strengthen it, encourage it, and teach it. Accordingly, its embodiment appears more frequently in some cultures than in others, and more strongly in some generations than in others. Personal liberty is a fragile achievement, and a single generation can decide to turn out the lights, surrender, and walk away from it.

It is by this fragile and precious liberty that (in the words of Jacques Maritain) “the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature.”

As I said at the start, I have tried, in these three short essays, to find the often lost precision in the terms social justice, the common good, and personal liberty and to do so in ways that transcend left and right. I invite your comments.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God. The three pieces in this series of essays, prepared with the assistance of Elizabeth Shaw and Mitchell Boersma, are derived from Novak’s speech on November 13, 2009 at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference, “The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.”

Published in First Things Online December 3, 2009

Three Precisions: Common Good

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless. I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.

In this, my second essay, I will examine the common good.

What Is the Common Good?

A number of years ago, at the Human Rights Commission in Bern, a misuse of the term common good poked its head through the clouds like an Alp. I had prodded the Soviet delegation to recognize the right of a married couple, one of whom was from one nation and one from another, to share residence in whichever nation they chose. The Soviets staunchly resisted the idea—and did so in the name of the common good. The Soviet Union, they insisted, had invested great sums of money and much effort to educate each Soviet citizen, and the common good demanded that these citizens now make comparable contributions in return. The Soviet partner in such a marriage could not, therefore, leave the Soviet state. Individual desires must bow to the common good of all.

Before this experience, it had never entered my mind that anyone could use the term common good to override the rights of free persons. I could understand the willing surrender of one’s own life or lesser goods for the sake of the common good. But the enforcement of the common good as a weapon against individual rights—or, to put it more exactly, against the rights of the free person—had not occurred to me as a subject for such abuse.

This experience taught me to reexamine other often-encountered uses of the term common good. Not infrequently, the common good was invoked against the evils of individualism and self-interest. Several ideologies of the twentieth century had set out to make war on “the atomic individual” and the selfish “decadence” of “individualism.” Instead, these ideologies raised up the nation and the collective will and abandoned the feeling of solidarity with the downtrodden. I remembered a letter written by a young German to Albert Camus on the vanity of Western individualism and (by contrast) the nobility and power of social purpose under one strong leader.

Not only Leninism and Stalinism but also fascism and Nazism exalted the collective good over the good of the individual and coerced the sacrifice of individual purpose for the sake of the communist, fascist, or Nazi collective future. Even some of my early intellectual heroes, the Personalists, went over to France’s Vichy regime to prevent the creeping spiritual decadence of Anglo-Saxon individualism from advancing onto the continent, and to reassert the primacy of the common good over the individual.

An important point lies embedded here. We often use the words individual and person interchangeably, but there is a distinction to be made. Statist ideologies have set out to diminish the individual in the name of the common good; the Church affirms the dignity of the person. Interestingly, when a state defines its foe as the individual, such statism actually gives the state the sort of opposition that it will more easily defeat and that ultimately will serve the state’s purposes. When the Church speaks of the nobility of the person, it is with the understanding that each person is a unique being endowed by God with a range of gifts—not the least of which is freedom—that enable that person to be an originating, creative source of action.

Statism, in effect, reduces the person to the individual—to a fungible, replaceable piece of the machinery of statist society rather than a unique, free being created by God, responsible for his own destiny, possessing dignity, and commanding respect as such. Persons are the real enemy—the real danger—for statism. Personhood is what the Church affirms, and persons are the strongest opposition to statism.

I also remember my excitement on reading Pius XII’s 1944 Christmas message, with its ringing defense of the human rights of the individual against the crushing weight of collectivism in Europe. Jacques Maritain later marked this message as a turning point in the Catholic defense of the human person in modern history. Henceforth, Catholics were warned to defend not only the common good, but also the individual person. The fruit of this shift was evident in the definition of the common good as set forth in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes: “the common good, that is, the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” (Gaudium et Spes, 26).

Prior to Vatican II, a great deal of intellectual effort went into forging new conceptions, not only of the common good, but also of the person. One example is the powerful debate between Charles de Koninck and Jacques Maritain in which Maritain’s position is marked out in his important title: The Person and the Common Good (1947). Just as the council was to define the common good in terms of the fulfillment of the human person, so also, in due course, did the human person come to be defined in terms of caritas, communio, and—with John Paul II—solidarity. In this new intellectual field, it became rather more common to define person in terms of communio and the common good. At the same time, the common good is not achieved until human persons are free to reach their personal callings, and the person is not complete until he or she turns in service to the common good. According to this “new anthropology,” person and community are defined in terms of each other.

In 1961 it was Karol Wojtyla, the young bishop of Krakow, who, in two long letters to the preparatory commission for Vatican II, suggested that these two themes, the person and the common good, ought to undergird all the work of the council. Later, as pope, he described the common good as “not simply the sum total of particular interests; rather it involves an assessment and integration of those interests on the basis of a balanced hierarchy of values; ultimately, it demands a correct understanding of the dignity and the rights of the person” (Centesimus Annus, 47).

It would be rash to think, however, that our search for intellectual precision in the definitions of person and common good are at an end. Let me call attention to two remaining problems.

First, it seems natural to speak of the common good of, say, Europe and the United States in the year 1900 as being advanced over their common good in the year 1800. It seems, furthermore, that considerable progress was made between the years 1900 and 2000 in achieving the common good and the fulfillment of persons, albeit after immense and unprecedented sufferings. Is an achievement of the common good yet higher than that we have today imaginable?

From such considerations we learn that the common good is a temporally analogous concept—a concept driven by a moving dynamism of intellectual reflection and institutional invention. Achieving the common good seems to involve a moving target that is set to ever-higher and wider-ranging standards.

Jacques Maritain taught us to think of setting proximate goals—goals realistically achievable in a relatively short time (if we work hard, and our work is blessed by Providence)—rather than holding only to currently unattainable ideals and so letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Futher, Friedrich Hayek taught us that many contributions to the common good are not intended by any one person or group but are the result of practical human actions: One person’s actions adjust to another’s, often over a long stretch of time, and they do so without all the parties to the result ever meeting one another. One example Hayek offered struck me with a certain force, as I had often experienced it hiking in the Alps: a well-worn path that marks out a moderate, rational course while well diagnosing the area’s topography. No one person mapped out the path; it achieved a certain order as the result of the practical intelligence of many persons over time.

Another example occurs to me: President Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862 respected the practical intelligence of each homesteader to develop his own land in his own way, given the land’s possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages. Moreover, it was to each homesteader’s benefit to accommodate and synchronize his own efforts—in planting, cultivating, harvesting and marketing—with those of others, to the mutual advantage of all. No one told the homesteaders what to do. No one preplanned the resulting order. The imperatives of practical intelligence led to a certain mutual adjustment and workable order.

The second point that needs to be defined with more precision is the multidimensionality of the concept of the common good. As part of a Ph.D. thesis, S. Iniobong Udoidem, a scholar from Africa, developed a chart based on the work of Yves Simon. In the chart, Udoidem maps out twelve different usages of the term common good. He distinguishes between the particular and the general common good, the material and the formal common good, and the earthly and the spiritual common good. He also distinguishes between the temporal common good and the eternal, universal common good of all humans, which is union with God. This fine piece of work opens our minds to the full richness—and many demands—of the common good.

Naturally, when questions of practical wisdom are directed to pluralistic peoples, there arise not only many competing ways of identifying the temporal, earthly common good, but also many competing ways of discovering how best to achieve it. In these matters, therefore, to assert that “X” is the common good is not to close the question but to submit it to the competition of ideas, which is essential to a free society. This is why the achievement of the temporal common good—That “sum,” in the words of Gaudium et Spes, “of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” —requires full measures of civility, of humility, and of the willingness to admit mistakes and learn from them. It is through such acts of self-government, in fact, that we achieve true personal liberty—the subject, tomorrow, of the third of these essays.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God. The three pieces in this series of essays, prepared with the assistance of Elizabeth Shaw and Mitchell Boersma, are derived from Novak’s speech on November 13, 2009 at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference, “The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.”

Published in First Things Online December 2, 2009

Three Precisions: Social Justice

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless. I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.

I will start, today, with social justice.

What Is Social Justice?

What, exactly, is social justice? I have searched many volumes on the subject (Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin’s The Church and Social Justice, for instance) and have not found a precise definition. A recent obituary in the Delaware Catholic reported that a nun named Sister Maureen gave her entire life as a religious for social justice. She served as a missionary in Africa for forty-six years, cared for the sick, taught the young, and brought assistance to the suffering and the poor. Are we to gather from this that the term social justice is simply a synonym for living out the beauty of the Beatitudes?

I once heard a professor at the Catholic University of Ružomberok, Slovakia, say that he thought of social justice as “an ideal arrangement of society, in which justice and charity are fully served. Until then, one cannot say that social justice has been realized.” Does this mean that social justice is a social ideal by which some people measure reality and toward which they strive, progressively, to move society?

American socialist Irving Howe once wrote that “Socialism is the name of our dream.” He meant a dream of justice and equality and (for him) democracy. Is social justice also the name of a dream, but not exactly the socialist dream?

To which genus does social justice belong? Is it a virtue? Is it a vision of a perfectly just society? Is it an ideal set of government policies? Is it a theory? Is it a practice?

Is social justice a secular, nonreligious concept? Many secular sociologists and political philosophers use the term that way, trying to tie it down as closely as they can to the term equality in the French sense, in which the word égalité also means the mathematical equal sign.

Or is social justice a religious term, evangelical in inspiration? Has social justice become an ideological marker that favors (in the American context) progressives over conservatives, Democrats over Republicans, and social workers over corporate executives?

And which writer was the first to use the term? In what context was he writing, and in connection with what social crisis?

The scholar Friedrich Hayek finds that the first writer to use the term was an Italian priest, Taparelli D’Azeglio, in his book Natural Rights from a Historical Standpoint (1883). It is in this book that Leo XIII (1878–1903) first encountered the term. The context was one of the most enormous social transformations in human history: the end of the agrarian age that had begun before the time of Christ, and the fairly abrupt entry into an age of invention, investment, urban growth, manufacturing, and services. No longer did families have an inherited roof over their heads and daily food from their own land. Now they were uprooted and dwelling in cities, dependent for shelter and food on the availability of jobs and their own initiative. Traditional social networks were cut to shreds, and the associations of a lifetime were torn asunder.

Two radically opposed social ideals were propagandized during this period. One was the socialism of Karl Marx and those of similar mind; the other was the radical individualism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. On the whole, the European continent leaned toward the first ideal and away from the second. Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), made it his aim to lean against both.

Leo understood that these new times demanded a new response. The old social order was fading fast, and a new one of some sort was swiftly arising. What shape it would take was not yet clear, however. The pope noted that because the family has always been the most central and intimate institution for handing down the faith, the new fractures and stresses in the family demanded that the Church enter into the battle for the shape of the future. Leo XIII saw that new institutions and new virtues among individuals would be required for the new times. For specific reasons that he carefully spelled out, he feared the socialist state. He also feared the radical individualism that, he predicted, eventually would drive the undefended individual into the custodianship of the state.

It is highly instructive, on the twentieth anniversary of 1989, to reread Rerum Novarum in the light of the events of that year. Certainly those events were fresh in the mind of John Paul II in 1991, when, in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, he repeated the century-old warnings of a growing socialist state:

According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good. This is what I have called the “subjectivity” of society which, together with the subjectivity of the individual, was cancelled out by “Real Socialism.” (Centesimus Annus, 13)

I know from the experience of my own family over four generations how stressful the great transformation of society has been. Most of the gospel texts are cast in agricultural metaphors—seeds, harvests, grains, sheep, land, fruit trees—and so resonate with the economic order of most of human history until the nineteenth or twentieth century. My family served as serfs on the large estate of the Hungarian Count Czaky, whose own ancestor was a hero in the turning back of the Turks near Budapest in 1456. My relatives were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, as near as I can determine, were not able to own their own land until the 1920s. Men, women, and children on the estate were counted annually, along with cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, for purposes of taxation.

My ancestors were taught to accept their lot. Their moral duties were fairly simple: Pray, pay, and obey. What they did and gained was pretty much determined from above. Beginning in about 1880, however, because farms no longer could sustain the growth in population, almost two million people from eastern Slovakia—one by one, along chains of connection with families and fellow villagers—began to migrate to America and elsewhere. Usually the sons left first and sent back later for wives. This was one of the greatest—and most unusual—mass migrations in history, with people migrating, not as whole tribes, but as individuals.

In America my grandparents were no longer subjects, but citizens. If their social arrangements were not right, they now had a duty (and a human necessity) to organize to change them. They were free, but they also were saddled with personal responsibility for their own future. They needed to learn new virtues, to form new institutions, and to take their own responsibility for the institutions they inherited from America’s founding geniuses.

In this context the term social justice can be defined with rather considerable precision. Social justice names a new virtue in the panoply of historical virtues: a set of new habits and abilities that need to be learned, perfected, and passed on—new virtues with very powerful social consequences.

This new virtue is called “social” for two reasons. First, its aim or purpose is to improve the common good of society at large—outside the family especially, perhaps even on a national or international scale, but certainly in a range of social institutions nearer home. A village or neighborhood may need a new well, or a new school, or even a church. Workers may need to form a union and to unite with other unions. Because the causes of the wealth of nations are invention and intellect, new colleges and universities may need to be founded.

In America, new immigrants formed athletic clubs for the young; social clubs at which adult males could play checkers, cards, or horseshoes; and associations through which women could tend the needs of their neighbors. Because many of the men worked as many as twelve hours a day in the mines or the mills, the women conducted much of the social business of the neighborhoods in political and civic circles. The immigrants formed insurance societies and other associations of mutual help to care for one another in case of injury or of premature death. Alexis de Tocqueville was correct, in his Democracy in America, when he called the voluntary forming of associations by citizens to meet their own social needs “the first law of democracy.”

But this new virtue is called social for a second reason. Not only are its aims or purposes social, but also its constitutive practices. The practice of the virtue of social justice consists in learning new skills of cooperation and association with others to accomplish ends that no single individual could achieve on his own. At one pole this new virtue is a social protection against atomic individualism; at the other pole it protects considerable civic space from the direct custodianship of the state.

This definition is ideologically neutral. Social justice is practiced both by those on the left and those on the right. There is, after all, more than one way to imagine the future good of society; and humans of all persuasions do well to master the new social virtue that assists them in defining and working with others toward their own visions of that good.

The breakdown of the old order called for new habits in building new social organisms—associations—to meet new needs. This explains why this new virtue of social justice arose only in the nineteenth century. It also sheds light on one of the most distinguished sobriquets of Leo XIII: “the pope of associations.” These were associations formed according to the new virtue of social justice to serve the common good—the subject, tomorrow, of my second essay.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God. The three pieces in this series of essays, prepared with the assistance of Elizabeth Shaw and Mitchell Boersma, are derived from Novak’s speech on November 13, 2009 at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference, “The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.”

Published in First Things Online December 1, 2009

The Ties That Bind

On October 11, 2009, at the invitation of former President of the Czech Republic Václav Havel, Michael Novak delivered the following keynote address at Forum 2000, an annual conference held in Prague to map the globalization process and to note its positive results as well as the perils encountered by an increasingly interconnected world. This year’s theme of Forum 2000 is “Democracy and Freedom in a Multipolar World” – in a word, “Democracy After 1989.”

That theme is too rich for a brief introduction. Surely, though, one of the dramatic differences between 1989 and 2009 is the new salience of nearly all world religions in matters of democracy. As Jürgen Habermas wrote after September 11, 2001, the notion that the world is secular, and becoming more so, is no longer tenable. In fact, after September 11, secularism seemed to Habermas like a small island, surrounded by a sea of turbulent religion.

Accordingly, I will make four points this evening on the bond between religion and democracy. First, the great French social thinker Alexis de Tocqueville taught us that religion gives democracy two important tasks: to put in place foundational principles on which human rights are secure against every raging storm; and to teach “the habits of the heart” that allow democracy to work in practice – habits of honesty, self-examination, self-mastery, and habits of free association with others, and a sense of universal fraternity with all other women and men on earth. If men do not learn the habits of self-government in their private lives, how will they practice self-government in their public lives? To live democratically is to live a high moral art.

By itself, secularism tends toward individual, not general moral standards. It begins with “tolerance,” and steadily slides towards relativism. Cultural decadence – first among entertainment elites, and then among the multitudes of the uninformed young – grows like fungus on the face of democracy. The silent artillery of time wears down the habits of the past. For this reason, democracy needs regular awakenings of conscience, often religious awakenings, just to survive as a morally beautiful and worthy enterprise – a moral enterprise. Democracy is moral or not at all.

Religion teaches humble people that they are valuable and noble, beloved by their Creator, equal to every other man. It also teaches us that the personal lives of plumbers and carpenters – and professors and playwrights – and all women and men, are meaningful, morally dramatic, and made in the image of God – as co-creators.

These are the first bonds of Religion and Democracy.

***

The second bond is the anti-totalitarian principle. Humans must not give to Caesar the things that are God’s, nor to God the things that are Caesar’s. Caesar is not God. Every state is limited. Many parts of human life do not belong to the state – not conscience, not inquiry, not the creative arts, and not the sacred and inalienable duty of each individual to his Creator: to say yes or to say no.

In the same way, no religion dares to coerce from above all the decisions of Caesar. No religion can coerce the consciences of individuals to respond yes or no. Before God, all individuals are free to respond in conscience. In this, the state cannot interfere. Man’s inalienable responsibility before God is the foundation of his inalienable rights before the state.

***

Third, there is a worldwide misconception that there is only one kind of secular state – the kind found in the European continent. The kind rooted in the ruthless irreligion of the French Revolution of 1789. The European continental secular state is virtually closed towards public religion. It tries to imprison religion in the recesses of private life – outside of public sight.

Yet there is, in fact, another type of secular state. The other type may be called the Anglo-American type. Here citizens are recognized as both religious beings and political beings. The one cannot be surgically separated from the other

Similarly, the institutions of man’s religious nature, and the institutions of the political nature – the church and the state – must be distinguished as Caesar and God are distinguished. Nonetheless, religion necessarily flows into political consciences, and political consciences generally root themselves in pre-political beliefs about human nature and destiny. The two interpenetrate each other. Communism was overthrown not by secular morality alone, but also by religious conscious from above.

Therefore, the state must not coerce religious consciences from above, and institutional religion must not coerce the work of Caesar from above. Fruitful accommodations must be worked out by trial and error.

***

The western world has yet to hear all the new reflections on liberty, human rights, democracy and the best human relation Caesar and God, from the other great religions of the world: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (to name those with more than 500 million adherents each).

The careening adventures of freedom and religion in their long journey through history are not at an end. Much is yet to be learned.

Published in National Review Online November 30, 2009

Portrait Unveiling at Ave Maria University

On November 8, 2009, Ave Maria University unveiled a portrait of Michael Novak, the first trustee of the University, completed by world-renown artist Igor Babailov. The portrait now hangs in the Ave Maria University Library. You can watch the unveiling ceremony below, and make sure to check out the rest of Babailov's work here.