The following essay was published by Real Clear Politics in the “1776” series, in February 2020.

 

After winning the independence they had declared in 1776, Americans had to prove that they could sustain self-government in peace. They’d governed themselves already, as colonists, but now the British government no longer protected them from the other European powers, and indeed remained a potential enemy of the new country. It’s easy for us today to wonder why American statesmen from Washington to Lincoln seemed obsessed with building and sustaining “the Union,” or why President Jefferson so readily bent his constitutional scruples to purchase Louisiana from Napoleon to extend it. But to Americans then, looking at maps of North America, seeing their republic surrounded by hostile empires and nations whose rulers viewed republicanism, and often Americans themselves, with fear and contempt, maintaining the Union meant survival—survival not only of their way of life but of their very lives.

How to strengthen that Union, the new American state—not a simple, centralized state as seen in Europe throughout the modern period, but a confederation—without losing the new American regime, one of the few existing democratic republics? The first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation, seemed incapable of holding the Union together. Americans tried again, framing the much-amended, much-abused, but still existing United States Constitution, which took effect in 1789.

To understand American self-government under that Constitution, one can do worse than to begin with its First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These civil rights, which parallel the unalienable, natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, stand at the center of republicanism considered as an activity of self-government. They limit the power of Congress, the branch of the federal government charged with legislating. They prevent Congress from legislating republicanism out of existence. 

First, religion. The Founders understood that religious institutions could exercise immense authority over human souls. If such institutions are fused with such engines of rule as executive power, including police and military forces, legislative power including taxation, and judicial power including imprisonment and capital punishment, rulers will more readily demand unquestioned obedience from subjects. They will have no reason to respect citizens—only subjects. A few decades later, the monarchies of Europe banded together in what they called the Holy Alliance against republican regimes. While they were reacting primarily to the excesses of the French Revolution, they were no friends of the United States or of Great Britain, which by then was widening its electorate, becoming more nearly a republic in the American sense.

“No law” means no law. There shall be no establishment of religion in America—meaning, no church or other institution, membership in which entitles the congregant to fuller political rights and powers than other citizens or empowers an ‘established’ church to compel other sects to conform to its rules and practices. Further, Congress can enact no laws prohibiting religious exercise; citizens can freely organize churches and other religious communities as fully fledged civic associations, with no interference from federal lawmakers.

President Washington underscored Americans’ religious freedom by writing to every major religious denomination in the country during his first term in office, affirming American religious liberty even before the First Amendment solemnized it. Probably the three most controversial religious groups at that time were Quakers, who declined to participate in wars, even wars defending the country; Catholics, often regarded as suspect adherents to a foreign power, and as proto-monarchists as well; and Jews, targets of age-old prejudices.

Washington assured the Hebrew Congregation which met at the Tauro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island that Jews would not be merely tolerated in America, but that the new republic recognized their natural and civil rights to worship God as their consciences dictated. It was evidently the first time any Christian head of state (Washington was an Episcopalian had so recognized Jewish practice. Commending Roman Catholics for “the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of [the] Revolution, and the establishment of [the] Government,” he promised that “all who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.” And to the Annual Meeting of Quakers in 1789, he observed that “the liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshipping Almighty God agreeably to their consciences, is not only the choicest of their blessings but also of their rights.” Quakers were second to no Americans as “exemplary and useful citizens.”

Self-government isn’t doing what you want to do; it is doing what you want to do in conformity with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, discernible by reason and by your conscience as they are enforced by free exercise of religious practices.

Washington’s letters display two crucial features of American religious freedom. First, it is preeminently a protection of the exercise of religion, not a restriction of its exercise. In his Farewell Address, he would call “religion and morality” “indispensable supports” of those “dispositions which lead to political prosperity.” Self-government isn’t doing what you want to do; it is doing what you want to do in conformity with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, discernible by reason and by your conscience as they are reinforced by free exercise of religious practices. At the same time, such freedom isn’t unlimited. Some religious practices might be accommodated but also criticized—Washington politely chided Quakers for refusing to join in military self-defense—or even banned, if they contradict civil laws founded upon natural right, such as religiously inspired rituals involving killing or torture. (You may freely worship the gods of the Aztecs, so long as you refrain from sacrificing virgins to the Sun God.) Congress may make no law prohibiting religious exercise, but that doesn’t prevent Americans from enforcing state laws against (for example) violations of the right to life, typically subject to state and local statutory prohibition. American federalism leaves many such crucial governmental functions to the states, functions that form part of the American enterprise of self-government.

Freedom of speech and of the press must not be prohibited—they cannot even be abridged by Congress. here, we must know what the founding generation meant by such a formula: freedom of political speech and publishing. Slander, libel, and obscenity were universally banned by state and local law, and could potentially be banned by federal law, too. Republican government requires discussion and deliberation by the sovereign people, How else could citizens make their sovereignty effective? This is why the Preamble to the Constitution begins with “We, the People of the United States.”

To rule by popular opinion requires the protection of those who speak and write on political topics. We cannot shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater because that isn’t a political act but a dangerous violation of civil society and of natural right. Equally, rule by popular opinion doesn’t mean protection of all means of expressing those opinions—for example, the aforementioned slander, libel, and obscenity, to say nothing of conspiring to commit commercial fraud or treason. And even these unsavory tactics are harder to punish if committed in political debate against a public official or candidate or office. Speech and writing directed against private citizens in civil society have always been more strictly ruled than political speech and writing, largely as a means of keeping civil society civil. The contemporary claim, popularized in the late 1960s, that ‘everything is political’ is, among other things, an attempt to bring such tactics under constitutional protection, with results much-deplored in public discourse today.

Similarly, the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances cannot be abridged by Congress because it, too, numbers among the means of popular sovereignty. Here again, popular sovereignty means the rule of the people in accordance with reason and conscience. We may assemble peaceably, not riotously; we may attend public meetings, but not disrupt them; we may petition our elected representatives but not interfere with their governmental duties.

All of this means that the freedoms protected by the First Amendment comport with every aspect of the American Founding, an attempt to design governments that secure natural rights for American citizens. In so doing, the Founders required of themselves, and of all citizens, self-government. Even the most prominent of the ‘permissive’ educators of fifty years ago, A. S. Neill, titled his book Liberty, Not License. By self-government, the Founders meant the rule of reason—”rational liberty,” as Publius terms it in Federalist #53. Such liberty begins with the individual, who learns to discipline his passions in childhood and youth within a family and in church and school. It radiates out into civil society—into local, state, and federal government, the latter charged with the responsibility of guarding American self-government from enemies foreign and domestic, by means of the Union whose structure the Constitution articulated.

Indeed, as Publius argues in Federalist #84, “the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, A BILL OF RIGHTS.” By this he means that even without an enumeration of such rights as religion and political freedoms, the Constitution declares and specifies “the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government.” That is, it is one thing to list our rights but quite another effectually to protect them. I can make myself the most elaborate ‘to do’ list of worthy actions, but if I lack the means of acting in accordance with it, I’m just doodling. The Constitution supplies the architectural drawing of the American regime of self-government. Like all structures designed for human life, it encourages those who dwell in it to walk in some ways and not in others. Any political regime guides citizens toward a way of life. The founders of our regime intended the American way of life to be one of freedom rightly understood—as ready compliance with, and defense of, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, laws vindicated by the Declaration of Independence and, nearly a century later, by the revolutionary (that is, regime-changing) Civil War fought on behalf of those principles and the people who adhered to them. It remains for American citizens to live in the structure the Founders designed by respecting its features, a respect that can only be maintained by what one Founder called “a moral and religious people”—which is to say, a people who perpetuate the American effort at self-government in their private, civil, and political lives.

The following essay was first published by Real Clear Politics as a part of their “1776” series, in February 2020.

 

In declaring their independence from Great Britain, Americans famously asserted their unalienable rights. Much less conspicuously, but no less tellingly, they listed ten moral virtues and duties consonant with those rights.

In announcing their political separation from the Empire, they begin by acknowledging a duty to observe “a decent respect of the opinions of mankind” by stating the causes for their decision. “Decent” means fitting, appropriate; the opinions of mankind are fittingly respected because human beings are by nature social, equipped with the capacity for understanding one another, for giving reasons for their conduct. Any important public action entails the duty to explain oneself, to justify the action before the bar of reasoning men and women.

To justify oneself, in turn, requires Americans to state their standard of justice. That standard is unalienable natural rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Justice numbers among the four cardinal classical virtues, defined and elaborated by Plato, Cicero, and other philosophers well known to the Declaration’s signers. Just conduct consists of actions defending natural rights in a civil society; to assert those rights, to separate oneself from those who would violate them, logically entails respecting those rights in all other persons, inasmuch as “all men are created equal,” all equally entitled to enjoy their natural rights undisturbed by tyrants.

Governments that secure such rights are established by the consent of the governed. This means that consent cannot mean mere assent or willingness. It can only mean reasoned assent. Reasoned assent to natural right implies a modest degree of another classical virtue, wisdom. In this case, it is what Aristotle calls ‘theoretical’ wisdom, understanding general or abstract principles. Americans recognize their duty to understand what human nature is—not only the ‘nature’ (really the character, including the habits of mind and heart) of Americans, or the English, or the French, but of human beings as such.

Aristotle identifies a second kind of wisdom: practical or prudential wisdom, the ability to figure out commonsense ways to secure the rights of human nature established in theory. ‘Prudence,’ the Declaration states, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Long-established governments have lasted for some good reasons; they have stood the test of experience, of practice, Much of the Declaration of Independence is given over to showing why the causes for which the signers owe mankind an enumeration are not light and transient. They are profound and long-lasting, and to fail to foresee their likely results would be to fail to exercise the virtue of prudence.

Closely related to prudence is a third classical virtue, moderation. Like all of mankind, Americans have exhibited patience in enduring “sufferable” evils as subjects of the British Empire. Only “a long train of abuses” revealing an intention by the regime of that empire to “reduce them under an absolute Despotism” gives them not only the right but also the duty to “throw off” that regime, sever themselves from that empire, and concomitantly to frame a new order that will secure their natural rights. Both prudence and moderation justify a right to revolution and, simultaneously, the duty to found a regime that will work better in practice.

The fourth classical virtue is courage. Without it, wisdom, justice, and moderation by themselves will leave you high and dry. As a baseball manager once said of a rival, “Nice guys finish last.” Accordingly, Americans announce their intention to defend their rights with “manly firmness.” It should be noted that manliness in their minds had no ‘gender.’ Abigail Adams was no less “manly” in her firmness than her husband, John. He knew that and he said it. Looking back on the American Revolution, he wrote that those were times that tried women’s souls as well as those of men, and that American women had exhibited no less courage than their husbands and sons. Several decades later, gallant Tocqueville went so far as to say that America owed much of its success in self-government to “the superiority of her women” to those seen in European ballrooms and salons, where the sterner virtues had gone out of fashion.

The virtue of civility treats naturally equal human beings as equal citizens in a regime designed to give every citizen representation in government—government by consent. The Signers held up the virtue of civility against barbarism, by which they didn’t mean primitiveness. They mean Machiavellianism, the intention to rule by force and fraud or, in their own words, cruelty and perfidy. By this standard, the English monarch’s policies regarding the American colonies were barbaric, however ‘civilized’ his pomp and circumstance may have made him seem. Aristotle understands human nature to be not only rational but also political or civil. By ‘political’ he means the capacity to rule and be ruled in turn, as good husbands and wives do in a justly ordered household, and as citizens do among themselves. Political or civil rule contrasts with parental rule—rule over children for ‘their own good.’ The civic equivalent of this would be kingship, one-man or one-woman rule for the good of the subjects, often described as the ‘children’ of the monarch. Political or civil rule also contrasts with the rule of masters over slaves, which is established, Aristotle observes, for the good of the aster, not the slave. The virtue of civility treats naturally equal human beings as equal citizens in a regime designed to give every citizen representation in government—government by consent. Civility animates the regime of republicanism, which will replace British tyranny.

Americans also esteem a virtue less classical than Biblical: humility. They have petitioned the British monarch in “humble terms.” The Bible teaches that humility is a virtue because, when God created all men equal in their humanity, He created them equal before God, and under God. In Hebrew, the word for humility, anav, appears frequently in association with the greatest of all Israelite founders, Moses, the great lawgiver. Moses’s humility enables him to bring forth the Ten Commandments not as his own laws, products of his own wisdom, but as God’s laws. In describing their right to independence as established by the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the Signers of the Declaration show a similar humility. They do not strut proudly before mankind as ‘exceptional’ Americans. They announce their intention to claim their rights on the foundation of laws seen in the nature created by God. They are not divine creators but human receivers of God’s gifts.

While petitioning the monarch in humble terms, they also appeal to the “magnanimity” of the “British brethren,” the people of Great Britain. Magnanimity—literally, greatness of soul—crowns and epitomizes the classical virtues. Aristotle describes the magnanimous man as one whose soul is big enough to endure the rigors of political life without resentment, without the petty retaliation exercised by men of micropsychia, smallness of soul. The Americans see that their action will take the British people by surprise. Britain’s mighty empire, a source of understandable national pride, will be diminished. Having given up on showing humility before the king—humility isn’t groveling—Americans ask from his people nothing less than greatness of soul. They can demand no less from themselves, as well, and accordingly hold the British people “enemies in War” but “in Peace friends.” They see that a war of independence will provoke angry passions in their own hearts against that people, even as they now feel such passions against King George and the British parliament. They vow to greet former battlefield enemies with magnanimity, once peace has been restored.    It has never been simply the case that Biblical humility and classical magnanimity comport easily with one another. The signers of the Declaration of Independence pair them. They can do so because they understand humility as a virtue attendant to due deference—in civil society, to a monarch insofar as he adheres to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, in civil society and in nature to God and His laws, to be obeyed by peoples and monarchs, commoners and aristocrats alike.

Finally, to one another the Americans pledge “our sacred Honor.” If Americans owe a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, they owe honor to one another, loyalty in a great and good shared action, namely, the establishment of just self-government in their country. They will not betray one another. They will respect the opinions of others but in this task each will deserve the good opinion of his countrymen.                                

“First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” George Washington served as the exemplary Americans to Americans. First in war, he showed courage on the battlefield, and civic courage, after the war, when he faced down a nascent military coup. First in peace, he showed a decent respect for mankind in his Farewell Address, avoiding military alliances in Europe (then a cauldron of war), and leading his countrymen to a constitution designed to secure justice for all American citizens. He proved to them that he possessed the wisdom to establish government by consent. And he won first place in the hearts of his countrymen with his unflagging civility, his humility in reprehending any suggestion that he made a monarch, a temptation King George never though he could resist. Perhaps above all, in his greatness of soul and sense of honor—’aristocratic’ virtues he humbly placed in the service of the republicanism Americans had fought for, and won, he proved that goodness strengthens a great man’s greatness.                                                                                                                                                                    

In all this, Washington became a living embodiment of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, their foremost practitioner, and the example for Americans of the virtues Americans esteemed. Throughout the soul-trials of regime change in war and regime-building in peace, Washington and his fellow Americans never considered these virtues uniquely American, but rather as the shared patrimony of all human beings, under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. 

Robert R. Reilly: America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020.

 

America is indeed ‘on trial’ today, arraigned by the newest iteration of the American Left, which denounces the American founding, but especially (in their preferred mode of argumentum ad hominem) the Founders themselves as demeaners of women, enslavers of Africans, destroyers of innocent indigenes. It is the less conspicuous, but in a way more insidious arraignment of America by the American Right that Reilly addresses. He rightly ignores the nasty vaporings of neo-Nazis and dolts generally, defending his country instead against thoughtful ‘conservatives,’ very often fellow Catholics, who misread the philosophic and theological sources of the Founders’ thought, damning their efforts as fundamentally ill-founded, corrupt and misguided from the start. Many American Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, now withdraw from public life into private enclaves (or more precisely conclaves), refusing to engage the supposedly irredeemable ‘culture of death’ all around them. In this they are less than Pauline, more like desert monks. Such writers as Catholics Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and Michael Hanby, along with the Baptist Russell Moore, claim that the American Founders took the purpose of government to be the liberation of the autonomous individual, despite the plainly stated argument of the Declaration of Independence, which holds the purpose of government to securing the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as defined by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, neither of which suggest ‘autonomy.’ [1]

With vigorous, manly style, Reilly sets them straight. Although he’s been compared to the traditionalist conservative, Russell Kirk, Reilly argues quite differently. Rather than attempting to minimize the Founders’ appeals to natural right in the name of a quasi-Burkean traditionalism, Reilly affirms the rationalist core of the American founding. That core formed part of a tradition, to be sure, in the sense that divine revelation and philosophic reflection both enabled men to discover it over time. But it isn’t traditional in the sense of being a mere amalgam of long-standing customs, conventions. It can withstand the scrutiny of rational inquiry. America may be on trial, but in his role as her defense attorney Reilly partakes of the old way of arguing cases, reasoning not simply from law and precedent but from principles discovered and elaborated by human reasoning.

“This book is about the lineage of the idea that made the United States possible. It traces the origin of certain truths without which the American Founding would have been inconceivable.” The Signers of the Declaration of Independence write, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” Not everyone can so hold them; for example George III, his soul blinded by libido dominandi, might very well not. “The tension between the primacy of reason, as it was theologically, philosophically, and politically elaborated, versus the primacy of will, as it was expressed in these same areas, is the driving engine of this book,” and the distinction matters politically because “primacy of reason means that what is right flows from objective sources in nature and the transcendent, from what is, as Plato proposed. Primacy of will, on the other hand, means that what is right flows from power, that will is a law unto itself. It is a conflict of might makes right versus right makes might.” Whether in the hands of one, few, or many, this distinction spells the difference between justice and injustice.

But more, since the Declaration is a syllogism, it cannot be conceived by persons who have little or no conception of reason, of thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction. To explain the pre-rational world, Reilly has recourse to the classic account by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City. “In the ancient world,” the world prior to philosophy but without widespread understanding of divine revelation, “men could not conceive of themselves outside” the political order; that is, the ancient cities and empires “provid[ed] man with his only source of meaning,” making no distinction between the laws, conventions, customs of the city and nature. One sees this even today whenever human beings fall into the grip of tribalism. “To enslave or slaughter a member of another tribe fit perfectly within the order of the tribal view” because tribe or city had its own gods, rivals of the gods worshiped by all other tribes and cities. “If a city lost a war, the ancients assumed that its gods had been defeated and subjugated by the greater powers of the victors’ gods”; the losers deserved nothing better than “mass execution or enslavement,” there being no known “moral grounds on which to object to this,” no word for ‘human being’ or ‘mankind.’ In 1793, sometime Vermont senator and Vermont Supreme Court chief justice Nathaniel Chipman reported on how many of the Amerindian tribes would butcher and scalp “old men, women, and children,” not as “secret acts of violence” but as “public transactions, performed, under what is, to them, the law of nations.” Two centuries later, the Hutus killed Tutsis in Rwanda, under the same principle. And less than a decade before the publication of Reilly’s book, a tribal chieftain in Iraq’s Al Anbar province said of an enemy tribe, “There’s no way to let them live. I’m not going to leave any of them alive…. We’re going to destroy them all.”

In the ancient world, the tribal religion was pantheist and indeed animist. “For the ancients, the divine order, far from transcending the world, was part of it.” If everything is a manifestation of God, then there are no substantial differences between men, animals, and things. This mindset encourages what we now call ‘magical thinking,’ whereby “questions were decided by divination, not reason.” Politically, “nothing is secular; there is no room for the notion of a secular state.” Those who assume humanity has put such thinking aside should consider the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ enunciated by some environmentalists, a divinization of Planet Earth that “will lead ineluctably to a redivinization of the state” in the form of a world government. This government will claim legitimacy on the grounds that the world is a giant organism crying out in need for a ruling brain, a brain that might well sacrifice large swathes of the human population ‘for the sake of the whole.’ That this will be called necessary only registers another belief of the pre-philosophic ‘ancients,’ that “everything is subject to fate, and fate [is] inscrutable,” that there is only the eternal cosmos, no “personal, providential God who values the individual person.” The individual person has no more value, in this mindset, than a single cell in a human body, subject to the impersonal functions of digestion and assimilation.

“Greek philosophy overthrew the tribal view of man with the idea that the mind can know things, as distinct from merely having opinions about them, because reality exists objectively, independently of what anyone may think about it It is accessible to the intellect and can therefore be truly known as it is. Through reason, man can ascertain the truth of things.” Politically, this means that the source of ‘the good’ for human beings “exists outside and above the political order and is therefore not determined by it,” that human societies differ in kind from ant and ape societies. It may have been Heraclitus who said that “the universe is an intelligible whole,” understandable by human beings, and intelligible “because it is ruled by and is the product of ‘thought’ or wisdom,” by logos—speech or reason. “Therefore, “all human laws are nourished by this original divine law” which orders all things intelligibly, that is, by the principle of non-contradiction.

Reilly cites Aristotle as the philosopher who best articulated this insight. “Aristotle taught that the essence, or nature, of a thing is what makes it what it is, and why it is not, and cannot be, something else.” Animistic shape-shifting and twenty-first-century ‘self-inventing’ cannot occur because they cannot be real. The purpose of any person or thing defines what is good for him, or it. Aristotle remarks that it isn’t good for an acorn to be prevented from developing into an oak. What is good or natural “is not imposed from the outside, and it cannot be altered.” Whereas “in plants or animals, this involves no self-conscious volition,” only physical laws or instinct, “Man is the only creature that has conscious knowledge of the end for which he was made. In classical Greek thought, a ‘freeman’ is one who is moved to act according to an understanding of the nature of things,” the one who “truly knows what he is doing.” “Since man freely chooses his behavior, he is the only one for whom the natural law is moral.” “Aristotle said man does not make himself to be man” through political or any other activity. “Man does not fabricate his end or telos. Human nature is a given,” a matter of ‘what is,’ of obligation. The end or purpose of man is happiness, which Aristotle defines as “the realization and perfection of virtue.” Philosophy perfects the person because philosophy is the highest and most comprehensive perfection of the distinctively human characteristic, the reason that enables persons to choose, to act freely instead of by physical laws or instinct alone. “Thanks to Greek philosophy… reason came to be the arbiter of right and wrong,” capable of seeing the distinction between what is good and what is bad for human beings and any other natural beings it can study with care. With philosophy, man “can discern natural causality and ascribe to things their true causes, rather than assigning magical properties to everything.” “To do what is unreasonable is wrong”—intellectually mistaken and morally misguided. The Catholic Church (Reilly reminds his fellow Catholics) regarded irrationality to be “the essential character of sin or vice,” doing so because Thomas Aquinas integrated Aristotelian philosophy with the teachings of the Gospel. “Sin is an offense against reason,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church declared in 1849.

Philosophy also directs the mind to ‘abstraction,’ which is a very good thing if understood to have limits. Abstraction enables human beings to do one of the things God commanded Adam to do: name the creatures in the Garden according to their kinds. In so doing, God was telling Man to understand the general ‘in’ the particular. A non-philosopher does that as readily as a philosopher, but only a philosopher is likely to do it when considering abstractions or generalities themselves—characteristically, as Reilly recalls, when Socrates proposes to define justice by abstracting from all existing cities and describing a “city in speech,” a city that sets a standard by which all existing cities may be justly judged. Ardent citizens regard philosophers with suspicion precisely because philosophers think that there’s a city better than the existing city, that the existing city doesn’t set the standard of conduct. Christians fall under the same suspicion, when they speak of the City of God, preferring it to the City of Man. Without some standard, some set of principles beyond those upheld by the rulers of the British Empire, the argument of the Declaration of Independence would make no sense.

That argument includes among its major premises the self-evident truth that all men equally share an unalienable right to pursue happiness. As Reilly puts it, “the higher standard that the Founders invoked against the depredations of the British Empire was what is right by nature. It is the objective standard to which they appealed against the arbitrary exercise of British power.” But, Reilly argues, for the classical philosophers true human happiness can be attained only by the very few, by the philosophers who seek and find the knowledge of the highest things, the grandest generalities, that all men desire but most men never really know. The Christian Thomas Aquinas counters that to strive for any end that cannot be secured is futile; “therefore,” Reilly remarks, “the happiness to which all men are naturally ordered as their final perfection cannot consist in the happiness of only a few.” The Founders invoke a principle enunciated by Aristotle, by ‘Athens,’ but satisfied only by Jesus, by ‘Rome,’ which Reilly understands to be the ‘capital’ of Christianity, no longer the capital of the old empire. The road to Rome passes through Athens, but by way of Jerusalem.

Before following Reilly on the path to Jerusalem, one should pause and consider whether the Thomistic argument against the classical-philosophic understanding of happiness is sound. If all men desire to know, as Aristotle observes, that doesn’t mean that all men strive for the highest, the most general knowledge. Nor does it mean that it makes no sense to embark on a quest that is impossible to complete fully. Omniscience is humanly impossible, but that doesn’t make the quest for knowledge vain. This is true of any desire; hunger for the very finest food on all occasions is practically impossible to satisfy, but that doesn’t mean that the quest to satisfy our hunger for such food is vain. If few human beings can satisfy the human quest for knowledge, and especially for theoretical wisdom, to the extent philosophers can, and if indeed they cannot satisfy their quest for knowledge of ordinary things, and especially for practical wisdom, to the extend that (for example) a great statesman can, this is no reason not to try, no reason to consider the quest futile. Everyone can learn a few things, else no one would survive for long.

In Jerusalem one finds the principle of transcendent monotheism. Defeated, and indeed exiled from Jerusalem itself, Israelites “did not consider their God defeated,” inasmuch as “there was no other god to defeat him.” “If the Hebrews were overcome by the Babylonians and taken as their captives, it was not because their God had failed them, but because they had failed their God,” who is “wholly transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent.” Such a god doesn’t ‘infuse’ the laws of His people into His people; he justly imposes them ‘from above,’ in the knowledge of what is good for them according to their character, which is innate. Because He is one, not many; because he is above and beyond, not within and bounded; because He is a person, not a principle; he can both command His people and dialogue with them, enter into a covenant with some or all of His rational creatures. His creatures are rational because He is rational and He has created one kind among them in His “image.” “The Genesis revelation that ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him’ (1:27) formed the basis of Western civilization,” “the fount from which sprang the sanctity of the individual person as invested with the divine image in his reason, free will, and immortality.” Moreover, even if only one kind among the created things is a person, created in the divine image, all of God’s creation is good: “Matter is good”; “because it was made by God, creation is stable and reliable,” unthreatened “by some evil demiurge who is equal to him and with whom he is constant struggle for supremacy,” as in Manicheanism. “In Israel’s revelation of creation, God’s handiwork is so well made that man can come to know the Creator by studying his works,” as the Jewish Christian Paul argues. Evil comes not from God, nor from matter, but “from man’s free will.” ‘History’ comes about not by fate, by necessity, but by the interplay between a freely-willing God and his freely-willing creatures. In ruling, God provides; He does not simply determine. Human beings are not God’s wind-up toys. If they were, they could not have been made in God’s image.

When Man does sin against his Creator, what can he do to pay his debt? Nothing: the penalty of sin is death. By their own efforts human beings cannot long avoid dying. “What would this created, finite being have to offer the infinite Being, whom he had offended?” Happily for him, the God he has offended is indeed providential, extending His grace to the creature He created in His image. God does not want to destroy the creature who made the wrong choice by means of the capacity for choice, for free will, which his Creator bestowed upon him. God promises Man a Messiah. In being told that by God, Man now sees the course of events not as cyclical but as linear. The course of events has a purpose—not to be sure, thanks to some intrinsic ‘law of history,’ some immanent force driving them to an inevitable ‘end,’ but rather as a providential intention formulated in response to man’s freely-chosen offense.

What has any of this have to do with the American founding? “God’s transcendence also had a dramatic effect on the political character of man’s rule, which could no longer properly be theocratic.” Whether under a republican or a monarchic regime, Israelite government consisted of rulers who led the people in battle and judged cases in court, but left the sacred rites of the Israelite cultus to the priests, who in turn left ruling to the rulers. “When King Saul overstepped these boundaries and presumed to perform the sacred rites, the prophet Samuel upbraided him.” This “Judaic desacralization of the ruler, in contradistinction to the character of political rule surrounding the Hebrews, was an essential step in establishing the integrity of the secular sphere and in introducing the distinction between the religious and the civic, without which constitutional rule could not eventually develop.”

‘Rome’ or Christianity consists of “the nuptials of Jerusalem and Athens.” As in any good marriage, those united remain distinct within the terms of the union. The Gospel of John begins with the beginning: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Loos was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him.” Logos means speech, ‘word,’ and reason. Thus “Revelation confirmed Heraclitus’ intuition that logos makes the universe comprehensible because all things were made by and through Logos.” Unlike Heraclitean logos, however, this is Logos with a capital ‘L,’ a person not “an intelligible principle or a cosmic force,” a ‘who’ not an ‘it.’ “The face of Logos made visible is the transforming experience of a Hellenized Christianity or of a Christianized Hellenism,” which “moved the classical world from an impersonal Logos,” from the pure-thought-thinking-itself ‘god’ of the philosophers to the Creator-God. “The Christian view was thus comprehensive: it explained man’s origins in God’s creation, the existence of evil from Original sin, and the final triumph of salvation in Christ over evil and death.” Man doesn’t feel fully at home on earth, but he now has “the reassurance that he was meant for elsewhere,” somewhere “outside of history in personal union with a transcendent, loving God, something man could not dare to have hoped for, much less imagined, until God revealed himself in Christ as desiring nothing more than to share his inner life with his creatures, to impart to them his divinity.” In sum, “revelation involves Reason” as the supreme Person Who reasons and acts in accordance with His Reason, which is His ‘nature,’ the core of His being, His essence. God as the sender of Man’s Messiah, in the form of Man, offers all men the assurance that they can achieve the highest knowledge, the fullness of wisdom that many seek but none can find without that Messiah, the Son who alone has the power to unite them with their Father. No individual human being, tribe, no race, no nation is excluded from this assurance because all men are created equal, created in God’s Image. “Christianity contains an invitation to reason because God’s rationality guarantees reason’s integrity”; “if God is Logos, reason and revelation are not at an impasse.” This is the Christian solution to the problem of happiness raised by the classical philosophers.

Both the consonance of faith and reason and the distinction between them may be seen in a simple illustration. If I say to you, ‘I am now holding in my closed hand a round object,’ you may believe me or disbelieve me; if you disbelieve me, you may deny my claim or you may simply suspend your belief until I offer evidence of it. If I say, ‘I am now holding in my closed hand a square object,’ the same choices apply. But if I say to you, ‘I am now holding in my closed hand an object that is a round square,’ you cannot have faith in my claim because it is self-contradictory, unreasonable, indeed inconceivable. You must assume that I am lying, delusional, or ignorant of the meaning of the words I am speaking. No one can have faith in any statement that is irrational, although one might have faith in an irrational statement he does not see to be irrational, having mistakenly interpreted that statement in rational terms. It is of course noteworthy that any rational claim very much depends for its validity upon the truth of its premises. I may ‘posit’ atheism as a premise and spin out a set of claims that follow logically from that premise, but the truth or fundamental rationality of my argument will depend on whether there really is no God. To affirm that there is a Creator-God and moreover that I shall obey Him are two choices, both acts of faith within the limits of reason in that they are not affirmations of self-contradictory premises. Whether those premises are themselves validated by the argument from design, the ontological proof, or other products of ‘unassisted’ human reason, or whether they are rather brought to me by the Holy Spirit, who is rational but not part of the human nature which is but an image of Him, is a separate issue, one beyond the ambitions of Reilly to address because he doesn’t need to address it in order to defend the American founding by tracing its philosophic and theological antecedents.

Christianity’s “validation and elevation of the profoundest insights of Greek philosophy also confirmed the limits of the political, at which Socrates and Aristotle had hinted.” “Each person could participate in the divine order of salvation as an individual, not through his participation as a citizen of his state or the mediation of a semidivine ruler, but through union with Christ,” whose “identity as a personal Savior was totally incompatible with the ancient cosmological view of the universe and the political legitimacy it bestowed on the ancient city or empire.” Not surprisingly, “Just as Socrates was killed for his insistence on his citizenship in the city in speech, so too were the early Christians martyred for insisting on the primacy of their citizenship in the heavenly city.” In this sense, with Christianity “the primacy of the political is over,” and not only for philosophers. “Man is no longer subsumed by the polis; rather the polis exists to serve man.” In another sense, politics has been reoriented from the regimes of human beings to the regime of God. In both senses, God is not Caesar. This does not denigrate Caesar. It puts him in his rightful place. “The secular is not antithetical to Christianity; it is a product of it. Christianity created the secular. It insists on it,” forming “the ultimate basis for the constitutional principle of the separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority.” Human beings cannot and should not attempt to install God’s regime on earth any more than “Socrates expected the Athenians to instantiate his ‘city in speech’ on the Greek peninsula.” In teaching the Socratic lesson to humanity generally, not only to potential philosophers, “Christianity saved politics from itself, or rather from trying to be something other than itself” by enabling constitutionalism and condemning “man’s self-deification.” 

When man understands himself as Man, made in the image of God but not himself a god, “Man’s self-rule now becomes conceivable, inimitably tied to his ability to discern a rational moral order in creation,” accountable to his Creator. Human beings are created equal before their Creator. The possibility of a good Samaritan—a good person who serves God but is not a member of God’s chosen people—can now be thought, and not only by philosophers but by the ordinary people Jesus addresses. “A tribal religion with a universal truth, Judaism now becomes transformed in Jesus to a universal religion without tribes.” God’s true chosen people henceforth are those who obey the commands of the Father, thus becoming brothers and sisters of His Son—not a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Galatians (4:6-7). “The Our Father was a revolutionary prayer when Christ said it, and it remains so today,” and it underwrites the revolution effected by the American Founders, even as they invoked the blessings of God’s providence as they declared their choice to attempt it. “Without Christianity, slavery most likely would have remained the norm of mankind”; without Christianity (as Tocqueville saw) there would most likely be no democracy in America, or anywhere else.

As noted, there would also be no constitutionalism as we know it, not only because God enters into a covenantal relationship with His people but because Christianity distinguishes two parallel sovereignties, respected in the Roman Empire after Emperor Constantine’s conversion. Because Roman imperial subjects enjoyed “dual citizenship under both sovereigns,” those sovereigns needed to negotiate limits on one another. “The fundamentals essential to constitutional order grew out of this dual perspective.” Both sovereigns owned property, thus possessing the means to defend themselves against one another and against foreign attack, as Tocqueville emphasizes in The Old Regime and the Revolution. Both sovereigns ruled by what one of Charlemagne’s advisers called “the common agreement and consent of the subjects.” The balance of these powers was at times deranged, especially after the collapse of the Roman Empire, when monarchs scrambled for power against one another, running over Church property in the struggle. (In 1067, for example, William the Conqueror “asserted royal power over the making of canon law and any ecclesiastical disciplinary actions concerning his barons and officials.”) The Church struck back in the person of Pope Gregory VII, who “forcefully rearticulated the two-swords teaching in both word and deed,” desacralizing feudal princes by divesting them of the ecclesiastical authority they had usurped.

In England, Bishop Anselm of Canterbury pushed King Henry I into a compromise, the Concordat of London, in 1107, whereby the king gave up his right to invest bishops and abbots but also “made the bishop a baron, with all the attendant duties to the king.” The conflicts between Henry II and Thomas à Becket, followed by King John’s conflict with Pope Innocent III, ended in the Magna Carta, co-written by Stephen Langton, the pope’s candidate for archbishop of Canterbury. The Magna Carta established Church freedom from rule by the monarch and the feudal barons along with the familiar rights of due process, trial by jury, and taxation by the consent of those taxed. When Magna Carta “received its definitive form” in 1225, Langton, now the archbishop, “pronounced that violators of the charter of any rank would automatically be excommunicated.” 

It was the great English common lawyer Sir Edward Coke who brought the principles of Magna Carta to Virginia in the form of its first charter, drafted in 1606; similar language was integrated into the charters of six other colonies by the middle of the century, and in the decades before American independence Congregationalist minister and Yale rector Elisha Williams argued on the basis of its principles, which he understood to be not merely the legal rights of Englishmen but “the inherent natural rights of Englishmen,” secured and confirmed by Parliament “but not derived from nor dependent on their will.” The Massachusetts patriot Samuel Adams made a similar argument, four years before the Declaration of Independence.  After independence, five states introduced Magna Carta language and principles into their constitutions. 

More generally, Catholic Christianity justified the right not only for the Church to excommunicate but for the people to overthrow a ruler or rulers who violated the contract, formal or implied, between ruler(s) and subjects. Manegold of Lautenbach, later the bishop of Chartres, insisted that “King is not a name of nature but a title of office,” a title and an office rightly revoked “as soon as he begins to act the tyrant,” failing to “govern and rule [the people] according to the principle of righteous government.” Similarly, John of Salisbury’s Politicratus, published in 1159, assigns to the king the role of ruling equitably—that is, judging cases “rationally” by “seek[ing] to apply like rules of right and wrong to like cases, being impartially disposed toward all persons, and allotting to each that which belongs to him.” John “defended tyrannicide against any prince who usurps the law.” A bishop of Grubbio, Peter Damian, wrote, “All political authority derives from God, but resides essentially in the people”; Reilly calls this “the foundation of popular sovereignty” as later instantiated in the American founding. 

Even ecclesiastical or canon law contributed to constitutional thinking in the secular orders, as it too was “based on Christian presuppositions of both natural and divine law” derived from the idea of the imago Dei. In his A Concordance of Discordant Canons—usually called simply the Decretum—Gratian sorted out the many existing canon laws by means of Thomas’s Aristotelian dialectic; “reason is the basis of the law,” that is, not only the secular law but the law of the Church. Divine law, from Scripture, and natural law, from reason as embedded in conscience, did not contradict one another, “as they ultimately came from the same source.” Human law should be aligned with divine and natural law as closely as the circumstances of a given people allow, in accordance with the procedures of both deductive and practical or prudential reasoning. Custom too is “subject to natural law,” having “no standing if it did not conform to reason and conscience.” As time went on and cases under the canon law accumulated, the decretists further harmonized human law with the two higher laws. Although partly derived from Justinian’s code, which had been rediscovered late in the eleventh century, canon law was never subject to imperial approval when it came to establishing new church associations. These “were constituted by the voluntary consent of their members,” Reilly emphasizes, and were likely the first entities to be called “corporations,” entities legally “independent from emperors, kings, and feudal lords.” “Medieval society became honeycombed with many such voluntary, self-governing associations,” a development unique to Christendom. Even the pope’s authority over the church “was to be exercised only within the law that established it—including divine and natural law.”

Perhaps the most important principle taken directly from the Code of Justinian was Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari— What touches all must be approved by all. Although its application under the Code was quite limited, for the canonists it came “to underpin the practice of self-government within religious orders, dioceses, abbeys, and the entire Church, especially as it applied to taxation and legislation.” It was “gradually elevated to the status of a constitutional principle” for secular governments, cited by John Dickinson in his The Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer, an influential tract in the years prior to the Declaration of Independence. The principle animates government by consent, and specifically the right to vote, a right exercised in the selection of the pope by the cardinals. Medieval family law, too, also “developed to reflect the requirement of consent, especially on the mutual consent of both spouses for the validity of a marriage”—a theme in more than one Shakespearean comedy. As for political representation in secular government, it too came out of Church canon law, beginning in the twelfth century. It was Thomas’s order of priests, the Dominicans, who emphasized the principle of consent and brought it with them to England when they arrived in 1221. From the Catholic Church in England this principle circulated into the secular realm. Thomas himself, following Aristotle, advocated a mixed-regime with a strong monarchic branch and, sure enough, by 1295 the Model Parliament was formed under King Edward I. Parliaments became common on the European continent by the beginning of the fourteenth century. 

So did a degree of religious toleration. Because, as Pope Innocent IV wrote, “by nature all men are free,” and infidels are men, they may not be deprived of their property, as “these things were made not only for the faithful but every rational creature”—a teaching, it might be added, consistent with the Noachide commandments. University of Paris chancellor Jean Gerson “reaffirm[ed] the case that infidels enjoyed certain rights by natural law.” King Louis X of France (1289-1316) concurred, adding that the term “Franks” means “free men,” and therefore France has a particular interest in counteracting servitude within its borders. “France signifies freedom,” Louis proclaimed; serfdom should be abolished.

It is true that the Christian-Catholic marriage of reason and revelation was attacked from within the Church early, as seen in Tertullian’s well-known rhetorical question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The more portentous assault came centuries later in the doctrine of nominalism, whose “corrosive effects fatally fractured medieval Christendom, though the formal break within the Church did not come until Luther in the sixteenth century.” Nominalists contend that “natures or essences do not exist in reality but are only ‘names’ or contrivances inhabiting the mind, with no correlation to what exists outside of it.” Adam was merely making things up as he went along. “Nominalism undermined the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of medieval constitutionalism and the very concept of law as based on natural law and reason and replaced it with will (voluntas).” Whereas for Aristotle and Aquinas, “reality exists in individual things, but those individual things are defined by their natures or essences,” and while “reason abstracts the idea of human nature from existing human persons,” human nature “is actually—in the exact metaphysical sense—present in individual men,” the nominalist William of Ockham’s via moderna denies “any intrinsic connection between words and reality, denies any human sharing of God’s knowledge via the act of naming, and claims that ideas are ‘subjective,’ existing only in our minds.” According to nominalists, there are no species by nature; “the creation of each dog is… an individual act of God’s will unrelated to any other act of his will”; and as for human ‘knowing,’ “nothing in reality seems intelligible in itself” but is rather “given its intelligibility by man’s mind.” “Naming becomes an exercise of the will.”

“Nominalism ineluctably leads to voluntarism, the view that God’s will is the first and only cause of things”; God’s will “is unbound by anything, including reason.” There are no real laws of nature. If Aquinas argues that “God is Logos or Reason itself” and His will “follows upon intellect,” Ockham “flips the relationship between intellect and will”: “God’s will becomes primary, and his intellect subordinate to it as a mere instrument.” Thus Ockham does for Christianity what Mohammed al-Ghazali did for Islam. As al-Ghazali puts it “Fire does not burn cotton; God does.” Morally this means that “intrinsically, acts are neither good nor bad, except insofar as god makes them so. God does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it.” When God pronounced his Creation good at the end of creation week, he meant that Creation had ‘turned out’ in accordance with his will, his commands, not that it conformed to his rational plan. With this, “classical natural law was displaced by political theology drawn from Scripture.”

Nominalism produced two main lines of thought, one atheistic and the other theistic. Niccolò Machiavelli saw that “if nature no longer defines what is good for man (and there is no certain God to define it either), then man can.” “Man’s will fills the vacuum left by nature; he can define his own end.” Martin Luther adopts a God-centered nominalism, believing that “man’s actions are irrelevant to this salvation because there is no necessary connection between moral goodness and redemption.” Only faith, not nature, provides moral guidance, since “once one is rid of essences, there is not an ‘ought’ in sight” and “moral truth is relocated to the will”—very often the will of a human ruler or set of rulers.

In the Machiavellian way, “Reason is no longer a legislator. Law becomes law not because it is a work of reason but because it is the will of the stronger.” If reason and nature no longer provide any guide, man is entitled (in the phrase coined by Machiavelli’s follower, Francis Bacon) “to conquer nature.” “The modern project of making man autonomous, or even remaking him, by gaining power over the world begins here.” This clearly opposes both the American Founders’ standard, the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, and their constitutionalism, which secures the unalienable rights ordained by those laws. Machiavelli’s lo stato—the modern, centralized state that replaces the ancient polis, the ancient empire, and the feudal societies—has no theoretical limits, only those imposed by chance and necessity, both manipulable by men of vulpine cleverness and leonine will.

Luther’s way is God-centered, and therefore has a substantial moral content beyond the human will, namely, divine revelation. Nonetheless, the “spiritual upheaval” induced by his Christian nominalism and voluntarism “led to political upheaval” and then to the statism intended to quell such upheaval. Castigating Aquinas (whom he may not have read) because he was “responsible for the reign of Aristotle”—whom he called a “muddy-minded pagan”—”the destroyer of godly doctrine.” Luther reduced natural law to conscience. To put it in terms of classical philosophy (which of course Luther would never do), Luther wants noēsis or the apprehension of the truth to occur without any reasoning. In Luther’s words, “God is He for Whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard…. What God wills is not right because He ought, or was bound, so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because He so wills it.” God’s reasons being inscrutable, inaccessible to human reason and known only by faith in His revealed Word, there is no point to human reasoning, especially since the human nature which includes the capacity to reason has been thoroughly corrupted by sin. “The child sins in his mother’s womb,” and he doesn’t improve thereafter; “sin is his nature; he cannot help committing it.” Politically, this means that “absent strong government, ‘men would devour one another.'” This is an unusual teaching. If government is exercised by men, why is it not equally corrupt and, given its superior power, an even worse devourer? 

“Luther’s extraordinary polemics against reason must be understood in light of his intention to discredit it so thoroughly that no alternative but faith remained. Luther did not abandon the use of practical reason in the secular sphere but left secular reason out of the sacred sphere.” To philosophize about Scripture is akin to practicing witchcraft, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, esteemed by Aquinas, is especially evil, given its commendation of moral strengthening through habituation or good works. In translating Romans 3:28 to read “man becomes justified by faith alone,” Luther adds the word “alone.” The world is no longer a field in which man prepares himself for the next world. And indeed faith itself involves no free choice, only divine predestination. “This new doctrine was in contravention of the long-standing Church teaching that the reception of the gift of faith was indeed an intrinsically free and rational act of the will in cooperation with grace,” inasmuch as “grace can be refused.” Not so: God’s grace acts like the lightning with which He knocked Saul off his horse in preparation for transforming him into Paul. “Here is a thunderbolt,” Luther wrote, “by which free choice is completely prostrated and shattered.” Human beings lack ‘agency’; they are agents of God, Who acts through them. If so, then evil thoughts, sentiments, and actions are, as Luther writes, “incomprehensible”—”secrets of his Majesty,” “inaccessible to human reason” but nonetheless just because, as Reilly summarizes, “will, not reason, is the source of right.”

Politically, Lutheranism “spelled the end of Christendom, which fell apart from the centrifugal forces Lutheranism unleashed.” Canonical law went up in smoke—quite literally, as Luther burned a copy of it in December 1520. With that symbolic act, “up in flames went the ecclesiastical corporation that had hemmed in secular authority” because “the Church as a corporation disappeared,” and the metaphor of the ‘two swords’ no longer governed. “It was the institutional structures of the Church that had given teeth to its oversight of temporal power. The demolition of these structures left it toothless. A single sovereignty could now monopolize man,” and the “Lutheran churches became state churches.” As Luther’s ally Philip Melanchthon put it, “the prince is God’s chief bishop (summum episcopus) in the church.” Theocracy took on either of the two regimes described by Machiavelli: monarchy or republicanism, James I or Oliver Cromwell. Either way, there was no right to revolution, inasmuch as God ordains the regime you have, although a people may resist passively if commanded “to do something against the will of God.” In this, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was indeed a good ‘Lutheran.’

It is easy to see how this dispensation leaves Christian states vulnerable to Machiavellian atheism. “If God is a positivist, so too is the ruler in his name.” Further, “once the state reabsorbs religion and no longer has a moral reference point beyond itself”—beyond Scripture as interpreted by the State’s established church—”it becomes pure power.” As a Christian, Luther himself would have decried such a result, and he tried to prevent it by substituting his “two kingdoms” doctrine for the “two swords” doctrine. He wrote, “Where the temporal authority presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it encroaches upon God’s government and only misleads souls and destroys them.” Indeed so, “but the two-kingdoms teaching was not an effective substitution for the two-swords teaching” because “it existed only as an idea,” with “no institutional structure to replace the one [Luther] had destroyed.” As a founder, Luther understood what a regime is in terms of its politeuma, its rulers (God-ordained princes), in terms of its purposes (salvation effected by God, peace effected by princes), and in terms of its Bios ti, its way of life (as laid down in Scripture) but not in terms of its politeia, its ruling institutions. He left them to the ‘secular’ rulers. “It is not hard to see the great attraction of this teaching to German princes,” Reilly comments, drily. [2] “Luther inadvertently opened the door to the politicization of religion. Machiavelli walked through that door” in the persons of such monarchs as the Tudors in England, Louis XIV in France, Frederick the Great in Luther’s Prussia. This was surely an unintended consequence. “Ockham and Luther were not aiming at absolutism; if anything, they were trying to counter what they saw as absolutism in the Church.” But “they did not seem to consider that their undermining of the Church’s authority and the abandonment of natural law would ultimately clear the path to political absolutism,” opening politics “not only to Luther’s Christian prince but to Machiavelli’s amoral one.”

The American Founders were neither Catholics nor Lutherans, for the most part. How then did they establish “a natural law foundation for the American republic”? Reilly suggests that Calvinism and Anglicanism both inclined to unify the lex naturae and the lex spiritualis, even if sometimes too closely. Nonetheless, the theoretical distinction lent itself to church disestablishment with the assertion of religious freedom as a natural as well as a civil right. Both Calvinism and Anglicanism esteem reason, even as they (like Catholicism) acknowledge the Christian doctrine of original sin. “Luther did not foresee the consequences of his teaching of sola fide in a world sine fide. He could only envisage Christian princes.” Calvinists and Anglicans were well aware of un-Christian princes, as indeed were the Catholics and Anabaptists who had confronted the Roman Empire. Because he writes primarily for Catholics, Reilly relegates his discussion of Calvinism to a footnote, but he provides a good discussion of the greatest Anglican writer, Richard Hooker.

To restore a Protestant understanding of popular sovereignty, social contract, and consent, all of them erased by Luther’s voluntarist conception of God, Hooker “first had to reaffirm a God in whom intellect preceded will in the notion of the Divine Logos.” This enabled him to “reconnect with medieval natural law and the doctrine of free will,” “return[ing] to things their essences.” In this he opposed “the extremes of sixteenth-century English Puritanism” (rather as his younger contemporary, William Shakespeare, would do), “endeavor[ing] to save the Reformation from itself by restoring essential aspects of pre-Reformation thought.” He did so by arguing that reason is necessary because only it can settle disputes, theological or secular. “Reason is man’s participation in the Divine Logos.” Law’s essence is reason, not will; “God is a teleologist,” endowing His creatures with purposes inherent in their natures; rulers must rule reasonably, in accordance with limitations placed upon them by constitutions to which their subjects have lent their consent. Consent is natural because human beings are naturally social; accordingly, there is a “voluntary compact at the foundation of government” and rulers rule on a foundation of popular sovereignty, itself under the laws of nature ordained by God. [3] Reilly finds the influence of Hooker’s restoration-Reformation in the political thought of John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and the American statesman James Wilson.

Between Hooker and the American Founders, however, stands the great Machiavellian defender of princely absolutism, Thomas Hobbes. His secular absolutism should never be confused with the divine-right absolutism advanced by Luther, although they share common ground in nominalism. Reilly cites his teacher, Father James Schall, who writes that “the divine will, presupposed to nothing but itself, presupposed to no divine reason in Ockham…. becomes the political will in Hobbes, again a will presupposed to nothing but itself.” Hobbes saw that divine-right absolutism led to uncompromising civil and international war on the basis of rival claims concerning Scripture—Catholic against Protestant, Protestant sect against Protestant sect. He hoped that ‘secularizing’ absolutism would end such conflicts, at least within the secular nation-states if not among them. If “Hooker opposed Puritan extremism on the basis of traditional Christianity and classical philosophy,” Hobbes “opposed Puritanism on the basis of his denial of both.” Unlike Hooker, Hobbes happily accepted the Lutheran claim that human nature is no good, that nature itself is “only an enemy to be overcome and mastered.” (Indeed, the young Hobbes had conversed with Francis Bacon.) 

Hobbes opposes Hooker at every turn. To Hooker’s affirmation of laws of nature instantiating the rights to life and liberty, Hobbes “derive[s] the law of nature from self-preservation, as he found it imperiled in the state of nature.” Hooker regarded civil law as “legitimate only insofar as it reflects natural law,” but Hobbes regards civil law as natural law, “constitut[ing] its own authority,” with “nothing higher than it.” Indeed, insofar as civil bespeaks man’s conquest of the natural state of things, “it is completely conventional,” not really natural at all. For Hobbes, unlike Hooker, there is “no rational common good” except for “the necessity of self-preservation,” and to secure that necessity not merely governments but absolute governments must be instituted among men. Man is not social, not a-social, but anti-social; hence men live in a constant state of war with one another, unless an absolute monarch masters their nature. “For both Aristotle and the Scholastics,” and Hooker, “the summum bonum is happiness. For Hobbes, it was not, because there is no longer any way to tell what happiness is, other than the absence of strife,” and assertions about what constitutes happiness in fact only contribute to human strife. There is no telos, no purpose, in nature, only a summum malum, namely, violent death, the fear of which supports the rule of the monarch and indeed the monarch’s centralized State, all-powerful “Leviathan”—”that Mortal God,” as Hobbes famously describes it. 

Consistent with this, Hobbes rejects both the two-swords doctrine and the two-kingdoms doctrine. The claim that there is temporal government and spiritual government, he writes, depends upon “two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign,” Leviathan. Leviathan’s word, and Leviathan’s sword, are the only ones Hobbesian man recognizes as real. “In fact,” Reilly writes, according to Hobbes “the power of the sword constitutes the truth and, therefore, also the law”: “authority, not truth” in the sense of truth ‘above’ the sovereign will, “decides the law.” In the striking frontispiece illustration of Leviathan in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the giant figure of the monarch consists of an amalgamation of human atoms, gazing up at the head of the monarch who wields the symbols of temporal and spiritual authority. In that illustration “we see only people’s backs,” not their faces: “they possess no individuality” as persons, only as bodies organized as subjects of their ruler. In this way “Hobbes’s radical moral skepticism,” his denial of any moral authority independent of the human sovereign’s will, “serves, and ineluctably eventuates in, tyranny,” although of course in his own terms Hobbes calls tyranny nothing more than “monarchy misliked.” “Good and evil,” Hobbes writes, “are names that signify our appetites and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different”; there is no such thing as a shared “distinction of good and evil.” Even individual men’s desires change constantly throughout life in a constant grasping for power after power, “which ceaseth only in death.” Such mutable beings need a strong monarch to rule them, to impose names on recalcitrant men, lest they devour one another, as nominalist Luther says they must do. Hobbes finds no ground for original sin, and indeed despises the doctrine as one that blames men merely for being men; he nonetheless finds ample ground for human willfulness, and moves to bridle it in accordance with the supreme effectual will—the human absolute sovereign, not the biblical God. 

Even as “Saint Paul spoke of ‘one body and one Spirit” in Ephesians 4:4, “Leviathan’s one body seems a grotesque parody or profane substitute for the Mystical Body of Christ that Paul described,” subjugating “all things to himself and incorporat[ing] all the bodies of his subjects, not to glorify them,” as in the Church, “but to conform them to, and glorify, the ‘Mortal God'”. For Hobbes, “divine will and material causality are the same thing,” as man, “like everything else in the universe, [is] amoral matter in motion.” Therefore, political science is “a kind of physics” in which material and efficient causes prevail, formal and especially teleological causes being imaginary. Hobbes, following Bacon and Machiavelli, aims at undoing “the achievements of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome,” “subvert[ing] Greek philosophy by erasing the distinction between nature and convention,” “materializing the transcendent” God of Judaism, and “sabotage[ing] the Christian distinction between the sacred and the secular with a redeification of the state”—a “redeification,” however, that denies spirituality and asserts materialism.

Hobbes book, Leviathan, “pleased almost no one.” Against it, Robert Filmer and James I reasserted the divine right of kings; Robert Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez upheld Catholic natural law and natural right; Algernon Sidney carried on Hooker’s legacy.

For Filmer, “kingship is the immediate and unmediated result of the Creator’s will. It is miraculous. No acts of rational free will or consent by the members of the political community are required for its institution or justification.” On the contrary, consent to monarchic rule is the subjects’ obligation. The monarch is free “from constitutional limitations and the natural law’s rational constraints.” This was music to the ears of James I, who “in a way” returned to “the era of sacred kingship” sans any suggestion of papal authority, since James was a Puritan. Throughout modern Europe, “as churches became national”—that is, statist—”kings became absolute.” Reilly correctly notices that Catholic monarchs “were only too happy to join in.” 

The Filmer-James assertion of monarchic divine right to rule found its first important philosophic opponents in the Jesuits Bellarmine and Suárez, and the two pairs exchanged polemics. In England itself, James’s vigorous defense of his alleged prerogatives provoked Parliamentary indignation, “sowing the seeds of the English Civil War.” As for Filmer, he saw that “Scripture citations could be quoted by both sides of the argument ad infinitum without a decisive outcome,” and so “moved the argument onto the grounds of natural right.” But this natural right derived not from the consent of the governed but from the supposed absolute right of fathers to rule their children, a right Filmer then extended to kings, conceived as the ‘fathers’ of their people. Bellarmine countered that (in his words) “the authority of the king descends, not immediately from God nor by divine right, but only from the law of nations”—that is, by common consent. The people’s consent, in turn, “was founded upon the principle of equality,” as “there is no reason why amongst equals”—members of the same species—”one should rule rather than another.” No king is so far superior to his fellow human beings as to rightly claim absolute authority over them. “In a commonwealth all men are born naturally free and equal.” Following Aristotle’s understanding of the family, Bellarmine writes, “the servant is ruled for the benefit of the master; the citizen for his own benefit. A political head seeks not his own but the people’s good; otherwise, he is a tyrant.” Aristotle would not describe fatherly rule as political, reserving that form of rule to the relation of husband and wife, but he does consider fatherly rule as serving the good of the children, not the good of the father, and therefore not “absolute.” For Bellarmine as for Aristotle, revolution against tyrants is rightful. Any regime is “valid so long as [it] serve[s] the common good.” Suárez concurred, point for point, as did the vast majority of Catholic theologians who wrote on politics from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Indeed, the English Jesuit John Floyd condemned slavery on the basis of natural rights in 1620, rights slaves “may defend by force against even their owne Maisters.” 

Does this make the American Founders closet Catholics? Surely not, as Reilly is quick to say. True, the Maryland Catholic Charles Carroll, educated by French Jesuits, “would have been thoroughly familiar with Bellarmine and Suárez,” but Thomas Jefferson was no stranger to their writings, having read Filmer’s attacks on them in his book, Patriarchia. Reilly points instead to “the common world of discourse” the Founders shared with the Catholic critics of nominalism, Hobbesianism, and divine right. “It was a common patrimony that Bellarmine and Suárez helped to restore for everyone’s benefit—because its source was in natural law, accessible to all by right reason.” This is what Jefferson meant when he wrote that the Declaration of Independence reflected “the harmonizing sentiments of the day,” sentiments registered by Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney—who explicitly praises the two Jesuits. As Reilly demonstrates, all “Catholic and Protestant opponents to absolutism called upon the same constitutional traditions to defend representative government.” Contra latter-day critics such as Deneen and Dreher, “the fundamental principles of constitutional rule are not somehow fatally dependent on Enlightenment notions that are alien to them,” since those principles “preceded the Enlightenment.” 

It is hard to deny that the predominant influence on Jefferson as he wrote the draft of the Declaration of Independence was John Locke. Locke is central to the Deneen-Dreher argument, and they classify him as a proto-Enlightenment Hobbesian, albeit one who leans toward republican regimes, away from monarchy—a kinder, gentler Hobbes, as it were. In this, Deneen and Dreher follow the interpretation of Locke advanced by Leo Strauss, who understands Locke as a covert Hobbesian. Was Locke a Hobbesian nominalist who endorsed a paradoxically material form of voluntarism? Or was he a natural-law man? 

“What matters” for the discussion at hand is not so much what Locke’s covert teaching was but “how the Founders understood him and to what purpose they applied their understanding.” Locke explicitly endorses the right to liberty from arbitrary power, theism, the law of nature, natural human equality, government by consent, and the right to revolution. In resisting the rule of the British monarch, “the American Founders clearly saw Locke in the tradition we have been delineating. Jefferson and Adams explicitly placed him there,” citing him along with the classical philosophers as a proponent of what Adams called “the principles of nature and eternal reason.” Reilly readily agrees with those who see that Locke’s epistemological theory, published in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, and his empiricism generally do not comport with classical or Christian teleology. James Wilson saw this at the time of the American founding. But, following the argument of the redoubtable Harry V. Jaffa, Reilly refers not to the Essay but to Locke’s more political works, including the Second Treatise and the two essays on religious toleration. In these writings Locke did indeed distance himself from Hobbes, advocating representative government, the right to revolution, the capacity of human beings to govern themselves, and the natural sociality of human beings. In his Questions concerning the Law of Nature Locke derives right from natural law, and surely not from the will of the sovereign; whether Lockean natural law is the same as Ciceronian or Thomistic natural law is an arguable point; to answer it, a reader must walk the long and winding road of the philosopher’s exotericism. As Jaffa and others have observed, the Founders for the most part did no such thing, readily taking Locke to be anti-Hobbes ‘all the way down.’

“The Founders not only declared the inherited principles of human equality, popular sovereignty, the requirement of consent, and the moral right to revolution that we have been following since the Middle Ages but, for the first time in history, instantiated them, put them into practice, producing a constitutional republic that was the product of deliberation and free choice.” They could do so (as Tocqueville insisted) because unlike the French revolutionaries who followed them the Americans had substantial experience in self-government, exercising both the constitutional rights of Englishmen and claiming title to “all the rights of nature,” as Massachusetts lawyer and pamphleteer James Otis put it, as early as 1764. Tellingly for Reilly’s argument, Otis went on to base his claim on the distinction “between the primacy of reason and the primacy of will,” writing that “Parliaments are in all cases to declare what is for the good of the whole; but it is not the declaration of Parliament that makes it so. There must be in every instance a higher authority, viz., GOD”; “should an act of Parliament be against any of his natural laws, which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to eternal truth, equity, and justice, and consequently void.” Reilly adds (again following Tocqueville) that it was the Christian endorsement of natural law that gave it widespread credibility. Belief in a despotic God is unlikely to conduce to regimes of democratic and commercial republicanism. A God who prefers to rule by the consent of His people affords men what might be termed the conceptual space needed to think of themselves as citizens, not slaves or subjects.

“The Constitution does not declare principles; it provides for their implementation.” This explains why, “while there are no Christian principles per se embedded in the Constitution,” the Constitution nonetheless can be said to have been “embedded in Christianity”—perhaps especially in those forms of Christianity that recall the republicanism enjoyed for a time by ancient Israel. The United States Constitution would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to conceive had its Framers not lived within a Bible-saturated religious culture, whether or not each and every one of them endorsed Christian principles in the solitude of his own mind.  

By contrast, the founders of the First Republic of France often attacked the Bible. Reilly quotes Abbé Sieyès, who proclaimed that in the new regime “the nation is prior to everything”; “its will is always legal.” For the French revolutionaries, Rousseau’s “general will” is “the all in all.” The young John Quincy Adams criticized the revolution for that affirmation, at the time. The French revolutionaries supposed human nature to be malleable, thus perfectible. The means for human perfectibility turned out to be, in part, the mass murder not only of traitors to the republic but even “all people who are not enthusiastic” in their support of the new regime, as Saint-Just insisted, on his way to earning his title, the “Angel of Death.” John Adams and Alexander Hamilton both criticized the revolutionaries for their atheism, predicting that it would lead to more deaths than seen in the Inquisition—as it did. 

With this impressive account of American principles firmly in hand, Reilly can finally turn to its latter-day Catholic critics. Patrick Deneen’s “views recall William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who believed that the U.S. Constitution was a ‘covenant with Death, an Agreement in Hell.” Even the sternest critics of Philadelphia will find the image somewhat overwrought, however much the City of Brotherly Love fails to live up to its stated principle, especially as it contemplates its sports teams. “Both Garrison and Deneen fail to understand that the Founding principles are themselves the strongest case against public moral corruptions such as slavery and abortion.” But even Garrison didn’t distort the words of the Founders as Deneen does Madison’s argument in the tenth Federalist. There, Madison writes that “the diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is… an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests” in any society. This hardly constitutes an endorsement of, or even a logical opening for, the arguments in behalf of ‘diversity’ in hiring practices and in government which have become staples of the contemporary egalitarian ‘Left.’ Madison “never says that diversity is something government should positively encourage,” only that “a multiplicity of interests (not of factions) can be useful in helping to prevent the formation of a tyrannical majority” in a political union constituted “out of diversity.” Madison is arguing for government protection of “the free exercise of an individual’s abilities,” abilities that differ from person to person but which are uniformly held as the property of each person. In the decades following the Founding, the American politician who most ardently advocated diversity in the social rather than moral sense of the term was Stephen Douglas, and he did so against Lincoln, and in opposition to the principle of equal natural rights. To say, as Deneen does, that Madison, following Locke, urges Americans to “pursue their appetites” is to make nonsense of both.

“The key, as the Founding Fathers knew, is virtue,” and not in Machiavelli’s sense of the term. “They taught that freedom is not divorced from nature; it is rooted in and limited by nature,” “conformity with what is naturally good,” not “license or licentiousness.” “Only a virtuous person is capable of rational consent,” and only consent defined as rational assent can consent to the kind of government advocated by the Declaration of Independence, a government that secures unalienable rights. “People who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants.” Deneen’s claims are “the opposite of the Founders’ logic.” As a result, Deneen finds the conclusion of the syllogism “a bit mysterious and incomprehensible,” as indeed it must be for anyone who fails to understand its premises. 

“It should be noted that current Catholic discomfort with the Founding was not shared by Catholics at the time of its establishment. Father John Carroll, a cousin of Charles Carroll, who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, celebrated the new regime as the home of religious toleration, a regime in which Catholics “are members of Congress, assemblies, and hold civil and military posts, as well as others.” In this regime, “free toleration is allowed to Christian of every denomination,” a “blessing and advantage, which it is our duty to preserve and improve with the utmost prudence by demeaning ourselves on all occasions as subjects zealously attached to our government.” Carroll attributed this toleration to “the genuine spirit of Christianity” in the United States.

The deformation of principle seen in the United States in recent decades finds no source in the Founding. Rather, Reilly maintains, it derives from the doctrine of the primacy of the human will, advanced in America by the Progressives, who took their bearings not from natural right, not from the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, but from German historicism. Although different from Ockham, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and other nominalists in many ways, historicism shares with them the denial of natural right. In its latter-day form, historicism secularizes Christianity, aiming at “an intra-historical perfectibility” that would transform politics “into an engine of salvation with man as his own savior.” “In modern ideology, equality does not yet exist; it is at the end, not the beginning. It is man who will metaphysically transform reality in order to establish equality, which then leads to total freedom.” This ‘project’ will fail because it depends upon the very Christian natural law sensibility it seeks to erase and supersede. There is no guarantee that the attempt to transform reality in order to establish equality will lead to anything better than the mass murder and prison camps the regimes of modern tyranny conjured in the last century. “Yet we can avoid the cataclysm anytime we choose to, by returning to reality, to reason, to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’ Reality is resilient because, as Plato said, it is what is—not whatever one fancies. Logos wins in the end.”

 

 

Notes

1. For a discussion of the Founders’ understanding of self-government, as distinguished from ‘autonomy,’ see Will Morrisey: Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)
2.  “One should note that Luther modified his position” on the right to revolution “sometime after 1530,” and indeed one might further note that Luther’s stances on this and several other matters (for example, the value of a liberal arts education) could change with his mood of the moment. In his clearly-written introduction to Reilly’s book, Larry P. Arnn observes that even Luther’s nominalist and voluntarist views conflict with statements he makes elsewhere. 
3. For a fuller discussion of Hooker, see “Reason within the Limits of Religion Alone: The Achievement of Richard Hooker,” on this website; for a book-length discussion, see Robert K. Faulkner’s excellent Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).