"Tolerating" Christianity Into Irrelevance

by Kenneth R. Craycraft Jr.

In A.D. 313, the Emperor Constantine instituted a new, revolutionary tactical policy regarding the problem of Christianity in the Roman Empire: He would try to eliminate its corrosive, subversive presence by instituting the new idea of "religious freedom." He would "tolerate" Christianity into irrelevance, and enlist its support for doing so. This was the conversion of Christianity to "Christendom," and it solved a centuries-old problem. Some 1,500 years later, Christendom rededicated itself to authentic Constantinian faith when, in 1791, America's Bill of Rights was added to its fledgling Constitution. Like the original version, this new Constantinianism managed to convince Christians that their interests were the same as the interests of the state; that they had been merged in such a way that Christians need not have any fundamentally presumptive suspicion toward the state. And like the original version, this meant of which it emerges. In this case, freedom of religion was for the purpose of enlisting Christians to sanction the ends of the Emperor. And the witness of the Church against the violence of worldly power all but disappeared. Religion was now "free, " but only as defined by the regime, and on the terms the regime established for it. The cost of that freedom was that Christianity became a tool of the Empire, for the Empire to achieve its ends. The critical distance necessary for the church to stand in judgment over the Emperor collapsed. Constantine could do as he willed, secure in the knowledge that the subversive witness of Christianity had been tolerated away.

Now compare the words of Constantine, as quoted above, with these: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.... Reason & experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of the religious principle. 'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular govemment. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of Free Government." Here is another example of a political leader recognizing and advocating religion as a tool of the regime. Not the truthfulness of one or any religion, but its usefulness, is why we want it to be "free." And, of course, that usefulness is for the aims and goals of power and empire. The dispositive implication is very dear: Religion which does not advance the good of the regime - including the regime of religious liberty which privatizes religion - is not legitimate religion. Religion has a purpose, yes: to support and further the goals of the state. But as a tool of the state, religion must be crafted and forged according to the needs of the state.

The words above are from George Washington, the Father of Our Country, in his Farewell Address. For Washington as for Constantine, "religious freedom" is part of a larger political story which imbues it with meaning and from which it cannot be extricated. Religious freedom is not the freedom of the church to name and maintain its own mission. Rather religious freedom is a "myth," invented for the purpose of telling and sustaining the story of American liberal democracy. There is no such thing as "religious freedom." There are only theories of religious freedom, advanced and protected by the regime in power, for its purposes and goals.

In one sense, this is deeply disturbing to the religious person; his religion is reduced to a tool of the regime, and thus loses the integrity of its own mission, which should include standing in judgment over the regime it has now been enlisted to support. But in another sense it is no big deal that there is no such thing as religious freedom. It is a myth, and wishing it were otherwise will not make it so. Religious freedom is but one aspect of the central audacious presumption of modem liberalism: that it has found a set of objective neutral principles, by which objective, universal judgments can be made. Thus, religious freedom is a universal good, according to liberalism, every bit as helpful to the atheist as to the priest. Religious freedom is, according to the larger liberal myth, the institution of neutral procedures, not substantive goods. But, of course, it is no such thing. "Religious freedom" is particular to the goods of the regime of which it is an invention. And as such, there is no such thing as religious freedom.

The first tenet of the liberal myth of religious freedom is the shift from an idea of the freedom of the church to the freedom of the individual. Consistent with its overall program of the atomization of human life, liberalism first tells us that authentic religious liberty is not seated in the right of a church to do as it must according to its doctrines and traditions, but rather in the right of the person to do as his conscience dictates. Where the church, acting freely, interferes with the free act of the individual conscience, the church has actually violated religious freedom, according to the liberal myth. Not only has the state no concern over the salvation of any man's soul; in the liberal myth, neither does the church. Any church which has the audacity to presume to define how its members ought to believe or act violates the American myth of religious liberty. This is most especially true when a church insists that its members act contrary to acceptable political or legal opinion. The American myth insists that private opinions - especially religious ones - are permitted public expression only within the boundaries that the myth has set. Not to obey these rulesis to risk public censure.

We see this censure, for instance, when a Catholic bishop dares to give moral instruction to Catholic politicians and expects them to obey this instruction in all spheres of their lives, public and private. A famous example occurred in 1990, when the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, John O'Connor, wrote the following in the archdiocesan newspaper, Catholic New York: "Where Catholics are perceived not only as treating church teaching on abortion with contempt, but helping to multiply abortions by advocating legislation supporting abortion or by making public funds available for abortion, bishops may decide for the common good [that) such Catholics must be warned that they are at risk of excommunication. If such actions persist, bishops may consider excommunication the only option." As a statement of church teaching, the Cardinal's words are actually notable for their circumspection and caution. He is merely voicing the rather noncontroversial point (by the church's self-understanding) that advocating doctrines contrary to the church's teaching puts one at risk of excommunication. It has long been a staple of church teaching that deliberate doctrinal deviation - the subject of the Cardinal's statement - is a far more serious matter than moral failure. Such deliberate deviation has always been a condition for being excluded from communion with the church.

But, while simply a statement of elemental church teaching, O'Connor's essay created a public and political firestorm because it violated the Ameri can myth of religious liberty. The New York Times ominously editorialized that, by suggesting that Catholic politicians ought to obey Catholic teach ing, the Cardinal is "tearing at the truce of tolerance that permits America's pluralist democracy to work." In an earlier editorial, the Times opined: "To force religious discipline on public officials risks destroy ing the fragile accommodations, that Americans of all faiths and no faith have built with the bricks of the Constitution and the mortar of tolerance."

In other words, the Catholic Church will be tolerated only insofar as it makes no demands on the consciences of its members, especially when they might exercise that conscience in the legislative chamber. ("Stop leaning on Catholic public officials now working to heal, not divide, the rest of society," orders The New York Times.) The reason is that such demands are deemed to be at odds, not simply with particular policy positions, but with the very institution of American religious liberty. The Times intimates that Catholic bishops flirt with violating the U.S. Constitution in such pronouncements as Cardinal O'Connor's. This was given clearer expression by Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, as cited in the Washington Post. Cardinal O'Connor, said Mr. Neuborne, has done "more damage to religious tolerance in this society than he realizes. When you accept public office, you're not a Catholic, you're not a Jew. You're an American."

Perhaps the most hysterical response came from David Boldt of the Philadelphia Inquirer: "There's room to wonder whether the bishops fully understand the risk they run.... Their efforts reflect a lack of understanding as to just how delicate the balance between church and state is in regard to the Catholic church in America. The Roman Catholic church, it needs to be remembered, is quite literally an un-American institution. It is not democratic. The church's views ... are sharply at odds with those that inform the laws of American secular society. And its principal policies are established by the Vatican in Rome."

It goes without saying that there is a dark and vile intolerance behind these words. But while the particular expression is hostile and vitriolic, the opinion is an orthodox one in terms of the American myth of religious liberty. Boldt is correct about three things. First, America is a secular political culture which grudgingly tolerates religion only within particular boundaries, the legitimacy of which boundaries is immune from religious evaluation or judgment. Second, the Catholic Church is indeed an undemocratic institution. As such, its cardinal dogmas are not open to debate. (Not insignificantly, this is a feature which Catholicism shares with the American myth, democratic as it may claim to be.) Catholic dogma is not decided by plebiscite; and Catholic discipline is hierarchical and authoritative. Thus, third, as far as the Constitutional side of the "truce" goes, the Catholic Church (in principle, at any rate) is an un-American institution, This is not to say that it is anti-American, but rather that its self-understanding and structure are significantly different from America's that the state could proceed to protect its pursuit of domination without having to worry about the judgment of those who should have known better.

Up to A.D. 313 in the history of Christianity, the standing policy had been one of persecution. This nettlesome, fanatical Jewish sect was seen as a threat to the stability of the Empire, and therefore had to be eliminated. To be sure, the level and methods of persecution ebbed and flowed. But persecution did not work. In the words of Tertullian, "the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church." Despite, or perhaps because of, the persecution, Christianity flourished in the Empire. So after more than 250 years of expensive, tedious persecution, Constantine tried a new tack. It was hard enough to hold an Empire together without the divisive presence of these petulant Christians. But rather than try to eliminate Christians, Constantine would try to strike a bargain with them that would effectively do the same. Rather than kill them, he would try to domesticate them. He would induce them to abandon their insubordinate witness against him, by joining their interests with his own. Constantine realized that he would never get Christians to bow to him under threat of death; he knew his history well. But maybe he could accomplish the same end by tolerating them. Perhaps they would bow to him - serve his interests, aims, and goals, while subordinating their own subversive witness to his needs - if he granted them religious freedom.

He did, and it worked. The best witness of this process is not the famous Edict of Milan, important as that was. Rather the new, successful policy is exemplified by a lesser-known document, also written by Constantine in 313, and directed to Anulinus, the prefect of Carthage, granting the clergy exemption from Imperial service: "It is my wish ... that those ... who are usually called clerics be completely exempt from public duties, that they be not drawn away from the service due to the Divinity ... but may rather fulfill the service of their own law without any hindrance. For it seems that, when they render the greatest homage to the Divinity, then the greatest benefits befall the commonweal."

Now what could possibly be wrong with allowing priests to be exempt from military, police, or jury service so that they could mind the altar and parish? Surely, this was a good thing. Well, no. Before the Edict of Milan, it never would have occurred to any Christian to work for the betterment of the Empire. Now it is assumed that all will, but that the clergy will be exempt so that they can concentrate on their ministry.

But what are they now ministering? Constantine enlisted the loyalty of Christians, not out of personal piety or religious faith (he probably never became a Christian himself, despite the prayers of his mother, St. Helen), but rather out of a tactical need to subvert their witness against the violence of his regime. Now that he was "tolerant" of them, Christians, Constantine hoped, would give theological sanction (not to mention manpower) to his plan to unify the Empire against his sometime partner, the treacherous Licinius. Blood was expensive; he needed peace at home to wage war abroad. So tolerating Christians was much more effective all around than killing them. Thus, the priest bowed to the Emperor, and Christianity has never been the same.

This is because, after the Edict of Milan, the church was no longer free.

Of course, in one sense, as now in America, the church did become "free" in Rome. Now Christians could worship in public. In some cases their property was restored, and they themselves began to appropriate pagan churches and basilicas for their own liturgy. But the cost was very high, and the corruption that followed was deep and broad. For the church was no longer free in the sense that it was able to name its mission, and to delimit the power of the state. This was its consideration in the new contract. Now the mission of the church was dictated by the needs of the state, and the church's authority was subordinated to the Emperor's. Of course, there were times when the Emperor bowed to the priest. And there were times when the church was a more powerful institution than the state. But what was its mission even in those times? It was to sanction power and empire, rather than to witness to the Kingdom of God.

The "freedom of the church" was no longer defined by the church. Now it was defined by the state, and thus it was no longer freedom at all. This is because "freedom of religion," like every political value, is determined by the context out self-understanding and structure. The Catholic Church is an institution which challenges (or ought to challenge) the particular American prejudice that religious opinions may not have expression in political life if those opinions seem to undermine America's myth of religious liberty.

Now one might reply that these are merely the opinions of law professors and op-ed writers, not the expression of law. This is not entirely true, but even to the extent that it is, it does not entirely mitigate the problem. No one will deny the evolutionary process of making laws in light of the Constitution, or of reading the Constitution in an expanded or modified way according to new circumstances, or of making laws that simply are not addressed by the Constitution, though they may be repugnant to certain segments of the population. The opinions of the Times's editors, Mr. Boldt, and Prof. Neuborne all make reference to the church's violating the spirit of the Constitution. In a country where persuasion is the essence of political and legal change, and where the power of the prevailing myths is jealously guarded, one cannot assume that such opinions will not have legal force in the future.

Consider the Supreme Court case Romer v. Evans, for instance, in which a law barring special. consideration of sexual orientation in discrimination complaints was overturned, in effect making homosexuals a protected class on a par with African-Americans or women. Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Catholic) wrote that the law "seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests." As Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent forcefully argues, Kennedy (writing for the Court) ascribes irrationality and hatred to those who hold to a moral principle which is at the heart of evangelical and Catholic sexual moral behavior. In Romer such moral opinion is excluded from the realm of legal rationality. And, of course, the position Kennedy derides is often, indeed nearly always, motivated by religious consideration. Here, such religious consideration is ruled out of court (literally!) as irrational.

Ironically, the logic of limiting the freedom of the church can easily be extended to the freedom of the individuals that the First Amendment ostensibly aims to protect. If the church may not insist that its members who are legislators oppose, say, abortion-rights legislation on religious grounds, then individuals who do oppose such legislation based upon church teaching may potentially be excluded. Consider, for example, the reaction of New York Congressman George J. Hochbrueckner to O'Connor's article: "If you follow this to its logical conclusion, you could well end up with no Catholic representatives in government. If you follow the teachings of the church, you get beaten up because you're a pawn of the pope. It's an untenable situation to put someone in." Thus, in the name of protecting individual religious liberty, individual religious liberty is abridged. It becomes fairly clear that the end at issue is not the expansion of religious liberty, but the protection of the state from religious influence.

And-this, I submit, is the real gravamen of the First Amendment religion clauses: not to protect the freedom of either the church or religious individuals, but to protect the state from influence by the church or religious individuals. So long as neither the church nor individual religious believers presume to judge the legitimacy of the regime or particular laws within the regime on explicitly religious grounds, both may enjoy tolerance; religious liberty is merely a means to the end of protecting the state. But when either church or individual presses the boundaries of the "truce of tolerance," the First Amendment's protection of the state from religious opinion will demand that the* religious opinion or activity be abrogated.

Thus orthodox Christianity, as an example, is in double jeopardy. First, it violates the spirit of the myth of religious freedom by claiming that it may discipline the consciences of its individual members. The church insists that religious freedom is freedom of the church. Second, the church insists that its faithful and obedient members must be allowed full participation in the political process even if that participation leads them to cast votes, formed by church teaching, that either affect non-Christians or undermine the state's necessary myths and rites, or both. The church violates both the end of the First Amendment and the means to achieving this end.

THE FOUR MYTHS

Four myths - here meaning things that just are not true - about the liberal myth need to be dispelled.

The first, usually propagated by religious believers, is that the American Founding is essentially religious, and that it grants the highest possible respect and liberty to religious belief, especially to orthodox Christianity; indeed that it must be seen as favoring religion over irreligion. While it cannot be denied that the populace at the time of the Founding was deeply religious, that is not the same as saying that the political and legal institutions erected at the Founding are themselves a product of religious belief (or even consistent with it).

The second myth understands the strongly secular basis of the Founding and celebrates it, but mistakenly thinks that it affords the orthodox religious person the same quality of freedom as the liberal religious or secular person. That is, those who hold the first myth argue that the Founding specifically intended to afford religious believers a strong, broad, and enduring basis for religious freedom, and that encroachment upon that is tantamount to an abandonment of the principle of religious liberty. Those who hold the second myth argue (correctly, I contend) that this view of the Founding is erroneous - that the Founding is indeed secular with secular intentions. But they are wrong to assume that, therefore, orthodox religious believers have the same political freedom and legal standing as nonbelievers or even those believers who are committed more fundamentally to religious indifference.

The third myth is that religious liberty is possible in any modem political regime. The first and overwhelming priority of any regime, including this one, is jealously to protect its principles, rituals, and institutions. One of those principles is a commitment to religious indifference.

By "religious indifference," I mean an attitude of adherence to one set of religious doctrines, but without any concomitant idea that this excludes the "truth" of competing and contradictory religious doctrines. While one might believe that religion has some value to human life, it really makes little difference what that religion is, just so long as that central notion is maintained. Religious belief which would presume to exclude the truth (defined as usefulness to the individual consistent with irrelevance to political life) of other religious belief is an exotic intruder into a realm of indifference. This is exemplified by Thomas Jefferson's quip that it neither picks his pockets nor breaks his leg how many gods his neighbor believes in. Religious opinion is not relevant to questions of politics and policy. Religious opinion that presumes to be so is, by definition, excluded from rational standing.

The fourth myth that needs to be dispelled is that religious believers are best off in a regime like this one that is so successful in propagating its myth of religious indifference; or worse, that such a regime is a product of Christianity. For Christians to assume that we have the "right" to enjoy the same liberty as everyone else is a prejudice borrowed from the alien liberal myth. And if the church assumes this prejudice it also assumes the philosophical and political story that informs it. Thus, it will find a need to give theological sanction to the very myth which has designs on marginalizing orthodox religious belief in America.

In other words, I do not believe that Christians have an interest in defending and furthering the idea of religious liberty as a political good. This is because the only regnant definition of religious liberty in American political discourse is one that has designs on marginalizing, if not eradicating as a significant presence, orthodox religious belief. The American story is not interested in persecuting Christianity to death. Toleration is a much more effective means, especially if the liberal regime is successful in enlisting Christians to give it aid and comfort.

American liberalism wants to diffuse and delegitimize Christianity as defined in any interesting way. The distinctly American brand of Romantic, Gnostic, and Pelagian Christianity does not endure against the liberal idea, but rather is a product of it. The condition of American Protestantism (and increasingly, Catholicism) is an indication of the success of the liberal myth. But even those Christian thinkers who take very seriously the claims of their faith are often unwitting participants in its undermining, when they assume that America is friendly toward them and, therefore, must be given theological sanction. Christians have no stake in the liberal argument for "religious liberty," because it is part of a larger political theory which is intent on ridding the regime of the insubordinate witness of orthodox faith.

But neither is there any other argument for religious liberty, if by that is meant the liberal myth of absolute political and legal neutrality, and thus of equivalent freedom for everyone. The choice between liberalism and religious orthodoxy is not a choice between reason and dogma; rather, it is a choice between competing dogmas. Or one could say that it is a choice between competing tradition-laden rationalities. In both liberalism and orthodox religious faith, the terms and conditions must be accepted as "reasonable" by one's interlocutor; and what counts as reasonable is precisely the same as what counts as a legitimate reason. And what counts as legitimate reasons are those assertions that are consistent with the discourse of the community by which one is formed. Christians have no stake in liberal religious liberty, because they have no stake in the tradition that makes it "rational."

The Catholic idea of religious freedom is neither interested in, nor capable of, securing the kind of undifferentiated religious liberty that liberalism (falsely) claims to have secured, because the Catholic principle recognizes that such an idea of freedom in a pluralistic political society is neither a possible nor even an ideal good to be pursued. Like liberalism, Catholicism is concerned with establishing freedom for itself, on its own terms; unlike liberalism, the Catholic idea attempts to ground derivative political-religious liberty for non-adherents in its own theology. But it makes no claim that this derivative liberty is not necessarily relativized and mitigated by the church's own precedent freedom, as granted by God. It does not claim to have a neutral principle. But this Catholic insistence that its own freedom is precedent does not, per se, distinguish it from liberalism. Liberalism, too, secures the highest level of religious liberty for its own adherents, while tolerating non-adherents within carefully constructed boundaries. The Catholic idea is simply more honest about the impossibility of securing, in principle, absolutely equivalent religious freedom for all people.

Christians have no interest in finding a political principle which facilitates disbelief in Christ; their interest is rather to induce people to believe by witnessing to the resurrection of the Christ who, Christians believe, relativizes all political theories, and who commands that people bind themselves to none - indeed that we bind ourselves to Jesus Christ alone as King. In this context Stanley Hauerwas and Michael Baxter, C.S.C., have recently concluded that we might have to leave the problem of church and state "profoundly unresolved." If a resolution implies that the theologian's task is to give theological approval to a particular regime, I would say that it is the mandate of the theologian (and the religious believer more generally) to leave the question profoundly unresolved. The history of attempts to resolve the question is the history of religious believers sacrificing the integrity of their faith to the interests of the political regime.

This is not to say that the theological vocation exempts us from struggling mightily to find a coherent philosophicalpolitical theory by which members of the City of God can understand their place amid the Earthly City. indeed it is precisely liberalism's presumption to have put all questions to rest (on its own terms and by its own rules) which compels the Christian to be highly suspicious of this "solution," and to work all the more diligently to find another more adequate theory particular to his own faith.

I conclude that there is no such thing as religious freedom, because there is no such thing as a neutral political or philosophical principle by which such a freedom can be judged. The American myth of religious freedom is as false as it is powerful.

Kenneth R. Craycraft Jr., formerly a professor of theology at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, is a law student at Duke University. He lives with his wife and five children in Durham, North Carolina. This article is excerpted and adapted from Craycraft's book The American Myth of Religious Freedom, to be published this month by Spence Publishing Company.

© 1999 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved. April 1999, Volume LXVI, Number 4.

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Opposing the Austrian Heresy

by Christopher Ferrara

I am privileged to introduce Dr. Peter Chojnowski's article "Corporation Christendom: The True School of Salamanca," which deftly exposes how the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, Sts. Bernadine of Siena and Antonino of Florence, and the late Spanish Scholastics on just prices and wages has been misrepresented by proponents of the so-called Austrian School of economics.

Dr. Chojnowski's article is an important first step in mounting a traditional Catholic response to the swelling ambitions of the Austrian school, whose two major divines, the deceased liberal Jewish thinkers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, wrote the foundational works of the Austrian movement: the massive tome Human Action (1949) by Mises, and the equally massive Man, Economy and State (1962) by Rothbard. These two books comprise the Old and New "Testament" of what amounts today to a cult of radical social and economic laissez faire, which, sad to say, claims a growing number of Catholic adherents.

A CULT OF LAISSEZ FAIRE

I do not use the phrase "swelling ambitions" or the word "cult" lightly. The Mises Institute, founded to preach a gospel of social and economic "liberty" to the world, boasts of the movement's success in near-messianic terms. As the Institute—headed by a Catholic, Lew Rockwell—recently declared:

We have been remarkably effective in building a global movement for liberty and its intellectual foundation. Today Austrians and libertarians form a cohesive movement the world over, united on principles, publishing as never before, and teaching the multitudes through every means available. For this reason, the Austrian School has been called the most coherent and active international intellectual movement since Marxism.1

The Mises Institute's tribute to Rothbard on the tenth anniversary of his death savors of a cultic dulia:

And so, to dear Murray, our friend and mentor, the vice president of the Mises Institute, the scholar who gave us guidance and the gentleman who showed us how to find joy in confronting the enemy and advancing truth, the staff and scholars of the Institute offer this tribute, alongside the millions who have been drawn to his ideas. May his works always be available to all who care to learn about liberty and do their part to fight for the cornerstone of civilization itself. May his legacy endure forever [!] and may we all become happy warriors for the cause of liberty.2

Heaven and earth may pass away, but Rothbard's words will not pass away.

WHAT KIND OF THOMIST IS THIS?

Rothbard befriended a number of prominent Catholics during his life, but evidently was converted by none of them. He professed to be a "neo-Thomist" because of his peculiar secularized notion of "natural rights" detached from any divine endowment. Rothbard (and other Austrians) attempted to pass off his version of natural rights as likewise sanctioned by the Spanish Scholastics, but of course no Scholastic philosopher ever held that there could be natural rights without a divine Obligor to give them the force of natural law, which is man's innate participation in the eternal law. There can be no rights without an obligor, nor law without a lawgiver. And if there is no divine Creator who endowed man with a fixed nature, what sense does it make to speak of human "nature" and "natural" rights in the first place? Rothbard's "scholarship" attributing to St. Thomas and Suarez the "absolute independence of natural law from the question of the existence of God…"3 was not only shoddy; it was nonsensical on its face.4

Rothbard's natural-right theory was limited to the (non-existent) "ownership" of one's own body and the ownership of private property attaching on first appropriation of unused resources.5 Since these were the only two natural rights Rothbard recognized as universally binding, he (like the strict utilitarian Mises) would limit the power of government to the protection of those rights only. Thus, he defined "freedom" as "the absence of invasion [his emphasis] by another man of any man's person or property."6

Based on his concepts of natural rights and freedom, whose deviance from Catholic teaching needs no demonstration, "dear Murray" advocated not only the legal right to abortion but also the right to sell one's children (i.e., to sell the ownership of parental rights), or, if one prefers, to let one's children starve to death. The latter "right," wrote Rothbard, "allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)? The answer is, of course, yes…."7 Rothbard was certain, however, that "in a libertarian society, the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum."8 These views of "dear Murray" are enunciated in his Ethics of Liberty, which Mr. Rockwell promotes as part of "the core" and one of the ten "must haves" of Austrian literature.9

FREEING PRICES AND WAGES FROM MORALITY

In demonstrating that the Austrians have not accurately presented the Scholastic teaching on the just wage and the just price, Dr. Chojnowski has done much more than to make an academic point. As he points out, Mises (and, even more so, Rothbard) advocated a social order that negate[s] Christendom and every social, economic, and moral teaching of the Catholic Church [and] also renders "inoperative" the entire Classical moral and philosophical tradition.

Dr. Chojnowski is here referring to a fundamental truth of human existence affirmed by Western man from the time of the pagan philosophers to the great anti-liberal popes of the 19th and early 20th centuries: i.e., that man is ordered by his very nature to life in society under a common ruler and set of laws, and that this arrangement, called the State, is necessary not only for the maintenance of peace but also for the achievement of virtue, which means "becoming as like to God as it is possible for man to become."10 As Pope Leo XIII declared in Libertas, his monumental encyclical on the nature of human liberty:

Even the heathen philosophers clearly recognized this truth, especially they who held that the wise man alone is free; and by the term 'wise man' was meant, as is well known, the man trained to live in accordance with his nature, that is, in justice and virtue.11

The Misesian-Rothbardian system, going even beyond the French Revolutionaries and The Declaration of the Rights of Man, utterly rejects this concept of the State. As Rothbard wrote in Ethics of Liberty:

[T]he great failing of natural-law theory—from Plato and Aristotle to the Thomists and down to Leo Strauss and his followers in the present day—is to have been profoundly statist rather than individualist.

That is, the entire Western tradition is wrong and "dear Murray" is right. Following Rothbard, many (if not most) contemporary Austrians would not only limit the power of the State to the mere prevention of violence and theft (a la Mises), but would abolish the State altogether in favor of a Utopian "anarcho-capitalist" polity in which social order is maintained entirely by insurance companies 13 and other private contractual agencies. As the libertarian scholar Ralph Raico explains:

Contemporary Austrian economists, following in Mises's footsteps, have by and large adopted a more radical form of liberalism. At least one of them, Murray N. Rothbard…has gone even further in his anti-statism. It is to a large degree due to Rothbard's "libertarian scholarship and advocacy"…that Austrianism is associated in the minds of many with a defense of the free market and private property to the point of the very abolition of the state, and thus of the total triumph of civil society….14

Thus, Marxist and Austrian alike envision a withering away of the State, although they arrive at their dreamland from opposite sides: the one by way of abolishing private property, the other by exalting it to the summum bonum of politics (even if, as Rothbard allowed, "personal ethics" might have a higher aim in view).

Seen against this background, the Austrians' attempt to cast the Spanish Scholastics as proto-Austrians, an undertaking begun by Rothbard, is highly significant. The aim here is to persuade us that it is perfectly Catholic to believe that "the market price is the just price" without further moral inquiry, and that this is true always and everywhere, both as to wages and commodities. Of course, to accept this dictum is to reject the teaching of seven consecutive popes, both pre- and post-conciliar, who hold quite to the contrary on the question of just wages: Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II have all insisted on precisely the point that the "market wage" and the just wage are not morally equivalent, as an employer is bound in justice to pay, whenever conditions allow, a living wage sufficient for the ordinary support of a dependent worker and his family, no matter what "the market" supposedly dictates. As Pope Leo declared in Rerum Novarum (§63):

[T]here underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim offeree and injustice….

As the Austrians would have it, the Spanish Scholastics shared their theory that prices and wages arise from the sum total of subjective utility assessments by parties to exchanges (i.e., what each party thinks the good or service to be acquired or given up is worth in terms of serving needs or wants on his personal scale of values), rather than by such objective factors as cost plus reasonable profit, what is needed to maintain one's station in life, or the commonly estimated intrinsic value of a good. As Dr. Chojnowski shows, however, the Austrians' own writings admit (or at least inadvertently reveal) that the Scholastics did not teach this absolutist view. Rather, as the renowned traditional Catholic economist Heinrich Pesch, S.J., pointed out in Volume V of his encyclopedic treatise on economics, Lehrbuch der Nationalokonomie, the Scholastic teaching on the just price involved "a combination of 'subjective' and 'objective' factors, as these exert decisive influence on the price formation." These factors included not just subjective utility but also "the qualitative capacity of the goods for satisfying human wants," the "work and costs involved in producing and making the goods available," and, most damaging to the Austrian claim, "the general [objective] value estimation and the officially set price" in keeping with the common legal practice in medieval times of ceiling prices fixed by the prince, especially as to the necessities of life.15 Indeed, even on the question of wages the Spanish Scholastics were in general agreement with the later papal view that in the labor market "compulsion was possible due to disadvantage in bargaining power held by either employee or employer" and that "[c]ollusion associated with labor market combinations might require an impartial observer to establish the just wage, properly reinforced by legal rule"16—not exactly music to Austrian ears.

Why the Austrian insistence on an exclusive subjective utility theory and the resulting "free agreement" as the only criterion of justice in prices and wages? Why do the Austrians seriously defend Scrooge 17 and the practice of price-gouging desperate consumers during emergencies,18 when the voice of conscience in every reasonable man cries "outrageous" and "unfair"? The answer is that if there is no objective standard of a just price or wage, and if the just price or wage is—in every case, always and everywhere—simply the market price, then the market becomes totally "self-regulating" and thus immune from moral correction of its abuses by either the Church or public authority. If the just price is nothing more than the market price, then, conveniently enough, the market never fails to achieve justice so defined. This means that the market's marvelous "self-regulating" capacity can then be cited in favor of an entire "free market society" based on "the market principle," wherein human action in general is free from any "external" norm of justice imposed by law, save that which governs economic exchange: i.e., the absence of violence or theft. As Rothbard argued in a passage full of loaded terminology:

Every time a free, peaceful unit-act of exchange occurs, the market principle has been put into operation; every time a man coerces an exchange by the threat of violence , the hegemonic principle has been put to work. All the shadings of society are mixtures of these two primary elements. The more the market principle prevails in a society, therefore, the greater will be that society's freedom and its prosperity. The more the hegemonic principle abounds, the greater will be the extent of slavery and poverty….19

THE AUSTRIAN HERESY

The effort to "baptize" what has rightly been called (in a broad, non-canonical sense) "the Austrian heresy" would lead us only to a "purified" form of the same social order condemned by every pope from Pius VI through Pius XII. As faithful Catholics understand, however, Murray Rothbard had no idea what "freedom" means, nor any authority to teach the world about the nature of social liberty. The whole truth about social liberty is to be found only in the teaching of the Magisterium, a single paragraph of which contains more wisdom than the entire bloated corpus of Austrian political philosophy. As Pope Leo taught in Libertas Praestantissimum:

[T]he eternal law of God is the sole standard and rule of human liberty, not only in each individual man, but also in the community and civil society which men constitute when united. Therefore, the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State; but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law….What has been said of the liberty of individuals is no less applicable to them when considered as bound together in civil society. For, what reason and the natural law do for individuals, human law, promulgated for their good, does for the citizens of States.20

Pope Leo here describes with marvelous concision the only concept of social liberty to which Catholics can adhere. Nor should we entertain the argument by certain Catholic Austrians that the Church's concept of social liberty is out of the question today, and that we must settle for an expedient compromise with "the facts." Speaking of precisely this sort of liberal Catholic, Pius XI declared:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country…on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV. There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.21

Finally, we can reply to these social modernists, who call for a compromise of the Catholic ideal, by citing against them Rothbard's own exhortation never to forsake a "radical idealism":

The free-market economist F. A. Hayek, himself in no sense an extremist, has written eloquently of the vital importance for the success of liberty of holding the pure and "extreme" ideology aloft as a never-to-be-forgotten creed. Hayek has written that one of the great attractions of socialism has always been the continuing stress on its "ideal" goal, an ideal that permeates, informs, and guides the actions of all those striving to attain it….Hayek is here highlighting an important truth, and an important reason for stressing the ultimate goal: the excitement and enthusiasm that a logically consistent system can inspire.22

Catholics can certainly subscribe to Rothbard's sentiment in "holding aloft" their own "never-to-be-forgotten creed" concerning true liberty. The Catholic creed of liberty is to be found in the doctrine handed down to them, not by liberal Jewish thinkers, but by the Church that God Incarnate founded to make disciples of all nations. We can only thank Dr. Chojnowski for standing in opposition to those, including misguided Catholics, who would advance another ideal of human society.

Mr. Ferrara is President and Chief Counsel of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, Inc., a religious organization dedicated to defending the civil rights of Catholics in litigation and public discourse. Mr. Ferrara's next book, Liberty, the God That Failed: The Church's Answer to Social and Economic Liberalism, will be published in June.

----------------------------------------------------------

1. "Mises Institute Supporters Summit: Radical Scholarship," http://_www.mises.org /upcomingstory.asp?control=68.

2. "The Unstoppable Rothbard," Jan. 7, 2005.

3. Rothbard, Murray, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p.4.

4. As Fr. Copleston observed, Suarez certainly taught that "God is, indeed, the author of the natural law; for he is Creator and He wills to bind men to observe the dictates of right reason." History of Political Philosophy, Vol. III, p.385. Without the divine will, natural law and natural rights as such cannot exist, for what obliges man to observe the "natural rights" of others if there is no God to impose the obligation? The later Scholastics merely emphasized the intrinsic goodness of the natural law against the nominalism of William of Occam, who held that the validity of the natural law depended solely on the arbitrary will of God, Who could, if He so willed, make murder a natural right.

5. Ethics of Liberty, p.43.

6. Ibid., p.42.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. See ("Ten Must Haves") http:// www.mises.org/store/category.asp7Customer ID= 848567 &ACBSessionID= euoZXmrhabgTmkMTw5DX&SID=2&Category JD=10; ("The Core") http://www.mises.org/ Study Guide Display.asp?SubjID=116. Like all doctrinaire liberals, Rothbard allowed that abortion and the willful starvation of children could be seen as morally wrong according to "personal ethics," but he insisted that the State has no right to prohibit such conduct.

10. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol.1, p.218 (concerning Plato's definition of the pursuit of virtue).

11. Libertas Praestantissimum, §6.

12. Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty, p.21.

13. See, e.g. Hans Hermann Hoppe, [I]Democracy: The God that Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p.247: "Widespread agreement exists among liberal-libertarians such as Molinari, Rothbard… as well as most other commentators on the matter that defense is a form of insurance and that defense expenditures represent a sort of insurance premium…the most likely candidates to offer protection and defense services [in place of government] are insurance agencies."

14. Ralph Raico, "The Austrian School and Classical Liberalism," at: mises.org/etexts/aus-trian liberalism.asp.

15. Heinrich Pesch on Solidarist Economics, Excerpts from the Lehrbuch der Nationalokonomie (Oxford: University Press of America, 1998), p.218.

16. Ibid., p.475.

17. Michael Levin, "In Defense of Scrooge," Dec. 18, 2000, at http://www.mises.org/ fullstory.aspx?control=573.

18. John R. Lott, Jr., "Especially During Disasters," http://www.lewrockwell.com/lott /Iott29.html. Lott, apparently, is not a formal Austrian, but his arguments, published on this major Austro-Libertarian website, are typical of this school.

19. Murray Rothbard, Power and Market, Online Edition, p. 1363.

20. Libertas Praestantissimum, §10.

21. Ubi Arcano Dei, §§60-61.

©January 2005
Vol. XXVIII, Number 1
The Angelus

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Liberty: The God that Failed

by Christopher Ferrara

The renowned Anglican covert to Catholicism, Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, once observed that “All human differences are ultimately religious ones.”[i] This is a truth even secular reason is forced to recognize. As the Satan-worshiping anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon admitted in his Confessions of a Revolutionary: “It is surprising to observe how constantly we find that all our political questions involve theological ones.” In reply, the renowned Catholic counter-revolutionary of the mid-nineteenth century, Don Juan Donoso Cortés, wrote: “There is nothing in this to cause surprise, except it be the surprise of Proudhon. Theology, being the science of God, is the ocean which contains all the sciences, as God is the ocean in which all things are contained.”[ii]

The history of Western civilization over the past 250 years is a chronicle of the decline of men and nations in consequence of a theological decision with profound political effects. That decision was the definitive refusal to conduct the art of politics according to the fundamental theological premise that an almighty and eternal God has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. What confronts us now is the prospect of life in a terminal civilization that has rejected the ancient dictum, in force throughout the West for more than a thousand years, that “Christianity is the law of the land.”[iii] We are the victims of what Christopher Dawson described as “the reversal of the spiritual revolution which gave birth to Western culture and a return to the psychological situation of the old pagan world…”[iv]

More particularly, the collapsing societies of the West groan under the consequences of what one liberal commentator has characterized as “a fundamental orientation toward politics chosen by early-modern Europeans in order to free themselves from the intellectual and spiritual influence of the Catholic Church…”[v] That is, the condition of contemporary Western civilization reflects the final destruction of the Catholic social order that endured in one form or another from Imperial Rome under the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century until the fall of the Imperial House of Hapsburg under the Emperor Charles I at the dawn of the 20th century.

By Catholic social order is meant a society with its organs of government, traditionally referred to collectively as the State[vi], which recognizes the Catholic Church at its summit and is responsive to her teaching. Such a State orders its laws and institutions (however imperfectly) to the Christian moral code and the final end of man as a creature of God, destined for either eternal beatitude or eternal punishment. This State may be monarchical, democratic or republican in its political constitution, and we have seen examples of all three forms of government (or mixtures thereof) within the dominant Western mode of Catholic social order. What was essential to this social order, known as Christendom, was the presence of an organic link between the Catholic Church and the State in virtue of which the Church was the conscience of the State. It is that link which was broken, and the result has aptly been likened to the decomposition of a human body from which the soul has departed.

One of the great triumphs of the new “fundamental orientation,” otherwise known as “classical liberalism,” is to have banished from the mind of contemporary Western man the memory that Christendom was the form and pattern of our civilization for most of its history. Classical liberalism is the system of thought which progressively divorces the art of politics from divine law and man’s final end in God, leaving the approach to God strictly to the individual members of civil society, artificially severed from its organs of government to allow for the fiction of the “private” believer. The liberal disjunction between civil society and the State, reducing the latter to merely value-neutral organs of government, was a radical break with the Western tradition that goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Christendom, which combined the inspiration of supernatural grace with the natural truths of the Philosophers, was the historical fulfillment of man’s divine ordination to life in the State, producing nothing less than all of the greatest achievements of Western culture in an alliance (by no means without its own peculiar problems) between the Church and political authority.

In place of a great civilization ordered to Christ, the forces of liberalism­—quite suddenly in historical terms, and by force of arms at each critical juncture—established a new order whose god is “Liberty.” We ought to call Liberty a god because, like any idol that man sets up for himself, its claims are deemed to supersede those of man’s Creator. Whereas Christ declared that His apostles were to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” and teaching them “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,”[vii] the god of Liberty declared the age-old baptism of nations to be annulled and the Christian commonwealth to be abolished. Whereas Christ taught that political authority descends to man from God, even in the case of the procurator who unjustly sentenced Him to death, Liberty decreed that political authority ascends from the “sovereign will” of the people, so that even God’s law could be subjected to popular repeal.

Whereas Christ taught that His truth will make men free, Liberty insisted upon a previously unknown conception of freedom in society: the mere absence of constraint on human action by the State, save for that necessary to prevent violence and to protect the right to the ownership, use and enjoyment of private property in the pursuit of whatever thing each individual deems to constitute happiness. Without the conformity of human law to the law of the Gospel, the term violence inevitably contracted, while the terms property and happiness expanded in proportion to what unrestrained human weakness and popular consensus demanded. Hence today human life in utero may, at the option of its “owner,” be destroyed and disposed of as waste, or extracted and inventoried at the embryonic stage for sale as a consumer good. And not even the political opponents of these crimes against humanity are willing to oppose them on any ground but an appeal to the same sovereign popular will that put Liberty on its pedestal.

In sum, the god of Liberty has imposed upon Western civilization what Pope Leo XIII succinctly denounced as “that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law.”[viii] This new conception of law expressed itself in utterly revolutionary principles which contemporary man, abysmally ignorant of his own Christian heritage, now unquestioningly accepts as the received wisdom of the ages:

[T]hat all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men….that the judgment of each one's conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks…[ix]

That these principles would destroy the foundations of our civilization was self-evident. Only forty years after Leo, Pope Pius XI observed that “With God and Jesus Christ, excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.”[x] But perhaps not even Leo and Pius could have imagined the full extent of the civilizational debacle Liberty has wrought: not only the abortion holocaust, but an epidemic of divorce, the universal practice of contraception, the depopulation of Western nations, the relentless advance of homosexualism, the destruction of the family, the spread of orgiastic consumerism, the debasement of art, music and architecture, and finally the emergence of a veritable neo-pagan social order in which Christians increasingly face persecution for mere utterances against the orthodoxy of “liberty.”

In place of the Christian commonwealth, Liberty has erected a market-driven “culture of rights,” founded on the fiction of the isolated individual in a mythical pre-social, pre-religious state of nature, who is said to possess “rights” abstracted from any divine ordination to life in the State or any collective social duty to God. These “rights” are merely elaborate explications of Liberty’s one commandment: thou shalt not interfere in human action. Denying any ordination of the State to an objective common good conformable to Christ and eternal beatitude, the culture of rights has led to a tyranny of public opinion, enforced by despotic popular regimes which crush any attempt to secure true freedom through restoration of the Christian moral order, with its divinely ordained limits on human action and its positive duties in justice and charity toward one’s fellow man.

Under such conditions the pursuit of any common good in the State is impossible, and society becomes a mere arena for the pursuit of what each individual deems his proper good, without regard for the total impact of these individual pursuits on life in society as a whole. Thus Christians are forced to live in a global, free-market Gomorrah in which a trip to the supermarket invites an attack upon the innocence of their children, which is assaulted on every side. The culture of rights has produced a culture of death—physical, moral and spiritual—that oppresses not only the Christian life, but truth, beauty and goodness themselves.

The libertarian acolytes of Liberty argue that it is not Liberty but the State that oppresses us. Rejecting the entire Western tradition, they declare that life in the State is not natural to man. The State, they maintain, arises from the unnatural imposition of organs of government upon a naturally free civil society by an age-old conspiracy of nefarious ruling elites, who have somehow managed to persuade generation after generation, in virtually every place on earth, that government is necessary. If only the unnecessary organs of government—kings, parliaments, presidents, congresses, governors, public magistrates, and so forth—can be eliminated, the “monopoly of force” by which the elites have for so long oppressed the Western masses will be ended, and civil society will triumph in the freedom and prosperity of the “spontaneous order” that arises from voluntary human cooperation. The State will wither away, just as it does in the dreams of Marxists. It will be the Second Coming of Liberty, whose first coming in 1776 ended with Liberty’s crucifixion by the Federalists, who gave the world yet another State.

Mass democracy, the libertarians concede, is a god that failed, just as communism failed.[xi] Democracy failed not because of Liberty (so the argument goes) but because the State’s “monopoly of force” enabled one group to oppress another through taxation, regulation and the threat of force in violation of the “free-market principle” of untrammeled interpersonal exchange. The libertarians conveniently overlook the indispensable role of the “free” market itself in fostering democratic tyranny by destroying social adherence to the objective moral order–a role de-ethicized secular governments are only too happy to facilitate with judicial decisions that bar any substantial legal limitation on the market’s promotion of vice and corruption. Christians are pressed between what Wilhelm Röpke called the “bloated colossus of the State” and the “cult of the colossal” in the marketplace. Even the Protestant Röpke, one of the foremost free-market defenders of the 20th century, was constrained to issue the warning that market competition “must not be allowed to predominate and sway society in all its spheres, or it will poison men’s souls [and] destroy civilization…”[xii] In Catholic social order it was not possible for the market to have this effect, for both the law of the Gospel and civil law protected public morality. In liberal social order, however, that effect was inevitable.

The libertarians do not see, or will not acknowledge, that the god of Liberty reigns equally over secular government and free market, constantly maintaining a symbiotic adjustment between these two basic elements of de-ethicized liberal social order. The de-ethicized government exacts from the de-ethicized market a tribute of taxation and regulation which merely dampens a still immense and growing material prosperity, and in return the market receives from government legal protection against the moral claims of Christianity, so that profit may abound from the sale of anything and everything for which entrepreneurs can create a demand, including embryonic human beings. Röpke, who was no advocate of Catholic social order, observed this symbiosis in his own renowned critique of economic liberalism: “[T]he economic liberalism of the last two centuries has disastrously gone astray in a manner fully paralleling the mistakes of political liberalism and ultimately stemming from the same source.” [xiii]

The dreamers of the libertarian dream fail to perceive that it is not the State as such, which will exist as long as there is human society, but rather the theology of the State that has led to tyranny. The worst of the “absolute” monarchs of Christendom was a model of limited government compared with the presidents and prime ministers of modern secular regimes who owe no allegiance to Rome. Even a leading libertarian scholar has acknowledged, apparently without recognizing the significance of his admission, that “the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.”[xiv] The monarchies in question were Catholic states embodying Catholic social order—the very order overthrown in the name of Liberty.

The liberal political philosopher Pierre Manent candidly observed that “the distinction between civil society and the state, and their union through the idea of representation [i.e. democracy], sets off a natural oscillation between two extreme possibilities: the ‘withering away’ of the state on the one hand, and the absorption of civil society by the state on the other. It is a distinction that calls out for negation, a negation that can benefit only one of the two terms.”[xv] Yet both terms have been supplied by liberal political philosophy in service of its great project: “the radical discrediting of the Church’s political claims…”[xvi] Hence both terms are in line with liberalism’s fundamental movement away from the Church’s vision of Christocentric social order, which alone can preserve the State from the oscillation between absolutism and anarchy.

As “statist” and libertarian devotees of liberty debate the future of their idol, we live amidst the ruins of the Christocentric civilization Liberty has leveled to the ground. Narcotized by the material comforts an endlessly inventive marketplace provides, Christians in general and Catholics in particular (with a few noble historical exceptions) have offered little resistance to Liberty’s inexorable demolition of nearly everything that was good and holy in the commonweal. Today there is only the occasional verbal protest from among the few “fundamentalists” who actually understand what we have lost. But even the fundamentalists have been effectively converted by the new order. As the proto-libertarian Benjamin Constant observed with smug certitude concerning the Catholic reactionaries of post-revolutionary France: “in declaring themselves champions of earlier centuries… [they] are, in spite of themselves, men of our century [who] have neither the strength of their convictions nor the hope that ensures success.”[xvii]

Liberty makes certain we remain deprived of the hope that ensures success by convincing us that the overthrow of Catholic social order was inevitable and is now quite irreversible: There will be faction and violence if any effort is made to topple me, Liberty warns us. For only Liberty can control the chaos that Liberty has unleashed. Our entire civilization has fallen prey to an ideological protection racket. But we are not protected. In fear of violence we pay tribute to violence. Each year abortion alone claims more victims for Liberty than all of the major wars in world history combined. And now ultimate violence approaches.

It is not as if our deliverance from this predicament were inconceivable. Another triumph of the new orientation is that it has blinded us to the political significance of the spiritual reality that, even today, the great preponderance of the population of the Western world consists of baptized Christians, with the overwhelming Western popular majority[xviii] remaining at least nominally Catholic. If this majority were to be aroused from its silent apostasy by the leaders of a Catholic Church returned to militancy, the world would certainly change again. As Dawson observed of our situation: “However secularized our modern civilization may have become, this sacred tradition remains like a river in the desert, and a genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of new life.”[xix] The leaders of the new order themselves, who erupt in nearly hysterical outrage at any sign of effective Catholic opposition to secular orthodoxy, evince an acute awareness of the immense spiritual power that lies dormant under the desert they have created. They know how easily an awakened fraternity of the baptized could topple the god of Liberty.

And topple Liberty we must, in the name of true freedom—the freedom that comes from the idea that we are the children of a loving God, who bestows upon us both temporal blessings and eternal happiness, if only men and nations will follow His counsels. But beyond a simple plea for a return to faith, Catholics must be prepared to argue that reason itself suffices to demonstrate that only a reconstruction of Christendom, or something approaching it as an interim step in the revival of the West, can avert the coming catastrophe, and that otherwise we are at the end of history. As the currently reigning Pope remarked when he was Cardinal Ratzinger: “[N]o society will long survive if in its public structure it is built agnostically and materialistically and wishes to permit anything else to exist only below the threshold of the public.”[xx] The Anglican scholar John Milbank, who represents the growing intellectual trend toward a radically Christian critique of secular social order, has expressed this conviction in a startling way: “Only a global liturgical polity can save us now from literal violence.”[xxi]

What of the objection that we are advocating the “impossibility” of a reconversion of the Western world to Roman Catholicism? I reply that this “impossibility” ought really to be seen as nothing less than the only reasonable course of action to save a dying civilization, which, after all, is still predominantly composed of baptized Catholics. At this point in the civilizational debacle, anyone who calls himself a Christian should at least be willing to make an effort to examine our situation from the traditional Catholic perspective, standing outside the framework of liberal premises whose adoption was no less an act of the will than the common faith that sustained Christendom for century upon century. As Milbank has observed, the governing assumptions of secular social theory “are bound up with the modification or the rejection of orthodox Christian positions. These fundamental intellectual shifts are… no more rationally ‘justifiable’ than the Christian positions themselves.”[xxii]

Let us argue, then, on the ground of reason in the hope that, for the skeptical, faith will follow. Even in the absence of faith, however, reason alone ought to impel the thoughtful man to rise up against Liberty, the failed god whose reign has brutalized and degraded us all in one way or another.

Notes

[i] Cited in Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy (South Bend:Gateway Editions), 1958), pp. 4, 75.

[ii] Don Juan Donoso Cortes, Essay on Catholicism, Authority and Order, (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1925), p. 1.

[iii] Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952), p. 18.

[iv] Ibid, p. 14.

[v] Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. viii (preface by Jerrold Siegel).

[vi] I use the term “State” in the classical sense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, which recognizes the indispensable organic relation between civil society and government. In libertarian thought, on the other hand, “State” means merely the organs of government, especially in the nations of the post-Christian West, whose varying absolutism is actually a departure from Catholic teaching on the nature of the just State.

[vii] Matthew 28: 19-20.

[viii] Immortale Dei, n. 23.

[ix] Ibid., n. 24.

[x] Quas Primas (1925).

[xi]Cfr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004). The author rejects both democracy and monarchy, advocating instead a never-before-seen society governed by private contractual agencies, thus correcting classical liberalism’s “error” in accepting the concept of public authority—i.e., government. Ibid., p. 229.

[xii] Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy, (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1958), p. 128.

[xiii] Wilhem Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (New Brunswick: Transacation Publishers, orig. pub. 1942), p. 48.

[xiv]Ibid., p. 69.

[xv]Manent, op. cit., p. 27.

[xvi]Ibid, p. 12.

[xvii]Cited in Manent, p. 91.

[xviii]I employ here and throughout the classical definition of the Western world: Western Europe and all the territory settled by Catholic Europeans in North America, Latin America (the countries of the Western hemisphere south of the United States) and Oceania, and the Eurocentric Christian culture and laws resulting from the vast Catholic expansion of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

[xix]Dawson, Understanding Europe, p. 255.

[xx] Cited in Thomas Storck, “John Locke, Liberal Totalitarianism, and the Trivialization of Religion,” Faith and Reason, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Autumn 2001).

[xxi]John Milbank, “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority” (Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004) (reprinted essay), p. 238. Millbank and others of the school of “Radical Orthodoxy” fail to appreciate that the answer they seek to the civilizational crisis is contained entirely within the traditional social doctrine of the Catholic Church, which needs only to be reasserted by the Church’s teaching authority. The Church has not “failed,” as Millbank suggests. Rather, her human element has failed to defend what even Vatican II called the “traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ,” thus allowing the impression to arise that the Magisterium has reversed itself, which is impossible.

[xxii]John Milbank, Theology and Social History: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 1.

©2005 The Remnant

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