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The 23rd Summer Symposium of The Roman Forum in Gardone, Italy, issued the following statement. We are pleased to publish it here on The Josias, as we share both its analysis of the current crisis, and its conviction that the our response must lie in an integral proclamation of the Catholic Faith, and a vigorous promotion of the Social Kingship of Christ.

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Preamble

Among the Catholic faithful the conviction grows that the ongoing crisis in the Church and the drastic moral decline of our civilization have entered a critical new phase which represents a turning point in the history of the world. Continue reading “The Lake Garda Statement: On the Ecclesial and Civilizational Crisis”

Must the political order be derived from a cosmic model (or, at any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or are there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity, through the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least a myth, powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these questions is no, we must ask then: Can a community exist without the sacred component, by the mere power of rational decisions and intellectual discourse?

            –Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred

INTRODUCTION

In the ancient world, legitimate political forms ranged across a wide spectrum in which “rule of the people” was only one of many political forms conducive to the common good—and a very unfavorable one at that. But today, “democracy has become almost a synonym for legitimate government, for the rule of law.”^[1] Pundits declaim that democracy ensures freedom and fair government, while a new colonialism seeks to spread “democratic values” to every corner of the world. If we are clued in to the reductive tendencies of modern thought, we should be wary of such absolute claims. In fact, with a little digging, we discover that the democratic ideology of modernity is built upon a novel philosophy and cosmology. Early moderns like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau sought to replace the worldview of Christian religion with their own, and in the process created new philosophies and myths that still legitimize modern political forms. A democracy bedizened with the false hopes of Enlightenment scripture becomes a Leviathan irreconcilable with church teachings; if it is disengaged from this unfruitful union, however, and defended under the aegis of Catholic Logos theology, it may be the political form most well adapted for securing the common good of modern nations.

We will first explain the nature of government according to the classical and Catholic understanding. Then, we will trace the discarding of this image in the early modern period. Finally, we will suggest how democracy might be disengaged from its current anti-Logos framework and put to good use in a Catholic political order.

I. THE DISCARDED IMAGE: A Logos-Oriented Politics

A. The Classical Cosmos

Edmund Waldstein succinctly explains the classical understanding of law, that discarded image of the cosmos upon which the Catholic Church has largely built its social teaching. Classical Greek thought, as found in Plato and Aristotle, presupposes that there is an “objective good that is knowable by human reason.”^[2] Today the term “objective good” seems to denote a rather vague notion of reason, but it was rather more colorful for the Greeks. In broad terms, it meant nothing less than the total harmonious order of the universe. They saw the “cosmos” as a marvelous hierarchy of things each tending towards the perfection of a unique principle called nature. Nature is the essence of a thing, its ordering principle, the plan or purpose of its birth, unfolding, and consummation. Nature uses its powers to perfect itself in fruitful interaction with other natures. A horse, for example, is born from its mother, grows to maturity by eating grass, propagates its species, and dies: it has fulfilled its nature in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

Man too has a nature struggling to work itself out, and it is a rational nature. Man’s unique identity consists in his ability to know his own objective good and also comprehend something of the order of the cosmos. But there is a problem:

The problem is that there are different powers in the human soul; there are the senses (touch, taste and so one) and then there is reason. The senses know a limited kind of goodness, and from this kind of knowledge come certain passions such as hunger and thirst and lust. Only reason knows the complete good, wherein happiness really lies, and understands it as good.^[3]

In other words, there are competing powers within man, and it is reason’s job to order those powers to man’s true good: man must be educated. Reason must “train the human soul…to help produce a harmony among its different parts….This harmony is called virtue.”^[4]

But Greek virtue was not “moral” in the Kantian sense, a self-actualizing quest for self-mastery. Rather, it presupposed a real participation in the order of the cosmos, an order that not only gives man a static model from which to work out his own perfection. Plato’s world of forms did serve that exemplary function, but in a much more religious sense, the forms were the real source of perfective power. There was a “givenness” about Greek virtue, a sense of being drawn up into a mysterious cosmic dance. As Waldstein explains:

The order of the whole universe is what Charles De Koninck calls “the good of the universe” and “God’s manifestation outside Himself.” Man as the micro-cosmos can reflect this order in his own person through virtue. This is why virtue can be identified with happiness—because virtue is a participation in that order which is the greatest image of the divine beauty and goodness.^[5]

Seen in this light, communion among men is a crucial part of this great order. Since personal virtue is not really individual, but a participation in a cosmic pageant, a virtuous community shows an even greater participation in the cosmic order. This is how Aristotle argues the point:

Even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states.^[6]

St. Thomas Aquinas took up the insights of Plato and Aristotle, and fashioned a Christian notion of the common good. He argued that:

order is what God principally intends in creation: every individual creature reflects some aspect of God’s glory, but it is the order, the harmony, the beauty of their unity, that most perfectly reflects the creator.^[7]

Something in the sum total of perfected beings is also god-like. Waldstein continues:

It is good for man to realize the order of the universe in his own soul but it is more godlike for him to realize it in the state…the community of men reflects God more than an individual man, just as the universe reflects Him more perfectly than any one creature.^[8]

We are finally ready to discuss the role of law. Since the goal of community is to manifest the divine order, law has the principal function of “producing this unity of order, both in the individual soul, and more especially in the community.”^[9] In other words, all law aims at the perfection of man’s nature within the context of a community. It is illegitimate otherwise: “legitimacy on this view does not depend on the ‘consent of the governed’ given through democratic rituals, but rather it depends on the objective good.”^[10]

B. Authority in the Catholic State According to Leo XIII

The discussion must inevitably pass to practical matters, to the forms of government in which this harmonious order can be instantiated. Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclicals provide a coherent Catholic teaching about the nature and forms of political authority, its relation to religious authority, as well as the proper relationship of the citizen to this authority.

It is first to be remarked that Leo is not opposed to any benign form of government in principle:

Catholics, like all other citizens, are free to prefer one form of government to another precisely because no one of these social forms is, in itself, opposed to the principles of sound reason nor to the maxims of Christian doctrine.^[11]

In fact, Leo is largely indifferent to the form or the means by which authority is constituted, so long as the source of authority be rightly conceived:

There is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.^[12]

Leo immediately goes on to explain this right conception of authority:

But, as regards political power, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God, for it finds this clearly testified in the sacred Scriptures and in the monuments of antiquity; besides, no other doctrine can be conceived which is more agreeable to reason or more in accord with the safety of both princes and peoples.^[13]

The pope does not go on to suggest some sort of divine right of political leadership; rather, he makes a metaphysical argument about the nature of political authority: Man cannot find perfection except in society; thus society is part of nature and willed by God. But every association of man needs a ruling authority, or else there will be mere anarchy. No man has in himself the authority to constrain the will of others; that power resides only in God. Thus, all political power comes from heaven, and “it is necessary that those who exercise it should do it as having received it from God.”^[14] In other words, society is one of the instruments God has ordained for the perfection of man’s nature; over and above individual reason, God constitutes social authority as a necessary means for man’s perfection. Authority, in this view, most emphatically does not arise from the will of the people, even if they are the efficient cause of its peculiar shape. Rather, it is from God and for Him.

From this metaphysical principle, it follows that the social organism must acknowledge its source by offering public worship to the true God:

For men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings.^[15]

In fact, Leo calls it a “public crime to act as though there were no God”; it is “one of [government’s] chief duties to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws.”^[16]

Any wholly natural and metaphysically consistent society, therefore, must acknowledge its dependence on God and explicitly enforce the laws of the Church. To do otherwise is to undermine the very nature of human society. In fact, Leo argues that unless the state acknowledges God, its authority will lack any sure stability.^[17] The doctrine of social contract is bound to lead to contempt for authority and an incessant revolutionary spirit. On the contrary, the Catholic doctrine will cause citizens to love and obey their rulers, and rulers to love and serve their citizens.

To summarize traditional Catholic teaching on the nature of political authority: society is the normal means ordained by God for the perfection of men’s souls, and its right ordering puts it in consonance with the rest of the cosmic order. Thus, authority takes its legitimacy from its place in this divine plan. Legitimate authority acknowledges this dependence on God, and orders the state according to the laws of the true religion.

II. LEVIATHAN: Liberty and Authority in Modern Political Thought

What we have described is the Logos-oriented politics of the classical and Catholic tradition. Government is the art of moving men and communities toward their final end in God, who has instituted governments for this very purpose. For government to work, laws must be drawn in accordance with the objective good, citizens must respect legitimate authority, and the true religion must be enshrined.

Now we must consider modern political philosophy. Modernity prides itself on being objective, practical and this-worldly, but as we examine its roots in the early modern period, we will find that it too rests on hidden, theocratic foundations. Its cosmology is, of course, not so rich as the antique, but it nevertheless exists as an a priori, mythological backdrop to modern political thought. The modern predilection for democracy must be understood as the necessary corollary of an erroneous cosmology that divinizes man.

Continuing trends of late medieval nominalism and humanism, the early moderns developed a novel conception of human freedom that, as Waldstein argues, was “disengaged from the good.” This development had several aspects. The first was philosophical. Late medieval nominalists scorned the delicate synthesis by which Thomas and the ancients had knitted nature to the divine, and offered a radically simplified cosmic image: Essences became disconnected from ends, the symphonic cosmos a mundane world of individual objects moved by the arbitrary will of God. Humanism ushered in the next stage when, poring over rediscovered treasures of pagan literature, they imbibed the classical sensibility to the glories of human accomplishment. They began to exalt what they perceived to be the infinite indeterminacy of the human will, its capacity to achieve nearly anything.^[18]

But if humanism retained some affinity with the old virtue tradition, early moderns who followed the Reformation radicalized the concept of freedom, stripping from it any connection to the good. In the emerging view, man’s dignity consists above all in being unimpeded. Freedom is no longer what is accomplished, but the condition of accomplishment: a radical autonomy, the absence of any restraint on the will.

Another aspect was political. As post-reformation nations were raked with internecine religious conflict, it became convenient to argue

that the objective good for man is too hard to know, too difficult to agree about, that in order to avoid the bloodshed of religious wars, it is necessary to limit politics to the care of a bare minimum of peace necessary to allow for the non-violent coexistence of persons with different views of what the true good is.^[19]

This is the thrust of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. ^[20] Whatever theoretical consensus remained to Europeans concerning some common objective good was destroyed in this final political development. From then on, politics decided not to concern itself with religion or any sort of claims about the objective good. Or so it thought. As Michael Hanby has argued in a recent article for First Things, the liberal state makes an implicit metaphysical claim: by denying God any role in the polity, it posits “that a thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent.”^[21] In this denial, modernity effects the apotheosis of man in a new mythology.

This apotheosis has a long history, including those steps discussed above, but took a great leap in the Scientific Revolution. Encouraged by pioneers like Francis Bacon and Galileo, early modern thinkers discarded Aristotelian conceptions of the universe for more empirical methods. Most importantly, they redefined motion, the concept underlying all classical cosmology. In classical physics, motion was a interior, teleological phenomenon directing natures toward their final ends; in modern physics, motion becomes a mere external happening, the blind action of material forces whirling objects around per inane quietum. This divorce from final causes leads to a new way of seeing and relating to the natural world. If the old world functioned organically, as a sort of garden of natures growing in participatory being towards fruition in God, the new world is a machine, a collection of empirical objects jostled here and there in space according to fixed laws of nature.^[22] Man is no exception. His natural activity, deprived of a final end in God, becomes the autonomous working of his own nature. Thus, man “attains his end,” or in the new metaphor “functions most efficiently,” when he enjoys that power most characteristic to him, the law of reason.

On this basis of mechanistic physics, early moderns built an edifice of mechanistic politics. Throwing out the organic metaphors, early moderns conceived the state in terms of a vast mechanism of forces checked and balanced against one another. For example, Hobbes’s systematic political treatise Leviathan takes as its theoretical foundation a mechanistic epistemology. In his account, man is not even really free, but like a floundering ship, is carried this way and that by his passions, which are in turn merely determined responses to external stimuli. Like atoms in the void, men bump into each other constantly in a state of incessant war. The only way to peace is for an absolute sovereign to be invested with all power of coercion. Hobbes’ sovereign stands like a lid on a kettle, tasked with keeping the effervescent passions of his people from boiling over into civil war.

Locke’s views are more pertinent to the discussion of democracy. Like Hobbes, he begins by considering a state of nature. Before society, however, man is also in a state of war, (though endowed with a more respectable rational faculty than Hobbes allows). Society is joined not for moral improvement, but for physical protection against predatory raids, and a guarantee of more economic prosperity than was attainable in the state of nature. Locke’s ethos is that of a very reasonable gentleman, and he often seems to invoke some sort of natural law; but he too ultimately deploys mechanist metaphors to explain the working of his system. Explaining the necessity of majority rule, he quite bluntly appeals to the physical principle of inertia according to which the greater force must always yield to the lesser.^[23] Locke’s state too is an engine, and human beings its cogs. And like an engine in a factory, its end is only the production of material prosperity.^[24]

If Locke and Hobbes gave to modern political thought its theoretical matter, Rousseau composed modernity’s mythological form. Surprisingly, underlying the new rationalist philosophy about man’s nature, there stands a veritable myth: the state of nature. This myth, in its various forms, underlies and legitimizes the political project of each of these thinkers.^[25]

According to Rousseau, men were born into a paradisical state of absolute self-sufficiency and contentment. Far from needing the help of other men, he wandered through warm forests eating plentiful food, hardly meeting other men. He was entirely sustained in a tranquil, dispassionate state by what Rousseau calls pity. This pity prevented him from harming other creatures or his fellow man. Only later, by a series of witless concessions of freedom, did mankind form families, cities, and states. Each step towards civilization further enslaved mankind.

But this makes of man a God, casting him in the form of entirely self-sufficient and undetermined rational agent. As James Kalb observes:

To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot know anything about God, but only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world. In short, you will say that we are God.^[26]

In Pierre Manent’s analysis, this is the dark myth lurking behind the progress of the democratic spirit: yearning for the pseudo-divine state of our ancestors.

What would sum up in the same or a like way our society and its extraordinary or paradoxical character of dis-society? It would be the notion of the state of nature . . . . How can we be interested in the individual in the state of nature as Rousseau describes, eating acorns and quenching his thirst at the first stream? The animal nonetheless interests us since ultimately this individual is each one of us: he is what we want to be. To put it in a nutshell, the state of nature is defined as a state of independence, liberty, and equality. We want to live independent, free, and equal. In this sense, the state of nature forms our horizon.^[27]

By seeking the ordering principle of society in the beginning, rather than in the end, the state of nature hypothesis inverts the traditional political order. For classical politics, it was not so much where man came from, or how he existed in an indeterminate past, but how he ought to be, and what he could be that mattered. Politics concerned itself about perfecting man’s nature by bringing it to some end. Under the new mythology of autonomous mechanism, man springs forth fully formed from the womb of nature, in need of nothing but safety and fuel to keep his machine going. Since man is born perfect, but unfortunately enslaved in society, modern politics strives to attain as much as possible for its citizens this original Edenic state of total autonomy. As a colleague put it, “Democracy is just the story of people trying to get as far away from each other as possible.”

In light of this analysis, it is clear that modernity, for all its vaunted idealism and its supposed autonomy from history or tradition, is built on hidden theocratic foundations; it merely proposes a new mythology in place of an old one. In Thaddeus Kozinski’s words:

It is not that modern liberal democracy has successfully desacralized politics, but rather has changed the locus of sacralization from cosmic order, divine law, and the Church, to the human person, the sacred freedom of individuals to choose their own sacred allegiances.^[28]

Catholics believe a story: the story about man’s original justice and original sin. The first moderns too believe a story: a new narrative of original justice, this time without original sin. In fact, the sin, in many cases, is precisely the entrance into society. Society itself becomes man’s original sin, the act that separates man from a mythical primeval state of innocence and integrity. For Catholics, man can be saved from his enslavement to sin, but only in the next life, and only if he follows the rule of divine and natural law. Modern politics too has a salvation narrative, but it is this-worldly: man can find “salvation” in the free satisfaction of all his (non-predatory) desires in the democratic state. Modern politics tries to guarantee its citizens as large a share of Original Autonomy as circumstances allow, with the ultimate goal of freeing men as entirely as possible.

In this new mythological account, democracy becomes an indispensible tool for the modern religion. All other forms of government in some way deprive individuals of autonomy, by privileging one class over another, or cleaving to accidental historical arrangements. This is why the first moderns worked hard to eradicate all obstacles to the ascent of democratic forms of government. In the French Revolution, for example, the monarchy, aristocracy, guilds, monasteries, in short all the traditional threads of the fabric of society were rent to make way for the novus ordo.

But the paradox of modern liberty is that man is not deified: he feels himself subsumed into a Leviathan. Since his own autonomous choice is his only claim to self-worth, he is faced with a paradox: either consent to association and lose autonomy, or refuse to consent to anything. As Manent argues:

The dilemma of modern liberty—the dilemma of modern liberty as experienced by the modern individual—could then be roughly formulated in the following way: Either I enter into a community, association, membership, and I transform myself into a part of a whole and lose my liberty, or I do not enter . . . and I do not exercise my freedom. In brief, this is the dilemma of modern liberty: either I am not free, or I am not free.^[29]

Man in modern democracy feels himself swallowed in the unrestrained motion of a majority devoid of a rational end. Government looms as the ambivalent referee of an orgy of blind desires, over a nation “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”^[30]

III. TAMING LEVIATHAN: Logos-oriented Democracy

If subsumed into such an anti-Logos modern religion, democracy cannot be reconciled in any way with the Catholic religion. Nevertheless, once these hidden religious foundations are exposed and repudiated, a Catholic is free to weigh democracy as one legitimate form among many others. The encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII clearly teach the conditions in which democracy is a possible form of government for the modern world.

Leo expressly affirms that democracy is a legitimate form of government: “Again, it is not of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of government, if only the Catholic doctrine be maintained as to the origin and exercise of power.”^[31] Under what conditions, then, would democracy be advantageous? I would argue that democracy is a form uniquely suited to the modern world, as long as it is not pure, and avoids the typical attitudes contrary to Catholic teaching. Leo suggests as much here:

Neither is it blameworthy in itself, in any manner, for the people to have a share, greater or less, in the government: for at certain times, and under certain laws, such participation may not only be of benefit to the citizens, but may even be of obligation.^[32]

To see how this might be so, we must turn to Tocqueville. In the introduction to his Democracy in America, Tocqueville argues convincingly that the tendency toward democracy is “the most continuous, the oldest, and the most permanent fact known in history.”^[33] As civilization increases prosperity,

all processes discovered, all needs that arise, all desires that demand satisfaction bring progress toward universal leveling . . . . When one runs through the pages of our history, one finds so to speak no great events in seven hundred years that have not turned to the profit of equality.^[34]

In light of this “providential fact,”^[35] the duty of those who direct modern society is “to instruct democracy,”^[36] not to oppose it. Unfortunately, because traditional society resisted democratic tendencies, democracy erupted by revolution,^[37] rather than after careful circumspection. I agree with this account, and believe that his trenchant comparison of aristocratic and democratic societies sheds light on several advantages of a democratic polity.

First, democratic society “will be less brilliant, less glorious, less strong, perhaps; but the majority of its citizens will enjoy a more prosperous lot.”^[38] Democracy does not have the glorious potential of aristocracy, but it does improve the lot of the common man.

Second, democracy can enliven the individual citizen by giving him political obligations. In his description of American townships, Tocqueville marvels at the energy of townsmen working for the common good together^[39] while remarking that the citizens of aristocratic countries often feels like a colonist in his own land, “indifferent to the destiny of the place that he inhabits.”^[40]

Nevertheless, while bringing democracy into a Catholic state, several dangers must be avoided. Tocqueville envisions a future society that:

regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to it without trouble; in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine and the love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment.^[41]

These observations point to the first difficulty in implementing democracy: the tendency it has to erode respect for authority. Frequent elections, for example, make people think authority does in fact reside in the general will, and does not make for stability and permanence in the legislative body. But this obstacle is not insurmountable, if it is balanced by a strong affirmation of the nature of authority: if the democratic state is ruled by a strong constitution that affirms authority’s origin in God, if it submits itself to the laws of his Church, provides for God’s public worship, and establishes the natural law as the foundation of all law.^[42] Oaths of office must include similar elements. Under such a system of laws, there need be no difficulty in assigning a large share of self-government to the people. Instructed by their laws and the virtuous examples of their leaders, they will seek to build up the kingdom of God by the exercise of their rights. Also, reverence that in aristocracy is attributed to the aristocrat and his family can be transferred to the offices and assemblies themselves. A House or an Executive authority, through a solid history of illustrious leaders, can still command the sort of reverence proper for a God-given authority.

Another difficulty endemic to democracy, even if it establishes respect for its ruling political authority, is the maintenance of the authority of tradition. Care must be taken that the whims of the people do not destroy the religious and cultural foundations of society. There is a democracy of the dead, whose will must be taken into account in elections. Monuments of culture, traditional practices and lore, must not be allowed to be neglected. Of course, there are democratic ways to protect these things: guilds, cultural societies, churches, all can work to maintain tradition as democracy is implemented. In answer to Molnar’s open question, we must affirm with Leo XIII that no society can remain robust without traditional religious foundations.

CONCLUSION

We have shown how democracy, as it exists within the ideological framework given to it by early modern thinkers, cannot be reconciled with Catholic principles. The classical and Catholic worldview holds that no social fabric can be woven without respecting the divine origin of authority and public profession of the true religion. Disengaged from a mechanistic mythology, democracy can be seen in its true light, as a form offering many benefits not found in more aristocratic regimes. Nevertheless, it is prone to self-will, improvidence, and contempt for authority, which must be combated with strong legal and cultural supports to tradition and religion. In the final analysis, the Leonine perspective on democracy can save modern man from the Leviathan, and help him return to the Logos.

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NOTES

^[1] Edmund Waldstein, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” Lecture at the Bratislavske Hanusove Dni, Pistori Palace, Bratislava, 25^th April, 2014, 1.

^[2] Ibid., 3.

^[3] Ibid., 3.

^[4] Ibid., 3.

^[5] Ibid., 4.

^[6] Nichomachean Ethics 1094b, emphasis added.

^[7] Waldstein, 4.

^[8] Ibid., 4.

^[9] Ibid., 5.

^[10] Ibid., 5.

^[11] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Au Milieu des Sollicitudes (1892), 14.

^[12] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Diuturnum Illud (1881), 7.

^[13] Ibid., 8

^[14] Ibid., 11.

^[15] Ibid., 6.

^[16] Leo XII, Immortale Dei (1885), 6.

^[17] See, for example, Immortale Dei, 32: “A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated.”

^[18] Concerning humanism, it is important to note that it began as a deeply Catholic movement. Its unofficial manifesto, Mirandola’s De Hominis Dignitate could seem an idolization of human will. But for Pico, man’s perfection is still deeply connected with God and grace.

^[19] Waldstein, 7-8.

^[20] For more on Locke, see “Lock’s Doctrine of Toleration: A Contract with Nothingness” on this site.

^[21] Michael Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity,” on First Things, Feb. 2015. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity

^[22] It is also ripe for exploitation. Man is no longer the steward of the nature-garden, but a reaper whose powers give him unrestricted domination over the other machines.

^[23] E.g., “For when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. For that which acts any being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it begin necessary to that which is one body to more one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body…” (John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, ed. Tom Crawford [New York: Dover Publications, 2002], 44.)

^[24] Of course he gives lip service to the natural and divine laws, but just as he invokes these laws he limits them explicitly to practical measures ensuring preservation.

^[25] There is no difficulty in the myth coming to light after its philosophical and political expressions. Some orthodox Biblical scholars explain the composition of the Genesis myth by later Hebrew prophets as a process of self-reflection projected back in history: “Because the human author was contemplating an object designed to reflect creation, and because he had a supernatural gift of insight into this object, he was able to offer an account of creation based on his reflections about Israel’s history—he gazed into Israel’s institutions and history and there saw mankind’s beginnings.”(Jeremy Holmes, Genesis 1-11 and Science, in SCI 402 Reading Packet, 84) We imagine Rousseau did the same for modernity.

^[26] James Kalb, quoted in Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013), 229.

^[27] Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics?: A Defense of the Nation State (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2006), 137.

^[28] Private manuscript

^[29] Manent, 119.

^[30] From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

^[31] Libertas Praestantissimum, 44

^[32] Immortale Dei, 36.

^[33] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.

^[34] Ibid., 5.

^[35] Ibid., 6.

^[36] “To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.” (7)

^[37] “Democracy has therefore been abandoned to its savage instincts; it has grown up like those children who, deprived of paternal care, rear themselves in the streets of our towns and know only society’s vices and miseries.” (7)

^[38] Ibid., 9.

^[39] “The inhabitant applies himself to each of the interests of his country as to his very own. He is glorified in the glory of the nation; in the success that it obtains he believes he recognizes his own work, and he is uplifted by it; he rejoices in the general prosperity from which he profits (90).”

^[40] Ibid., 91.

^[41] Ibid., 9.

^[42] As in the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, so rudely violated of late.

by Gregory de Rivière-Blanche

 The following essay rounds out our series on the question of political legitimacy, taking up the question from a somewhat different angle, with the guidance of St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas. —The Editors

The Josias’s ongoing symposium regarding legitimacy has raised several interesting questions about the legitimacy of modern states. One point that has come up repeatedly in the various contributions is whether a Catholic ought to obey an illegitimate government.^[1] In discussing this question, Daniel Lendman has assumed that the illegitimate state is necessarily at variance with the divine will.^[2] For our part, we shall show that, to the contrary, the illegitimate state may be an expression of the divine will as a chastisement sent by God to a sinful people. We suggest, therefore, that the Catholic should consider this point when examining his relationship to an illegitimate government. Continue reading “The Illegitimate State as Chastisement”

by Jeffrey Bond

Today we present the third and final installment of an essay on John Locke’s doctrine of toleration.  The first part can be found here, and the second here.  An earlier version of this essay appeared in A Letter from the Romans, the Newsletter of the Roman Forum and the Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute, February, 1999, No. 4.

PART III

Although Locke initially attempted to identify toleration with the Christian virtue of charity, his doctrine of dogmatic toleration actually rests upon his conviction that human knowledge concerning eternal salvation is wholly subjective. Although Locke’s epistemology is somewhat concealed in his Letter, we know from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding[1] that he is an empiricist. That is to say, Locke denies that man has any innate speculative or practical notions; rather, man depends solely upon sense perception and internal reflection to obtain knowledge. Accordingly, Locke defines knowledge as “the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas” (p. 525). He asserts that his definition of knowledge is sound because it “is evident that the Mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them” (p. 563). Hence, Locke rejects the realistic epistemology of the ancients and the medievals who understood truth as the mind’s conformity to things. For Locke, reason has no intuitive capacity, no immediate grasp of the reality outside of itself; knowledge is therefore merely discursive. Indeed, Locke defines knowledge by the discursive act of the knower rather than by the object known. Man can know the operations of his own mind, but he cannot objectively know things outside of his mind. As a result, man is restricted to engaging in hypothetical explanations of the object before him by means of sense perception and introspection, for man cannot truly know the object itself.

We can understand, then, why Locke belittles the value of speculative knowledge at the beginning of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Since man cannot really grasp things as they are in themselves, he ought to turn his attention to matters that directly affect his life and conduct here and now. After all, Locke believes that the empirical phenomena that the mind encounters through the senses are in themselves worth little or nothing; it is the mind’s activity, according to Locke, which gives meaning to the otherwise meaningless phenomena. Here we see a perfect correspondence between Locke’s epistemology and his famous labor theory of value. In the Second Treatise, Locke stresses again and again that man’s labor gives value to nature which, prior to the addition of human effort, is relatively worthless. Since man can perceive no definite purpose or end in the empirical phenomena of nature, it is his labor, physical or mental, which artificially creates value where there was none before. In the physical realm, man’s labor transforms the meager material of nature into whatever his desires lead him to value; and in the mental realm, the activity of man’s mind brings organization and structure to the phenomena that he cannot really know in themselves. Therefore, just as physical labor is the source and value of real property, so too mental labor creates meaning by transforming the worthless raw materials of the empirical world into man’s own intellectual property, namely, his ideas.

Locke’s doctrine of toleration is a supreme example of man’s creative power with respect to intellectual property. Like the invention of money, which he identifies as the artificial creation most responsible for lifting man out of the poverty of the state of nature, Locke’s doctrine of toleration has no objective ground in the nature of things; and yet this doctrine, once it has been conventionally accepted by others, is capable of transforming the entire world in accordance with his personal vision. For Locke, even the law of non-contradiction, which the ancients and medievals identified as the first principle of the speculative intellect, has no intrinsic worth due to its speculative truth; the only value of the law of non-contradiction, or any other idea, is the labor put into formulating it, and its subsequent acceptance as valuable by others, much as men once agreed to make gold or silver the medium of exchange. Locke himself recognizes that his doctrine of toleration has no intrinsic value; but if men subjectively believe this doctrine to be true or valuable, much as they believe in money, then the doctrine becomes true and valuable for them. Although Locke rejects the possibility of a self-evident truth that can be grasped immediately by the mind, he is willing to operate as if his doctrine of toleration is self-evidently true. Simply put, the power to affect human behavior is more important to Locke than theoretical reasonableness, because man cannot really know whether or not his ideas actually conform to reality. Locke believes that man’s relation to the universe can only be defined in terms of man’s awareness of the ideas of order he constructs in his own mind, for each individual creates for himself the meaning of all empirical phenomena.

Locke’s position would seem to be as follows: since man cannot really obtain objective knowledge of a divine order outside of himself, it makes no sense to attempt to impose or even urge religious uniformity on men, for there is no standpoint outside of ourselves from which religious and political disputes can be settled. Consequently, it would be irrational to impose religious ceremonies and doctrines where man possesses mere opinions, and no real knowledge. For Locke, even the very idea of God is the product of the mind’s activity. In fact, the mind that conceives of God is really God himself. This radical subjectivism, however, is not directly taught by Locke, who apparently wished to avoid the anarchy to which this view would lead if widely embraced. Consider what Locke writes in his Two Tracts on Government about the destructive practical consequences of the collapse of all law: “all authority will vanish from the earth and, the seemly order of affairs being convulsed and the frame of government dissolved, each would be his own Lawmaker and his own God.”[2] While Locke’s view does in effect make each man the measure of all things—his own Lawmaker and his own God—Locke is at pains to conceal the full implications of his doctrine of dogmatic toleration. And yet, because he denies that there are any innate speculative or practical notions, Locke cannot really say that peace and order are objectively preferable to anarchy. He seems to grant implicitly that peace and order are self-evident goods for man, yet his own subjectivism undermines his arbitrary preference for a comfortable life rather than a violent death. Locke can really only say that he himself prefers peace and order to anarchy, although what he means by “peace” and “order” is of course wholly subjective. Apparently Locke spoke his real mind when he asserted at the beginning of the Letter that all claims of orthodoxy are disguised quest for power, for this assertion rightly applies to his own attempt to establish a new orthodoxy, i.e., to remake the world in his own image.

Despite first appearances, the doctrine of toleration is, ironically, an attempt to impose religious uniformity on the world. Locke’s claim to orthodoxy is hidden by his emphasis on toleration, but the toleration Locke preaches is dogmatic, not practical. Thus Locke gives the appearance of neutrality with respect to religious belief, but his position is anything but neutral. Real neutrality would have to allow men to consider every position, including the position that said it was the one and only true position. But this position, which is that of the Catholic Church, cannot be permitted because it directly questions the truth and authority of Locke’s dogmatic toleration. The Catholic Church, then, is the greatest impediment to Locke’s quest for power because the Church embraces dogmatic intolerance. Locke’s plan is to impose religious uniformity on the world by eliminating any real choice with respect to religion. The plan is as follows: as long as each religious group subordinates its doctrine and practices to the one supreme doctrine of toleration, these religious groups are free to differ all they want in their self-confessed subjective beliefs. And despite all their apparent disagreements, they will nevertheless belong to Locke’s universal church of toleration. The Catholic Church will then be eliminated by consensus, for all the other churches will be united against the Catholic Church for rejecting the one supreme dogma. Toleration will then become the ultimate religious good.

If the implications of Locke’s doctrine of toleration appear to be frightening, that is because they are. To see the real meaning of Locke’s doctrine is to see the internal logic of the modern enterprise. Although Locke repeatedly asserts, as do all contemporary Lockeans, that each individual is the measure for himself of religious truth, nevertheless Locke sets forth this very doctrine as somehow true for all men, namely, that God only requires each man to perform those actions and hold those beliefs that he subjectively believes God requires of him. But how, given Locke’s subjectivism, can he claim to know that the Catholic position—which says that each individual is not the measure of religious truth—is wrong? On Locke’s own terms, he must admit that an individual Catholic, who subjectively believes that the Catholic position is true, is as right in his belief as Locke is in his own. The reason Locke hates the Catholic position is that the individual Catholic claims that Catholic beliefs are objectively true and necessary for himself and others. Locke cannot say that the Catholic position is wrong, unless he claims that objectivity in religious matters is in fact possible after all. But because Locke begins by denying that men can resolve political and religious disputes on the basis of the objective merits of the conflicting positions, the best he can do is to try to achieve power over the Catholic position by convincing the world that the doctrine of toleration is in each man’s best interests. In this way, Locke works to create a universal consensus that the doctrine of toleration is sacrosanct. This, of course, requires the absolute suppression of true Catholic doctrine, or the transformation of Catholicism into a subjective sect like every other religious sect.

Recall that Locke said that only those who teach the duty of tolerating all men will be granted the right to toleration by the magistrate. Note that what is prior for Locke is the duty to tolerate others. Only those who will accept the duty of toleration are granted the civil right to be tolerated themselves. This priority that Locke gives to the duty of toleration is mirrored in the way in which men enter into the Lockean social contract. In fact, it is now clear that Locke’s doctrine of toleration is not an addition to the social contract, but the very essence of it. Each man must first renounce his natural right to denounce and punish evil in others before he is granted the civil right to have his life, liberty, and property protected by the magistrate. We can see, then, in the very origin of the social contract, the “logic” of our contemporary situation where our duty to tolerate evil has increasingly eclipsed individual rights, even understood in Lockean terms. When a man enters into a Lockean social contract and accepts the duty to tolerate the subjective opinions and practices of all other men, that man thereby renounces his right to make objective judgments. The apparently irresistible allure of this contract is that those who accept the duty of toleration will likewise have the right to have their own subjective views tolerated by others, as long as these view do not violate the doctrine of toleration which holds the entire contract together. Clearly modern man has not been able to resist Locke’s flattering assumption that each man’s subjective views are sufficient for his happiness as long as he does not insist on their absolute objectivity. Like his forebears in Eden, modern man seems unable to resist the promise of being a God unto himself, even at the price of being a communion of one.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Locke’s doctrine of toleration is that it is wholly negative and without objective content. Like Protestantism, which gave birth to this monster, Locke’s doctrine is only intelligible insofar as it is a rejection of Catholicism. Since an individual’s religious interests cannot be established objectively, the interests of each individual are determined by his freedom to choose those doctrines which he believes will advance his interests. But no one is really free to choose other than Locke’s position. The situation is much like that of the communist elections we were repeatedly told about in grade school: there are many candidates to choose from, but they are all communists. American elections in Lockeland are no different. By convincing men to embrace subjectivity as the pseudo-objective truth, Locke seemingly satisfies the soul’s desire for objective truth while simultaneously emptying that truth of any real content. Thus, man is left adrift in the sea of constantly shifting, subjectively determined interests of all parties to the social contract. Life is reduced to vector forces, and to the vectors go the spoils. In Lockland, objective claims about right and wrong will be rarely made, and even more rarely understood. Since there is no objective knowledge to which men can refer to resolve disputes, there is no real boundary to the magistrate’s authority, or rather, power over men. Thus does the so-called order established by Lockean law become an end in itself. Unlike the ancients and medievals, who understood law to be a means to promote other ends, such as virtue and the salvation of souls, Locke sees only the power of the law, not its reasonableness. And there is no standard external to the magistrate’s will that man can evaluate with his reason. Therefore, the obligation to obey does not depend upon knowledge, but upon power; and the sole foundation of the magistrate’s power is the need to avoid the consequences of anarchy. But one man’s anarchy is another man’s order. Hence, the will of the magistrate becomes the supreme temporal and spiritual power in Lockean society, and in Locke’s church there are conveniently no clergy from whom the magistrate must wrest power.

Although Locke’s imposition of a universal church is achieved indirectly rather than directly, it is all the more powerful for having entered, as it were, through the back door. And because Locke’s doctrine of toleration instills in men a subjectivist habit of mind, it renders them inhuman by eroding their ability and desire to make objective judgments about good and evil. Thus, Locke’s doctrine not only undermines the specifically human act of moral judgment, but it also destroys rationality itself. It is difficult to imagine a doctrine better suited to prepare minds for the reign of the Anti-Christ, the anti-Logos. Certainly Locke’s doctrine, which is contrary to reason, is grounded upon faith alone, where “faith” is understood in the most subjective sense of the word. In fact, Locke’s universal church seeks to replace the three supernatural virtues as follows: faith is reduced to an irrational belief in the social contract, which is really a contract with nothingness; hope is reduced to the vain expectation of endless material comfort; and charity is reduced to the supreme duty of toleration, the practice of which leads to the eternal loss of our very selves.

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NOTES

[1] All quotations from Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are from Nidditch, P., ed., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford University, 1979).

[2] Abrams, P., ed., John Locke: Two Tracts on Government (Cambridge University, 1967), p. 45.

by Jeffrey Bond

Today we present the second installment of an essay on John Locke’s doctrine of toleration.  The first part can be found here.  An earlier version of this essay appeared in A Letter from the Romans, the Newsletter of the Roman Forum and the Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute, February, 1999, No. 4.

PART II

Having briefly reconstructed the orthodox Catholic teaching on toleration, both dogmatic and practical, we are now in a better position to consider Locke’s arguments for toleration in his Letter.  Locke’s professed reason for promoting toleration is the same as that given by proponents of toleration today:  he wishes to establish peace in civil society by putting an end to men persecuting and even killing one another over religious differences.  We see immediately, then, that Locke’s promotion of toleration is consistent with what he identifies as the purpose of the social contract as outlined in his Second Treatise.  Man voluntarily leaves the state of nature and enters into civil society to protect his life, his liberty, and his property from invasion by others.  Locke teaches that the very purpose and justification for civil society consist in this alone:  to ensure a life of comfortable self-preservation.  Thus, Locke defines the commonwealth as “a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests,” and he carefully restricts these civil interests to “life, liberty, health, and indolency of the body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.”  In fact, Locke expressly asserts that the jurisdiction of the magistrate, who in Lockean society possesses the legislative power, “neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls” (p. 172).  Locke rejects not only the Platonic and Aristotelian teaching that politics is the architectonic art the business of which is the care of souls, but also the Catholic Church’s perfection of that teaching, which holds that politics, while remaining autonomous in its own realm, must nevertheless be subordinate to the higher principles revealed by the Catholic Faith.

Having so narrowly limited the business of government to that which pertains to the body alone, it becomes an easy task for Locke to accomplish what he sets forth as his goal in the Letter:

I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.  If this be not done, there can be no end put to the controversies that will be always arising between those that have, or at least pretend to have, on the one side, a concernment for the interest in men’s souls, and, on the other side, a care of the commonwealth (p. 171).

We are not surprised, then, when Locke informs us that, “the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth.  The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable.”  Moreover, Locke asserts that the church and commonwealth “are in their origin, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other” (p. 184).

By insisting that the line between church and state is absolute, Locke attempts to put two traditional notions to rest:  first, that religious purposes are served by civil authority; and second, that civil interests are served by the public support of religion.  In order to undermine this traditional Catholic teaching on the mutual reciprocity between the Church and the state, Locke uses two sets of parallel arguments:  the first set is dependent upon his understanding of religion, which is generically Christian, but specifically Protestant; and the second set is dependent upon Locke’s understanding of the nature of civil society.  Having already defined the commonwealth in such a way as to limit it strictly to matters pertaining to the body, Locke then defines a church in such a way as to limit it strictly to matters pertaining to the soul:

A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such a manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls (p. 175, emphasis added).

As Locke’s subjective language makes clear, his definition is clearly Protestant, emphasizing as it does the private judgment of the church members as to what is and is not acceptable to God.  Furthermore, Locke’s definition of a church emphasizes the freedom to join, not the content of what the church believes.  Note, however, that the freedom Locke grants to individuals to define what is acceptable to God, as well as the freedom to join or leave any church without physical coercion, does not include the freedom to extend their religious concerns into the affairs of the body politic.  Locke insists that civil authority may not be assisted by religion in any way, nor may religion be served by an intervention of the civil authority.  He rejects the idea of legal imposition of religion; instead, he carefully limits the legally permissible scope of religious activity so that conflicts will not arise.  In this way, Locke attempts to establish civil peace by effectively banning religion from the body politic, as if men’s souls were not merely distinguished notionally from their bodies, but were somehow completely separate in reality itself.  By treating the soul and body as abstractions, as if a human being were two distinct things instead of one, Locke is able to make a radical separation in principle between church and state.  In language made familiar to Americans through the First Amendment to the Constitution, Locke insists that the laws may neither establish nor forbid any articles of faith or forms of worship.

There is, of course, a problem with Locke’s insistence on the absolute separation of church and state.  Although he neatly divides reality into two completely distinct worlds, nevertheless man’s civil and religious interests, just as a man’s body and soul, must still live together in the same place.  Clearly, then, some relationship between them must exist, and therefore Locke is compelled to consider more specific rules to govern possible conflicts.  The principle he enunciates is as follows:  the magistrate can forbid anything that endangers the civil interests of the commonwealth, whether it occurs in a church or not.  Thus, whatever the magistrate can lawfully forbid in the public realm he can also forbid in the private realm if it has practical consequences adverse to civil interests.  For example, if it is unlawful to kill infants in secular life, then it can also be forbidden in a church, even if that particular church claims such killing as part of what they believe is owed to God.  Hence, according to Locke, the magistrate is not actually forbidding a religious sacrifice; it is the slaughter of children that is forbidden.  The magistrate, since he cannot concern himself with the good of souls, cannot forbid something because it is a “bad” religious practice, but only because it is a bad political practice.

But what is to be done if the magistrate, while operating within his legitimate authority, violates a man’s religious conscience?  Locke states that anyone is free to break a law that violates his conscience, but he must suffer the punishment for breaking that law.  If, however, the magistrate acts outside of the law, then there is no obligation to obey him.  Locke’s position is thus summarized as follows:  there is no legitimate civil law that has a specifically religious purpose; and the individual has no exemption from legitimate civil law on religious grounds.  There can be no doubt, then, that Locke’s separation of church and state is heavily weighted in favor of the state.  In addition, the state, in principle, makes no distinctions between true and false religion in deciding what religious doctrines it will or will not suppress.  Locke writes the following:

Further, the magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or profession of any speculative opinions in any church, because they have no manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects.  If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does not injury to his neighbor. . . I readily grant that these opinions are false and absurd.  But the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man’s good and person (p. 205).

Locke is apparently willing to tolerate this central Catholic doctrine concerning the Eucharist—even while he ridicules its content—but he refuses to tolerate Catholic opinions in practical matters, as we shall soon see.  The reason for Locke’s intolerance in non-speculative matters becomes clear when he finally admits that the boundaries between the church and the state are not as “fixed and immovable” as he had initially claimed.  He now acknowledges that there is in fact a meeting point between the church and the state:

The good life, in which consists not the least part of religion and true piety, concerns also the civil government; and in it lies the safety both of men’s souls and of the commonwealth.  Moral actions belong, therefore, to the jurisdiction both of the outward and inward court; both of the civil and the domestic governor; I mean both of the magistrate and the conscience.  Here, therefore, is great danger, lest one of these jurisdictions intrench upon the other, and discord arise between the keeper of the public peace and the overseers of souls.  But if what has been already said concerning the limits of both these governments be rightly considered, it will easily remove all difficulty in this matter (pp. 205-206).

While admitting the “great danger” of conflict with respect to the realm of moral actions, Locke is confident that invasions by one jurisdiction into another will be rare, presumably because men in Lockeland will prefer their civil interests to religious ones.  With self-interest having been liberated by means of the narrowing of civil interests to bodily concerns alone, Lockean men can be counted on to choose their own comfortable self-preservation rather than risk the possible loss of life, liberty, and property for the sake of their private religious beliefs.  Therefore, despite Locke’s sudden concern for the “good life,” he is manifestly not reverting to the classical and medieval teaching that promotes virtue for its own sake as the proper political end for man.  After all, Locke has so arranged matters that the state and church have an interest in moral actions for very different reasons.  Lockean morality is not for the sake of virtue or for the salvation of souls, but rather for the sake of preserving property and a pleasant existence.  In sum, civil society has a legitimate interest in morality only insofar as it is concerned with protecting life, liberty, and property, but no further.

Like Hobbes and his followers, who initially banished all traditional moral education in favor of a new “scientific” analysis of humanity, but then rushed to assure us that moral education can be used to restrain the passions their systems have unleashed, Locke, too, finds himself looking to morality to prop up his social contract.  Modern man has every reason to fear this kind of moral education, for our age has seen it all too often in the form of re-education camps, gulags, mental hospitals, and the silencing of those who have embraced traditional morality.  Instead of the objectively good life being the purpose or end of civil society as it was for the ancients and the medievals, Locke seeks to use morality as a means to support his radically limited political ends.  If we keep this in mind, it is easy to understand why and when Locke sets limits to his doctrine of toleration which, in effect, subordinates the church to the state.  For example, because Lockean society is built upon the social contract, Locke is very concerned with men keeping their promises.  He therefore refuses to extend the right of toleration to atheists because their denial of the existence of God undermines civil society:  “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon the atheist.  The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all” (pp. 212-213).  Although in the Second Treatise Locke suggests that enlightened self-interest—without any additional moral support—is sufficient to keep men true to their promises, here, in the Letter, Locke indicates that the social contract itself depends upon some religious belief.

Locke’s social contract, however, does not rely upon just any religious belief.  He seeks to promote only those beliefs that will support, and not challenge, the limited political ends which he has proposed.  Therefore, just as Locke refuses to tolerate atheists for their lack of belief, he is even more determined to suppress Catholicism for having the wrong religious beliefs, namely, those that undermine his doctrine of toleration.  Locke makes his case as follows:  “I say, first, no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate” (p. 210).  Although Locke admits that examples of these kinds of opinions are rare in any church, he identifies another “more secret evil” which is more dangerous to the commonwealth.  This greater danger, Locke explains, is “when Men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative covered over with a specious show of deceitful words, but in effect opposite to the civil right of the community” (pp. 210-211).  For example, although Locke notes that no sect openly teaches that princes may be dethroned by those who differ from them in religion, certain sects, he claims, say the same thing in other words:

What can be the meaning of their asserting that kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms?  It is evident that they thereby arrogate unto themselves the power of deposing kings, because they challenge the power of excommunication, as the peculiar right of their hierarchy.  That dominion is founded in grace is also an assertion by which those that maintain it do plainly lay claim to the possession of all things. . .  I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion (p. 211).

 Although Locke does not mention the Catholic Church by name here, his attack upon certain distinguishing aspects of Catholic doctrine is unmistakable, such as the pope’s authority to excommunicate even kings.  Moreover, in his less famous An Essay on Toleration,[1] Locke writes that Catholics or “any similar group” should not be tolerated because “where they have power, they think themselves bound to deny it to others.”  Catholics, “who owe blind obedience to an infallible pope,” cannot be won over “either by indulgence or severity;” they are “irreconcilable enemies” both in regard to their “principles and interest.”  Catholics, Locke explains, are “like serpents” who can “never be prevailed on by kind usage to lay by their venom” (pp. 95, 96).  Thus, Catholicism ought not to be tolerated because it contains doctrines “absolutely destructive to society” (p. 92).  Locke even goes so far as to imply, by way of comparison to the brutal persecution of Catholics in Japan, that it would be prudent to employ a similar policy of suppression in England.  For although he generally counsels against persecution, since it often engenders compassion and esteem from those of different religions, Locke argues that this will not occur in the case of the persecution of Catholics who “are less apt to be pitied than others, because they receive no other usage than what the cruelty of their own principles and practices are known to deserve.”  After all, Catholics will not “be thought to be punished merely for their consciences” because they “own themselves at the same time the subjects of a foreign enemy prince” (p. 96).  In his Letter, Locke makes this same accusation against those who submit to a “foreign enemy prince,” by which title Locke clearly means the pope, and perhaps even the Prince of Peace, our Lord Himself:

That church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those that enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince.  For by this means the magistrate would give way to the settling of a foreign jurisdiction in his own country, and suffer his own people to be listed, as it were, for soldiers against his own Government.  Nor does the frivolous and fallacious distinction between the court and the church afford any remedy to this inconvenience, especially when both the one and the other are equally subject to the absolute authority of the same person, who has not only power to persuade the members of his church to whatsoever he lists, either as purely religious, or in order thereunto, but can also enjoin it them on pain of eternal fire (p. 212).

Because Catholicism will not and cannot teach Locke’s doctrine of dogmatic toleration, and because Catholics submit to the pope and ultimately to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, Catholicism cannot be granted the right of toleration by the magistrate.  As was evident from the beginning, Catholicism is Locke’s mortal enemy.  Note, however, that Locke rejects the primacy of the pope not on theological or religious grounds, but because the papacy allegedly undermines civil society.  Earlier in the Letter, Locke directly challenges the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession, but his argument is weak in the extreme.  Consider his response to those who would insist that the true church must have a bishop “with ruling authority derived from the very apostles:”

To these I answer:  In the first place, let them show me the edict by which Christ has imposed that law upon his church.  And let not any man think me impertinent, if in a thing of this consequence I require that the terms of that edict be very express and positive; for the promise He has made us [Matthew 18:20], that wheresoever two or three are gathered together in His name, he will be in the midst of them, seems to imply the contrary.  Whether such an assembly want anything necessary to a true church, pray do you consider.  Certain I am that nothing can there be wanting unto the salvation of souls, which is sufficient to our purpose (pp. 176-177, emphasis added).

Certainly the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura is lurking behind Locke’s response, to say nothing of his explicit reliance upon private judgment and individual certitude.  The only support Locke gives for his position is to quote a single passage from Matthew, all the while ignoring the more determinate passage two chapters earlier where our Lord explicitly founds His Church on the Rock which is Peter (Matthew 16:18).  Locke shows little interest in pursuing the all-important question of church authority; and if we consider the context of the passage Locke does cite (Matthew 18:15-20), we see that when our Lord says “wheresoever two or three are gathered in My name,” His words presuppose that the two or three are already in His Church, which Matthew records our Lord as having established two chapters earlier.  In other words, two or three men coming together in His name does not definitively found a church, because Christ established His Church on Peter; but whenever those who are already in His Church gather in His Name, our Lord says He will be with them.

Locke likewise does not pursue the question of how Scripture is to be interpreted with any genuine concern, for he immediately falls back on the subjectivity of all interpretation.  He writes as follows:

But since men are so solicitous about the true church, I would only ask them here, by the way, if it be not more agreeable to the church of Christ to make the conditions of her communion consist in such things, and such things only, as the Holy Spirit has in the Holy Scriptures declared, in express words, to be necessary to salvation; I ask, I say, whether this be not more agreeable to the church of Christ than for men to impose their own inventions and interpretations upon others as if they were of Divine authority, and to establish by ecclesiastical laws, as absolutely necessary to the profession of Christianity, such things as the Holy Scriptures do either not mention or at least do not expressly command?  Whosoever requires those things in order to ecclesiastical communion, which Christ does not require in order to life eternal, he may, perhaps, indeed constitute a society accommodated to his own opinion and his own advantage; but how that can be called the church of Christ which is established upon laws that are not His, and which excludes such persons from its communion as He will one day receive into the Kingdom of Heaven, I understand not (pp. 177-178).

If there is no living authority established by God to interpret even the “express words” of Holy Scripture, then each man logically becomes the ultimate authority for himself.  There is something deeply ironic about the fact that Locke—in the very place where he presents himself as somehow knowing the mind of the Holy Spirit, the true laws of the church of Christ, and who will and who will not be saved—criticizes the pope for allegedly manipulating the church of Christ to accommodate his own opinion and his own advantage.  Finally, Locke shows the disingenuous nature of his inquiry into these fundamental theological matters when he writes at the conclusion of the passage quoted above that this is “not a proper place to inquire into the marks of the true church” (p. 178).  Since Locke began his Letter by setting forth toleration as the chief characteristic mark of the true Church, his comment must be seen as ironic.  At the same time, Locke’s comment points to the very heart of his doctrine of toleration because it indicates that theological debates of this kind are precisely what he wishes to eliminate by convincing men to adopt dogmatic toleration.  All claims to orthodoxy, as Locke has already insisted, are just pretenses to seeking power.  Rather than engage in frivolous and fruitless speculations, then, Locke invites his readers to accept the true church’s sole article of faith, namely, that this is no objective knowledge of a divine order.

(Continued in Part III . . . )

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NOTES

[1] All quotations from Locke’s An Essay on Toleration are from Viano, C., ed., “An Essay on Toleration,” in John Locke: Scritti editi e inediti sulla toleranza (Einaudi, 1961).

In general we consider something to be legitimate when it is operating in accord with the laws and rules which properly govern that thing. In this way, we say that a person acts legitimately when he operates in accord with the laws of the state in which he dwells. In this is perhaps the first meaning of the word. However, states likewise have a legitimacy or illegitimacy by which they must be measured. Since Locke, many have seen that legitimacy as something “derived from the consent of the governed.” Some, such as Max Weber with his notion of “Legitimitätsglaube”, exclude all normative criteria for legitimacy and reduce it to a set of beliefs that a people have about their government.^[1] Such notions, however, are (finally) excluded when one turns to the teachings of the Church summarized well by Pope Saint John XXIII, “Since God made men social by nature, and since no society can hold together unless some one be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every civilized community must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its author.”^[2] Political legitimacy, therefore, must be derived from God.

Continue reading “A Note on the Legitimacy of Governments”

by Jeffrey Bond

Today we conclude our series on the different methods of teaching.  Part I and Part II are available here.
– The Editors

Part III: The Problem of Seminar

The open-ended nature of the seminar paradoxically requires that there be fairly strict guidelines for the teacher using the seminar mode; the teacher using this mode cannot simply rely upon the order of learning proper to the subject matter itself. Indeed, if the seminar teacher were to insist upon following a strict order determined by the subject under study, he would stifle the untutored efforts of the students and thereby undermine the very purpose of the seminar. But if the seminar teacher is not to follow the order intrinsic to the subject itself, how is he to guide the students? What criteria is he to employ?

Once it is recognized that the purpose of seminar is not to resolve to knowledge but rather to reasoned opinion, the guide for both teacher and students must be the text under consideration. We can well understand, then, why Great Book schools that claim that the seminar is the heart of their curriculum must also insist that the real teachers are the books, and not the living instructors who use these books in their classrooms. By this account, a Great Book itself is supposed to provide the definitive standard on how to read it, the discipline to which it belongs, and its ultimate meaning. In a word, the greatness and even the truth of these texts are believed to be somehow “self-authenticating.”

This view of the Great Books is inadequate. It cannot reasonably account for how these books were designated “great” in the first place. To argue that the real teachers are books, and not living men, ignores the fact that someone—and not a book—must have established the canon of Great Books by a standard outside of the books themselves. Here we have a secular version of sola scriptura, the Protestant teaching that the Book of books can enlighten its readers without the need of a living teacher. Quite apart from the fact that the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, which established Scripture’s authority in the first place, has rejected this claim (as does the plain meaning of Holy Scripture itself), we can see that the doctrine of sola scriptura destroys the authority of the very book it seeks to elevate. Sola scriptura implicitly posits private judgment as an authority higher than that of Holy Scripture. Similarly, the Great Book schools that, in effect, make every book a sacred text, proceed as if each chosen book can serve as its own authoritative teacher. If this method were rigorously followed, however, the authoritative measure guiding the reading and selection of Great Books would necessarily be private judgment. The matter could not be otherwise, for if there were no authority or standard beyond that of the text, every reader would be free to draw his own interpretation. And so every man would be his own teacher.

It would be foolish to deny that Great Books are virtually indispensable to liberal education. Yet efforts to educate would be vain were we not to recognize that education is ordered not to books but to truth. Nonetheless, for the purposes of the seminar one can grant, in a certain sense, supremacy to the text. It remains, then, to set forth specific guidelines for seminar, including the proper relationship among teacher, students, text, and truth. Having done so, we must revisit the tutorial and lecture modes and do likewise.

Guidelines for Seminar

Leading a seminar is an art of sorts, for there are certain procedures that, if followed, can produce a thoughtful and, it is hoped, inspiring conversation that promotes habits in the interlocutors requisite for the intellectual life. In order to set forth the steps that the teacher of seminar must follow to obtain this desired end, it is necessary to outline what can be called the “phases” of seminar. It should be recognized from the outset, however, that while we can sketch these phases in rough form, it would be a mistake to pretend to that we can systematize and predict the phases of the seminar as if they were the phases of the moon. Seminar is not a science.

A seminar, like a tutorial, normally begins with the teacher asking a question. Given the fact that a seminar generally deals with an extensive amount of material, and often an entire work, this opening question should be of the sort that directs the conversation to the heart of the text under consideration. The text, like a hard nut, has to be cracked open by the opening question so that students can get to the meat hidden within. A question of this kind is not easily answered, but rather requires an extended conversation, if it is to be answered at all. Indeed, it will often be the case that the interlocutors in the seminar will fail to reach a consensus.

Because the failure to reach consensus can be a source of frustration for students who have been trained to look for simple solutions that can be written down in their notebooks and memorized, the teacher of seminar must repeat from time to time, as does Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, that often the best that can be achieved in a conversation of this sort is a greater awareness of what one does not know. If nothing else, seminar should manifest that the questions addressed by the Great Books are not easily answered, and this realization should move students to a greater sense of humility and wonder. Needless to say, to recognize that these fundamental questions are not easily answered is not to say that they cannot be answered. Through the experience of seminar, the students must come to realize that often one can only take the first dialectical steps in examining a question thoughtfully. To advance beyond this initial inquiry would require more time and a more precise investigation. The meaning of a truly great text will not be exhausted by one or even many discussions.

1. The First Phase

In the first phase of seminar, especially with inexperienced students, one should expect a rather chaotic discussion. Most students, like the character Meno in the Platonic dialogue of the same name, invariably assume that the answers are easier than they really are. Hence students can be expected to be impatient with one another and to ignore the objections raised against their own opinions. In word, they can be expected to seek victory rather than truth. Moreover, rather than honestly weigh the merit of the opposing opinions of their fellow students, most students will seek confirmation of their own positions by looking to the teacher for an official stamp of approval. The teacher of seminar must resist the students’ desire to have everything that is said filtered through him, because his first goal in the first phase is to get the students to talk with one another rather than look to the teacher as judge of each thing that is said. This is no small task, but it is essential if the students are to progress in their ability to converse intelligently with one another. If the teacher in the first phase of seminar actively enters the discussion in a substantive way, the students will inevitably learn to wait passively for answers from the teacher rather than actively to seek answers for themselves.

Here in the first phase the seminar teacher should generally restrict his input to questions and procedural matters. For example, when a student, ignoring what was just said by another student, arbitrarily attempts to move the conversation in a different direction, the teacher should ask that student whether his remarks address what was just said. Similarly, whenever a student fails to address previously expressed opinions contrary to his own, the teacher can ask that student how his own view squares with the contrary opinions which have already been set forth. Moreover, whenever it is clear that a student is criticizing another student’s position according to an inadequate understanding of that position, the teacher can insist that the student first repeat the substance of the position he is criticizing to the satisfaction of the other student before he continues with his critique. These and other techniques must be employed if the students are to learn to listen carefully and to respond thoughtfully to one another.

2. The Second Phase

Once students have taken seriously the need to talk with each other, the seminar can move into the second phase. Whereas the seminar teacher can be content in the first phase with the students presenting unsupported opinions (insofar as the goal is simply to habituate them to speaking with one another), the second phase should be characterized by the expression of opinions grounded in the text. In reality, of course, this second phase will not always be so clearly separated from the first phase. Nevertheless, there is a definite progression in the seminar as the students increasingly begin to examine the text for evidence to support their positions. To encourage this practice, the teacher of seminar need only ask a student who presents an unsupported opinion where he finds evidence for his position in the text. If this is done at the right time and in the right manner, the students will soon follow suit and begin to make this same demand upon each other. As a result, a salutary docility to the mind of the author will begin to direct the conversation along a more fruitful path, as unsupported opinions give way to more thoughtful judgments based upon an analysis of the text.

3. The Third Phase

As students acquire the habit of paying closer attention to the text in their efforts to answer the opening question, they can be expected to become better readers as they prepare for seminar outside of class. As they read, they will ask themselves, “What is the major problem that this text is addressing?” Having considered this question, they will naturally be attentive to the solution the author appears to be proposing, as well as the key steps taken by the author to reach that solution. As students improve in their preparation for seminar, one can expect the conversation to become more focused. Here we can discern in the seminar a third phase characterized by the greater likelihood that the students will reach consensus on the meaning of the text. Although it would be unreasonable to expect to reach conclusions in every seminar, the students can at least be expected to eliminate inadequate interpretations more readily.

In this third phase of seminar, the teacher can feel freer to participate in the conversation in a substantive way, and not simply as an intellectual traffic cop. Here he can sharpen and deepen the discussion by means of his own study of the text. But like a good athletic coach, he must be careful not to push the students beyond their capacity at any given time. The coach himself may well be able to perform a certain action perfectly; but what matters is what the players themselves can achieve. If he hopes to see his players perform well, the coach must assist his players in their labors without doing their work for them. Therefore, as in the first two phases of seminar, the teacher must endeavor to strike a mean between excessive interference, which derails the students’ own efforts, and an extreme laissez-faire approach that promotes intellectual chaos.

The teacher of seminar must also remember that his participation in the give-and-take of seminar must model what he expects from his students. If he is to inspire others to engage in a fruitful dialectical inquiry, he must convey—not only through his words, but most especially through his actions—his willingness to submit his own reasoning to examination by others. Both teacher and students must strive to follow this ideal, which is well expressed by Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias, where he explains his philosophical modus operandi:

And what kind of man am I? One of those who would gladly be refuted if anything I say is not true, and would gladly refute another who says what is not true, but would be no less happy to be refuted myself than to refute, for I consider that a greater benefit, inasmuch as it is a greater boon to be delivered from the worst of evils oneself than to deliver another (458a).

4. The Fourth Phase

It should be noted that the first three phases that we have outlined are all ordered toward the interpretation of the text (even if the first phase is merely preparatory). In these phases the students are concerned with asking themselves what the author is trying to show them. In the fourth phase, which in a certain sense transcends the limitations of seminar, the focus shifts from what the author is saying to whether what the author is saying is true or not. In the first three phases the teacher will find it necessary to remind the students that one cannot judge the veracity of the text until one has first established its meaning. (And this goes hand in hand with the practice of not criticizing the opinion of another student until one has demonstrated that one understands the other’s position.) In the fourth phase, however, if in fact the students have reached a certain consensus on the text, the question naturally follows whether or not what the author is saying is true.

Given the difficulties inherent in the study of the Great Books, it must be understood that many seminars will never reach the fourth phase. And even when they do reach this fourth and final phase, it must be stressed that the end is to have the students discuss whether the agreed upon teaching of the text is true, not to have the teacher dictate to them what the truth is. With this caution in mind, the teacher of seminar should at times push the seminar into the fourth phase, even if the consensus as to what the author is saying is only tentative. For example, the teacher may say, “Let us assume at this point that we have rightly understood what Freud is saying about the nature of mind. Let us now ask ourselves, ‘Is it true?’” While a premature attempt to move into the fourth phase will undermine the habit of submitting to a thoughtful examination of the text, the artificial attempt always to suppress this last and highest phase of the seminar would be equally destructive. In making the decision to move beyond the text, the teacher of seminar must obviously be guided by his own knowledge both of the subject matter and of the degree of comprehension his students have of the text. He must also be guided by the nature of the text in question and the relative importance of confronting the question of truth with respect to a given author.

Not every text, of course, will readily answer to the question, “Is it true?” Of some texts, especially poetic and rhetorical texts, it may be more appropriate to ask, “Is it beautiful?” or “Is it good?” In this context, the teacher of seminar must help the students distinguish between the question “How well does this work of art move us?” and the question “To what end does this work of art move us?” Authors such as Milton and Nietzsche may move us powerfully, and yet we may not be moved towards the Good or the Beautiful.

5. A Final Thought on the Four Phases of Seminar

It needs to be reiterated that a seminar cannot be expected to follow these four phases in strict order. There will generally be a certain overlap among the four phases outlined above, for even experienced students can be expected on occasion to lapse into the first two phases.

Teacher and Text

Our investigation of the phases of seminar has revealed that even here, where one must grant supremacy to the text in a certain sense, the text itself cannot be supreme in the ultimate sense. This is truer still with respect to the tutorial and lecture modes of teaching, because they are expressly ordered toward the truth of things, not books. Indeed, even when a text contains nothing but truth, as is the case with Holy Scripture, there still must be a living authority to explain the truth that the text contains. Books cannot be their own masters. They are instead instruments of the art of teaching and in no way a substitute for a teacher. No object explains, interprets, or validates itself, especially a book. Rather, that which interprets and explains is a mind. It is a telling fact, furthermore, that some of the greatest teachers of mankind, such as Socrates, who rather lived philosophy and thereby led others to it, and Jesus, the Teacher, left us no writings at all. A teacher, then, is a living and right intelligence honed by experience. Such a one should ordinarily have a wide, systematic, and deep reading. But more importantly, he is one who can orally demonstrate, defend, and convey his erudition. Moreover, the teacher must stand somewhere in a durable intellectual tradition of universal and objective worth that recognizes a book’s value from the standpoint of a rational whole or ordered body of perennial truths; that is, a proven and justifiable wisdom that both draws from and exceeds the written work of man, and judges it. For the ground of truth is ultimately to be found in the tale of nature, human reason, and Eternal Reason, which transcends any and all products of the pen.

This having been said, we should acknowledge the proper sense in which it can be said that the teacher subordinates his own mind to a text. After all, it is reasonable to suppose that most living teachers will not possess as deeply and as fully the knowledge of things possessed by the greatest teachers of the past. We are speaking here of men such as Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the other Doctors of the Church. In studying the works of teachers such as these, the living teacher himself must be docile if he is to come to know the truths that he hopes to teach others. Even here, however, in attempting to form his mind according to the truest texts, a teacher in the ordinary course of things is dependent upon the prior direction he himself has received from a living teacher (cf. Acts 8:26-38). For the only reason a man seeks in the first place to form his mind according to a given text is because he has reason to suppose that the text itself conforms to the truth of things in some, if not all matters. But how can he know this without a hearing it from another? This question brings us back to the demonstrated superiority of the tutorial mode of teaching where the text serves as an instrument of the living teacher who can address his students at whatever level he finds them.

Teacher and Students

Our investigation of the modes of teaching has appropriately led us to the paradox of learning and its consequences: to learn something in the natural order, we must already know it in some way. Indeed, how can we come to know a thing unless we stand in some prior relation to it? For if we learn something new and objective, we grasp it; but if we grasp it, we grasp it in the recognition that it means something, or is intelligible to the mind, such as it is. That being the case, it follows that we stand in some prior relation to it. This insight is of capital importance, because it suggests that there is a natural order to the mind and thus an order of knowledge that is in accord with reason and nature. It is this that sets the limits to the whole sphere of teaching and learning.

Now, in general, the student is possessed neither of the experience, wide reading, nor the intellectual whole that is the privilege of the teacher. The student, then, if left to himself, even with ample time, to decipher the works of great authors, presuming he happened to know who they were, would languish, more often than not, in a desultory mix of error and insight dictated by the vagaries of an untutored taste. In fine, while the student must certainly think for himself, more so he must think rightly, which demands guided acquaintance with the deep truths of man’s long and arduous investigation of reality, as well as tested ability to wield them in the service of Truth.

Without the cultivation of the teacher, the student’s mind is a field of wild flowers mixed with, and often choked by, weeds. The furrows and sprouts of genuine knowledge come when the field has been cleared and exposed to the sun, overturned, and irrigated by one who knows his art. Truly, the seeds and tendrils of knowledge are within the student by nature; but they are in need of experience and educational soulcraft in order to mature into the good fruit of learning, as the young vine is in need of the vinedresser. Art and nature work together to achieve the ends to which nature is ordered, but which nature has difficulty in attaining without the human person who is, in respect of nature, both apprentice and master.

However gifted the teacher, and whatever mode of teaching he employs, the acquisition of knowledge and the inculcation of the intellectual and moral habits necessary to the acquisition of that knowledge are ultimately dependent on the receptivity and will of the student. Nevertheless, the teacher, if he provides a good example, can assist the student even in acquiring these habits. In a very real sense, then, teachers themselves must be students of that which they do not know, not only so that they may continue to learn themselves, but also so that they may provide a living model for their students. It bears repeating that teachers must exhibit the habits that they desire to see in their own students.

We see in the Platonic dialogues exemplary imitations of philosophical conversations involving young students who possess the habits we should encourage in our students. The best of these students are Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic, the young Socrates in the Parmenides, and Theaetetus in the dialogue of the same name. Theaetetus, a young man about whom Socrates prophesied great things, is perhaps the best model of all. Theaetetus is said to combine qualities that seemingly defy combination: he is courageous, and yet patient; daring, but docile. Socrates also praises Theaetetus for his sense of wonder, the mark of a philosopher. Most important of all, Theaetetus is willing to slay his own intellectual offspring when he discovers that the opinions to which he has given birth, under the influence of Socratic midwifery, are without the living truth.

If the noble pagans, such as Plato, understood the need for intellectual humility so that those seeking the truth might practice “benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy” (Seventh Letter 344b), then we, as Catholics, must have even greater vigilance concerning the danger of intellectual pride. Scientia inflat, as St. Paul warns us (1 Cor. 8:1). The sole remedy for this grave malady is the divine charity about which St. Paul writes:

Charity is patient, is kind; charity does not envy, is not pretentious, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, is not self-seeking, is not provoked; thinks no evil, does not rejoice over wickedness, but rejoices with the truth; bears with all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13:4-7).