Professor Peter Lawler on a 19th-Century Philosopher
MOUNT BERRY, Georgia, 7 NOV. 2003 (ZENIT).Orestes Brownson believed
that only the Catholic understanding of the relation between reason and
Revelation can make sense of the undeniable truth of America's founding
principles.
So says Peter Augustine Lawler, the Dana Professor of Government at Berry
College and author of several books, including "Aliens in America: The
Strange Truth About Our Souls." He wrote the introduction of the recently
reprinted Brownson classic "The American Republic" (ISI Books).
So says Peter Augustine Lawler, the Dana Professor of Government at Berry
College and author of several books. He wrote the introduction of the
recently reprinted Brownson classic "The American Republic" (ISI Books).
Here, Lawler relayed to ZENIT the thought of the 19th-century Catholic
philosopher and convert.
Q: Who was Orestes Brownson and why did he become a Catholic?
Lawler: Orestes Brownson [1803-1876] spent the first half of his life as
an ardent seeker of religious truth. He was a Presbyterian, a Unitarian
minister, a secular religious socialist, a humanitarian political activist
and a leader in the American Transcendentalist movement of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Because of his turn to conservative
politics and the Catholic faith, Brownson has been expunged from most
histories of Transcendentalism.
In the 1840s, he finally turned to orthodox Christian theology. He
abandoned Transcendentalist pantheism with his discovery that belief in
supernatural revelation and creation is not incompatible with human
reason, and that the modern impulse to pantheism, in fact, places human
feelings or sentiments above the rational nature that really constitutes
the human personality.
Brownson was received into the Catholic Church in 1844 and spent the rest
of his life as a relentless and contentious defender of both the truth of
the Catholic faith and its place in a republican America where human
beings could fulfill their natural perfections as rational, political and
created beings.
Q: Some say Brownson's "The American Republic" is the second best book
written about America, after Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in
America." Why is that?
Lawler: Tocqueville's book, written as a reflection on his visit to
America in the 1830s, is rightly viewed as the best book ever written on
America and the best book ever written on democracy.
Seeing America from a French, aristocratic and Catholic background,
Tocqueville presented himself as a friendly critic of democracy. He showed
how the Americans, sometimes in spite of themselves, managed to do so well
in reconciling the democratic principle of equality with the spirit of
liberty and the spirit of Christianity.
The Americans were the largely unwitting beneficiaries of certain
aristocratic inheritances that moderated their democratic extremism, the
most important of which was Christianity.
Tocqueville also made clear that without such moderation, the progress of
democracy might turn against human individuality itself. Like Brownson, he
believed that American Protestantism was an unstable compromise between
transcendent religious authority and the reduction of faith to merely a
matter of private judgment or subjective experience.
He predicted that the future would bring either a renewal of Catholicism
in the service of human liberty or some liberty-negating version of
pantheism, which would be nothing but an edifying or sentimental version
of atheistic materialism.
Two signs of the greatness of Tocqueville's book is that it understands
America better than she understands herself and that it is in many ways
far more true today than when it was written.
Brownson's book, published in 1866, does not match Tocqueville's in either
literary style or political astuteness. But through his own wide learning,
his Catholic faith and his rejection of the selfish willfulness of modern
philosophy in favor of the realism associated with St. Thomas Aquinas,
Brownson was also able to be a friendly critic of America from a
perspective that transcends fundamentally the characteristic prejudices of
modern democracy.
Like Tocqueville, Brownson sees that the political forms of aristocracy
and monarchy, although legitimate in certain times and places, are neither
possible nor desirable for his nation, but he adds that the aristocratic
qualities of the South are indispensable to balance the sentimental
humanitarianism
a
democratic, virtually pantheistic excess
of
the North.
He also explains far more clearly than even Tocqueville why the American
Constitution cannot be defended coherently according to the theory of the
Constitution's framers. Brownson first had the thought made famous by the
American John Courtney Murray that only from the perspective of Catholic
realism can we explain why those framers built better than they knew, why
their remarkable practical accomplishments were far superior to their thin
or "social contract" theory.
Q: What was Brownson's objection to the "social contract" understanding of
the American Constitution?
Lawler: The Jeffersonian view, according to Brownson, is that government
has no natural or divine foundation. It originates "in convention"; the
source of its authority is purely human and the foundation of obedience is
the enlightened self-interest of the individuals who consent to that
authority. The Jeffersonian view is inadequate because government needs
more than unfettered egoism to sustain dutiful citizens.
The philosophy of the American founding, Brownson contended, is basically
atheistic, and for him any theory of "political atheism" suggests that
there is no real check on the human rule, that there is no real
distinction between republican and despotic government. For every human
being to view himself as irresponsibly and personally sovereign is as
despotic as for a king or emperor to view himself that way.
And by the time Brownson wrote "The American Republic," the
state-of-nature theory of John Locke had become incredible; the
philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau had made it clear that it is impossible
really to conceive of enlightened, selfish and asocial beings inventing
government out of nothing.
Brownson concluded that Americans think both falsely and detrimentally
about liberty when they believe that the Constitution is their own
creature to be manipulated at will.
Q: Why did Brownson think that America's "providential" or unwritten
constitution is more fundamental than her written Constitution?
Lawler: The unwritten or providential constitution
what we have been given and cannot understand as our willful product
is
properly constitutive or organic.
The written constitution is merely legislative; only a people who are
already constituted can lay down the law. An unwritten constitution is
always the precondition for a written constitution, and it sets limits to
what the written constitution can reasonably accomplish.
What the American founders were given by nature and tradition included the
republican form of government from Rome, science and art from Greece,
British political institutions and the Christian truth about the rights of
human beings
the rights of beings who are both part of and transcend by their
natures a particular political community.
The mysterious gift of the unwritten constitution
its
providential origin
is
what inspires the loyalty of citizens that is rooted in much more than
consent. By denying the reality and goodness of what we have been given,
the modern or contractual spirit, according to Brownson, is opposed above
all to the high and indispensable political virtue of loyalty.
Brownson concludes that it is providential in more than one sense that the
American founders could build better than their theory because they were
more constrained by their largely Christian tradition than they knew. It
would be the height of ingratitude for Catholic Americans to ridicule
their nation's founders, and any correction they offer to the founders'
thought is with the intention of providing a further foundation for their
remarkable accomplishments.
Q: Why did Brownson think the Declaration of Independence's fundamental
American truth that all men are created equal depends on the providential
inheritance of Catholic thought?
Lawler: Brownson thought that all human beings have equal rights as men,
and no human being has the right to govern another. That is because "man
is never absolutely on his own, but always and everywhere belongs to his
Creator." Our acknowledgment of our dependence as creatures
the
very opposite of the Lockean principle of self-ownership
that is the true foundation of human equality.
All governments that truly protect rights depend on the assumption that
the human being is not God and all despotism originates in the error or
sin that he is. So only the Catholic understanding of the relation between
reason and Revelation, or nature and the Creator, can make sense of the
undeniable truth of America's founding principles.
Because revelation is needed to complete reason
or
illuminate the most reasonable account of the origin and perpetuation of
all things
only something like Thomism can see clearly and so protect adequately the
proper basis of our freedom of thought.
Q: Why did Brownson think that America, properly understood, is
particularly ready for Catholic instruction?
Lawler: The Catholic Church's mission of evangelization is neither
supported nor impeded by American government and the Church has full
freedom to wield political influence through persuasion. In one sense,
Brownson wrote, "The American state recognizes only the Catholic
religion," because her [the U.S.'] Constitution and laws are free from the
peculiarities of sectarianism.
Americans are ready to see that true religion must be catholic, that is,
universal. The proper view of the American understanding of liberty
reflects openness to the truth about God being available to us all. Thomas
Jefferson worried mainly about "religious tyranny," the use of political
authority to impose religious conformity. But his solution to that form of
tyranny tended to be another, the imposition of the thoughtless
indifferentism of Unitarianism.
Brownson thought that, providentially, America opposed both forms of
religious tyranny. Reason leads the mind in the direction of catholic or
universal truth, the truth about human liberty and dignity under God. The
power and charm of Brownson's writing comes from his unflinching devotion
to that truth. ZE03110722
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