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I. The Political Conquest of the Catholic Mind
One of the defining characteristics of the modern age, and also one of the most subtle, is its subordination of theoretical to practical reason: the tendency, as Francis Bacon put it, to let “the active tendency itself mark and set bounds to the contemplative part.”[1] The inversion and subsequent conflation of theory and practice, and the corresponding reduction of truth to possibility or functional success, has had vast consequences not only in the scientific and technical spheres but in the political sphere as well. The subordination of questions of truth to the political common good is a system requirement for what has come to be known as “liberal public reason,” where “the political common good” turns out to be nothing other than the eternal perpetuation of liberal order itself as the condition of possibility for all other goods permitted to appear within it, such as religious liberty.[2]
This arrangement has long been legitimated by what I have elsewhere called the “civic project of American Christianity,”[3] a project that in its Catholic form—now at least a century and a half old—parallels in the intellectual sphere the sociological assimilation of Catholics into the American mainstream. The “civic project” spans both the theological and philosophical differences historically dividing Protestants and Catholics and the political differences dividing the American left and right.[4] That the flagship journals spawned by this enterprise—Commonweal and America on the one side, First Things on the other—have at least until recently appeared as mirror images of one another is evidence of this underlying unity.[5] Simply put, the “civic project” in its Catholic form is the attempt to harmonize liberal order and Catholicism—whether liberalism be “classically” or “progressively” conceived—by arguing or at least assuming that the former is the highest political expression of the latter.[6] The insinuation that the Founding of America is the inevitable, even providential, outworking of these ancient Catholic principles is more than a little ironic, given the right’s avowed aversion to historicism. The “cunning of history” whereby, in the words of the late Peter Lawler, “the combination of American Lockeanism and American Puritanism/Calvinism produced something like an accidental American Thomism,” surely involves a magic exceeding anything dreamt of by Hegel or Marx.[7]
The strength of this project and the ardor of its devotees explain why American Catholic thought tends overwhelmingly to be political thought, often taking an empirical or sociological rather than a speculative form, even when presented in the guise of history, theology, natural philosophy, or ethical theory. Liberal order, as we shall discuss, has been spectacularly successful in eliminating all theoretical and practical alternatives to itself, establishing itself as the ultimate horizon of thought and its principles as first, even the only possible philosophy. All real—that is to say, public—thought in American life finally is political. The “civic project” makes the principles of this order the ultimus finis of Catholic thinking. It compels its protagonists to stop thinking at the boundary of liberal horizons and to settle for truths that are just “true enough” to undergird this order or to achieve this or that political end within it. The problem is that “true enough” is rarely true enough.[8]
The cost to the Catholic mind has been incalculable. The voluntary limit on how far we are willing to think has become an involuntarily limit on how far we are able to see. The “eclipse of the sense of God and man” that so concerned John Paul II and Benedict XVI and is coextensive with the modern secular—an immanent field of power relations and an ontological tabula rasa that forms the all-encompassing domain within which the drama of history is thought to unfold—casts its shadow within the Church as well as without, depriving us of the light even to recognize our own irreligion.[9] The Christian imagination is thus left bereft in the face of our historical predicament, and the Church often seems to have little more than platitudes, moralistic or therapeutic echoes of the zeitgeist, to offer to a civilization that is rapidly consuming itself.
Robert Reilly’s America on Trial
This project is now dying, though it is unclear what, if anything, will replace it. It is obvious to all but its most trenchant defenders that the “self-evident” truths upon which American order rests are no longer true or evident enough to prevent liberal order from realizing itself in its totalitarian opposite.[10] Among the stalwart devotees to this dying project, but determined nevertheless to press on, is Robert R. Reilly. His book, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, which has been met with great acclaim from the American Catholic right, is an exemplary instance of the intellectual tendencies that I have just described.
Reilly names me, along with Patrick Deneen, as one of the chief prosecutors of the case against the American Founding—though the choice of the “trial” metaphor is his, not mine. His, too, is the book’s presentation of the central question between us. What I regard as a philosophical question about the essence and logic of American liberal order, Reilly regards as a historical question about the Founders’ sources and a psychological question about the sincerity of their intentions. A great deal of incomprehension is generated in the translation from the one conception to the other. Adjudicating the American Founding is at best an ancillary concern of mine, necessitated to a great degree by the insistence of people such as Reilly that an (impossible) return to a more pristine form of the Founding principles would save America from a nihilistic fate and and by their refusal even to consider that this fate might have been set in motion by the revolutionary transformation in metaphysics, theology, and natural philosophy that underlay the Founders’ eighteenth-century articulation.
This difference in framing says something important about the genre of Reilly’s work. The argument of the book is not philosophical but political, though it is not obvious that Reilly grasps the difference. Its primary aim is not really to understand the true essence of American order, the meaning of our moment in history, or even the arguments of his interlocutors. Had understanding been Reilly’s goal, he would have posed a different sort of question. What differentiates the modern age from its predecessors, for example, and how might America exemplify this difference? Is there anything truly novel about the “American experiment”? Alexander Hamilton certainly thought so.[11] What can religion be within American liberal order? Does this order place any structural constraints upon it, and if so, upon what metaphysical and theological basis? Is there any correlation between “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” appealed to by the Declaration and early modern conceptions of law, God, and nature?[12] Do these underlying metaphysical and theological presuppositions have any bearing on the subsequent shape of the American project and American self-understanding? Are there any flaws in this conception, and how might they manifest themselves in the social order? There are many other questions of this kind; Reilly considers none of them. If he were really interested in determining whether recent criticisms have any basis in truth, he would have consulted a broader cross-section of liberalism’s Christian critics—people such as David L. and D. C. Schindler, John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Pierre Manent, Adrian Vermeule, William Cavanaugh, and Stanley Hauerwas, among numerous others (to say nothing of Leo XIII)—to determine whether there is more to this critique than the reductio to Locke and Hobbes that he imputes to Deneen and me. Were he genuinely interested in understanding rather than simply refuting my own line of criticism, he might have consulted my work in natural philosophy and metaphysics to learn more about how I understand the relationship between early modern natural and political philosophy, a relationship that was not lost on seventeenth- and eighteenth century-thinkers themselves.[13] At the very least, he would have actually engaged with the essay that seems to have so provoked him. Reilly announces in his introduction that vindicating the American Founding against the supposed “trial” prosecuted by Deneen and me is a central purpose of the book. The formulation “Deneen and Hanby” appears repeatedly, fusing our distinct arguments into one position of his own creation. And yet he cites me exactly twice: once from a 2015 article for First Things, a second time from my reply to his letter to the editor objecting to that same article. I now wish I had taken the time then to write a less dismissive response to what I thought were his uncomprehending objections. I might have saved us both a lot of trouble.
Though I am flattered that Reilly could work himself into a book-length lather on such a slim basis, a genuine attempt at understanding might have saved him from numerous errors, oversimplifications, and misunderstandings—and even brought some real light to the debate.[14]
He charges me with Hegelianism, a dog whistle guaranteed to elicit the approval of commentators on the American Catholic right who give little evidence of having actually read him. Yet anyone familiar with my thought would know that Hegel plays virtually no part in it (the same can be said for Strauss), and that I am in fact a critic of nineteenth-century historicism, whose emergence in the English-speaking world I take to be partly a function of eighteenth-century mechanical philosophy.[15]
Reilly also imputes to me a simplistic reduction of the Founding to Locke and Hobbes, in order to have something to refute. He treats the Hobbesian dimension of liberalism principally as a question of intent, as if the charge were that the Founders contrived to use Locke as a mask for their Hobbesian designs. Locke rejected Hobbes, leaving ample evidence that he was a “natural law realist” rather than a nominalist, and so “The Founders took Locke to be in the tradition of Hooker” rather than Hobbes. This suffices for Reilly’s purposes. For “the question at issue is not whether [Locke’s] teachings could be put to disparate uses, but rather to what use the Founders put them. What matters is how the Founders understood him and to what purposes they applied their understanding.”[16] Reilly simply disregards the mechanistic philosophy of the era that achieved apotheosis in Newton and the corresponding reconception of reason that would launch the entire “critical project” of modern philosophy as though they had no political relevance, a relevance not lost on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers themselves.[17] (Thus Reilly would probably be surprised to learn that I regard neither the Leviathan, nor the Second Treatise, nor even The Federalist Papers as best expressing the essence of the novus ordo seclorum, but would, if such an award must be given, bestow that honor to Bacon’s New Atlantis.) Failing to comprehend this reconception of nature and reason, Reilly fails to see that the contrasts upon which he builds his entire case—reason vs. will, natural law realism vs. nominalism—are not entirely to the point, or that his appeals to Locke’s theological positivism and moralism restate rather than solve the fundamental problem, which cannot be resolved simply by cataloging Locke’s references to “the judicious Hooker.” He fails to consider also that the Framers’ perception of an urgent need for the new American state to limit itself by dividing and diffusing sovereignty might already attest to the “Hobbesian” absolutization of politics and to the elimination of the Church as a “limiting principle” transcending political order. Nor does he see how the negative rights intended to limit the state actually increase the scope and power of its enforcement.[18]
Once again, Reilly’s is not the modus operandi of a philosopher, but that of a defense attorney. Indeed, his principle for interpreting the Founders precludes any real philosophical analysis. Reilly insists that the meaning of the Founders’ words and deeds is exhausted by what they meant in writing and committing them—neither more nor less. “To understand [the Founders] in a way other than they understood themselves would mean they were in the grip of forces beyond their own comprehension.”[19] This principle is historically naïve and philosophically incoherent; so it is little wonder that Reilly himself does not consistently adhere to it. It should be noted, first of all, that the plausibility of his argument for a natural-law foundation to American order hangs not on the intention and motivation of the Founders’ expressed in the Constitution itself, but on the Declaration of Independence—and thus relies on acceptance of Harry Jaffa’s questionable theory that the Declaration of Independence functions, in Patrick O’Neil’s words, as a kind of “Ur-Constitution,” the ‘why’ to the Constitution’s ‘how.’[20] I have no wish myself to contest this theory—in fact, I am inclined to accept it—but it is necessary to point out that the Constitution’s own silence on the matter and its omission of any reference to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as allegedly undergirding its separation of powers and enumeration of rights makes this unspoken axiom far from self-evident. Reilly’s principle is contradicted historically, moreover, by the discrepancy, apparent even within their own lifetimes, between what the Founders intended and what they created, which leads the eminent historian Gordon S. Wood to suggest that they were in the grip of forces they did not fully comprehend.[21] Reilly’s adherence to this principle is selective. He certainly does not extend it to his opponents; neither does it seem to rule out the “better than they knew” defense of the Founding advanced by John Courtney Murray and his disciples. Rather it seems only to apply to my “worse than they knew” rejoinder. And Reilly’s attempts to transmute “Nature’s God” into the Christian logos or transmute the medieval distinction between spiritual and temporal power into the modern distinction between church and state in anticipation of the liberalism of Locke or Murray are simply historically naïve and anachronistic.
What concerns me at present, however, are the philosophical implications of Reilly’s interpretive principle. If the meaning of every idea is exhausted by the intentions of its thinkers then not only do ideas never derive from others of which we are unaware, but there is also no possibility of them having causal effects unintended by their originators. Since the meaning of every idea would lie self-evidently on its surface, there could be no question of unexamined presuppositions or unanticipated logical implications. It’s a principle that seems to be borrowed straight from Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word,” says the great egg-man, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”[22] Reilly’s principle denies ideas any philosophical meaning independent of an author’s intent and thus precludes any real philosophical analysis, for it leaves nothing left to analyze but historical influences and psychological motivations and intentions: that is, whether the Founders “really meant” what they said about God, freedom, morality, and the rest of it. This is really all that Reilly’s method comes down to—reflecting, perhaps, the Founding generation’s own “whiggish” assumptions about historical causality, and the reduction of English-speaking philosophy to a sort of empirical psychology in the aftermath of Locke and Hume. It is not an approach likely to deepen our understanding, but it is a method well-suited to its task. For Reilly’s aim is not to get to the bottom of things—there can be no bottom of things from his methodological vantage—but to exonerate his client. And this aim guides his framing of the point of contention and his selection and arrangement of the evidence, determining how and what he presents and—perhaps even more importantly—what he does not.
Reilly’s trial gambit raises a question about the identity of the jury. Just who is he trying to convince, and what further end is served if his client goes free? Reilly’s is not an argument designed to win over progressives, Catholic or secular, who openly embrace the historicism he deplores. Nor does it seem to be aimed even at a majority of conservatives, long accustomed to grounding their preference for negative rights and limited government within the closed world of legal positivism and “originalism”—a process that began within the Founders’ own lifetime and is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the state’s self-contradictory attempt at self-limitation.[23] Reilly cannot concede that the myth of the “civic project” has been falsified by events, but he can see that this project is in peril. He worries for its future and for the future of Christians in the public square.” He seems particularly solicitous toward the young (for students influenced by the likes of Deneen and me), worried that “they will feel they no longer have a country they can love and wish to serve” and thus will decline to follow their forebears down the “path of guardianship.”[24] In one inadvertently telling remark, Reilly says that those who “denigrate the Founding” as Deneen and I do “exclude themselves from the public arena by conceding it to their opponents.”[25] And what if our “denigrating” conclusions happen to be true? The implication is that one should stop thinking at the point where understanding the truth ceases to be useful in the “public arena” or risks sacrificing political influence. One could hardly ask for a clearer illustration of the difference between a political and a philosophical argument—or of the high cost of the “civic project.” Nor could one ask for a better explanation of why Fr. Neuhaus’s “Catholic Moment” passed without ever arriving, despite the fact that Catholics are now poised to take the reins of American power in every branch of government. There is no barrier to the advancement of Catholics in American public life provided that Catholic truth is irrelevant to the discharge of their public duties.[26] One is free to believe whatever one likes in America so long as it’s false.
From Reilly’s vantage along the guardian’s path, then, arguments like Deneen’s and mine are “fraught with danger.” “If Christians come to believe that America is congenitally their enemy,” he writes, “they will cease to defend it and join in its destruction for their own reasons.”[27] Of course it is preposterous to think, as Deneen observed the first time Reilly leveled such accusations, that America needs our help in destroying itself.[28] And the line of reasoning that leads from the attempt to understand the truth, to the declaration of enmity, to complicity in the destruction of the country is as illogical as it is calumnious, rather like accusing someone of patricide for admitting that his father is an alcoholic. I have treated this curious, quintessentially American understanding of patriotism elsewhere.[29] It regards America not as a place, but as an idea, and patriotism not as devotion to one’s patria—one’s home, hearth, and kin—but as adherence to a philosophy. If this philosophy happens to be false, then so much the worse for truth.
Just-so Stories: Answers that Miss the Question
Reilly builds his case nonetheless. He mines the legacies of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem in their Christian synthesis, so essential to the subsequent history of the West, to establish the historical and intellectual preconditions without which America would not be. From Athens, the West inherited the ideas of a rational universe governed by a divine intellect, of the primacy of reason in the moral life, of an immutable human nature (and thus of natural law), and of the immortal soul. Jerusalem contributed monotheism, the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and the essential goodness of the world, the imago dei, and salvation history. Christian Rome universalized these truths, when salvation history came to its culmination in Christ: it recognized the inviolability of the human person and de-divinized the world. This made the separation of sacred and secular spheres to be a Christian necessity and eventually led, “by a long road,” to religious freedom, as paradigmatically understood by John Courtney Murray, one of the principal architects of Dignitatis Humanae.[30] The bedrock conditions are now in place from which constitutionalism could develop.
The impressive collection of texts Reilly assembles in support of his claim of continuity is easily the best part of the book. He draws on a plethora of sources from the Middle Ages to argue that essential characteristics of the American Founding thought to be products of the Enlightenment derive in fact from medieval natural law origins: the principle of equality, the rule of law founded in reason, the “dual sovereignty” of the sacred and secular, government by consent of the governed, and the right to resist tyranny. (He says nothing of the sacramental order of reality, reflected in the rites of coronation, that underlay and united the secular and spiritual powers in one ecclesial order.)[31] Reilly then looks to the familiar story of the voluntarism and nominalism that arose in the High Middle Ages, with a view to their political implications. At the foundation of these philosophical developments is the elevation of the will to primacy over the intellect, which annihilates the natural law—rooted in the divine logos and based on human reason—and thus ushers in an era of absolutist thinking foreign to the older tradition: secular in the case of Hobbes, theocratic in the case of Martin Luther, James I, and Robert Filmer. Against this, Reilly employs his method of assembling like-sounding references from diverse authors and citing the Founders’ self-attestations that their universal principles are those of the tradition to establish a genealogy connecting the Americans to their medieval forebears in the natural-law tradition, a lineage that passes from Aristotle and Aquinas to Hooker and Sidney—with cameo appearances by Bellarmine and Suarez—and ultimately to Locke and the Americans. The American Revolution thus appears at the conclusion of this reconstruction not as the radical institution of a new world order, à la the French Revolution, but as a conservative restoration of the Christian natural law tradition.
Those already versed in the mythology of the “civic project” will recognize these as commonplaces in the conservative telling of that mythology. Equally familiar is the cast of villains who shoulder the blame for America’s “fall,” thereby absolving the conservative wing of a critical examination of first principles. German historicism, Darwinism, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson—perennial foils in the ongoing battle against political progressivism—all make their predictable appearance. The story is Whig Catholic history at its finest.[32] At several points, Reilly even implies that Catholic natural law principles are fully realized in the political sphere for the first time in Protestant America, though it takes a few “just-so” stories to pull this off.[33] He equates “Nature’s God” of the Declaration with the “Judeo-Christian God”—which is itself notably a sociological abstraction rather than a theological description—“for the simple reason that there is no other revelation (or cult, if you will) at the base of a culture that supports the Declaration’s principles to the extent that they could have originated within it.”[34] And there was no need to embed specifically Christian principles in the Constitution both because it was necessary for these principles to be “independent of the validity of any particular religious beliefs” and because colonial America was apparently so Christian that the colonists would simply know that the philosophical appeals to Nature’s God on which it rested “were vindicated by and sustained by the God who reveals himself as the divine Logos.”[35] Just so. Why it was necessary for such a deeply Christian nation to transmute its God into a philosophical abstraction belonging to no actual religious tradition and its faith into these ‘independently valid’ philosophical terms, only so that each individual could then translate them back, he does not say.
Still, it might surprise Reilly to learn that I find nothing particularly objectionable about most of these claims, stated at this level of generality. I certainly see nothing in them fatal to my own view. Obviously, the American Founding is an event in a Western and Christian history that includes the discovery of the New World, the Protestant Reformation, the disintegration of Christendom, the English Civil War, and the Scientific Revolution. It could not but be informed by the tradition from which European civilization drew its breath, just as it could not fail to be affected by these transformations. I have never regarded the Founding merely as the incarnation of Lockean philosophy, despite Locke’s obvious influence upon the thought of Jefferson and other Founders. Nor have I regarded Lockean philosophy in quite so reductive and simplistic a fashion as Reilly supposes.[36] The whole of modern political philosophy unfolds in the shadow of Hobbes, and the question of Locke’s literary and philosophical relationship to him is a complex one that does not turn, in my view, either on the simple question of acceptance or rejection or on Locke’s attitude toward absolutism, the natural law, and morality. Certainly, the invocation of Locke’s moralism or his appeal to the law of nature in the Second Treatise is not the objection to my position that Reilly imagines, though in acknowledging these aspects of Locke’s thought it should be noted that the nature and function of “natural law” in his philosophy remains a vexed question among Locke scholars.[37] I have always understood the thought of the Founders as a complex amalgam of Protestant Christianity, Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy, Baconian and Newtonian natural philosophy, and the Renaissance tradition of civic humanism. It is hardly an accident that we have a senate and a capitol, or that the young nation filled its new Rome along the banks of the Potomac with Greek and Roman temples. Nor is it an accident that the Founders did not build in Gothic; this fact alone ought to call into question Reilly’s inordinate stress on the medieval Christian origins of the American Founding. “If any one cultural source lay behind the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century,” Gordon Wood writes, “it was ancient Rome—republican Rome—and the values that flowed from its history.”[38] If anything, Reilly’s account of the Founding’s Christian, natural law origins understates the Founders’ neo-classicism in forming their republican imagination. The warnings of of Cicero, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus against the corrosive effects of luxury and decadence fueled the Founders’ own suspicions of the corrupting effects of “interest”—defined, in Madison’s words, as “the immediate augmentation of property and wealth.”[39] Roman history would also provide the archetypes after which they patterned themselves: Cato, sacrificing his life for his country; Cincinnatus, laying aside his commission to return to his farm.[40] Jefferson hoped, rather romantically, that the yeoman farmers he imagined would populate his empire of liberty would be such high-minded, disinterested men.” “ ‘Ours,’ he informed Crevecoeur in 1787, ‘are the only farmers who can read Homer.’ ”[41] Though the radical liberty advanced by Jefferson and Thomas Paine would contribute to the dissolution of this republican vision even within the Founders’ lifetimes, in their minds it also served as the precondition for any possible realization of that disinterested ideal.[42] “ ‘Interest,’ many of them said, ‘is the greatest tie man one man can have on another’ ”;[43] by contrast, the “classical ideal of disinterestedness was based on independence and liberty. Only autonomous individuals, free of interested ties and paid by no masters, were capable of such virtue.”[44] The demise of this neoclassical vision and the dramatic transformation of the new nation into “a scrambling business society dominated by the pecuniary interests of ordinary people” prior even to the adoption of the Constitution, raises the enduring question of whether the Founders’ republican ideal could survive the corrosive effects of Lockean liberty and its metaphysical underpinnings.[45] That it has not survived is beyond debate.
Reilly’s Whig philosophical history ultimately fails, however, for the same reason that it is superficially plausible, because it is neither philosophy nor history in any rigorous sense. Reilly valorizes ideas like eternal truth, but he never moves beyond assembling similar sounding texts to analyze how these ideas function differently in their disparate literary and philosophical contexts, much less does he enter into philosophical speculation about what God, nature, freedom, reason, law, are.[46] Reilly’s historical naïveté is at least the equal to his philosophical incomprehension and finally inseparable from it. For example, his grand genealogy of the classical and Christian roots of American civilization concludes with the blithe assertion that Christianity requires “the secular”—thus obviously preparing the way for religious freedom and the First Amendment as the realization of that requirement—, while paying no heed to the difference between ancient and modern senses of the term, or to the work of people such as Andrew Willard Jones or John Milbank which should have made such easy elisions impossible.[47] It is therefore unsurprising that the real significance of the early-modern revolution in metaphysics and natural philosophy, of the loss of a sacramental order of reality, and of the Protestant Reformation—ingredients all in the new conception of political order—completely escapes him. In the same way, Reilly’s generic references to “Christianity” and the abstract “Judeo-Christian heritage” conceal the historical fact that “Christianity” and “God” were highly contested terms everywhere in the eighteenth century and especially in colonial America, refuge to a vast assortment of British non-conformists and religious misfits from northern Europe. Perhaps Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God is too invested in contemporary polemics to be a reliable historical guide; nevertheless, it must be conceded to Stewart that the mere existence of a text like Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, a weirdly Spinozistic tome attributed at the time to Ethan Allen—“prophet of Ticonderoga,” “Philosopher of the Green Mountains,” and leader of the Green Mountain Boys—“testifies to the presence in the remotest regions of revolutionary America of modes of thought that have been almost universally regarded as too old, too radical, and too continental to have played a role in the founding of the American republic.”[48] Yet Reilly needn’t have consulted Stewart or the Green Mountain Philosopher. Ben Franklin’s Autobiography would’ve done, or Jefferson’s Bible, which he hoped would “prepare the euthanasia for Platonic Christianity.”[49] Apparently, Jefferson forgot that “Nature’s God” “reveals himself as the divine Logos.”
In extracting the pure principles which [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to them. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites, and the Gamelielites, the Eclectics the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their Logos and Demi-urgos, Aeons and Daemons male and female with a long train of Etc. Etc. Etc. or, shall I say at once, of Nonsense.[50]
History Inside the Great Transformation
Because the Whig historian always sees history tending inevitably toward his own present—historicism for me but not for thee—the past is always perfectly comprehensible to him. Just so, Reilly views this vast swath of philosophy and history from the pre-philosophical Egyptians to the Progressive era from the comfortable vantage of his own untroubled present and its unspoken assumptions. This, presumably, is why he has not really comprehended my position and indeed remade it in the image of his own political preoccupations—that, and the fact that his self-appointed role of defense attorney absolves him of understanding it. He simply does not see what he does not see. And it is why, from my point of view, he consistently poses the wrong questions: “Was the American Founding rooted in the Judeo-Christian heritage and natural law, or was it infused with notions of the radical autonomy and the perfectibility of man and, therefore, inimical to the Christian and natural law conception of reality?”[51] “Was Locke a nominalist and a voluntarist, or was he a natural law realist?”[52] “Were those ‘rights’ ordered to any natural end, or were they autonomous, to be exercised at the will and complete discretion of their possessor? In other words, was the enterprise primarily an exercise of pure will, or was it grounded in reason?”[53] Like his challenge to Deneen and me to “prove that the Founders had a non-teleological or anti-teleological view of nature along the lines of Hobbes,” the questions are empty and beside the point.[54]
Even Hobbes did not simply reject Christianity, though the atheistic implications of his philosophy were immediately sniffed out. He reinvented Christianity as an instrument of his politics. So too did Locke, albeit more subtly, and Jefferson also, with “Nature’s God” and a de-Platonized Jesus forming the two poles of the new enlightened Unitarian faith he prophesied for America’s religious destiny.[55] Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century titans such as Bacon, Newton, and Locke were not simply voluntarists who exalted will over reason.[56] They were also rationalists bent on redefining and regulating reason as the counterpart to the physics of force that was supplanting the Aristotelian physics of form. The result was not a simple rejection of natural law but a transformation of the meaning of both law and nature: so that natural law became the Laws of Nature, which are not exactly the same thing.[57] As Amos Funkenstein once said, the “laws of nature” enjoyed their finest hour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a replacement for the substantial form abolished by the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century.[58] The paradigmatic example is Newton’s laws, which would define the scientific ideal for the English-speaking world deep into the nineteenth century.[59] Final causality was not thereby eliminated, but rather transformed from an immanent quality of substantial form—the “sake” that expresses a thing’s unity, denotes its ontological identity, and grounds the distinction between natural and violent motion—to an extrinsic purpose, a design, extrinsically imposed on extended matter from without by a contriving God.[60] Hobbes will echo this in launching his Leviathan.[61] This extrinsic teleology would persist in British natural theology through William Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises right up to the time of Darwin, and it is still by and large what English-speaking Darwinians like Richard Dawkins take teleology to be when they reject it.[62]
What I have always meant by the “conflation of nature and artifice” is this mechanistic reconception of nature, the theologia naturalis presupposed and implied by it, and the corresponding conflations of contemplation and action, truth and function—not endless self-creation or “the perfectibility of man” as Reilly seems to think, though these mechanistic reductions probably make such fantasies inevitable.[63]
The mechanization of nature and reason commences in earnest in the seventeenth century and underlies the new “science of politics” in a way whose importance is sometimes overlooked. All previous political philosophy accorded some role to human construction in the foundation of the polis, and the idea that the soul is a microcosm of the city is at least as old as Plato. But Hobbes was the first, as far as I know, to fuse the microcosm and the macrocosm into an “artificial man” and to make him into a “Mortall God” endowed with divine attributes of unity, immutability, and indivisibility. He was also the first political theorist to conceive of the “life” of both soul and city as a machine. This “artificial” conception of nature, and a conception of knowledge as construction, underlies an ambition that is every bit as technological as it is political.
Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a pump, and the nerves, but so many strings, and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by its artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, (In Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended.…[64]
The ideal of “knowledge through construction” inherent in the conflation of nature and artifice played an important role in the emerging sense of history as a human artifact and provided enormous impetus, long before the arrival of German historicism or American pragmatism, to “cunning of history” arguments purporting to offer a “science” of providence and a transcendental logic for the outworking of history.[65] John Dewey regarded pragmatism not as one possible school of philosophy, but as the real truth of what thought had really always been.[66] Nevertheless he traces the dawning realization of this truth and his own intellectual patronage to Francis Bacon, whom he regarded as “the real founder of modern thought.”[67] Reilly, as we noted, predictably blames the Whigs’ familiar cast of villains for American decline. “German historicism” is the arch-villain, though Reilly—apparently forgetting that Darwin, Wilson, and Dewey weren’t German—also includes Woodrow Wilson’s replacement of the Founder’s “Newtonian” Constitution with his own “Darwinian” version, and Dewey’s aspiration to “a control of human nature comparable to our control of physical nature.”[68] Dewey’s own recognition of the essentially Baconian character of pragmatism, not to mention his own avowed distrust of German philosophy, suggests that beneath the dichotomy of Newton and Darwin, or classical and “renascent” liberalism, there lies a common ontological substrate.[69]
Early protagonists of the newly mechanized nature did not reject God, at least not explicitly. Rather their program was theologically warranted.[70] As Funkenstein observes, the seventeenth-century drive toward univocity in language and method and toward homogeneity in nature transmuted the question of God’s eternity and ubiquity into a straightforward physical problem, an idea later echoed by Jefferson.[71] Newton would even conclude, remarkably, “that the quantity of the existence of God was eternal, in relation to duration, and infinite in relation to the space in which he is present.”[72] This signifies an utter loss of the analogical difference between God and the world—and a mostly “quantitative” conception of the difference between divine and creaturely attributes—and it marks, for all intents and purposes, an end to the “Platonic” metaphysics of participation in which the doctrine of creation had been explicated and which undergirded both the symbolic cosmos and the sacramental order of the Middle Ages.[73] In consequence of this reduced sense of both God and nature held by the new “secular theologies,” it was much more common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to invoke directly the agency of a “contriving” God in order to explain complex features of the world that seemingly defied mechanical explanation—biological functionality, language, human fellow-feeling and sociality—than it had been in the thirteenth, when a more radical sense of divine transcendence and a metaphysics of participation sustained a robust distinction between primary and secondary causality.[74] Locke, in language that foreshadows Paley’s natural theology, will frequently write this way when he runs up against a difficulty in the Essay, and Jefferson will later echo what had by then become a commonplace way of speaking.[75] The problem is that this sort of theology has a kind of built-in obsolescence. God becomes redundant once experimental reason discovers how the artifact works or once an alternative mechanism such as history or natural selection can be found to account for the artifact’s first assembly.[76] This is one reason why the conservative contrast between the Newtonianism of the Founders and the Darwinism of the Progressives is overdrawn. Mechanism replaces the inherent unity and intelligibility of form with the formalism of law and eliminates the transcendence conferred on things by Platonic and Aristotelian form, effectively erasing the distinction between a transcendent order of being and the order of temporal development. “What things are” is now wholly resolved into how they came to be and how they work. This terminates logically in the conflation of being and history, the linear series of causes and effects that construct the present. Experimental knowledge reconstructs this series and ascertains its regularities. Scientific explanation thus becomes an explanation of what Bacon called the “latent process” by which the present comes to be; shifting attention away from things properly speaking, and toward the processes governing their assembly and interactions.[77] As Hannah Arendt put it, “The shift from the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ implies that the actual objects of knowledge can no longer be things or eternal motions but must be processes, and that the object of science therefore is no longer nature or the universe but the history, the story of the coming into being, of nature or life or the universe.”[78]
The point I wish to emphasize here is that the new science of politics that commenced in the seventeenth century and provided the intellectual underpinnings for the republican revolutions of the eighteenth was neither merely political, nor simply a straightforward rejection of the antecedent Christian tradition. Rather it was one aspect of a radical transformation of that tradition at every level—theological, metaphysical, natural, scientific, ecclesiastical, cultural and sociological—a transformation that cannot be papered over by appeal to similar sounding texts separated by centuries. Reilly simply adopts the perspective one has from inside the transformation, perhaps unconsciously, and then reads the whole tradition from that vantage.
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[1] Bacon, The New Organon, ed. by Lisa Jardine, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), II.4.
[2] I frequently use the term “liberal order” instead of “American Constitutional order” or similar terms because I mean to indicate by it something more comprehensive than the strictly political order founded upon and instituted to protect so-called “natural rights,” something that includes it. Rather I mean to indicate by this phrase both the ontological order—the philosophy of nature—necessarily presupposed and advanced by this conception of politics and also the social form to which it gives rise. Both, as I have argued elsewhere and will explain again below, are essentially “technological.” See Michael Hanby, “Before and After Politics: The Technocratic Fate of Liberal Order,” Political Science Reviewer 43.2 (2020): 511-30; Hanby, “What Comes Next,” New Polity: A Journal of Postliberal Thought 1.3 (November 2020): 77-87.
[3] See Michael Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity,” First Things (February 2015), available at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-
american-christianity.
[4] For a recent article that illustrates precisely this point, and shows the dependence of the left and right iterations of this project on the thought of John Courtney Murray, see Massimo Faggioli, “What Joe Biden (and All American Catholics) Owe Jesuit John Courtney Murray,” America, January 19, 2021, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/01/19/joe-biden-john-courtney-murray-who-was-239757.
[5] I rather doubt whether my 2015 First Things article (see footnote 3, above) that effectively pronounced an end to the traditional First Things project and which apparently helped catalyze Robert Reilly’s defense of American first principles, would have been published prior to the arrival of Rusty Reno as editor—especially given the 1980s controversy, an important precursor to today’s debate, between Fr. Neuhaus and David L. Schindler, dean emeritus at the John Paul II Institute where I now teach. I regard Reno, with whom I share something of a “Yale School” formation in our distant pasts, as a friend. But we do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything, including, probably, both the first principles of the American Founding and the proper response of Catholics to our present political predicament. Indeed, I see his recent piece on “Practical Integralism,” with its focus on policy outcomes, as almost an inversion of my article “For and Against Integralism,” which First Things published in March 2020. Perhaps Reno’s piece is an attempt to advance something of the original First Things project in a new form. But I gratefully regard the willingness of First Things to publish a piece so critical of the assumptions animating its original project, as well as the pieces of Patrick Deneen and other critics of liberalism, as an important acknowledgment that the dramatic changes in America since the 1980s call for a critical re-examination of those principles and commitments. What the outcome of this reassessment may eventually be in terms of the journal’s editorial stance, and whether there is a similar self-examination taking place among the younger generation staffing the traditional media organs of the American Catholic left, I cannot say. See Rusty Reno, “Integralism Practical, not Theoretical,” Theopolis, January 14, 2021, https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/integralism-practical-not-theoretical/; Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” First Things (March 2020), available at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/for-and-against-integralism.
[6] See Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity.”
[7] See Lawler, “Better than They Knew: A Response to Patrick Deneen,” First Things, January 25, 2013, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/01/better-than-they-knew-a-response-to-patrick-deneen.
[8] An example of this can be seen in the debate over same-sex marriage leading up to Obergefell, notable for the speed with which it was “resolved” and for the thoughtlessness that accompanied such a profound and far-reaching decision. Conservative Catholics generally contested this proposed change on the grounds permitted by liberal public reason: that judicial fiat would violate democratic norms and the rightful powers of the legislature, that it would lead to the curtailment of religious freedom, or that it would have negative social consequences. What was most fundamentally at issue, however, was the truth of the human being, the redefinition of the fundamental realities of human life—of man, woman, mother, father, and child—and the presumption of the state to assume authority over the meaning of nature. Having largely failed to recognize this, it is unsurprising that they were then caught flatfooted when, within months, this victory had morphed into the full-blown sexual-orientation and gender-identity revolution we are now undergoing. See Michael Hanby, “The Brave New World After Obergefell,” December, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3501246.
[9] The concept of “irreligion” is from Augusto Del Noce and signifies something worse than atheism, which is still an inverse kind of theology and a form of engagement with God. It indicates the muting of the religious sense and the elimination of God as a real question from the horizon of thought. See Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2014), 132-3.
[10] Del Noce calls this simultaneity of collapse and fulfillment the “suicide of the revolution” in the case of Marxism. For a thorough and profound explanation of why the logic of modern freedom is essentially and necessarily self-subverting, see D. C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2017).
[11] “The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of justices holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided. To this catalogue of circumstances that tend to the amelioration of popular systems of civil government, I shall venture, however novel it may appear to some, to add one more, on a principle which has been made the foundation of an objection to the new Constitution; I mean the Enlargement of the Orbit within which such systems are made to revolve” (Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 9,” in Hamilton, Madison, Jay, The Federalist [New York: Signet, 1961], 72-3).
[12] Reviewers who praise Reilly for having returned the Founders to their proper historical context never seem to have this context in mind. They uniformly distort the debate by repeating Reilly’s own error of artificially separating political philosophy from its necessary basis in natural philosophy. Among the many examples, see D. Q. McInerny, “The Same Adorable Source,” The New Criterion 39.5 (January 2021), available at https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/10/the-same-adorable-source.
[13] See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 80-109.
[14] See Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Patrick Deneen has already defended himself against an earlier version of Reilly’s charge, made in The Claremont Review of Books. Though Deneen’s project and mine are mostly complementary, they are nevertheless quite distinct, despite the tendency of critics like Reilly to lump them together. To avoid this confusion, and to avoid imputing to Patrick my own understanding of the issues, I will let his defense stand on its own. See Deneen, “Corrupting the Youth? A Response to Reilly,” Public Discourse, September 19, 2017, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/09/20087/.
[15] This emergence is particularly apparent in the transition from William Paley to Darwin. See Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 105-249.
[16] Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020), 226.
[17] Consider, for example, Christopher Wren’s late-seventeenth-century draft of the Royal Society charter:
“The Way to so happy a Government, we are sensible is in no matter more facilitated than by the promoting of useful Arts and Sciences, which, upon mature Inspection, are found to be the basis of civil Communities, and free Governments, and which gather multitudes, by an Orphean charm, into Cities, and connect them in Companies, that so, by laying in a Stock, as it were, of several Arts, and Methods of industry, the whole body may be supplied by a mutual Commerce of each others peculiar faculties; and consequently that the various Miseries and toils of this frail Life, may, by the Wealth and Plenty be diffused in just Proportion to every one’s Industry, that is, to every one’s Deserts.”
The text of this draft, given in Stephen Wren’s Parentalia, is cited in Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39.
[18] Bernard Bailyn, whose authority Reilly does recognize, seems to see this paradoxical problem when he writes of the Framers’ desire “to reconcile the need for a powerful, coercive public authority with the preservation of the private liberties for which the Revolution had been fought” (p. 2); their discovery that “absolute power need not be indivisible but can be shared among stages within a state and among branches of government (p. 4); and that the Constitution’s basic proposition was “that power could be created and constrained at the same time” (p. 54) (To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders [New York: Random House, 2003]; see also pp. 1-36, 100-130). For a further critique of the inherent “totalitarianism” of this attempt at self-limitation, see D. C. Schindler, “Liberalism, Religious Freedom, and the Totalitarian Logic of Self-Limitation,” Communio 40.2 (Fall 2013), 577-631. Though I wish ultimately to maintain that only the Church can limit and prevent the absolutization of political order, I recognize that talk of the Church as a “limiting principle” risks an essentially modern and anachronistic conception of politics and its problematic, insofar as it suggests that ecclesial and political order are by nature extrinsic to one another and not mutually interpenetrating and overlapping “spheres” of the one natural and supernatural reality.
[19] Reilly, America on Trial, 249. Reilly is taking sides on one of the more important methodological controversies of twentieth-century American historiography. Gordon S. Wood describes it thus: “I have never thought that one could explain anything fully by referring only to the beliefs of people. In writing the article [“Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution”] I was well aware of the powerful implications of Bernard Bailyn’s introduction to his Pamphlets of the American Revolution, which had just been published in 1965 and which would eventually become The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). As shatteringly important as I knew Bailyn’s work to be, I nevertheless thought it tried to explain the Revolution too much in terms of the professed beliefs of the participants. Thus I wrote the ‘Rhetoric and Reality’ article as a corrective to the idealist tendency I saw in the neo-Whig literature of the 1950s and early 1960s that I believe had climaxed with Bailyn’s stunning work” (Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States [New York: Penguin, 2011], 54; see pp. 1-55). Wood’s own method is interesting because it makes ample space for the “way of ideas” while neither equating their significance with the beliefs of those who held them or succumbing to the “the traditional assumptions of neo-Progressive social history” and what Wood considers its crude “polarities of ideas versus behavior, rhetoric versus reality” (54). While Wood is not a philosopher, his acknowledgment of the causal efficacy of ideas and the importance of broader context for determining their implications leaves room for the kind of philosophical interpretation Reilly disdains. It is not clear whether Reilly is conscious that he is taking sides in a much larger battle over the principles of American historiography, but he does cite Wood (p. 2) so he is presumably aware of the issue.
[20] Patrick M. O'Neil, "The Declaration as Ur-Constitution: The Bizarre Jurisprudential Philosophy of Professor Harry V. Jaffa," Akron Law Review 28.2 (1995): 237-252, available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232682197.pdf. See also Thomas G. West, “Jaffa versus Mansfield: Does America Have a Constitutional or a ‘Declaration of Independence’ Soul?,” Perspectives on Political Science 31.4 (Fall 2002): 235-46.
[21] As Gordon Wood puts it, “The American leaders may have begun their Revolution trying to recover an idealized and vanished Roman republic, but they soon realized that they had unleashed forces that were carrying them and their society much further than they had anticipated. Instead of becoming a new and grand incarnation of ancient Rome, a land of virtuous and contented farmers, America within decades of the Declaration of Independence had become a sprawling, materialistic, and licentious popular democracy unlike any state that had ever existed. Buying and selling things were celebrated as never before, and the antique meaning of virtue was transformed. Ordinary people who know no Latin and had few qualms about disinterestedness began asserting themselves with new vigor in the economy and in politics. Far from sacrificing their private desires for the good of the whole, Americans of the early Republic came to see that the individual’s pursuit of wealth or happiness (the two were now interchangeable) was not only inevitable but justifiable as the only proper basis for a free state” (Wood, The Idea of America, 75).
[22] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 124.
[23] This is evident in the competing conceptions of judicial review in evidence in the Supreme Court case Calder v. Bull (1798) which has remainedan on-going battle, despite the apparent victory of legal positivism. The fundamental question was whether judicial review would be anchored to the Constitution and legislative acts, or whether the judiciary could strike down positive law on the basis of natural law—albeit a natural law that has undergone a “dissolution [...] into the natural rights of the individual—the rights of ‘life, liberty, and estate’—[that has been achieved] through the agency of the Social Compact.” These last words are quoted from the locus classicus on this question, Edwin Corwin, “The Debt of American Constitutional Law to Natural Law Concepts,” Notre Dame Law Review 25.2 (1950): 258-84, at 262, available at https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3789&context=ndlr.
[24] Reilly, American on Trial, 319, 6.
[25] Ibid., 318.
[26] Marc Barnes puts it very well: “This is simply what it means to be a judge within a liberal society — to administrate a justice which is not directly related to truth and falsity, good and evil, but to the past decisions of that same liberal society. A fancy way of putting this is that, within liberal societies, the faculty of judgement is ordered, not towards principles of justice, but towards the will of the sovereign. The judiciary does not make laws, it receives them from legislators, interprets them, and judges particular human actions to be in or out of accord with them. The judge exists within a closed world. The ceiling of her judgment is the political power which makes the laws, whether expressed in the Constitution and past cases, or as pushed by the people and their politicians” (“Judges without Justice: What Liberalism Means for ACB,” New Polity, October 6, 2020, https://newpolity.com/blog/judges-without-justice).
[27] Reilly, America on Trial, 4.
[28] See Deneen, “Corrupting the Youth?” op cit.
[29] Hanby, “What Comes Next.” American patriotism could never ultimately mean the traditional piety toward one’s patria: the “love of peace, and quiet and good tilled earth” that bound the Hobbits to the Shire or the devotion to people and place that forbade Lee from taking up arms against his beloved Virginia. It is doubtful whether such archaic forms of love could ever have been sustained in a relentlessly expansive nation bent upon the continual subjugation of its own continent, but the priority of local attachments over abstract principles was permanently discredited in the United States by the shameful legacy of slavery and the American Civil War and was, in any case, destined to be undermined by the inherent rootlessness of an American populace carried along by the ever-forward thrust of advanced capitalism in the twentieth century. People from nowhere with no real home can have no real place to love. Even now, ask any middle-aged American adult in what parcel of “good tilled earth” he intends to be buried, and there is a good chance he does not know—especially if he belongs to the meritocratic class. This unsettling fact, which is surely unique in the history of the world, is cause for wonder. See Hanby, “What Comes Next,” op cit.
[30] Reilly, America on Trial, 52. For a documentary history of the composition of Dignitatis Humanae and a powerful critique of Murray and the still dominant Murrayite interpretation of its meaning, see David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis Humanae” (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015).
[31] “I have described thirteenth-century France as sacramental and incarnational. What I hope I have made clear is that the secular power and the spiritual power were not operating in different realms. Rather, the spiritual power was a power precisely inasmuch as it operated in the secular world, and the secular power was a power precisely inasmuch as it worked toward a spiritual end. What made them ‘powers’ and not just violence on the secular side or ritual functions or preaching on the spiritual side was the combination of their spiritual legitimacy and their efficacy in the temporal society: both were the Church, clerical and lay, in action. The Church in action both constituted the kingdom and pointed beyond it to the unity of Christendom and, ultimately, of humanity itself” (Andrew Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX [Steubenville: Emmaus Academic Press, 2017], 145-6). A serious appraisal of Jones’ work would reveal the anachronistic character of Reilly’s analysis.
[32] The notion of “Whig history” originates with Herbert Butterfield’s famous 1931 volume, The Whig Interpretation of History. It has come to be a pejorative designation for an anachronistic form of historiography, whether political, scientific, or religious, that views history from the vantage of an “enlightened” present toward which history is thought progressively and inevitably to tend, and that selects its relevant elements on that basis. The term “Whig Thomism” was first coined by Lord Acton, and later appropriated by Michael Novak to describe what we could call the “proto-Enlightenment” or “proto-American” elements in the thought of St. Thomas, abstracted (so I would argue) from the historical and ontological setting that originally made them intelligible. This misreading of St. Thomas is used by the “conservative” devotees of the “civic project” to synthesise Catholicism and liberal order. This inevitably involves the construction of a historical narrative (exemplified here by Reilly)—whose basic elements have become recognizable to anyone familiar with such attempts—that answers to the description of Whig history. See Michael Novak, The Hemisphere of Liberty: A Philosophy of the Americas (Washington: AEI Press, 1992), 107-23 and Novak, “The Return of the Catholic Whig,” First Things (March 1990), available at https://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/03/the-return-of-the-catholic-whig.
[33] See e.g., p. 13: “As John Quincy Adams would later say, their ‘theory of government had been working itself into the mind of man for many ages.’ But the Founding was also something new. What was revolutionary about it was that, for the first time in history, the effort was made to found a regime on these truths, for as Adams remarked, they ‘had never before been adopted by a great nation in practice.” Or p. 52: “The secular is not antithetical to Christianity; it is a product of it. Christianity created the secular. It insists on it.… This was the ultimate basis for the constitutional principle of separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority. By a long road, it eventually led to religious freedom—something that would have been inconceivable unless the political order had been secularized. (Ultimately, it was the basis for the First Amendment.) … Jesus’ words, Lord Acton said, gave to the civil power ‘bounds it had never acknowledged, and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the integration of Freedom.… The new law, the new spirit, the new authority, gave to liberty a meaning and a value it had not possessed in the philosophy or in the constitution of Greece or Rome before the knowledge of the truth that makes us free.’” Or p. 248: “We have emphasized that liberty and constitutional order are not the products of just any conception of the universe, but only one—that of the Judeo-Christian and natural law tradition. And so we come around at last to what this genealogy made possible. The Founders not only declared the inherited principles of human equality, popular sovereignty, the requirement of consent, and the moral right to revolution that we have been following since the Middle Ages, but for the first time in history, instantiated them, put them into practice, producing a constitutional republic that was the product of deliberation and free choice.… The Founders accomplished this in the form of an extended federal republic the likes of which the world had never seen.”
[34] Ibid., 264.
[35] Ibid., 266.
[36] Garry Wills famously denied virtually any Lockean influence upon Jefferson, but Ronald Hamowy and Allen Jayne, among others, pretty much demolish this view. See Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Doubleday, 1978); Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 36.4 (October 1970): 503-23; Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 41-61.
[37] Questions abound concerning both the function and the actual content of the law of nature—which Locke leaves undeveloped in the Second Treatise—as well as its compatibility with the doctrine of the Essay. Peter Laslett, who edited the Cambridge edition of the Two Treatises, writes the following in his long introductory essay to that work. “So sharp here is the contrast between two almost contemporaneous works by the same author that in one passage in Two Treatises, perhaps in a second passage also, Locke uses language on the subject of natural law which seems inconsistent with his own statements about innate ideas in the Essay. Questioning on this point cannot be pressed too far, for we are told that ‘it would be besides my present purpose, to enter here into particulars of the Law of nature, or its measure of punishment, yet, it is certain that there is such a Law, and that too, as intelligible and plain to a rational Creature, and a Studier of that Law, as the positive Laws of Commonwealths, nay possibly plainer’ (II, § 12). It seems that it was always ‘beside his present purpose’ for Locke to demonstrate the existence and content of natural law. He did not do that in his Essay, even in the 2nd edition where the passage in the second book which Tyrrell had complained of was rewritten. He would not do so by bringing out his early Essays on the Law of Nature, which Tyrrell asked him to do in the course of their exchange. As Dr Von Leyden has shown, these earlier essays would not have provided a doctrine of natural law capable of reconciling the theory of knowledge in Locke’s Essay with the ethical doctrine of that work and of Two Treatises. This, it is suggested, may have been one of the reasons why Locke was unwilling to be known as the author of both books.” See Laslett’s “Introduction” in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 81-82, referred to hereafter as Two Treatises. Laslett’s introduction will be cited by page number, Locke’s own text by its internal numbering. For a profound critique of the “impotence” of Locke’s conception of law, see D. C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality, 66-87.
[38] Wood, The Idea of America, 59.
[39] Quoted in Wood, The Idea of America, 140.
[40] Ibid., 57-80.
[41] Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 44.
[42] Wood, The Idea of America, 127-69.
[43] Ibid., 140.
[44] Ibid., 143.
[45] Ibid., 139.
[46] A number of these texts and ideas are not quite so similar as they seem, for example the implicit equation of the medieval doctrine of the two swords, which Reilly calls “dual sovereignty,” and the separation of the church and state, or the comparison of Suarez, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence on pp. 215-17.
[47] See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic Press, 2017).
[48] Stewart notes that what is most striking about the book, what makes it most worthy of his attention, “is its lack of originality.” “From the serenity of his mountain lair, Ethan Allen appears to have rediscovered an infinite, centerless, and eternal universe; a nearly pantheistic deity coeval, coeternal, and coextensive with this unending cosmos; a human body composed of the constant flux and reflux of material particles, a natural world of constant transformation in which nothing is ever truly created or destroyed; and a host of other speculative visions that seem both older and more profound than the best-of-all-possible-worlds of watchmaker Gods and providential blandishments with which deism has long been identified.” Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 14, 15.
[49] Jefferson, “To John Adams” (October 12, 1813), in Merrill D. Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1301-2. Anti-Platonism is something of a theme in Jefferson’s letters. In addition to the letter to Adams, see also “To Peter Carr” (August 10, 1787), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 900-901; “To Benjamin Waterhouse” (June 20, 1822), in Writings, 1458-9.
[50] Jefferson, “To John Adams” (October 12, 1813), in Writings, 1301.
[51] Reilly, America on Trial, 2.
[52] Ibid., 225.
[53] Ibid., 289.
[54] Ibid., 310.
[55] Jefferson famously remarks in his 1822 letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (Writings, 1458-9), “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” Jefferson’s letter to Waterhouse deserves to be read in its entirety.
[56] Jefferson, “To John Trumbull” (February 15, 1789), in Writings, 939-40.
[57] On the provenance of the “Laws of Nature” (plural) in the Founding Fathers, and their distinction from the traditional sense of natural law discussed by Reilly, see the work of the great Newton scholar, I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 108-34.
[58] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 123. After offering a hypothetical definition of bodies as determined quantities of extension that are mobile, impenetrable, capable of exciting sense perception, and subordinate in their motions to certain laws, Newton writes, “That for the existence of these beings it is not necessary that we suppose some unintelligible substance to exist in which as subject there may be an inherent substantial form; extension and an act of the divine will are enough” (“De Gravitatione et Aequipondio et Fluidorum,” in A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall (eds.), Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962], 140).
[59] For more on Newton’s paradigmatic role in defining the British scientific ideal, see Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 85-140.
[60] See Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-85.
[61] “Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal” (Hobbes, Leviathan, praef., 1).
[62] The locus classicus of the genre is William Paley, Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity from the Appearances of Nature (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1854). However, Paley was a devotee of Locke and regularly lectured on him, so there may have been some Lockean inspiration for his argument.
[63] For a succinct and profound account of the modern transformation of the meaning of truth, see Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 57-66. For more on the conflation of contemplation and action (or theory and practice), see Hans Jonas’s essay “The Practical Uses of Theory” in Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 188-210.
[64] Hobbes, Leviathan, praef., 1.
[65] See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 38 ff. The “dismal science” of political economy is in this tradition, and the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the “life cycle” of states—depicted visually (and romantically) in the nineteenth century in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire—probably owes something to it as well. For more on how the new “science of providence” transforms the meaning of providence itself, see the important discussion of Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 202-345.
[66] This pretense to unmask the truth claims of all preceding philosophy merits Dewey a place among Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion.”
[67] Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 28.
[68] Reilly, America on Trial, 325-6. Interestingly, Reilly neglects Dewey’s own criticism of Hegel’s thought as leading to absolutism, which ought to complicate any attempt to lump Dewey and “German historicism” together indiscriminately. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, (London: Forgotten Books), 77-102, 187-213.
[69] For a landmark account of the essentially Newtonian presuppositions of Darwinian theory, mediated to Darwin by the British political-economists, see David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving, 57-139.
[70] In addition to Funkenstein and my own work, see the fascinating work of Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also the magisterial three-volume history of Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[71] See Jefferson, “To John Adams” (August 15, 1820), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1443, discussed below.
[72] The entire passage is worth quoting: “Space is a disposition of being qua being. No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is everywhere, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space it occupies, and whatever is neither everywhere or anywhere does not exist. And hence it follows that space is an effect arising from the first existence of being, because when any being is postulated, space is postulated. And the same may be said of duration: for certainly both are dispositions of being or attributes according to which we denominate the presence and duration of any individual thing” (Newton, “De Gravitatione,” 136).
[73] In describing the matter this way, I am of course assuming that Aristotle and the Christian Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages are, in a fundamental sense, a form of Platonism. See Hanby, No God, No Science?, 49-104. For more on the transmutation of the divine attributes, see Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 3-25; Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-49. For more on the social and political implications of sacramental order see Jones, Before Church and State, 161-2: “The point of this example is that within the sacramental cosmos, every social function had, intrinsic to its very self-identity, elements that we might be inclined to label ‘secular’ and elements we might be inclined to label ‘religious.’ This is not to say that the monarchy or its opponents justified itself with a Christian ideology—such a conception preserves the division between the religious and the secular by simply laying one on top of the other. Within such a conception, this religious ideology could change while the monarchy, for example, retains categorical integrity as itself secular: the Christianity of the monarchy is seen as accidental to its essence as the State. This is the conceptual framework maintained by the proponents of the secularization thesis.... Rather, we must recognize that within a sacramental worldview there is no fundamental conflict between the temporal and the spiritual that needs to be dealt with through an ‘alliance’ of Crown and altar. To the contrary, the spiritual and the temporal are united fundamentally—that is the very definition of a sacrament.”
[74] Funkenstein remarks on the significance of this new theology: “A new and unique approach to matters divine, a secular theology of sorts, emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a short career. It was secular in that it was conceived by laymen for laymen. Galileo and Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, Hobbes and Vico were either not clergymen at all or did not acquire an advanced degree in divinity. They were not professional theologians, and yet they treated theological issues at length. Their theology was secular also in the sense that it was oriented toward the world, ad saeculum. The new sciences and scholarship, they believed, made the traditional modes of theologizing obsolete; a good many professional theologians agreed with them about that. Never before or after were science, philosophy, and theology seen as almost one and the same occupation.” Funkenstein goes on to note that the new theology was neither theoretical in the traditional sense—ordered to contemplation—nor practical, that is, moral, though these thinkers often dealt with moral questions. It is rather that a certain conception of matters divine formed an indispensable part in the new system of natural knowledge. What Funkenstein wrote in 1986 remains true: this is “a fact of fundamental social and cultural importance,” and the definitive work exploring this significance is yet to be written. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 3-9.
[75] See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 2004), II.23.12, III.1.1, III.5.39–III.6.40, IV.10.1. See Jefferson, “To Peter Carr” (August 10, 1787), Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 901-5.
[76] As Funkenstein puts it, “It is clear why a God describable in unequivocal terms, or even given physical features and functions, eventually became all the easier to discard. As a scientific hypothesis, he was later shown to be superfluous, as a being, he was shown to be a mere hypostatization of rational, social, or psychological ideas and images.… Once God regained transparency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and kill” (Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 116).
[77] In the life sciences, this is reflected in the shift in attention from ontogeny—the development of a living organism over the course of its own lifetime—to phylogeny, the relation between generations and the mechanisms by which heritable bits of data are passed between them.
[78] We might reformulate this for the political sphere by saying that the ontological premises of classical liberalism naturally terminate—and have their practical outworking—in progressive or “renascent” liberalism. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 296. See Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-249. On “renascent liberalism,” see John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 61-93.