Catholic Republic, page 4
c. “Today, especially in the United States, evangelical Protestants find themselves reconsidering [emphasis added] the issue of Natural Law. Their interest seems to be occasioned by two things. First, the political success of evangelical Protestantism has made it necessary to frame an appropriate language for addressing civil politics and law. Second, evangelicals find themselves in dialogue with Catholics, with whom they share many common interests in matters of culture and politics—interests that would seem amenable to Natural Law discussion.” Louis Bouyer, “Catholic Moral Theology,” in Principles of Catholic Moral Life, ed. William E. May (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1980).
d. Only upon the final edit of this book, I came across the thought of Fr. Vincent Miceli, who posed the Church’s bette noire, Modernism, as something very, very similar to what I’ve coined Prot-Enlight: “its religious ancestor is the Protestant Reformation; its philosophical parent is the Enlightenment; its political pedigree comes from the French Revolution.” Vincent Miceli, The Antichrist (Harrison, NY: Roman Catholic Books), 133.
e. Admittedly, saying “only,” “all,” or “none” is always a huge commitment. But whenever in this book the reader takes issue with the appearance of these, please recall that the central idea of the Protestant Reformation (“sola scriptura”) did so first.
Citations
1. Undeniably, the primordial form of the republic hails to pre-Christian Greece and Rome. As we will see, the Natural Law underlying such republican elements as local rule and popular morality in Greece and Rome— remarkably well-developed in many ways—proved to need what culminated in Christian Revelation: a more specific reason (logos) and goal (telos) for the republic.
2. Francis, Cardinal George, O.M.I. “A Tale of Two Churches.” Catholic New World, Periodical of the Archdiocese of Chicago, 9/7/14-9/20/14 edition. “About 1,800 years into her often stormy history, this Church found herself as a very small group in a new country in Eastern North America that promised to respect all religions because the State would not be confessional; it would not try to play the role of a religion. This Church knew that it was far from socially acceptable in this new country. One of the reasons the country was established was to protest the king of England’s permitting the public celebration of the Catholic Mass on the soil of the British Empire in the newly conquered Catholic territories of Canada. He had betrayed his coronation oath to combat Catholicism, defined as ‘America’s common enemy,’ and protect Protestantism, bringing the pure religion of the Colonists into danger and giving them the moral right to revolt and reject his rule. Nonetheless, many Catholics in the American colonies thought their life might be better in the new country than under a regime whose ruling class had penalized and persecuted them since the mid-sixteenth century. They made this new country their own and served her loyally. The social history was often contentious, but the State basically kept its promise to protect all religions and not become a rival to them, a fake church. Until recent years.”
3. Kirk, Russell. The Roots of American Order. Intercollegiate Studies Institute Publisher; 2003. Page 230.
4. It’s just another name for what Pope Pius X has called “Modernism, the sum of all heresies.”
5. One brief caveat, before proceeding on to an explication of the ways in which each of these properties was rejected by both Protestantism and the Enlightenment: the Catholic rendition of Natural Law is not the only one in history. While Enlightenment and Protestant thought rejected Natural Law, not everyone else besides the Catholics did. The Jews had their own iteration of the Natural Law, from the days following the Babylonian Exile, at which point Judaism became dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, where it became Hellenized. And the Greeks (who Hellenized those Jews) had several changing conceptions of it, spanning the time from Homer through Alexander the Great. There was a nebulous Homeric-tragic Greek version of it, forerunning Aristotle’s and underpinning some of Aristotle’s basic assumptions about nature. And this Aristotelian version was carried into the young Roman empire, where Romans also formed their own distinctive iteration, in both pagan and later Christian forms. It was that matured Aristotelian iteration of Natural Law that Thomas Aquinas came to modify very slightly, and which went on to become the single aspect of Catholicism most objected to by Enlightenment and Reformation thought. (Thus, one could call Aristotle almost as indispensable for republics as Thomas Aquinas is!) This Catholic rendition of Natural Law is the thing! It is the seat of all earthly republics.
6. Pope Benedict XVI, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, spent much of his career defending the notion that the West’s “dehellenization,” or removal of two of Aristotle’s four causes from nature, by the Reformation, altered the modern view of reality as well as of theology. Pope Benedict states it most simply in the Regensburg Address, where he identifies the Reformation as the first of three moments of dehellenization in the West, for its Enlightenment-styled ontological removal of the formal cause (logos, eidos) and the final cause (telos) of nature. (That is to say, the “second prong” of Catholic Natural Law, nature as intelligible, and also the “third prong,” nature as purpose- oriented.) Pope Benedict’s claim of the Protestant de-naturalizing of the Natural Law of the West was a claim he openly made about their take on the world—not only about theological points like salvation or the sacraments or even God’s attributes. This point is firmed up by Pope Benedict’s identification of the second moment of dehellenization: the Kantian takeover of the European view of nature. While Kant never “took over” English- speaking Europe, John Locke did, to a virtually identical effect. Both Kant and Locke—Protestants themselves and powerful philosophical Protestantizers of Europe—were making claims about ontology, not theology. And both Kant and Locke represented a second step not only of Western dehellenization, but very arguably, a second natural step of Protestantism itself (but this latter point is merely the “cherry on top”). Since I’ve already addressed the Protestant dehellenization of Catholic Natural Law prongs two and three, I might as well tend to prong one. Protestants argue amongst themselves the degree to which man is determined by sin, making him both immoral and unfree. But at the most-simple level, all Protestants believe in a far more sin-deterministic view of man’s day-to-day life than Catholics. Even a specific recourse by Reformers to “Natural Law” proves a radically different thing than the Catholic Natural Law needed in republics for self-rule. For instance: “There remain in man since the fall the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good outward behavior. But so far is this light of nature from being sufficient to bring him to a saving knowledge of God and to true conversion that he is incapable of using it aright even in things natural and civil” (Synod of Dort, 1618). Another instance: “As man is enclosed by the darkness of error, the natural law gives him scarce an inkling of the kind of service which is pleasing to God” (John Calvin).
7. Pope Benedict XVI.
8. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics (EN). Book V makes continual reference to this proposition. In a nearby place in the EN (1141a20-22; see 987b20-27), Aristotle remarks that if man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science. Commenting on this passage, James V. Schall notes that “it suggests that there is a relation between the truth of man and the freedom of man.” (Schall, James V. “The Uniqueness of the Political Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.” http://faculty.georgetown.edu/schallj/WS11BJVS.html.
9. Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), n. 1731: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will, one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our Beatitude.”
10. John Calvin used this term to designate a sense of human will which could not be governed by the intellect such as to turn from sin, even temporarily.
11. Luther, Martin. On the Bondage of the Will. December 1525.
12. This book will continually refer to both Protestantism and Enlightenment thought as rejecting ontological realism, since being is portrayed as unintelligible by both camps.
13. Aristotle. EN. Book V of the Ethics is seen pervasively as standing for the position of Natural Law realism.
14. http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/aquinas-vs-intelligent-design.
15. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Glory of The Lord: a Theological Aesthetics, vol. 4: the Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity. trans. by Brian McNeil. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. Page 396.
16. In some quarters, Protestants claim that the Reformation did not pull away from ontological realism. They allege that sola scriptura restricts its skeptical claims only to what is knowable about theology, not about philosophy or science. But this claim will end up being contradicted both by extrapolations and by the early (Calvin, Luther) and late (Karl Barth) Reformers themselves.
17. Once again: two of four Aristotelian causes were more or less erased by Enlightenment science. We will later see how the Reformation joined the Enlightenment in eradicating these two causes.
18. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Q. 91, A. 2.
19. Bouyer, Louis. Introduction to Spirituality. Christian Classics Publishing: Notre Dame, IN. (Republished in 2013.) Page 11.
20. Aristotle had posed four types of causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) which were accepted by Medieval Catholic thinkers. The Enlightenment removed the most important two of these (formal and final) from the way that modern science proceeds. Afterward, it could no longer be presumed that the natural universe had any goal (telos, or final cause) or intelligibility (formal cause) at all. In fact, the proposition of a natural goal was explicitly rejected by the Enlightenment, which brought about the irony that the “scientific explosion” of the Enlightenment actually produced far less good science than it might have, had it not removed final and formal causation. As mentioned above, Chapter Six will explore this paradox of Enlightenment science.
21. Again, prongs two and three of the Natural Law described in this section correspond closely with the two most important Aristotelian causes, formal and final, which also happen to be those two causes removed from investigation by Enlightenment science and the Protestant Reformation. Formal cause corresponds with the intelligibility (prong two) and final cause corresponds with the teleology (prong three) of nature.
22. The identical goals of each were the demystification, the desacralization, and the democratization of individuals from the “hegemony” of the Catholic Church. Put another way, Protestantism is just Enlightenment thought… except with Christ tacked on. The Reformation jettisoned all the same aspects of the “bygone” Catholic era as the Enlightenment, but unlike the Enlightenment it retained a single item: Christ.
23. So, in sum, the first two chapters of this book cover the first two, out of three, phases in the life cycle of a republic. Chapter One focuses on the first phase, founding, as a subset of Jefferson and his influence, Locke; Chapter Two focuses on the second phase, framing, as a subset of Madison and his influence, Montesquieu.
24. With a remarkably non-partisan look at the jurisprudence of separation of church and state in America, famous legal scholar Philip Hamburger (who does not approach the topic as a Catholic) comes to a remarkably similar conclusion about the mesalliance between American Protestantism and post-Enlightenment secular thought in the 19th century.
25. CCC, n. 2207.
26. We will see this same Prot-Enlight shift from freedom as means to freedom as the end, in Chapter Two. In Chapter Five, we will see how and why each half of Prot-Enlight, for differing reasons, violated the Catholic Natural Law by making economic freedom into the goal itself, replacing family sanctity which it is geared to serve.
27. CCC, n. 2207.
Here, the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
The idea of formulated ‘rights’ comes from Western civilization. Specifically, it comes not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson—as many might assume—but from the Canon law of the Catholic Church.
—Thomas Woods
Chapter 1: Breaking the Old Regime:
The Crypto-Catholicism of the Natural Rights in the Declaration
Today in the United States, and in the West in general, the role of the government has grown intolerably large. The space left for individual rights and for the authority of family, in turn, has shrunk drastically. Such a thing cannot come to pass in a true republic, the form of government that once seemed to describe the United States.
Nowadays, the most accurate way we can refer to our nation is as a “republic-in-name-only.” This term designates nations like ours bearing a tenuous relationship with the Catholic Natural Law, described in the Introduction.
But, as we shall see, even republics-in-name-only, like the United States, claim to affirm individual rights. Given our rights-centered founding, even today’s comparatively lax citizenry is somewhat vigilant, and wouldn’t allow the government to capriciously strip away rights.
Even today’s citizens, asleep at the wheel, would probably notice such an obvious breach. Something a bit more subtle must be at work.
The hidden (“crypto”) Catholicity of those natural rights imagined by the American founders sped the growth of government we see culminating today. Even though those founders created the republic to be far healthier than present-day America, it was nevertheless crypto-Catholic all along. And the appropriation of these Catholic natural rights by the founders set in motion the eventual erosion of those rights.
This first chapter, on the natural rights in the Declaration of Independence, and the next one on the Constitution, will describe how and why the source of these rights (Catholicism) put forth by the founders was hidden in the first place.
But first, we must take a look at which rights have been removed, and what exactly replaced them.
Once we investigate which natural rights were removed and replaced, we will conclude that ours is a republic-in-name-only. It is what is suggested by the term “tyrannical government.” American founders like Thomas Jefferson felt exactly the same about England in the late 18th century, as the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence evidence: “[W]henever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
But, in using language so closely mirroring the Catholic Natural Law, Thomas Jefferson was only borrowing from another, even greater Thomas: Aquinas.
One might accurately say that America ceased to be a true republic because government grew too large, and because the people’s natural rights were taken away and supplanted by false rights. More on this below.
Recall the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Dr. Indiana “Indy” Jones swiftly snatches the booby-trapped gold talisman and replaces its weight on the booby trap with a finely calibrated bag of sand. In this way, he seeks to prevent the talisman from being missed. (Recall how the collapse of the entire structure immediately ensues!)
In a similar fashion, the American government has snatched our talismanic rights and replaced them with idols as worthless as Indy’s bag of sand. But our political and moral situation in America today is unbalanced precisely because when the government removed the people’s natural rights, the substitutes they offered were anything but finely calibrated to appear like those they stole. Unlike Indy’s bag of sand, the false rights replaced by the government were not of sufficiently similar heft to have fooled anyone—and yet they did.
After all, these pseudo-rights proffered by the government turned out to be not only false, but even anti-rights: perfect opposites of what they substituted. One would assume that the American people should have caught on to such cheap fraud!
But we have been utterly duped.
If the Prot-Enlight American founders of the 1760s and 1770s had been candid about the new republic’s secret wiring—which turns out to be unequivocally Catholic—then these anti-rights would never have been placed before the American people!
Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the secret wiring of the American republic was necessarily Catholic, but the young republic’s label was as Protestant as its Colonial authors were. And Protestantism had long before rejected the Catholic Natural Law doctrines that it would eventually come to need in America.
Because the impasse between America’s Catholic wiring and its Protestant label was never resolved, the republic currently functions secularly. In other words, American ambivalence about Catholic Natural Law put the germ into the host. And this gradually secularized society. To function secularly is to see our God-given rights removed. Our rights are not worldly, but rather otherworldly; to treat them as worldly is to take the first step in forfeiting them.
Even in a republic openly wired to the Catholic Natural Law, eventual disintegration is the certain end. Along a wide enough time span, any republic will fail. But America, on account of its false view of rights, seems to be dying prematurely. As James Madison once said, “Liberty may be endangered by abuses of liberty as well as abuses of power.”1 Saint Augustine in City of God reminds us that decline is the eventual fate of all earthly republics.2 But again, this should not happen so soon after the founding, as in America… and certainly not by such obvious counterfeits of natural rights!
