Catholic Republic, page 6
As will be shown below, only Catholic teachings can truly affirm the right of revolution—through Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of the Aristotelian Natural Law tradition. The Catholic tradition following Aquinas taught that all just revolutions are based upon violations of life, liberty, and property.
The main point of this chapter is that neither half of Prot-Enlight should have taken credit for the American Revolution. One would need to affirm the three prongs of the Catholic Natural Law (described in the Introduction) to do that!
Excepting only one Catholic founder, Charles Carroll, it was these American Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers—not Catholics—who wrote, ratified, and set into motion the Declaration of Independence. And the Declaration is of course famous for its beautiful articulation of natural rights. This means that the founders contradicted their Prot-Enlight philosophy: they borrowed from and appropriated their sworn enemy the Catholic Church, and its Natural Law, which they refuted most ardently in other places.
It turns out, all these natural rights require Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of nature itself. Ironic!
Thomas operates on the notion that government exercises God-given, natural—not just socially contracted—control over its citizens. But for Thomas, that governmental control was to be heavily restrained. Thomas strongly viewed the family as the primary unit of society. He believed that the father and not the state holds guardianship of the son.29 In other words, the father, not the government, is responsible to provide for his family.
On that basis alone, Thomas must be seen as one of the very earliest advocates of limited government. But the evidence gets even more convincing.
In addition to this, Thomas beat modern libertarians to the punch by asserting that not all virtue should be required by the state, nor all vice prohibited. Also, the state’s power should be limited to creating state police and enforcing martial powers.30 Family and local communities should take charge of the rest of life’s activities. The popular misconception of a “big-government Thomas Aquinas”—which came about in the last century31—is a complete and utter perversion of the truth.
To the contrary, Thomas regarded self-reliance and private property ownership as vital to mankind: “It is lawful for a man to hold private property and it is also necessary for the carrying on of human existence [emphasis added].”32
Also indispensable for Thomas was personal financial property ownership. In fact, he repeats Augustine’s rule of thumb as to the manner in which the state can so easily become a “robber”33 if its laws restrict private property rights. In On Law, Morality, and Politics, Thomas continues: “to take other people’s property violently and against justice, in the exercise of public authority, is to act unlawfully and be guilty of robbery.”34 Of course, he offers the caveat that, “If rulers exact from their subjects what is due them, in justice in order to maintain the common good, there is no robbery.”35
So, the key question is: What public roles would qualify for Thomas as satisfying the common good in present-day America? Not many. As noted above, the common good would seem to require only the martial and police powers of the state. Thomas writes:
“Public authority is committed to rulers in order that they may safeguard justice. And so they are permitted to use force and coercion only in the course of justice, whether in wars against enemies or in punishing civilian criminals [emphasis added].”36
Whether it is popularly emphasized much or not, the Catholic teaching in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII tracks Thomas Aquinas’s quote above very closely: “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary.”37 Immediately after this passage in Rerum, the famous encyclical repeats Thomas’s above words, verbatim.
Taken together, all this underscores the Catholic call to public aid not by heavy taxation, but by private charity instead.
The same paragraph in Rerum Novarum refines this concept even further: “Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind [which cannot be taxed!], has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.”38
An individual holds his private property as his right, the Church affirms. Charity is man’s duty, Rerum acknowledges, but it is religion’s role to encourage it. And it is God’s role to enforce it, not the state’s: “There is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding [not forcing!] each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.”39
And to the mere two functions proper to central government which cannot be properly discharged by individual families—police and martial power—Thomas adds only one more power: a very limited basis for revenue collection. This is a simple tax owed to rulers for the civic job that they perform on behalf of the people they represent. But, once more, these “Thomistic taxes” are not a type of government-enforced charity; they are merely a method of compensating public servants. Churches and family fulfill the role, for Thomas, of charity dispensation.
So, Thomas Aquinas does not—as we’ve been led to think—view the state as the nanny-like enforcer of morals:
Laws do not command regarding every action of every virtue. Rather they only command things that can be ordained for the common good, whether immediately, as when things are done directly for that good, or mediately, as when lawmakers ordain things belonging to good training, which trains citizens to preserve the common good of justice and peace. Human laws do not by strict command prohibit every vicious action, just as they do not command every virtuous action.40
This Thomistic model leaves little or no room for the sort of statist, coercive, “public morality” comprised by 21st century taxation. Nor does it leave room, for that matter, for eminent domain, discussed above. Both of these would almost always qualify for Thomas as state robbery, as they rival the household father for his sacred role as provider.
And what does Thomas advise once the state becomes a robber of property or liberty? Revolution.
Long before the American Revolution, Thomas Aquinas and his followers put forward an unequivocal right of revolution: “He who kills a tyrant to free his country is to be praised and rewarded.”41 About this particular passage, it has often been noted that, “Thomas certainly does not go out of his way to differentiate between tyrannicide and less drastic forms of disobedience.”42 Thomas was not the peacenik modernity has made of him.43 Spanish Jesuit Thomists Francisco Suarez and Juan de Mariana interpret Thomas by paraphrasing that there is little difference between life under a tyrant—a state which has turned to robbery—and being ravaged by a “ferocious and cruel beast.”44
And Thomas further distinguished between permissible insurrection (tyrannicide meeting a few preconditions) and impermissible sedition (which does not pass those preconditions).45 In fact, Thomas says that a king or lawgiver who exceeds his authorized power is the one who has committed sedition against his people, thereby triggering their right of revolution.
“If at any point,” Thomas writes, “positive law defects from the Natural Law, a citizen may legitimately refuse to obey.”46
However, Thomas cautions that in order “to deserve this benefit from God, the people must desist from sin” and he later repeats that “sin must be done away with in order that the scourge of tyrants may cease.”47 Revolutionaries must always remember this caution, but few, except the American “Men of ’76,” seem to have done so.
Even with Thomas’s condition that people must desist from sin in order to rebel or disobey authority, he is more extreme in his support for forcible regime change than Augustine. Even though Augustine holds that an unjust law is no law at all, he forbade tyrannicide to the citizens.
Regardless, we must remember that tyrannicide—condoned by Thomas and condemned by Augustine—is far more extreme than the particular revolt we call the American Revolution. Jefferson and company did not want to kill King George III. They did not need to. They simply wanted to secede from England, and it is a safe assumption that the political philosophy of Thomas Aquinas certainly (and that of Augustine probably) justified this.
What’s most important for this chapter is the fact that Thomas justified the conditions of the American Revolution, whereas early Protestant thought could not. (Nor could the thought of the Enlightenment.)
The true story of the Prot-Enlight American Revolution contrasts starkly with the thought of Thomas Aquinas: as a response to intrusions into American liberty by the British government, some very confused Protestant Colonists followed a set of doctrines known as Whig Theory set down in England during the prior century. Whig Theory represents a combination of Protestant and Enlightenment thought. Whig Theorists had begrudgingly, and secretly, followed the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and the Spanish Thomists in the area of natural rights (which of course included the right of revolution).
But, remember, both halves of Whig theory—Prot and Enlight—rejected the Catholic Natural Law.
Therefore, the Colonists who followed the Whigs did so against their own Protestant and Enlightenment fundamentals regarding nature—which ran directly contrary to the three prongs of Catholic Natural Law described in the Introduction to this book. In so doing, they created a new, befuddled, self-contradictory sort of Protestant Natural Law theory in order to depose the so-called “divine right of kings” pushed by those loyal to the king.48
We have seen that the four natural rights (including the right of revolution) described in the Declaration of Independence hail back to Thomas Aquinas and his followers, and the Aristotelian Catholic tradition. This has been kept an almost total secret in America.
After all, we’ve been taught that the rights described during the Revolutionary War emanated from the philosophy of John Locke and the Whigs, not from Thomas Aquinas or earlier.49
Let us now turn, as the American founders did, to the beliefs of the Whigs themselves, and assess whether their pseudo-Natural Law philosophy was truly independent of Thomas Aquinas… or even whether it counts as a Natural Law philosophy at all!
“Protestant Natural Law” and “Enlightenment Natural Law” as Contradictions in Terms
At this point, the reader should understand from the Introduction to this book that the English Whigs—and their American emulators—consolidated both halves of what I’ve termed the “Prot-Enlight.” And we recognize today the effect: the total overturning of the rights regime which the founders established in 1776. What follows is further detail as to why neither half of Prot-Enlight could have possibly embraced (nor did embrace) the Catholic Natural Law.
The present portion of the book will not make sense without the Introduction. But as a refresher before examining the Whigs themselves, let’s examine why both Prot-Enlight camps producing Whiggism rejected the truths of Catholic Natural Law (even as they lifted Thomas Aquinas’s convenient conclusions for the purposes of the Declaration).
You may have heard the term “Protestant Natural Law.” There should not be one. The concept represents a contradiction in terms. Neither the original Protestant Reformers nor their present-day American intellectual grandchildren, America’s so-called “religious Right,” can affirm the Catholic Natural Law.
Martin Luther held that the human will is “in bondage.”50 Without free will to choose right from wrong, ethical and political rights—products of liberty—make no sense. Luther’s fellow Reformer John Calvin wrote that “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.”51
One sees that even if Luther and Calvin failed to reject the term Natural Law altogether, they at least rejected the concept.
Moreover, at the Synod of Dort in 1618 and 1619, very important early Protestant canons on this matter were laid out:
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 [emphasis added].52
The last sentence says it all. For Protestants like the American founders, if nature cannot tell us about civics—let alone about theology or ethics—then the efficacy of the Natural Law is destroyed. It must be one way or the other: nature is either intelligible or not. As Carl E. Braaten once famously wrote on First Things, Lutherans and Calvinists (i.e., the Protestants) “swing erratically between a position of utter rejection of Natural Law and one of conditional acceptance.”53 They can neither reconcile themselves with Catholic Natural Law, nor very well do without it!
Some modern Protestants who see the obvious practical value of the Catholic Natural Law are quick to exaggerate the highly-conditional ways that Luther and Calvin did accept it. But this is not very convincing. To assert that Luther and Calvin were pro-Natural Law is, after all, to erase one of the very foremost bases of the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant suppression of Catholic Magisterium and Sacred Tradition wholly removed the Catholic Natural Law from the practice of Protestant Christianity. Only the Bible (sola scriptura), one among three teaching pillars of the Catholic Church, remained available to Protestants.54
Wherever Luther and Calvin allegedly embraced Natural Law, they must not have been describing the Catholic version. For a coherent theory of republicanism one needs the Catholic Natural Law described by Thomas.
Recall, to qualify as a Natural Law advocate, you need all three prongs of Catholic Natural Law described in the Introduction.
Also, as mentioned above, if man’s will is presumed to be in bondage, or, predestined, as Luther and Calvin believed, respectively, then how can either thinker affirm even a limited Protestant sense of Natural Law? Ethics without freedom?! Impossible. If man is “incapable of using [reason] aright even in things natural and civil,”55 how in the world can citizens use their minds to take momentous political steps like waging a revolution? Or articulating Constitutional rights in the processes of self-government?! They cannot.
Finally, the Reformation developed (whether Luther and Calvin liked it or not) into a full repudiation of Catholic Natural Law by the early 20th century. Protestantism culminated with the teachings of openly anti-Natural Law thinkers like Karl Barth, who held it diabolical.56 Such Protestant development included hyper-fragmentation into over 38,000 Protestant sects, by our own day.
Notwithstanding the impossibility of perfectly grouping all Protestants, it still makes sense to generalize some about the impossibility of a coherent Protestant Natural Law tradition: i.e., by its multifarious nature, Protestantism presents simply too many targets for a single arrow. But, one can fairly generalize Protestantism on the very basis upon which the Reformation was waged: fidelity to Scripture alone.
So much for Protestant Natural Law.
We must not forget to reject the plausibility of “Enlightenment Natural Law.” In an opposite but equal way, this second oxymoron is a bit simpler to understand. Whereas the American grandchildren of the Reformation, the “religious Right,” rejected the Catholic Natural Law from within Christianity, the grandchildren of the Enlightenment—the so-called secular Left—rejected it from outside Christianity, or total secularism.
In favor of “the new science,” such Enlightenment thinkers57 as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and John Locke rejected Catholic reasoning about nature (i.e., Aristotelianism-Thomism). Chapter Six will deal with this new “scientism” specifically.58
The Introduction to this book explained in far greater detail how and why the new Enlightenment view of nature in the late 16th and early 17th centuries comprised a rejection of the Catholic Natural Law. The fine details are unimportant. Here, it suffices to repeat once more that such a rejection comprises three parts: rejecting man’s freedom within nature, rejecting nature’s intelligibility, and rejecting nature’s purpose.
The reader should think about this in a general way: if nature is blind and random, as the Enlightenment (and in a different way, the Reformation) posited, how could it be free, intelligible, or teleological? It cannot. And without these, Catholic Natural Law is implausible. Thus, Enlightenment Natural Law is also a contradiction in terms.
As we proceed into the next sections, it will become clear that most of the Enlightenment thinkers were also Protestant thinkers, which is probably why such a phenomenon as “Prot-Enlight” came about. And nowhere was this phenomenon more deeply rooted than within the Whig politics of England in the 17th century—the source to which the American founders looked for establishing their rights regime less than a century later.
It should now be clear that in the 16th and 17th centuries, Reformation and Enlightenment thinkers agreed together about one primary proposition: that the Natural Law of the Catholic Church should be overturned in the Modern world. For a whirlwind view of what happened in England the century before the American Revolution—the Whig or Glorious Revolution—see this very important footnote.c
The Whig Heroes of the Founders
Now you’ve seen why the American Prot-Enlight founders should have been unable philosophically to reason about the Catholic Natural Law. Now we will see how they were unable to do so historically. This involves something called “Whiggism.”
