Catholic Republic, page 8
For reasons hopefully now familiar to the reader, the concept of a Protestant—or an Enlightenment— Natural Law makes about as much sense as a “circular square.”
Now, the Whigs were English Parliamentarians, who during the late 17th century opposed the English king on two firm grounds. First, as staunch opponents of all things Catholic, they opposed the hated line of Stuart kings, the royals who they viewed as secret Catholic foreigners with non-English allegiances to papist countries. Second, as the political party first to elevate the legislative branch over the executive, Whigs forged new political theory by assigning legislators fiduciary duties to the people they represented. The Whigs relegated the role of the executive branch—the king—to a secondary status in English government. Legislators, naturally close to the people, represent the popular interest in ways that kings, presidents, and judges cannot. The American recognizes this Constitutional concept well in his own Constitution. That is because it comes from the Whigs. During the 1640s the idea of Parliamentary sovereignty was on the grow in England, whereby Parliament challenged the king at every turn. In 1649, Parliament put to death King Charles Stuart by sword. Generally distrusted by the English people for his favoring of the “more Romish” Anglican Church over the “more Protestant” Presbyterian one and for his marriage to a Catholic French royal, King Charles saw his late monarchy give rise to two Civil Wars culminating in his own beheading. With one swing of the sword, Parliament proved it could as much as it would! In no small dose of irony, the notion that a king could be put to death by mandate of the people—via Parliament—should have been, but wasn’t, ascribed to the Catholic Natural Law tradition discussed above. Instead, the Parliamentarians who went on to become the “Whig” party falsely claimed intellectual authorship over the doctrine of tyrannicide, even though their sola scriptura theology and their rejection of the inference of rights from nature seemed strongly to prohibit it.
In fact, most honest Protestants, to whom both the Natural Law tradition and its explanatory power remained unavailable, looked to chapters in the Bible like 1 Peter and most especially Romans 13 as admonitions against revolution and tyrannicide. Thus, the reference by a very Protestant Parliament in 1649 to exclusively Catholic ideas in the execution of a Catholic king was both as secret and as ironic as the American Revolution turned out to be one century later. Over the next three decades, the English idea of Parliamentary sovereignty grew into mature theory, notwithstanding its paradoxical beginning. This meant that the tension between the Crown and Parliament would remain until the Glorious Revolution of 1688, by which time Parliament was widely recognized as the dominant reigning power in the English government. The very next year, 1689, John Locke’s Second Treatise—the primary inspiration for the American revolutionaries nine decades later—extended the prior year’s proposition to express that even Parliament is only conditionally sovereign. Parliament was to hold power only insofar as it represented the people, the true sovereigns. From that point, popular sovereignty took such a firm hold over English politics that the Whigs essentially banished all Tories from all major governmental offices from 1715 until 1760 during the so-called Whig Supremacy. Lo and behold, who but the tyrant King George III would emerge in 1760 to break the Whig stranglehold?! The fusty connection between the neo-Whig American Colonials and King George’s reintroduction of Tory politics into England was mostly accidental, if altogether fitting. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were far more concerned with the ideas of the Whigs, rather than the personalities of the party itself.
d. Calvinists, to be specific.
e. Anglicans and Gallicans, to remain specific.
f. From very early in the Christian tradition—a millennium before Thomas Aquinas even—Natural Law thinkers like Saint Augustine and the Patristics spoke about a “book of nature” (Natural Law) and a “book of Scripture” (supernatural law), as will be referenced in Chapter Six. The latter is superior and more specific, of course, insofar as it memorializes inerrant revelation by God to man; but it is available only to believing Christians, lacking the universality of the Natural Law. As such, Locke’s inclusion of Scripture as part and parcel of the Natural Law appears not only to be new, but also tendentious and intellectually dishonest.
Citations
1. Madison, James. Federalist #63. In Chapter Two, we will discuss the connection with another famous founder’s quote: “A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy… once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”
2. Augustine reminds us that the City of God lasts forever; the City of Man is doomed to decline.
3. Recall that both halves of Prot-Enlight, Protestant and Enlightenment thinkers, rejected all three aspects of the Natural Law.
4. Insofar as such rights were truly Catholic, they were correct conclusions about nature and man; insofar as they were crypto-Catholic, their basis within nature was convoluted and covered up, leading to their popular misapprehension in America.
5. Jefferson, Thomas. Declaration of Independence.
6. Because, as we shall see, liberty and the pursuit of happiness wind up being the same thing, we also must ask if the right to private property is honored by the government. Locke included property as the third natural right; for reasons of expediency, Jefferson substituted pursuit of happiness, which was redundant of liberty, in place of Locke’s property.
7. Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
8. Doe v. Bolton 410 U.S. 179 (1973).
9. Planned Parenthood v. Casey 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
10. Ibid.
11. Pope Leo XIII. Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae: Regarding Americanism, an encyclical promulgated on January 22, 1899.
12. The right of liberty becomes a sort of pole star of all the other political rights—the means by which they are captured or measured. In other words, liberty enables the capture of the others. Both “life” and “property” are also named in the Due Process Clauses of the Constitution, since the framers like the founders well knew the small number of natural rights. But liberty enables the furtherance of both life and property rights. And on that Constitutional basis, the chapter following this one, on the crypto-Catholicism of the American Constitution, will make even clearer the perversion of the idea of freedom in American jurisprudence. Before it could be taken from us, liberty was first transformed into a pseudo-doctrine of license. But for the moment, it should suffice to say that in both the legal and the popular context, American liberty has been supplanted and perverted by American license. The symptom is the rampant pleasure seeking we see all around us.
13. The concept of Eudaimonia, as taught by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (EN), is the Natural Law’s first model of human happiness, especially that of the high Medieval period. This indicates not pleasure but rather a moral happiness, whereby humans note the effect of filling their proper function. 14. Plato. The Republic. Book I, 347c.
15. Kelo v. City of New London 545 U.S. 469 (2005).
16. Whereas the formal foundation of republicanism lies in the rights of life and liberty, the material foundation of any republic, as the Declaration of Independence recognizes, is the governmental defense of private property ownership by citizens.
17. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Book V, Ch. 3.
18. Matthew 25:15.
19. Augustine. City of God: 19, 13: Justice is defined considering “the disposition of equal and unequal things, giving to each what it deserves.” It is equally unjust to make equal things unequal as is to make unequal things equal, as Aristotle affirms in the Nicomachean Ethics.
20. Thomas Aquinas. De Regimine Principum. Book 4, Chap. 9, page 76: “Further, nature does not fail in necessities, as I said above, and therefore neither does the art of civil government, but this would happen if possessions were equalized among families, because citizens would die of penury, which would lead to the corruption of the polity. It also follows that the equalization of possessions is unsuitable from a consideration of the gradation of personages, as well as from human nature. There is a difference between citizens just as there is between members of a body, to which I compared a polity above: moreover, the virtue and function of different members is different. It is well known that someone who is noble must make greater expenditures than one who is not noble—it is for this reason, for example, that the virtue of liberality is called magnificence in a ruler on account of the great cost involved. This could not happen where possessions were equal.” Here is the spot where Thomas cites Matthew 25:15.
21. Augustine, City of God.
22. Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
23. Stanley v. Georgia 394 U.S. 557 (1969).
24. Lawrence v. Texas 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
25. Obergefell v. Hodges 576 U.S. _ (2015).
26. James Madison, in Federalist #39, proposes that England has “been frequently placed on the list of republics.”
27. Thomas Jefferson letter to William S. Smith, November 13, 1787. Paris.
28. Regan, Richard J. Introduction to Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, page xxi. Hackett Publishing; 2000.
29. Pope Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor. May 15, 1891. (Para. 14): “Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the state; for it has the same source as human life itself. ‘The child belongs to the father,’ and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as a member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that ‘the child belongs to the father’ it is, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, ‘before it attains the use of free will, under the power and charge of its parents.’ The Socialists therefore, in setting aside the parent, and setting up a state supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.”
30. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 66, A. 8.
31. The Natural Law scholar John Finnis is probably partly responsible for this characterization of Thomas’s philosophy, which poses that Thomas did not hold the view that is cited directly above from Thomas: De Regimine Principum. Book 4, Chap. 9, page 76.
32. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Second Part of the Second Part; Q. 66, A. 1.
33. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae, Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 66, quotes Augustine (City of God): “If justice is taken away, what are kingdoms but massive robberies?”
34. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 66, A. 8.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Rerum Novarum. (para 22). Other passages in Rerum Novarum which are staunchly supportive of property rights include: “It is not easy matter to define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labor. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators are intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men’s judgments and to stir up the people to revolt” (para 2); “To remedy these wrongs, the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are clearly powerless.” (para 4).
38. Rerum Novarum. (para 22).
39. Rerum Novarum. (para 19).
40. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. First Part of the Second Part, Q. 96.
41. Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, 44.2.2.
42. The Elfin Ethicist: “Thomas Aquinas on the Right to Resist.” This article also addresses the not negligible difficulty that Protestants face under the infamously anti-revolutionary Scriptural admonition of Romans 13:1-7. http://www.shadowcouncil.org/wilson/archives/005614.html.
43. EN 1160b. Both Thomas and Aristotle favor quasi-political bodies or groups of overthrowers to individuals acting as lone assassins, but Thomas seems not to outright forbid it.
44. Mariana, Juan de. Del Rey y de la Institucion Real. Vol. I, Book I, Chap. VI. Madrid; 1599. Page 109. The famous School of Salamanca of Spanish Jesuits was thornily Thomist, as seen here.
45. Littlejohn, J. Martin. The Political Theory of the Schoolmen and Grotius: submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Doctor of Philosophy in the University Faculty of Political Science, Columbia, New York. College Springs; Current Press. 1894. Page 155.
46. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae: Ia IIae, Q. 97, A. 3 (line 1985a).
47. Thomas Aquinas. On Kingship: To the King of Cypress. Aeterna Press. Chapter 7. Thomas continues, “As the Lord says by the Prophet Hosea: ‘I will give thee a king in my wrath, and it is said in Job that he ‘maketh a man that is a hypocrite to reign for the sins of the people.’”
48. But, as one would expect, many Protestants still (more honestly) rejected Scholastic political theory as a Romish article of Catholicism and Natural Law theory. On the one hand, Anglican and royal-absolutist Robert Filmer wrote Patriarcha largely in response to Jesuits Suarez and Bellarmine. The Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Revius published his own response, Suarez Repurgatus. It suffices to say here that the Catholic tradition strongly affirms the right of revolution, whereas the early Protestant tradition rebuffed it; that is, until certain Protestants—the Whigs—needed to borrow from it in order to respond to Filmer! Even today, the just revolution remains a difficult and obscure Scriptural idea within Protestantism, which is really what this first chapter aims to show. Romans 13 seems to present much of this trouble. One notes as evidence of this paradox the fact that some Lutheran universities even used works of Suarez as a textbook.
49. At one point, Jefferson admitted that Aristotle was among the four most central figures, which stuck out like a sore thumb since men of the Enlightenment like Jefferson had all but excised Aristotelianism and Scholasticism from the pages of history!
50. Luther, Martin. Of the Bondage of the Will. December 1525.
51. Calvini Institutio Christianae Religionis. Geneva; 1559. II, 8, 1.
52. Canons of Dort. 1619.
53. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/12/002-protestants-and-natural-law
54. The Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura excised two-thirds of the Catholic teaching voice, leaving only the Bible intact. The Magisterium and Holy Tradition were both severed. No surprise, these are the two pillars based upon the Natural Law. The Protestant cannot later recapture what the Reformation tossed aside simply because at some later point it became decidedly inconvenient not to have it!
55. Canons of Dort. 1619.
56. Weber, Otto. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. trans. by Arthur C. Cochrane. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1950. Pages 33-40.
57. Prot-Enlight particularly denotes the English empiricists, but also includes to a lesser extent some of the English rationalists.
58. In most of these cases, this represented a new form of atomism, called by some “corpuscular reductionism,” which openly embraced materialism, a view completely opposed to the intelligibility of Natural Law.
59. Since revolution-bulwarking “tyrannicidist” Catholic followers of Thomas Aquinas (and Jesuits like Francisco Suarez and Robert Bellarmine) had been firmly opposed by the Tory absolutists who defended the divine right of kings and the royal Oaths of (Protestant) Allegiance of 1606, 1643, and 1672, it is surprising that in England the first Whigs (who, like the Tories, were Protestant) willingly took such Catholic Jesuits as exemplars. Once again, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” runs strong in politics.
For example, Whig archenemy Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha—the crown gem of Royalist theory—was actually a response piece not to Whigs but rather to the forerunning arguments of the Jesuits’ Natural Law tyrannicide. This proves the point, more or less. The important thing is that the Whigs had a readymade referent when they looked to rebuff the hated Royalists—fellow Protestants, but hated partisans. It is a curious appropriation and adaptation, although it is becoming familiar in this book.
60. Lutz, Donald S. “The Relative Influence of European writers on late 18th Century American political thought,” in The American Political Science Review, 78/1. March 1984. (Also, Lutz adds to these ideas his Origins of American Constitutionalism. Critique of Lutz published by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 1990.)
61. Zuckert, Michael. Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. Princeton University Press; New Jersey, 1994.
62. Spitzer, Robert J. Ten Universal Principles: A Brief Philosophy of the Life Issues. 52. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011. Spitzer continues the discussion on page 74: “we can see the faint outline of Jefferson’s three inalienable rights…Suarez’s right to self-preservation corresponding to Jefferson’s right to life, Suarez’s right to the natural perfection of human nature corresponding to Jefferson’s right to liberty, and Suarez’s right to happiness corresponding to Jefferson’s right to the pursuit of happiness. In another part of De Legibus, Suarez includes property within the notion of natural rights.”
63. Neff, Stephen C. Hugo Grotius on the Law of War and Peace, Student Edition. Cambridge University Press; 2012. Introduction, xxxi.
64. Friedmann, W. Legal Theory, Universal Law Publishing Co.; India, 1999. (Cited in Daudi Nyamaka’s paper, “Social Contract Theory of John Locke (1632 to 1704) in the Contemporary World.” June 2011.) 65. Donald Lutz. “The Relative Influence of European writers on late 18th Century American political thought,” in The American Political Science Review, 78/1. March 1984.
