After nearly 100 years since the beginning of the attempted rapprochement between Catholic thought and modernity, Catholic political philosophy has begun to reject its former ralliement with Enlightenment liberalism. In his deeply influential recent work, Why Liberalism Failed, Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen argues that the project of liberal modernity has reached a state of crisis (Reference Deneen2018). This crisis, however, is not due to the failure of liberalism, but rather its success; liberalism has reached a critical junction, Deneen writes, because “its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology” (Reference Deneen2018, 2). Although having a pronounced effect on contemporary political discourse, Deneen's critique of liberal modernity, a 500 year old political philosophy marked by “[l]imited by effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections” (Reference Deneen2018, 2), is not quite as revolutionary within Catholic philosophical discourse as it might appear—especially when one recognizes that many Enlightenment liberals crafted their philosophy as a rejection of Medieval thinking in general and Thomism in particular.
As Deneen himself demonstrates, the Enlightenment liberal project was formed to deconstruct the effort by Aquinas and other scholastic and classical thinkers to “delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings” and “to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing” (Reference Deneen2018, 35). Deneen rightly notes that “[l]iberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and later the notion of human nature itself” (Reference Deneen2018, 35). Deneen argues that one of the central elements of liberalism is the placement of man above nature as a god-figure who has mastery over the entire world as well as his own nature. Christian philosophy and theology, in essence, places man within a cosmos to which he is subject to the natural order and is obligated to adhere to this order with his free will. As liberalism reached its terminus and apogee, the liberal subject or “liberal man” broke free from the bounds of nature only to find himself enslaved by the liberal state and its attendant hegemonic ideological structure that demands unconditional uniformity. Christianity was able to coexist with liberalism for several hundred years, but, in the end, unmoored from its classical and scholastic vision of man, Christianity has become the suppliant to an increasingly totalitarian and secularizing neoliberal political order.
Deneen's work represents a major shift in Catholic political thought, which, at least in Western Europe and the United States, had been strongly allied with the liberal project (especially its Anglo-American version). One of the principal groups in the latter twentieth century who helped to establish the rapprochement between Catholic political thought and a post-World War II version of liberalism were the members of the Catholic branch of the neoconservative movement. Taking up Lord Acton's concept of “Whig Thomism,” these Catholic neoconservatives attempted to demonstrate that the principles of Aquinas's political philosophy are essentially liberal and thus can be utilized for the Cold War and War on Terror geopolitics of the neoconservative movement. However, although the Catholic neoconservatives were right to argue that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries required a political philosophy suited to the time and age, they were wrong in their attempt to present Thomistic political philosophy as liberalism. Rather, drawing from the writings of Pope Leo XIII and eschewing the method of the Catholic neoconservatives, we can reexamine the need within our own post-millennial, globalized age to find a historical incarnation of the political principles of Thomism.
THE CENTRAL ARGUMENT OF WHIG THOMISM
Whig Thomism is a concept originally developed by nineteenth century British Catholic liberal thinker Lord John Dalberg-Acton in his May 28, 1877 speech “The History of Freedom in Christianity.” Referring to Thomas Aquinas as “the most celebrated of all the Guelphic writers,” Acton proceeds to provide what at first appears to be a lengthy quote from Thomas Aquinas, echoing language from the American Declaration of Independence. Acton immediately follows this alleged quote with the statement that it “contains the earliest exposition of the Whig theory of the revolution” and “is taken from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas…” (Reference Acton1877). However, as Kenneth Craycraft notes in a 1994 article, this extended quotation is nowhere to be found in Aquinas's writings. Craycraft's piece provides a thorough analysis of Whig Thomism as a Thomism that largely and ironically departs from the text of Aquinas. Craycraft (Reference Craycraft1994) is not the only scholar to notice errant text and historical reading that Lord Acton's Whig Thomism requires. Robert Kraynak, in one of the few modern English language endorsements of Aquinas's vision of constitutional monarchy, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, refers to Acton's passage as “misleading” (Reference Kraynak2001, 98). As even Robert Royal, a Catholic scholar who has spent much of intellectual career allied with the Catholic neoconservatives, admits in his 2006 work, The God that Did Not Fail, one of the many Catholic intellectual histories produced during the early twenty-first century, the passage from Acton “is actually a combination of various statements by Aquinas, some of which do not accord with modern republicanism in quite the way Acton suggested” (Reference Royal2006, 240–41). Rather in the neoconservative argument, Aquinas serves as “cultural capital” that can be utilized in framing a narrative of the alleged evolution of Catholic thought during the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century. As the neoconservative movement has come to a close, it is now time to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Catholic neoconservative use of Aquinas.
It is precisely this use of Aquinas that was so critical to the Catholic neoconservative movement that needed to present itself as a movement representing the authentic and living teaching of Catholicism. In their many works, the Catholic neoconservatives present a long list of qualities that define a “Whig” in the argument for why Thomas Aquinas should be viewed as one of the founding fathers of liberalism. However, their argument can be divided into a few core parts. The first part of the Catholic neoconservative argument is that selected passages of Thomas Aquinas's writings provide the groundwork for the concept of a “free person” that would be enshrined in the American founding documents and the writings of Anglo-American liberals of the eighteenth century. The second leg of the third legs of the Catholic neoconservative argument is that Thomas Aquinas was a humanist who had a nascent view of “rights” in his work. The third element of the Catholic neoconservative appropriation of Aquinas is their framing of law as being ordered toward promoting liberty.
The first of the Catholic neoconservative core arguments for Whig Thomism is that Aquinas laid the groundwork for what United States Justice William Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas famously called “the marketplace of ideas” in Abram v. United States (1919). In This Hemisphere of Liberty, a work written to counter the growth of liberation theology in Latin America, Novak writes that Aquinas held that “[c]ivilization is constituted by reasoned conversation” (Reference Novak1990, 114). Novak's innocuous phrase here is, in fact, loaded with a liberal interpretation. Novak continues his argument quoting Thomas Aquinas's statement that “[r]ational creatures are governed for the sake of men. Men are principles, not merely instruments” (Reference Novak1990, 114). Thomas Aquinas's passage used by Novak is part of a longer argument from the Aquinas on the divergence between men and animals. However, the reading that Novak gives is that humans should live in a free, that is, liberal society in which there is “freedom of religion,” “freedom of inquiry,” and “freedom of thought” (Reference Novak1990, 114). Novak further argues that modern humans should “be moved by rational persuasion, not by force—and not by demagogy or seduction…” (Reference Novak1990, 114). As a result, Novak states, “that regime is the more civilized which relies less on coercion and more on rational persuasion” (Reference Novak1990, 114). Thus, the modern political and anthropological phenomenon of the enlightened human who lives in a liberal democracy has its roots in the writings of Thomas Aquinas according to the Whig Thomist reading. Novak's argument, in itself, has a number of merits in a liberal society, and his wider project of trying to find a “neutral ground” between Catholicism and liberalism, may have some merits, but, as we will see, Novak's view is entirely inconsonant with Thomas Aquinas' view of liberty.
Novak develops his interpretation further in works such as On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense in the American Founding. In On Two Wings, Novak argues that Aquinas is called the first Whig “because of the centrality he gave to human liberty in nature and history” (Reference Novak2002, 120). Novak like many NeoThomists, neoconservatives and other Catholics who attempt to reconcile Thomas Aquinas with liberalism, conflates Aquinas's treatment of “free will,” liberum arbitrum as a human faculty with the notion of political freedom in Enlightenment liberalism. Novak argues that Aquinas developed “the idea of personal liberty in exquisite analytic detail, with precisions beyond the ken of earlier writers concerning such concepts as the will, practical wisdom, liberum arbitrium, conscience, synderesis, and other aspects of liberty” (Reference Novak2002, 121).
Novak's fellow neoconservative George Weigel explains elsewhere that contained within the “Thomistic vision of the human person” is a “powerful concept of freedom” (Reference Weigel2008, 161). Weigel specifically then argues that this new concept of freedom is both a remedy for radical Islam as well as softer approach to war represented by “the yellow ribbons of the era of Jimmy Carter” (Reference Weigel2008, 171). Weigel repeats these points throughout his works. In his 2005 The Cube and the Cathedral, Weigel writes, “On Thomas's view, freedom is the great organizing principle of the moral life—and because the very possibility of a moral life is what distinguishes human beings from the rest of the natural world, freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way” (Reference Weigel2005, 80). In the same work, Weigel explains that freedom is “a matter of gradually acquiring the capacity to choose the good and to do what we choose with perfection, with excellence” (Reference Weigel2005, 81).
Whig Thomism also reads the philosophy Thomas Aquinas as being fundamentally humanistic. In Against the Grain, George Weigel speaks of Thomas Aquinas's “deeply humanistic vision of the human person, human goods, and human destiny” (Reference Weigel2008, 161). Drawing from the work of Dominican Fr. Servais-Théodore Pinckaers, Weigel in a December 5, 2001 William E. Simon lecture at the Ethics and Public Policy Center titled “Two Ideas of Freedom,” in which the Catholic neoconservative thinker openly stated that he frames his discussion of Thomas Aquinas's concept of freedom vis-a-vis William of Ockham's as well as Isaiah Berlin's deliberately in light of the September 11 attacks (Reference Weigel2008, 155–56). Thus, the Catholic neoconservative presentation of Whig Thomism is intimately tied to neoconservative public and foreign policy. In “Two Ideas of Freedom,” Weigel presents an extended definition of his reading via Fr. Pinckaers's development of Aquinas's concept of freedom as a “means to human excellence, to human happiness, to the fulfillment of human destiny” (Reference Weigel2008, 161). It is, as Weigel further argues, “the great organizing principle of the moral life” as well as “the human capacity that unifies all our other capacities into an orderly whole, and directs our actions toward the pursuit of happiness and goodness, understood in the noblest sense: the union of the human person with the absolute good, who is God” (Reference Weigel2008, 162).
At the conclusion of his argument in “Two Ideas of Freedom,” Weigel interestingly attacks Isaiah Berlin for (rightly) holding that Aquinas believed that law has a coercive force. Weigel, however, argues, “Berlin goes so far as to suggest that, for a ‘schoolman’ like Aquinas, as well as for the Jacobins and communists of the modern period, it is legitimate to force others into living their freedom rightly. That kind of crude coercion was certainly true of Jacobins and communists, but it is no part of Thomas Aquinas's theory of freedom” (Reference Weigel2008, 168). Rather, Weigel sees Aquinas as an advocate of “persuasion in politics” (Reference Weigel2008, 168). Weigel's argument is that there should be a semi-coercive philosophy for the human person or “the more humanistic vision of Aquinas,” a via media between totalitarianism and libertarianism (Reference Weigel2008, 172).
For the Catholic neoconservative vision of Whig Thomism, freedom is regulated by virtue, not law. In The Cube and the Cathedral, Weigel states that “free and democratic societies characterized by tolerance, civility, and respect for others” are “[d]eveloped through the four cardinal virtues—prudence or practical wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance…” (Reference Weigel2005, 81–82). Fr. Benedict Ashley also sees Whig Thomism, which “emphasizes the development of character (virtue) through good action,” as a return to an authentic Thomism as opposed to “the moral theology of the manuals” “in the preconciliar Church,” which were “deontological and legalistic, basing the morality of human acts on the will of the legislator” (Reference Ashley, Mary and Scott Appleby1995, 76). As we will see, this legalism is, in fact, found in the texts of Aquinas.
Law is another key component of neoconservative presentation of Whig Thomism. Although, as we will see, there is much in Thomas Aquinas's thinking on law that suggests that the Aquinas believed that law primarily served a coercive function, the Catholic neoconservatives attempted to reframe Thomas Aquinas as advocating a vision of law as being fundamentally structured toward encouraging freedom. The Catholic neoconservatives believed that law for Aquinas does not have to do with shaping humans for good but rather for ensuring human freedom. Weigel, in Against the Grain, explains that, according to Aquinas, “law has a lot to do with freedom. Law can educate us in freedom. Law rightly understood, is not a work of heteronomous (external) imposition but a work of wisdom, and good law facilitates our achievement of the human goods that we instinctively seek because of who we are and what we are meant to be as human beings” (Reference Weigel2008, 163). Weigel further provides more intellectual scaffolding for his justification of the radical sea change in Catholic teaching, arguing that “natural law reasoning” changed over time and “the human condition” could be “altered” by “[c]reativity” (Reference Weigel1987, 121).
Robert P. George, the principal neoconservative legal theorist, likewise includes Aquinas among “the proponents of natural law in all its varieties,” which includes thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King Jr (Reference George2001, 156–57). These thinkers, George explains, “have shared a fundamental belief that humanly created ‘positive’ law is morally good or bad—just or unjust—depending on its conformity to the standards of a ‘natural,’ (viz. moral) law that is no mere human creation” (Reference George2001, 169). Unlike the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, in the neoconservative reading, it is not law, but rather virtue that regulates human behavior.
AQUINAS ON LIBERTY
It is true that Thomas Aquinas celebrated the human will as a glorious mark of man's status as being made in the image and likeness of a Divine Creator. However, Aquinas's definition of the faculty of the will does not indicate that Aquinas would thereby embrace liberal political philosophy. Aquinas's definition of the will in the First Part of the Second Part of The Summa Theologiae, for example, is a prelude for discussion on moral culpability and has nothing to do with politics. Humans differ from other created beings, such as Aquinas's own example of a stone or unnamed animals, because “man especially knows the end of his work, and moves himself…” (Reference Aquinas1947). Aquinas further, in Article 4 of Question 6, states that the will can “suffer violence” in as much as “violence can prevent the exterior members from executing the will's command”; however, “as to the will's own proper act, violence cannot be done to the will” (Reference Aquinas1947). Aquinas further explains, “the act of the will is nothing else than an inclination proceeding from the interior principle of knowledge: just as the natural appetite is an inclination proceeding from an interior principle without knowledge. Now what is compelled or violent is from an exterior principle. Consequently it is contrary to the nature of the will's own act that it should be subject to compulsion and violence: just as it is also contrary to the nature of a natural inclination or movement” (Reference Aquinas1947). It is contrary to the nature of the will to be forced; however, as Aquinas, notes, a person can be, for example, “dragged by force” (Reference Aquinas1947). There is little doubt that in these passages Thomas Aquinas is emphasizing the importance and power of human free will; he is not talking about individual liberty in a state or providing the groundwork for such later liberal concepts as “freedom of speech” or the New Left idea of “freedom of expression.”
Thomas Aquinas continues with this argument in Article 5 of the same question, further affirming the unnatural character of violence against the will:
Violence is directly opposed to the voluntary, as likewise to the natural. For the voluntary and the natural have this in common, that both are from an intrinsic principle; whereas violence is from an extrinsic principle. And for this reason, just as in things devoid of knowledge, violence effects something against nature: so in things endowed with knowledge, it effects something against the will. Now that which is against nature is said to be “unnatural”; and in like manner that which is against the will is said to be “involuntary.” Therefore violence causes involuntariness. (Reference Aquinas1947)
Violence can be used to force someone to do something involuntary, but it cannot alter the will of someone. Thus, a heretic or political dissident can be forced against his or her will to stop spreading error, but his or her will cannot be forced with violence. This distinction is essential to understanding Aquinas's allowance of freedom of conscience and his firm condemnation of the public practice of heresy, as well as Thomas Aquinas's promotion of the use of torture and physical compulsion to induce a heretic to recant in S.T. II-II, q. 10, a. 8. On the other hand, again, this admirable definition of free will does not translate into a political philosophy in Aquinas's thought.
THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN AQUINAS
Although Thomas Aquinas defends the notion of the interior will as being, by nature, free, this celebration of human interior freedom in no way translates to political liberty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Although Aquinas argued for freedom of conscience, that is, the notion that one could not be compelled to embrace the faith, he did not advocate for a “marketplace of ideas” in which free discourse on matters of faith and morals in the public sphere would lead to a just society. As Kenneth Craycraft Jr. notes, Whig Thomism ignores Thomas Aquinas endorsement of torture and even the execution of heretics in the Summa Theologiae (1947) (2001).
Furthermore, unlike the Whig Thomist liberalism of Michael Novak, George Weigel, and other Catholic neoconservatives, the goal of law, according to Aquinas, is to make men and women good, not to ensure their political and religious liberties. As Aquinas writes, in his “Treatise on Law,” “the proper effect of law is to make those to whom it is given, good, either simply or in some particular respect” (Reference Aquinas1947). Included in Aquinas's understanding of law, further, is divine law, which has the role of “directing of human conduct” (Reference Aquinas1947). As Aquinas further explains, in an oft forgotten passage, one of the essential qualities of a just human law is that it “‘foster religion,’ inasmuch as it is proportionate to the Divine law” (Reference Aquinas1947). Thus, contrary to the Whig Thomists' championing of religious liberty, positive human law has the obligation, according to Thomas, to promote the Catholic religion and conform, as much as possible, to divine law.
What is more, the mandates of divine law, according to Aquinas, should be enforced by the state. Aquinas famously argues that, just as counterfeiters of coins should be put to death, so too should heretics be “condemned to death by the secular authority…” (Reference Aquinas1947). As recent scholars have suggested, this does not mean that Aquinas's endorsement of death for heresy should serve as a model for the contemporary world (Finnis Reference Finnis1998, 1; KerrReference Kerr2002, 207; Drury Reference Drury2008; Dulles Reference Dulles2005, 156). Nonetheless, Aquinas's firm condemnation of heresy and the public teaching of error makes it difficult to reconcile Thomas Aquinas's thinking with liberal, Whiggish thought, for, in Aquinas's thought, a unified political body is essential for a healthy, properly functioning community.
Although the liberal political societies in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, which Whig Thomas cherish, are defined by an intellectually and religiously pluralistic character, such a notion is largely alien to Thomas Aquinas's thought. For Aquinas the goal of a political society is unity and order. In his De Regno ad regem Cypri, Aquinas writes that “the more efficacious a government is in keeping the unity of peace, the more useful it will be” (Reference Aquinas, Phelan and Eschmann1949). In De Regno, Aquinas even suggests that a pluralistic community would fall apart, for “it is evident that several persons could by no means preserve the stability of the community if they totally disagreed” (Reference Aquinas, Phelan and Eschmann1949). If the leaders of a political community disagree about what Aquinas would argue are the most important matters pertaining to divine and natural law, such a political community would quickly disintegrate.
As a further illustration of the incompatibility between Whig Thomists and the genuine philosophical principles of Thomas Aquinas, we see that Aquinas advocates a government in which the people are not given public liberty, but are, in fact, ruled by a monarch in a mixed regime. In Question 105 of the First Part of the First Part of The Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, commenting on the judicial precepts of the “Old Law,” writes that the government of the ancient Hebrews was “the form of Government established by Divine Law,” for it contained elements of democratic, aristocratic, and monarchic government (Reference Aquinas1947). Aquinas explains that a democratic element to government should be included, for, giving a “share” in government to “all” “ensures peace among the people” (Reference Aquinas1947). Yet, the ideal form of government should include aristocratic and monarchic elements, and “the best form of government is in a state or kingdom, where one is given the power to preside over all; while under him are others having governing powers…” (Reference Aquinas1947). Finally, Aquinas explains that “this the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers” (Reference Aquinas1947). Although such a statement might lend itself to a “Whiggish” interpretation, reading Question 105 with Aquinas's other writings indicates that although he includes a “democratic” element to his ideal polity, he does not include a liberal or Whiggish, democratic element. In Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, a rare twenty-first century work, exploring and even advocating Thomas' monarchic vision, Robert Kraynak writes that neoconservative arguments that Thomas Aquinas's advocacy for a mixed regime are incorrect, and the mixed monarchy is “not a type of protosocial democracy…,” nor does Aquinas, in Kraynak's view, prepare the way for the mixed monarchy of the English constitution…” (Reference Kraynak2001, 48). Aquinas's depiction of democracy is, rather, “medieval corporatism applied with tine doctrine of the Two Cities rather than the first stirring of modern liberty” (Reference Kraynak2001, 98).
Although scholars like Fr. Thomas Gilby are right to note that Aquinas would reject a totalitarian government such as those that emerged in the twentieth century (Reference Gilby1958), Aquinas nonetheless argued for a hierarchical society in which “inferiors” are ruled by “betters.” In Question 96 of the Summa, Aquinas writes that in the state of innocence prior to the fall of Adam and Eve, there still would be rule or leadership in a community. This rule would be a “kind of dominion” in which a greater man would “direct” another man “to his own good or to the good of the community” (Reference Aquinas1947). The language here is one of rule, not simply of an authority being a guide or protector of liberties. Moreover, when discussing eternal law, Aquinas presents a sketch of the hierarchical chain of command: “Wherefore we observe the same in all those who govern, so that the plan of government is derived by secondary governors from the governor in chief; thus the plan of what is to be done in a state flows from the kings command to his inferior administrators” (Reference Aquinas1947). Expressing similar sentiments in De Regno, Aquinas writes that the idea of the king ruling is contained in the very title of king: “the very name rex is derived from the fact they direct the government” (Unde ad omnes reges pertinet gubernatio, et a gubernationis regimine regis nomen accipitur)…” (Reference Aquinas, Phelan and Eschmann1949). The merits of these passages certainly have been subject to scrutiny by twentieth century philosophers and theologians, but there is little question that, contrary to the views of the Whig Thomists, Thomas Aquinas had a decidedly illiberal view of a government. On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas markedly conservative and hierarchical vision of political society does not leave us at an impasse, for, by briefly examining the writings of Leo XIII, which the Whig Thomists themselves claim as their guide, we can find an authentic way to coordinate Thomistic political thought in a liberal society.
AQUINAS IN THE CATHOLIC NEOCONSERVATIVE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
In the hands of Catholic neoconservatives such as George Weigel and Michael Novak, Whig Thomism has taken on a life of its own. For the neoconservatives, Thomas Aquinas is the true father of the Enlightenment as well as such momentous and cataclysmic events as the 1789 French revolution (Weigel Reference Weigel2005, 103) as well as a key influence American Founding Fathers James Madison and Alexander Hamilton who, due to their alleged understanding of the “ravage of original sin in human affairs,” supposedly supported Thomas Aquinas's “notion of separated powers” (Novak Reference Novak1996, 93). Even the Bill of Rights, according to George Weigel, was rooted in “Thomistic constitutionalism” (Reference Weigel1987, 117).
In his 1987 treatment of the Catholic just war tradition, Tranquillitas Ordinis, George Weigel labels the seeds of Whig Thomism as “St. Thomas's constitutionalism” which include “the Thomistic principles of personalism, the common good, pluralism, and subsidiarity, would be needed” (Reference Weigel1987, 40). Certainly, such language could refer to legitimate concepts in Thomas Aquinas's work; however, Weigel conflates these concepts with liberalism, noting for example that the thought of John Courtney Murray's “was rooted in Thomistic constitutionalism…” (Reference Weigel1987, 109). Weigel further defines Thomistic constitutionalism as being rooted in the “sense of the governor's responsibilities for the right ordering of public life for the common good” as well as Aquinas's claim that “sovereignty does not belong to the monarch by divine right through birth, but through the consent of the governed, who delegate the sovereignty that is given to them in community by God” (Reference Weigel1987, 35). Drawing from Fr. John Courtney Murray's analysis of Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris, Weigel writes that the notion of “the free man under a limited government” is a mark of “the constitutionalism of Thomas Aquinas” and a “Thomistic” “political ideal” (Reference Weigel1987, 86). Weigel, however, does caution against “confusing Aquinas with Jefferson…” (Reference Weigel1987, 35). Despite his distinction between the thought of Thomas Aquinas and that of the American Founding Fathers, Weigel argues that the “roots of a Catholic theory of democratic governance can be found here” as well as in “…Thomas's insistence on the ‘natural’ character of society and government as implied by the creaturely sociability of man” (Reference Weigel1987, 35).
In Will it Liberate? Questions about Liberation Theology, Michael Novak lays out another progressive vision of history in which Whig Thomism is but one stop on the evolution of the reception of Sacred Scripture in history: “One must see the Bible as it actually worked in the history of political economy, as yeast works in dough. One must study how it affected Catholic social thought from Augustine to Aquinas to Lord Acton and, above all, how it affected the social vision of the new American republic in its political, economic and moral systems” (Reference Novak1986, 37). The overall neoconservative narrative is that Thomism, read as “Whig Thomism” was an important step in the development of Christian political theory, which culminates, in the view of the Catholic neoconservatives, in American liberal democracy.
The Catholic neoconservative argument for Whig Thomism draws from a scholarly pedigree, and some scholars such as M. Stanton Evans (Reference Evans1994), Brian Tierney (Reference Tierney1982), and Richard Tuck (Reference Tuck1979), have attempted to craft a narrative rooting contemporary constitutional law theory and other aspects of liberalism in Aquinas. However, the neoconservative argument that, although Aquinas's texts do not support liberalism, the principles or foundations of Aquinas's thought do seems to clash with the analysis both of scholars of Thomas Aquinas as well as historians of medieval political thought. Medieval political scholar, Joseph Canning, for example, in his History of Medieval Political Thought, argues, “…Aquinas favoured a limited monarchy in the form of a mixed constitution containing monarchical, aristocratic and popular elements as being mostly in practice to secure the common good though ensuring the participation of all” (1996, 130). Canning further states that the very principles of Thomism suggest an illiberal monarchic and hierarchical structure to society, for Aquinas “used the metaphysical argument that monarchy, in that it expressed the principle of unity, was best suited to bringing about peace and thus procuring the common good. Likewise he interpreted the organic approach as favouring monarchy…” (1996, 130). Even Thomists themselves have stated Aquinas clearly developed a theory of hierarchy and monarchy in his work. In one of the rare English language scholarly books on Aquinas's political theory, Fr. Thomas Gilby, O.P. argues, that Aquinas had a “strong a sense of graded responsibilities” (Reference Gilby1958, 294).
Several scholars further have taken issue with the Catholic neoconservative misappropriation of Aquinas. Thomas Rourke in A Conscience as Large as the World: Yves Simon versus the Catholic Neoconservatives takes objects to the Catholic neoconservative attempt to appropriate Aquinas for their purposes, writing that “[c]ontemporary Catholic neoconservatism does not embody essential elements of the Thomistic tradition” (1997, 253). Patrick Allitt likewise, in Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985, argues that the Whig Thomism of Fr. John Courtney Murray takes a “certain amount of license with the historical record…” (Reference Allitt1993, 34). Michael Baxter likewise criticizes Fr. Murray for simultaneously invoking the message of the Gospel for American political ends as well as simultaneously marking a sharp distinction between the Gospel message and politics. Baxter argues that “Murray was more ready and able than his predecessors to important theological terms and categories into his social theory…, but he did so in such a way that his theology effaced itself as it moved into the realm of the natural and the social” (Reference Baxter, Thorn, Runkel and Mountin2001, 82–83). Whether the late Fr. Murray is invoking the incarnation, the redemption, or even the Sermon on the Mount, he, according to Baxter, creates “spiritual/temporal distinction,” which “dictates (and mutes) the significance of other theological terms and categories” (Reference Baxter, Thorn, Runkel and Mountin2001, 83). Baxter's critique regarding John Courtney Murray is equally applicable to the Catholic neoconservatives who likewise instrumentalized much of Christianity, including and especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas, for the sake of the advancing a neoconservative political agenda.
Robert Kraynak further notes that Whig as well as Neo Thomism is essentially a “synthesis of Thomas and Kant—the natural law teaching of traditional Thomism, featuring man as a rational and social animal with transcendent longings for God, combined with the Kantian theory of moral personality, featuring man as an acting and willing agent claiming a host of social, economic, and political rights” (Reference Kraynak2001, 156). Ultimately, this movement, in Kraynak's view, has tied “Christianity too closely to liberal democracy and associated structures, such as capitalist, that are not always hospitable to Christian spiritual and moral life and that are not necessarily the best choice for the temporal realm” (Reference Kraynak2001, 232–33). Kraynak is correct to see the tension between Christianity and liberalism and its grandchild, neoconservativism; however, Baxter's analysis of Murray, which I hope to apply to the Catholic neoconservatives, is a compliment to Kraynak's. The Catholic neoconservatives did not simply attempt to mix liberalism and Catholicism; rather, they instrumentalized Catholicism (specifically here the thought of Thomas Aquinas) for the sake of partisan politics, and, by doing so, radically severed the spiritual from the temporal sphere.
POPE LEO XIII AND A THOMISM FOR A LIBERAL SOCIETY
The last central component of the appropriation of Whig Thomism by the Catholic neoconservatives is the narrative that Pope Leo XIII was the first liberal pope, whose call for the return of Thomas Aquinas to Catholic universities and seminaries in his 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris, was itself a command for a new and liberalized political Thomism. In the Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Michael Novak had presented Leo XIII as a liberal reformer who was “determined to chart a new course” after the pontificate of Pius IX (Reference Novak1993, 37). To do so, Novak explains, Leo “took as his master, and recommended as teacher par excellence for the whole Church, that ‘first Whig’…St. Thomas Aquinas, who more than any other championed a synthesis of faith and reason, grace and nature, Christianity and humanism” (Reference Novak1993, 37). Leo's use of Aquinas, Novak further writes, was done “to close the breach between modernity and the medieval/ancient past—and, in particular, between the life of the Church and the life of the world” (Reference Novak1993, 52). Fr. Benedict M. Ashley O.P. presents a similar but more scholarly narrative in his essay, “The Loss of Theological Unity: Pluralism, Thomism, and Catholic Morality” (Reference Ashley, Mary and Scott Appleby1995). Fr. Ashley argues that, in Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo “did not mean to limit Catholic theology to the past, because he explicitly insisted on the updating of Thomism” (Reference Ashley, Mary and Scott Appleby1995, 67). In Evangelical Catholicism, George Weigel likewise argues that Leo XIII, despite his frequent and explicit condemnations of liberalism in His Holiness's encyclicals was, in fact, the first liberal pope whose encyclical Aeterni Patris argued for a return to “a close reading of Thomas Aquinas's original texts, which were to become the foundation from which to build a distinctive Catholic intellectual engagement with modernity” (2014, 13). However, precisely what this intellectual engagement with modernity required to be effected was a retooling of Thomas Aquinas a proto-liberal thinker, and this retooling ultimately created a Thomism that would be unrecognizable to the Aquinas himself.
Moreover, contrary to suggestions by neoconservative Catholics such as Novak as well as George Weigel, Leo XIII had, in Aeterni Patris, stated that Catholics should turn to the “teachings of Thomas on the true meaning of liberty …on the divine origin of all authority, on laws and their force, on the paternal and just rule of princes, on obedience to the higher powers, on mutual charity one toward another…,” for these teachings “have very great and invincible force to overturn those principles of the new order which are well known to be dangerous to the peaceful order of things and to public safety” (Reference Leo XIII1879). Pope Leo clearly states that Catholics should return to the principles of Thomas Aquinas's political theory not to reconcile with the philosophical principle of liberalism, but to combat them. It is at this juncture that not only does the neoconservative project of Whig Thomism but the political trajectory of NeoThomists such as Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon seems to fail to adhere to injunction of Aeterni Patris. As part of the euphoria of the “American Century,” in which National Socialist and Italian Fascist as well as Soviet totalitarianism were both crushed by the liberal democracies of the West, the NeoThomists as well as the neoconservative Whig Thomists had hoped that the Anglo-American brand of liberalism would ultimately be able to be synthesized with the decidedly late Medieval thought of Thomas Aquinas—even though this was not Leo's intent. Finally, Leo XIII, despite his condemnation of philosophical liberalism, does provide a modus vivendi for American Catholics seeking to live in harmony with the American democratic tradition.
Although his 1899 encyclical condemning the Americanist heresy, which, in many ways prefigures the project of “Whig Thomism,” Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae is better known, Leo XIII, also penned an encyclical praising the success of Catholics in the United States four years before Testem Benevolentiae, titled Longinqua. Echoing the sentiments of the ralliement that he proposed with the secular Third Republic of France in his 1892 Au Milieu Des Sollicitudes, in Longinqua, Pope Leo, expressing his “esteem and love” for the “young and vigorous American nation,” notes that the flourishing Church in America is due to the “equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic” (Reference Leo XIII1895). However, as a prelude to his later condemnation of Americanism, Pope Leo warns those American bishops tempted by the siren song of liberalism and “Whiggism,” that the principles of American liberalism are by no means compatible with Catholicism, and “it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced” (Reference Leo XIII1895). For Pope Leo XIII, it certainly was possible for American Catholics to be patriotic and loyal to their government. However, this patriotism should not be translated into an embrace of the philosophical liberalism that undergirds American democracy. As a result, reading Longinqua with Pope Leo's command to return to the political principles of Thomas Aquinas's political thought in Aeterni Patris as well as a careful reading of Thomas Aquinas's political philosophy reveals that, despite the valid and noble efforts of the Whig Thomists, many of their political theories are not consonant with Aquinas's thought, and, what is more, they do not fulfill the renewal of Thomistic thought mandated by Leo XIII.
However, despite the strong critiques of liberalism as well as democratic principles throughout his work, Pope Leo does appear to present a compromise or creative application of Catholicism to the condition of liberalism via a sort of Catholic realpolitik in his 1892 encyclical Au Milieu des Sollicitudes. Reflecting on the often violent tug of war between les deux Frances or the “two Frances” fashioned throughout the tumult of the nineteenth century and consisting of secular, liberal France, on the one hand, and conservative Catholic France, on the other, Leo XIII describes liberal France as consisting of “a vast conspiracy that certain men have formed for the annihilation of Christianity in France…” (Reference Leo XIII1892). The Holy Father, known as “the light from the heavens,” further is principally concerned with the maintenance of Catholic influence in France, praising those who in France who fight in “defense of the Catholic faith” (Reference Leo XIII1892). However, he uses a great deal of language drawn from liberalism. He speaks of “the inalienable rights of the Catholic Church…” (Reference Leo XIII1892). This use of liberal language to articulate Catholic political philosophy is very interesting and reflects Leo's attempt to incarnate Catholic political thought within a liberal milieu.
Within his encyclical, Pope Leo articulates that he wishes that the new French republic be a distinctly Catholic republic in which the citizens are united in “true religious sentiment” on which “moral sense” is founded (Reference Leo XIII1892). Leo further states that religious sentiment of French Catholics should be even deeper “because they have the happiness of belonging to the true religion” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Since religion is the basis of morality and law in the state, Leo argues that since Catholicism is “the true Church of Jesus Christ,” it is especially suited for “the regulation of life in society and in the individual” (Reference Leo XIII1892).
At the same time, Leo dismisses the notion that he wishes the Church to have “political domination over the State” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Rather, Pope Leo believes that the Church's role is to undertake the “tutelage” of political societies (Reference Leo XIII1892). Nonetheless, Leo tells Catholics to cease advocating for the restoration of the monarchy in order that France might have peace, for “a great union is necessary,” and “it is indispensable that all preoccupation capable of diminishing its strength and efficacy must be abandoned” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Drawing from the Augustinian and later Thomistic principle that one of the principal goals of political life is tranquillitas ordinis, Leo argues that not only Catholics in the Third Republic, but “all upright and intelligent Frenchman” should “utterly…disregard all germs of political strife in order to devote their efforts to the pacification of their country” (Reference Leo XIII1892).
Noting that “[v]arious political governments have succeeded one another in France during the last [19th] century…,” the Thomistically-inclined Leo XIII makes a subtle plug for monarchy as the “best of these forms…” of government (Reference Leo XIII1892). However, at the same time, taking his cue from Aristotle's Politics, Leo states that “in all truth it may be affirmed that each of them [monarchic, imperial, and republican forms of government] is good…” (Reference Leo XIII1892). For Leo certain forms of government are best adapted “to the character and customs of such or such a nation” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Leo then even more interestingly adds that, in the “order of speculative ideas, Catholics, like all other citizens, are free to prefer one form of government to another precisely because no one of these social forms is, in itself, opposed to the principles of sound reason nor to the maxims of Christian doctrine” (Reference Leo XIII1892). This flexibility then allows for a historically informed (but not necessarily historicist) application of the principles of Catholic political philosophy to one's temporal milieu.
In Paragraph #15 of the encyclical, Leo further discusses the possibility of incarnating principles and abstractions in the “facts” of late nineteenth century European politics (Reference Leo XIII1892). Although Pope Leo admits that the “principles” of politics “remain fixed,” on the other hand, these principles “becoming incarnated in facts, …are clothed with a contingent character, determined by the centre in which their application is produced” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Within late nineteenth century France, Leo argues, the political situation necessitates a peaceful reconciliation between Catholicism and the Third Republic. For better or worse, Leo argues, a government may change its character; moreover, due to “social need,” a government might justify “the creation and the existence of new governments…,” for the sake of “public order” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Leo's point is that although a republic might not be the ideal form of government for France, the social need for order requires that Catholics accept the Third Republic. However, Leo interestingly notes that the republic should be tolerated only “as long as the exigencies of the common good shall demand it..,” leaving open the possibility for other forms of government in the future, including the restoration of a monarchy (Reference Leo XIII1892). Catholics in France must accept the fact that the Republic is “the actual government of their nation” (Reference Leo XIII1892).
Leo explains that the anticlerical character of the Third Republic is derived, not from the nature of a Republic, but due to the legislation proposed under the Third Republic. Leo, at the same time, condemns the separation of Church and state promulgated by the Third Republic. Arguing that “…Catholics cannot be too careful in defending themselves against such a separation,” Leo appears to make a reference to the United States in which Church and state are separated. The pontiff describes this situation as one in which “if it have numerous and serious inconveniences, also offers some advantages—above all when, by a fortunate inconsistency, the legislator is inspired by Christian principles—and though these advantages cannot justify the false principle of separation nor authorize its defense, they nevertheless render worthy of toleration a situation which, practically, might be worse” (Reference Leo XIII1892). France, however, is in a different situation, for the nation is “…Catholic in her traditions and by the present faith of the great majority of her sons, the Church should not be placed in the precarious position to which she must submit among other peoples…” (Reference Leo XIII1892). Leo's point is that an ideal situation is one in which the Church has a teaching authority over the population of a country and its legislation is greatly influenced and ultimately rooted in (if not necessarily controlled by) the Catholic Church. However, due to historical contingencies, some countries (such as the United States) have required the Church to relinquish this teaching role within that nation's borders. In countries such as France that have a Catholic majority population, every effort should be made to establish some union of Church and state that would give the Catholic Church power over the legislation and morals of the country.
CONCLUSION
Although much if not most of Leo's advocacy for a return to more intimate church-state relations in France would not sit well with most of both (neo-)conservative and left-leaning Catholics in the twenty-first century, Leo's method is an especially interesting coda to our discussion of the Catholic neoconservatives. Drawing from the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, Pope Leo XIII argued for maintaining the principles of the need for the confessional state in which the Catholic Church served as the teacher and guide of morals and legislation of a community whereas, at the same time, making it clear that Catholics must be temporary concessions to historically contingencies. The Catholic neoconservatives, on the other hand, argued that the authentic principles of Thomas Aquinas good be aligned with liberalism. The historical contingency, they argued, was reversed. It was medieval thinking, not liberalism, the Catholic neoconservatives argued, which restricted truly Thomistic (and thus truly Catholic) political principles from flowering. As I hope to have demonstrated, Thomas's teaching was essentially linked to the hierarchical and “organicist” thought of the Middle Ages, and thus the Catholic neoconservative attempt to establish Aquinas' philosophical principles as being fundamentally liberal fails. At the same time, Pope Leo's method provides a blue print for future dialog among those many citizens of the world who take religion and faith and their relationship to politics seriously.
Living in an age in which metaphysics and terms like “substance” or “form” as well as certain eternal verities are subjects of dismissal and even ridicule among theologians, it is, on the one hand, difficult to discuss something like philosophia perennis or a perennial philosophy. Nonetheless, for many of the world's believers, the idea that truths are eternal plays an important role. Since the thirteenth century, Thomism has played an important factor the formation of Catholic thought. Although Thomist thinking relies upon pre-modern, classical and medieval, concepts to which many scholars in the postliberal period have found themselves adverse, there is a rich reservoir of conceptual tools in the work of Thomas Aquinas. The key flaw in the Catholic neoconservative method was the ahistorical attempt to argue that these political principles of Thomas were essentially liberal. Rather, following the direction of Pope Leo, it would have been wise to seek to apply the intellectual principles of Thomas to the historical milieu in which the Catholic neoconservatives found themselves. Perhaps (and this is a discussion for another time) there is, following the Thomistic arguments of Alaisdar McIntyre in After Virtue, recognize the need in post-liberal era for striking a sober balance between freedom and order that would allow for a true human flourishing.
Although those on the left and, surprisingly, the right might quibble with the remnants of 1990s and 2000s (neo-)conservativism behind Patrick Deneen's critique of liberalism, there is much in Deneen's critique of the totalitarian nature of the post-liberal global order. Just as the twentieth century superstructure of would could be called “state capitalism,” or the merger of industrial and consumer capitalism with the state power of allegedly liberal nations, hid its essentially predatory and destructive nature behind the veil of “family values,” patriotism, and Christian iconography and phrases, so too does the new hyper-consumerist, debt-driven, twenty-first century superstructure of state capitalism hide behind the veil of progressivism, freedom, and concern for the environment. In both its twentieth century “conservative” branding, and its twenty-first century progressive façade, the superstructure of Western capitalism has an essentially totalitarian nature, colonizing and appropriating rival systems of thought and utilizing them for its own ends. The key question is how this structure can be tamed ethically and placed in the service of true justice.
