American and Catholic
by George Weigel
Michael Novak’s achievement
Back then, in theological circles, a fad existed for titling articles and books “Toward a Theology of” this, that, or the other thing (a fad once neatly parodied by my Toronto colleague Margaret O’Rourke Boyle, in “Toward a Theology of Garbage”). Indeed, the “toward” bug infected Novak on one occasion, when he christened an extended essay “Toward a Theology of the Corporation.” But that was, I’m sure, a literary venial sin. For Novak’s entire intellectual enterprise has never needed that faux rhetorical booster “toward.” As he showed me in his 1968 Theology Today essay on theology’s “standpoint,” authentic Catholic intellectual life, and especially Catholic theology, is always “toward”: Catholic intellectual life consciously engages the fullness of human experience, which Catholic thinkers “read” through the prism of revelation and reason, both of which, they maintain, cast the light of truth on human affairs. This conviction—that reflection on the things of the City of God can illuminate the paradoxes, tragedies, conundrums, and possibilities of the City of Man—stands at the center of Michael Novak’s thought.
And that is why, in more than a half-century of scholarship, journalism, and public service, Novak has applied his philosophical and theological skills to virtually every consequential aspect of the human condition. He has not followed a preset itinerary but has deliberately charted previously unexplored territories and terrain. That choice—to break out of conventional patterns of thought and become one’s own intellectual GPS—has not always made for an easy life.
Some did not appreciate having their disciplines and practices examined through lenses ground by theological reason; in fact, some of those whose turf Novak surveyed regard the very notion of “theological reason” as oxymoronic. Explorers make mistakes, and Novak would be the first to admit that what once seemed an interesting track to follow eventually turned into a blind alley, or that the account he gave of this or that form of human activity was incomplete. One of the most impressive aspects of Novak’s intellectual personality has been his openness to criticism and his willingness to say, when necessary, “you were right and I was wrong”—a confession that comes harder to intellectuals than to most.
Like others who, in the standard political categories, made the pilgrimage from left to right, Novak has been pilloried as a traitor to his class. The truth is that he had the courage to face facts and hold fast to his deepest convictions about human dignity and human freedom, rather than adjust those convictions to the shifting fashions of political correctness. Like virtually everyone who enters the public arena with ideas that challenge the regnant wisdom, Novak must have wished, from time to time, for a better class of enemies. Unlike some of those enemies, he has maintained a commitment to charity, candor, and respect.
It has not been easy being an intellectual trailblazer, this past half-century; perhaps it never is. Still, it’s worth noting en passant how nasty intellectual exchange—or what passes for it—often is, these days. Late in his life, which was built around debate and controversy, almost always conducted with robust good humor, G. K. Chesterton regretted that his friend Hilaire Belloc’s controversies were always so “sundering.” That had something to do with Belloc’s bulldog demeanor. But in our own time, controversy over ideas has become inexorably “sundering” because of the secular-messianic streak that dominates late-modern and postmodern intellectual life, especially at the sometimes-bloody crossroads where ideas meet public policy. Those who challenge the shibboleths of the politically correct academy aren’t merely mistaken; they are wicked and must be shunned. That this cast of mind has seriously eroded American public life has become all too clear in, for example, recent Supreme Court dicta that dismiss those who defend traditional moral norms from postmodern Gnosticism as irrational bigots. Similar shunning dynamics, rooted in the same belief that history’s ratchet only works in one direction, have too often made intra-Catholic controversy an unpleasant arena in recent decades.
But enough about the difficulties that Michael Novak has faced over a half-century of intellectual exploration. What about his singular achievement?
It is not within my competence to make judgments about Novak’s account of economic life; others are better equipped to determine what he got right and what has been left incomplete in his philosophical and theological analysis of markets, free enterprise, the system of democratic capitalism, and the vocation of business. But however those judgments wind up, it’s clear that Novak, with singular dedication and real effect in the evolution of Catholic social doctrine, introduced a new temper to Catholic thinking about economic life. We can describe that new temper as an empirical sensibility that never descends into empiricism.
Novak’s account of economics begins, not with abstractions, but with keen observations of what is, which, in turn, lead to a disciplined reflection on how what is ought to be understood, casting light on moral truths and responsibilities in the process. Or, as his friend Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian social thinker, has put it, Novak’s seminal thinking about economic life raised an important question, little explored previously in Catholic social thought—or indeed in any other religiously informed social thought: Might “laws” exist in economic life analogous to the moral laws that a disciplined reflection on human moral action can discern? Is there, in other words, a deep structure to economic life that helps explain why some economies “work,” whether those economies are lodged in medieval Benedictine monasteries or in modern business enterprises? And does that deep structure reflect truths about the human person and human relationships that we can recognize by a careful, empirically informed reasoning that is attentive to the truths about the human condition that we learn from biblical religion?
From its inception with Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, modern Catholic social doctrine, for all its insights, had a somewhat abstract, top-down quality. Thus, the strikingly empirical character of Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II’s seminal 1991 encyclical on the free and virtuous society in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, marked a significant development in the Church’s evolving social thought. The basic principles of that tradition remained in place, but they now found themselves filled out by a far more attentive reading of the realities of late-modern political and economic life—including the one that Novak powerfully described at the outset of his groundbreaking 1982 book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism: “Of all the systems of political economy which have shaped our history, none has so revolutionized ordinary expectations of human life—lengthened the life span, made the elimination of poverty and famine imaginable, enlarged the range of human choice—as democratic capitalism.” Recognizing the truth (and limits) of that insight, Centesimus Annus developed Catholic social doctrine’s “standpoint” to include the possibilities of empowerment latent in free economies, clearly reflecting Novak’s influence. If Catholic social doctrine continues to unfold along the trajectory of Centesimus Annus, it will continue to bear the imprint of Novak’s thought.
The impact of Novak’s writing on Catholicism and economic life wasn’t just felt in Rome. A samizdat translation of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism circulated in poorly printed and tattered editions among the leaders of Solidarity in Soviet-controlled Poland, helping to shape the post-Communist future of that country. The Polish government recently acknowledged Novak’s contribution to a free Poland by awarding him the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Merit, one of the nation’s highest honors. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism had a similar influence across the Tatra Mountains, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Novak’s thinking on economics and his critique of Marxist-influenced “liberation theologies” also helped turn the tide against an influential movement that threatened to reduce the Church in Latin America to a political agent advancing a totalitarian agenda. At the same time, his creative extension of Catholic social doctrine helped Latin American scholars, clergy, and political leaders think beyond the authoritarianism and mercantilism that had often characterized Catholic public cultures south of the Rio Grande.
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Read more: www.city-journal.org
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Theology of the Corporation:
A Conversation with Michael Novak
This interview was conducted by Joop Koopman.
Religious philosopher Michael Novak, cofounder of Crisis Magazine, was the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. According to many observers, Novak’s influence played an important role in the drafting of Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical on Catholic social teaching. In particular, Novak’s work is seen within the Holy Father’s vision of the free society as a threefold system — political, economic, and moral.
In 1981, Novak published Toward a Theology of the Corporation in which he first examined what he called the “high spiritual vocation” of the business corporation. Aiming for a more general audience, in 1997 he published three lectures sponsored by Pfizer Inc., the New York-based pharmaceutical company, entitled The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation. An expanded version of these Pfizer lectures is available from Rowman & Littlefield.
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Koopman: For most readers, economics conjures up facts and figures of a strictly material nature. In your book, you uphold the publicly owned business corporation as an institution endowed with great “moral possibilities,” as an engine of change and a guarantor of civic freedom and stimulant for man’s cocreativity with his Creator. How did you make this connection between theology, Catholicism, and economics? What prompted you?
Novak: When I was still in the seminary in the late ’50s, I had already begun to investigate the relationship between religion and economics. It was clear that figures like Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Courtney Murray had studied the relationship between religion and politics. But no one had done much with economics. People in the humanities showed no adequate absorption in the field. I took up the matter; it became an ambition.
My wife, Karen, and I were in Rome during the second and third sessions of Vatican II. One of my most vivid memories was the growing conviction in those days that the modern period is the era of lay people: the move from emperors and kings to rule by citizens. At least in democratic societies, lay people share sovereignty over their own countries. If things go wrong, it is their responsibility to make corrections. If new initiatives are needed, it is their responsibility to imagine them. This became a dominant theme in my thinking.
One of the most important places for the laity to act — particularly if the poor are to be raised up — is the economy. In the end, it is not government that alleviates poverty, but a growing economy. We need to move the poor into the middle class. That is primarily the responsibility of lay people in the economic sphere.
In those early days, though, you were clearly on the Left.
I was convinced that a good Christian, even a good humanist, had to be on the Left and probably couldn’t be a friend of business. Business was merely buying and selling, mere hucksterism, after all. Nevertheless, upon completion of my studies in philosophy and theology, and then the social sciences, I began to catch up on studying economics by way of Christian socialism. Reading all the theories, I had a concrete turn of mind and wanted to see what some of these ideas would mean in practice. But I couldn’t find a socialist state that I could admire.
One that had succeeded, you mean?
One that I admired. Sweden, for example, was a successful, wealthy country. But I found life there, when I visited, rather gloomy. The atmosphere was psychologically stifling, without a sense of liberty, generosity, or risk. It was all about safety and holding on to what people had — trying to get privileges out of the government without doing anything in return. Then there was the Soviet Union, of course. My family had come from Slovakia. It was clear that communism had made a mess of it in the entire region. Everywhere I looked there was disappointment. All the socialists’ experiments in Asia and Africa had clearly failed, too. I came to the conclusion that there had to be something wrong with an idea that kept inspiring experiments that all eventually failed.
These discoveries were part of your own “conversion” from the political Left toward a conservative position. Who guided you in particular?
I began to see the point of writers like Joseph Schumpeter and Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich von Hayek, who held up the art of enterprise, the creative initiative of starting up new companies, as the most important, dynamic feature of the economy. They believed that economists too seldom study the entrepreneur; their main focus tends to be on an aggregate number — that which is already achieved, what is already present and working. They then miss the dynamic factor, like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs working in a California garage, launching the Apple personal computer — an invention that would change the face of American industry within twenty-five years. In that time span, from ground zero, more people would come to be employed in the computer industry and in the field of computer-driven communications than in any other industry.
Hence, as you have put it, a “full-fledged theology of the lay person” has to take economic matters into account.
Don’t forget that the largest number of Jews, Christians, and Muslims are working in businesses, as owners, managers, entrepreneurs, or simply as workers. Most lay people spend most of their time engaged in economic activity. And a worker today might become an entrepreneur tomorrow. Hence, the age of the laity required the development of a theology of economics and, finally, a theology of the business corporation.
Little study had been done in this area, I found. In the ancient world there had been a tendency to hold up the contemplative virtues as superior to the active life. They are, of course, but that shouldn’t result in a demeaning view of the practical virtues. We should not look down on the Marthas of this world.
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Read more: www.crisismagazine.com
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