Catholicism and Republicanism:
More Than Compatible
But last month, Patrick Deneen wrote an excellent article on The American Conservative announcing that these six out of ten Catholics don’t matter at all, in the larger scheme of things. “Liberal Catholicism has no future,” Deneen writes, “like liberal Protestantism, it is fated to become liberalism simpliciter within a generation.” Notwithstanding the fact that liberal Protestantism—unlike liberal Catholicism—is in America an extreme minority position, I couldn’t any more agree with Deneen’s claim about ideological relevancy. Don’t sweat the moot. Instead, Deneen directs the Catholic faithful to look to their own ranks, with an eye to parsing the relative division or cohesion inhering there. Those remaining four out of ten votes, Deneen admonishes us, represent where orthodox American Catholicism lives. This too is a sagacious prompt.
Deneen asks: how compatible is Catholicism with self-government and how formative is the interplay of the two upon those intra-orthodox subgroups? Recalling that reasonable minds can and do differ, Deneen splits either side of the dividing line into what may be called the “non-compatibilists” and the “compatibilists.” Respectively, they are those who think “American Catholic” (or even more aptly, “Catholic citizen of a republic”) designates a contradiction in terms, and those who do not.
This is precisely where Deneen and I part ways. Even if he is correct that the two sub-groups of American orthodox Catholics indeed self-identify thus, he forgot to write: “[sic].” Such self-identification is spurious. It presents a false dichotomy. To say “compatible” is a gross understatement of the truth, and “non-compatible” is outright wrong.
Indeed, a major connection seems to have been missed by virtually everyone within the Church of Rome, from the laity to the Curia: the compatibilists, the non-compatibilists, and Deneen himself. (And of course, as he points out, heterodox Catholics don’t even count.) The Natural Law ideas of Catholicism requisition a certain, ineluctable outlook on government: republics require Natural Law, which itself needs a Catholic explication. This is not to say that to be Catholic, one must believe in republican self-government. Rather, if one already believes in self-government, as virtually every twenty-first century American or European does, his republicanism itself requires the ideas of the Catholic Church.
It is one thing to argue that Catholicism, alongside Protestantism or Enlightenment thought, can alsosustain republicanism, as John Courtney Murray once argued, and as Samuel Gregg more recently has. It is quite another thing altogether to argue that Catholicism alone can sustain republicanism—i.e. that Protestantism and Enlightenment thought cannot. In this claim, which I stake, I believe I am sui generis.
America’s Declaration and, to a slightly lesser extent, its Constitution were structured almost exclusively upon the ideas of “Whig theory” from England in the prior century. Whig theory’s mature form, John Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise, was in turn fertilized by the coalescence of two sixteenth century movements: the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation, which each repudiated (contrary to popular opinion) all the heftiest parts of Natural Law theory. That is, nature is a forum for freedom, morality, intelligibility, and teleology. Locke well knew that his own empiricist epistemology (and in an opposite/equal way, the Reformation epistemology) laid low these four important attributes formerly ascribed to nature. Simply, if nature is unintelligible as he posed it, it can have no discernable law.
And this acknowledgement forced Locke to bifurcate bizarrely between true, Aristotelian Natural Law of the Catholic Church (which, as a Reformer and an empiricist, both of which rejected Aristotelianism, he had no choice but to reject) and his new brand of it, which adopted its conclusion but none of its primary four premises (nature’s freedom, morality, intelligibility, and teleology). This cast the convincing, yet misleading, impression of a nature as simultaneously inscrutable yet somehow, still a source of rights. By way of a heinous convolution of ideas and an egregious misnomer, he became Natural Law’s putative godfather, the cherry-picker of a conclusion with none of its premises.
In that way, and that way only, could he simultaneously a) plagiarize from the Scholastics of the Catholic Church in order to b) describe, in 1689, the prior year’s Glorious Revolution againstCatholicism in England! Whig Theory is intellectual history’s greatest irony: imagine getting into a fight with someone because you insist this person should not carry a knife. In the ensuing struggle, you wrest the knife from him and use it on him … all to force him to acknowledge that he should not use the knife. Of course you prevail, because the knife is indeed effective. This was more or less the Whig stance on Natural Law (i.e. the “knife”) in England in 1689. And the American Founders and Framers imported all this ambivalence into their “American Whiggism” a century later. Thus, eighteenth century American Natural Law was no less tortured than seventeenth century English Natural Law. Both were fueled exclusively by the Prot-Enlight amalgam of Whiggism, which rebuked but secretlyincorporated Scholastic political theory.
But the whole hodgepodge, I acknowledge, also represents history’s best political experiment to date, which, irrespective of its etiological cover-up, got things 90 percent right or better at the beginning. At the beginning. On account of the idea’s low fidelity, however, it devolved rather quickly, in under two centuries.
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