It has been awhile. I have been extremely busy and my computer charger is broken so I have extremely limited access to the internet. Anywho, I will talk more later on the great time I had at the 12th annual Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference. It was a blast. For the time being, muse over the paper I presented; or as much as I remember. Dr. Ralph Wood gave a far more eloquent treatment of lockean libearlism and the response through Catholic Imagination as presented in Flannery O'Connor...it was AWESOME!. Thus, I kinda readjusted all my stuff last minute and tried to hit something new at a different angle...most of it was just my speech and not so much written...also, there are probably many errors...deal with it :)
If for whatever reason you use my paper for anything, do cite it please.
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American Catholic: Newmanian Critique and a Thomistic Remedy
The Question I wish to address today is whether one can be both truly Catholic and truly American. I must note that some of this may seem like an inadequate repeat of Dr. Wood's paper yesterday. However, I will attempt to approach a slightly different issue with regards Newman's criticism of Post-Lockean Liberal Theology and American Catholicism.
I will begin then by illustrating Newman's criticism of liberal theology, move into a discussion of the Americanist heresy as condemned by Pope Leo XIII, and offer what I take to be a humble set of possible Thomistic remedies.
I. Liberalism
So what then is liberalism. Cardinal Newman defines Liberalism in his famous "Biglietto Speech", given on the occasion of his appointment to the College of Cardinals, on May 12, 1879 as follows:
"Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man's religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society."
This work, and the Apologia as a whole, reflects one of Newman's primary concerns: to defend religious faith and the authority of Church institutions in an age of increasing liberalism and disbelief that Newman feared would eventually lead to a catastrophic destruction of religion. The liberal idea, originally posited by Locke, that human reason is the supreme judge of truth (even revealed truth), Newman believed, would result in the eventual destruction of faith and religion. 'In a sense, though Liberals may profess religion, Newman feared that their religion would become nothing more than a mere humanism veiled by the externals of a real religion.'1
For Newman, I take him to have 3 essential issues with liberal theology: 1) the anti-dogmatic principle, 2) the anti-sacramental principle, and 3) the anti-creedal principle (I will also refer to this principle as the principle of private judgment or the anti-communitarian principle). These three principles, then, are the rational fabrications Newman feels has made certain factions of the Anglican Church no longer Christian.
I.a. First Principle: The Anti-Dogmatic Principle
On Newman's account, rational religion is incompatible with doctrine and dogma. Newman clearly states in the beginning of his Apologia that his battle with liberalism was “first, over the principle of dogma: my battle was with liberalism; by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments.”2 Doctrine and dogma, like the doctrines of Christ and the Trinity are not demonstrable by pure reason; rather they are to be accepted by faith. Therefore, a liberalist is not inclined in the least bit to believe them unless they could be evidentially and rationally demonstrated. In his follow-up note titled Liberalism in which he treats this in a slightly more thorough manner than simply asserting the “anti-dogmatic principle”, Newman notes that he understands Liberalism to posit that “no one can believe what he does not understand...Therefore, e.g., there are no mysteries in religion.”3 The rational, liberal view is not simply that we cannot have much through doctrine. Rather, liberal religion asserts that we ought not have anything to do with doctrine. Doctrines can never be justified with respect to reason. Doctrines lead to partisanship and fanaticism; one person's doctrine is simply another person's demonic-doctrine and we simply end up fighting over them and this is precisely the fear of the liberalist...to avoid bloodshed. Being against doctrine is in fact the primary principle of liberalism. The notion of a creed-less religion, that is, the liberal religion, is an absolute fiction for Newman. Religion must have doctrine if it is to be rightly called a religion.
I.b. Second Principle: The Anti-Sacramental Principle
The second fundamental principle of liberal religion with which Newman strongly disagrees is the anti-sacramental principle. It is a natural, logical development of the first, as Newman shows by concluding that 'if no one can believe doctrine, there will be no miracles in religion.'4 “Liberal religion tended to be minimalist at best with regard to what can be known religiously, for religious inquiry is authorizable to the degree to which it is governed by the rational method.”5 Yet, articles of faith, are improvable by the rational method and mode of inquiry of the liberal Christian. For Newman then, the logic and evidence necessary for a liberal Christian, according to his rational method, to rationally assent to the Sacraments is impossible. The liberal Christian, then, excludes any real understanding or sensibility of a realm of existence or being beyond the visible world (where science is performed). What Newman refers to is the “invisible” world or the non-visible reality we don't directly sense. Thus, the second fundamental principle of liberal religion is a principle of reason that finds itself inhospitable to religious mystery or the invisible world. A brief point here on the word sacrament: The Greek μυστήριον, literally meaning a mystery or revealed secret was translated by St. Jerome as either sacramentum or mysterium, a visible sign and an invisible sign. Thus, if you act as if the only reality is the natural world, there will be no invisible world for the sacraments to act in a visible sign of an invisible reality. If one only believes in this world and the empirical sciences which can claim to prove without a reason of a doubt its facts, the Sacraments end up being meaningless. Thus, the Rationalist Christian has, as a first principle, an unargued anti-Sacramental principle; if one cannot prove the Sacraments, religion cannot teach the Sacraments. Here I will briefly mention, as Dr. Woods so eloquently noted yesterday, the need for, on the micro level, the opening of the mind to the unknown. Liberalism is just another “-ism”; a systematic approach to truth that closes the mind to the transcendence of truth which is, of course, catastrophic with regards to theological inquiry and religion. In an attempt to avoid bloodshed, as Locke would put it, all liberalism accomplishes is a plurality of religions at a common-denominator level and in an attempt to allow for all religions, it ends up void of any religion.
Sensibility regards what one is open to and what one is not open to. The liberal Christian, then, has no sensibility for the indemonstrable and the mysterious and the Sacramental. We need a sensibility to the world as a Sacrament and the Sacraments themselves (as signs of God's invisible workings), Newman warns, or else Christianity will die to rationalism's need for facts. The invisible world, by its very nature, is beyond our empirical and rational methods of evidentialism.
In terms of a Thomistic Remedy, I think of the life and intellectual method of the good Angelic Doctor. There was a common rationalist tendency to turn the teachings of the Angelic Doctor into a dogmatic source of rationalism. At times, the pre-Vatican II Popes hinted at this. The five ways, for example, and what Aquinas was able to clearly show the unaided reason was capable of knowing, are not meant to create a rationalist approach to theology. This however, has been fundamentally misunderstood by modern and post-modern Thomists...particularly influenced by the Enlightenment and Kant. It is an issue of taking Thomas as a source of truth without looking at the method of the Angelic Doctor as a whole...a method that was full of wonder and mystery. He notes at the outset of the Summa in the very first article that “even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.”
There is for him, a certain positive functionality of fides. For Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth). Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in the Prima pars, question 16, article 1:
Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei.
(Truth is the conformity of the intellect to the things.)
Aquinas thus characterizes the articles of faith as first truths that stand in a “mean between science and opinion.” They are like scientific claims since their objects are true; they are like mere opinions in that they have not been verified by natural experience. Fides is an intellectual act whose object is truth. Thus it has both a subjective and objective aspect. From the side of the subject, it is the mind’s assent to what is not seen: “Faith is the evidence of things that appear not” (Hebrews 11:1). Thus, there must a certain humility of the capacity of human reason to the teachings of the Enlightened rationalists; an openness to mystery and wonder. Unwilling to work out of any “-ism,” Aquinas was intellectually open to the truth as such. When a brother writes Aquinas, seeking advice on how to study, the Angelic Doctor responds:
Non respicias a quo, sed quod sane dicatur memoriae recommenda: Ea quae legis fac ut intelligas, de dubiis te certificans.
(Never mind who says what, but commit to memory what is said that is true: work to understand what you read, and make yourself sure of doubtful points.)
This openness to mystery, this theological wonder I think is most poetically expressed at the end of the Dumb Ox's life: having written so eloquently of God in his Summa Theologiae and even having that eloquence confirmed by God Himself in a vision, arrives at his discourse on the Blessed Sacrament and famously asserts that “mihi videtur ut palea.”6 He could speak eloquently but at the end of the day, especially in the face of the Blessed Sacrament, all remains a mystery to the Angelic Doctor, the Dumb Ox. There must be the constant self-emphasis, so that we might avoid rationalism, that no human mind, no “-ism” can ever grasp the transcendence of uncreated Truth.
1.c. Third Principle: The Anti-Creedal Principle (The Principle of Private Judgment or The Anti-Communitarian Principle)
Linked to the first two fundamental principles of liberalism is the principle of private judgment. The rational method that liberalism proposes is not a communal-based or tradition-based power or mode of judgment and reasoning; a denial of a Creed results in a denial of a Christian community. Rather, it is a purely private affair. If one is to make a rationally valid judgment with regards to the truth (or lack thereof) of a religious tenet, he must 1) make the judgment privately in accord with his own reasoning and 2), as I have said, must have sufficiently compelling evidence to conclude the truth value of some religious doctrine or sacrament. With regards to the first point then, through the over-emphasis of accepting as true only that whose truth is made manifestly clear to the reason, the principle of private judgment becomes a principle against authority and tradition; that is, the Pope, for example, cannot reveal the 'so-called' truths to the members of the Church. Rather, they must rationally conclude that, or some different truth, on their own. Thus, Newman asserts that Liberalism posits that “ no theological doctrine is anything more than an opinion”7 and “there is a right of Private Judgment: that is, there is no existing authority on earth competent to interfere with the liberty of individuals in reasoning and judging for themselves about the Bible and its contents, as they severally please.”8
Newman takes the logical conclusion of the Principle of Private Judgment to be that “religious establishments requiring subscription are Anti-Christian.”What Newman accomplishes, however, is a reconciliation of individual rationality with tradition, private judgment with authority. First, Newman asserts, in his essay on Private Judgment, that:
“there is this obvious, undeniable difficulty in the attempt to form a theory of Private Judgment, in the choice of a religion, that Private Judgment leads different minds in such different directions. If, indeed, there be no religious truth, or at least no sufficient means of arriving at it, then the difficulty vanishes: for where there is nothing to find, there can be no rules for seeking, and contradiction in the result is but a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt. But such a conclusion is intolerable to those who search, else they would not search; and therefore on them the obligation lies to explain, if they can, how it comes to pass, that Private Judgment is a duty, and an advantage, and a success, considering it leads the way not only to their own faith, whatever that may be, but to opinions which are diametrically opposite to it; considering it not only leads them right, but leads others wrong, landing them as it may be in the Church of Rome, or in the Wesleyan Connexion, or in the Society of Friends.”
For Newman, private judgment offers a far less than adequate epistemology. As Professor O'Regan notes, “ Liberal religion is imposing unrealistic requirements for faith, requirements, indeed, that it does not make in other walks of life and other areas of
knowledge.”9 The knowledge of things of a Divine Essence is, Newman feels, beyond the capacities of our Intellect; Uncreated Truth utterly transcends the created human mind. Newman asks whether “Is it right, or is it wrong, to begin with private judgment? May we not, on the other hand, look for a blessing through obedience even to an erroneous system”10
I.d. Liberalism Recap
While Locke believes that the consequences of belief in religion are devastating, Newman asserts that the consequences of John Locke's way of 'doing Christianity' is utterly catastrophic with respect to Christianity. According to Newman, religion becomes so thinned out that it becomes un-recognizable and incoherent; that is, it seizes to be a religion and is a nothing more than a mere morality...if that. Lockean Rationalism is at the root of this incredible thinning out of Christianity.
Newman describes liberalism as "false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and there is out of place.”11 By this he meant that those whom took it upon themselves to judge doctrines which are beyond human capacity are, according to his epistemology, simply wrong. The Lockean idea that the human reason is the supreme judge of all truths, even Divinely revealed truths, Newman argues, would inevitably lead to a weakening and eventually to the destruction of faith and of all real religion. The Lockean Rationalist asserts his own intellect above and beyond the Word of God and in a sense, has a kind of authority over God's Word.
Rationalism is an abuse of reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and for purposes that are unsuitable and unfitted. To rationalize in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; it is to make our reason the supreme judge of Revelation. They contradict or collide with our pre-existing rational private judgments, we ought to reject them. Thus, faith for the rationalist is contradictory to reason since faith, by its nature, is the acceptance of what reason is unable to ascertain according to its own powers.12 The liberal Christian, then, has done a horrible thing to Christianity; it has stripped out the necessary components of religion in an attempt to strip out the 'fluff' caused by traditions and dogmas. And if this continues, argues Newman, religion itself will self-destruct and become nothing more than a mere morality, void of truths at most.
II. Americanism
The effects on religion then, are evident...we must read the Scriptures at face value; that is, it is a manifestly clear text void of obscurities and accessible to all rational beings – it is “self-interpreting.” What then does this have to do with Americanism. The Americanist heresy is characterized as an insistence upon individual initiative which the Vatican judged to be incompatible with what was considered to be a fundamental principle of Catholicism: obedience to authority. Pope Leo XIII wrote against these ideas in his letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae to Cardinal James Gibbons. In 1898 Leo XIII lamented an America where church and state are "dissevered and divorced," and wrote of his preference for a closer relationship between the Catholic Church and the State, along European lines. I want to point out that liberal theology is a far different animal from liberal political thought. There is however, I believe, a fundamental link between the two...a hyper emphasis on Enlightened Lockean natural rights. (Secondly, this response by the Church to the endorsement of Church and state I take to be a very extremeist approach to the conflict...rather than counter-cultural which, as grace builds upon nature, the church builds upon the community, this comes off as an anti-cultural response, almost a monastery in the hills a la MacIntyre's end of After Virtue)
III. Thomistic Remedy
Though I started with a discussion here of liberal theology, I only use to set up what I perceive to be a problem in American Catholicism...which I believe is liberal theology but a liberal theology supported by liberal, secular politics. What is accomplished in this country is the same kind of plurality of religions where no religion has any authority to assert or proclaim its doctrines in a public sphere. Religion is a natural right of every individual and should NEVER be inhibited by an authoritative teaching of an institution. Thus, religion is pushed into a purely private and individualistic sphere. That this is problematic for the Church doesn't take much explanation: Christ commands his Apostles to go out and Baptize in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. When pushed to a private sphere, religion can end up being a mere patting each other on the back in support of doctrines already held in common, as Dr. Dan McInerny mentioned in his great talk yesterday regarding Catholic movies. But the Catholic Church clearly has at its mission a call to evangelize.
The solution? Going out to the street corner and asserting dogmas (to combat the anti-dogmatic principle) is not right. Nor is an outright dismissal of the natural right foundation as I have noted is not the correct answer... as the Congregation for Clergy recently noted, we are called to be counter-cultural, not anti-cultural.
Natural Rights are important; they show our shared dignity. The Abortion debate would be fruitless for example if there were no appeal to natural rights. The problem is not natural rights as such but the over emphasis of natural rights. Newman argues in his essay Who’s to Blame that the State is not at once both free and strong; rather, it is merely free.13 He situates this within a fantastic discussion between Athens and England. A state, he notes, “implies two things, Power on the one hand, Liberty on the other; a Rule and a Constitution. Power, when developed, results in contralization; Liberty in self-government.
Our secular culture finds itself, at the price of guaranteeing individual rights and freedoms, failing to promote the common good. Thus, in a real sense, failure to root the laws of man in the law of God, that objective, external truth, the laws of a liberal state seem to literally fail to be laws.14 Christ does clearly tells Pilate that he would have no power if it were not given to him from God. There is a one-sided focus on the preservation of rights over and above the furtherance of duties, especially duties to the other (which would combat the radical individualism of the preservation of rights). The other emphasis on Natural Law will very quickly lead to over-protection and a pure Kantian sense of duty. The Church ought not compel and coerce people to the faith by having the state wave a Catholic flag. Some sort of a separation is good; 'render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.'
The Aristotelian mean is what we need; we need that balance. Newman says to assimilate what you can and reject what you must. I do not think this implies to pick and choose between a list of doctrines the secular culture gives and say 'yes we like this, no we don't like this get rid of it.' For the Catholic, there must be an understanding that this culture must be redeemable. It is, in a sense, baptizable as we see with Ancient Athens, Rome, Gaul, etc throughout the history of the Church. Hence we must build up on the secular culture we encounter. We cannot merely get rid of natural rights as I have noted. Thus, the total exclusion of a natural law conception in our law and our society is a problem. Again we cannot merely assert and import natural law into the society; rather we must build natural law up upon the notion of natural rights.
And here is where I venture off into some risky and ambitious territory. The building up of a notion of natural law, I believe, can begin with a notion of a right, and an obligation, to offer sacrifice to the gods. We have a right to religion but, as Jefferson puts it, that there is a wall built between church and state almost completely overlooks this right. We have a right to freely choose a religion without any sense of coercion...but no right to practice that religion at least in a public way which I have shown is essential to the health of religion.
In the Nichomachean Ethics, within the greater discussion of δικαιοσύνη (Justice) in Book 5, Aristotle discusses the justice as sacrificial when he says that “Justice is that quality in virtue of which a man is said to be disposed to do by deliberate choice that which is just, and, when distributing things between himself and another, or between two others, not to give too much to himself and too little to his neighbor of what is desirable, and too little to himself and too much to his neighbor of what is harmful, but to each what is proportionately equal; and similarly when he is distributing between two other persons.”15 With regards to the sacrifices to the gods, this involves a just part of goods which, in the public domain, a portion of land must be devoted to these services in honor of the gods.16 This public domain, then, gives public expression to the sacrifices so that, on the Aristotelian account, it involves both city, priest, and citizen. The point here, is that, as regards justice and the just state, man has an Aristotelian natural right, and even an obligation, to offer sacrifices to the gods and this Aquinas will adapt into his Natural Law.17 It is with this right, and obligation, I believe that attempts to make religion public can begin. This right to religion, I believe, will open the door to a notion of the common, natural law in our culture and revitalize the Catholic imagination and sensitivity to Dogma, Sacraments, and Creed.
As I mentioned at the outset, this paper was originally going to focus on a remedy at the micro-level; an attempt to redeem private religion through Catholic imagination and Theological Wonder that would allow, at the very least, public devotion in the public sphere within the institution that would avoid the thinning out of religion altogether. However, I readjusted this paper to in turn offer a very humble attempt to redeem it at the macro level; a first step at reintroducing a discussion of a natural law concept that would help counter the excessive emphasis on natural rights as Locke understands that might might allow for public practice of religion.
1Davies, Michael. John Henry Newman's critique of liberalism. Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 15 No 9 (October 2002), p. 12.
2Apologia, pg. 32. (emphasis is my own).
3ibid, pg. 191
4ibid, pg. 191
5O'Regan, Cyril (1992) "Newman's Anti-Liberalism," Sacred Heart University Review: Vol. 12: Iss. 1, Article 5, pg. 88. Available at: http://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/shureview/vol12/iss1/5
6What I have written seems to me to be straw
7Apologia, 191
8ibid., 192
9O'Regan, 96
10Apologia, 134
11Apologia, 187
12As St. Thomas Aquinas defines fides, faith does not compel immediate assent, but the intellect is moved by the will to assent to p because (i) the intellect perceives p as being proposed as true by a trustworthy authority and (ii) the person who assents desires some good promised by assent to p. ---- “that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act,” ST. IaIIae, cix, 1, corpus.
Newman, Cardinal John Henry, “Who’s to Blame?,” Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2004, pg. 326.
Aquinas argues for the necessity of civic law, so that it truly be a law that is ordered to the common good by promoting good and shunning evil , being rooted in the natural law. Civic laws, then, are concrete implications of the very general principles of natural law as they come to be actually applied in a given community, through the moral virtues and prudentia or φρόνησις (phronesis, practical wisdom).
15NE, 1134a
16Politics, 1330a8-13
17Also, Aristotle has some fascinating language about the immutability of law amongst the gods in Book V, Chapter 7 that could imply an immutable natural law within his discussion of classical natural rights,
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