If you attend Mass in the crypt of the Basilica of the
Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame, you may be startled to notice,
as you walk up to take communion, that your steps take you directly over the
final resting place of Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876). The fact that Notre
Dame makes little or no effort to direct visitors to his tomb reflects the
neglect into which Brownson, almost certainly the greatest American Catholic
thinker of the nineteenth century, has fallen. Although he has on rare occasions
attracted the attention of some leading modern intellectuals, including Christopher
Lasch, Russell Kirk, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Brownson is now all but
forgotten. This fate is undeserved: Brownson possessed an acute and prescient
mind, and his profound reflections on the relation between democratic politics
and Christianity have much to teach us today. The reappearance of Brownson's
classic volume, The American Republic, and the scheduled publication
of four more volumes of his works in political philosophy, provides an opportunity
to reacquaint ourselves with his thought.

Orestes Brownson was born in Vermont and into poverty.
At a young age he moved with his family to Saratoga County, New York. There
he was largely self-educated, but he still managed to memorize almost all
of the Bible by the age of fourteen. For most of his youth he was an ardent
and restless seeker after truth, never attaching himself for long to any one
spiritual or political position. By the time of his conversion to Catholicism
in 1844, Brownson had been a Presbyterian, a minister in both the Universalist
and Unitarian churches, a Transcendentalist, a militant atheist, and a devotee
of the form of secular, utopian socialism taught by Robert Owen and Fanny
Wright. He worked as a humanitarian political activist, belonged to the New
York Workingman's Party, and took to denouncing laissez-faire capitalism as
worse than medieval serfdom. Through all his religious and political peregrinations,
Brownson wrote prolifically, and, especially prior to his journey to Rome,
he was considered one of the leading thinkers in America.

For the young Brownson, orthodox Christianity held little
appeal because of its teaching about man's alienation from God. Brownson insisted
on identifying the voice of God with the voice of humanity, and he taught
that the kingdom of God-which would be perfectly just and free of all oppression-could
be established on earth. Almost a decade before the publication of The
Communist Manifesto, Brownson's essay "The Laboring Classes" predicted
the inevitability of class warfare ending in the advent of heaven on earth.

Brownson did not consider himself a revolutionary, however.
As Gregory Butler explains in his fine study of Brownson's ideas (In Search
of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson, 1992),
Brownson understood his writing to be an "outgrowth of the American tradition."
Moreover, "he thought he saw in the American Constitution the germ of the
new, perfected organization of mankind." For Brownson, the Jacksonian Democratic
party could serve as a vehicle for realizing his ideals, and he made an active
effort to direct that party's thought. He even became "President Martin Van
Buren's man in Massachusetts" and accepted a patronage job from the government.

Yet these hopes were thoroughly dashed by the presidential
election of 1840. The consensus then and now is that Brownson's "The Laboring
Classes," which Van Buren's Whig opponents used to charge that the Democrats
intended to abolish the wage system, contributed to Van Buren's failure to
win reelection. Brownson's uncritical, progressive faith in democracy never
recovered. Soon he would describe himself "a conservative in politics." It
was a political conversion that served as a prelude to his rapid advance toward
religious orthodoxy.

Over the next few years, Brownson would conclude that man's
progress in history depends on his communion with, and the continuous action
of, a Creator. He also concluded that belief in supernatural revelation and
creation was not as incompatible with reason as he had once supposed. Before
long, Brownson had decided to convert to Roman Catholicism and was received
into the Church by Bishop John B. Fitzpatrick of Boston in 1844.

The American Republic
(1866) is Brownson's most comprehensive work of political reflection-which
means that it is about much more than politics narrowly understood. Republican-or
distinctively and properly political-life cannot be understood simply on its
own terms, Brownson argued. It must be placed in the broader context of human
life as a whole and its proper relation to the truth about the whole of God's
creation.

This cluster of assumptions makes Brownson's
work somewhat unique in the history of political thought. Plato and Aristotle,
for example, distinguished between the love of wisdom that animates the few
and the lies or conventions that characterize political life. They were not
opposed to deception when writing for a political audience, and they wondered
inconclusively about whether the gods or nature really supported moral aspirations.
In contrast, the modern political thinkers who are most influenced by Machiavelli
tend to connect truth to effectiveness. They are, in other words, pragmatists.
For them, the truth is what enables us to change the world; it is not something
to be discovered, but something to be made. As that most radical and influential
of pragmatists, Karl Marx, famously wrote, the point of philosophy is not
to understand the world, but to transform it.

Later modern thinkers, those influenced
by Pascal and Nietzsche, take a darker view of man's relationship to truth.
Convinced that Machiavellianism cannot succeed in completely remaking the
world, they believe that, in the end, the pragmatic project is an ineffective
diversion from the terrible truth-the meaninglessness-that underlies all human
projects. We thus have little choice but to face up to the fact that our
deepest longings for knowing and loving cannot be satisfied. Only our courage,
not our knowledge, can keep us from despair.

Against all of these views, Christian thought
proposes something very different: namely, that human beings have been made
to know the truth, and that the truth is fundamentally Good News. Brownson
should grab our attention, then, because he adopts a philosophic stance on
political life that is neither pragmatic nor existentialist. And neither does
he point back to Greece in an effort to bypass the Christians, as many twentieth-century
political theorists have done. Rather, in a broadly Thomistic way, he views
natural reason and supernatural theology as complementary human goods-and
he rejects the easy dichotomies that permeate so much of the history of political
philosophy. We need not choose Athens or Jerusalem, rational self-sufficiency
or humble submission to authority. We ought to follow reason, but
we ought also to recognize its limits-and what those limits imply about the
centrality of revelation. As Brownson writes, "Let philosophy go as far as
it can, but let the philosopher never for a moment imagine that human reason
will ever be able to understand itself." Most crucially, the philosopher
will never be able to answer, through reason alone, the most pressing question
of all: Why did rational, finite beings come into existence in the first
place?

We could not have figured out simply by
using reason and analyzing the natural facts available to us that the world
was, and continues to be, created by a providential God. But once we learn
of this fact through revelation, we know that it is the most reasonable account
of the origin and perpetuation of all things. Theology thus aids human reason
in making sense of the facts it perceives about nature: "In this sense, tradition,
both as to the natural and as to the supernatural, renders an important service
in the development of reason, and in conducting us to philosophic truth."
Biblical revelation in general and Christianity in particular are indispensable
for philosophy's development. The dogmatic denial of the possibility of the
truth of revelation leads to philosophical shipwreck (as the self-destructive
history of philosophy in the twentieth century so clearly demonstrates). It
is for this reason that Brownson distinguishes between two kinds or modes
of philosophical reflection: "philosophy in the sense of unbelief and irreligion"
and "philosophy in the sense of the rational exercise of the faculty of the
human mind on the divine and human things, aided by the light of revelation."

When Brownson turns to politics itself, he draws striking
conclusions from his insights into the harmony between reason and revelation.
For example, he informs us that it is appropriate to view the influence of
Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence on the United States
with a degree of ambivalence. While Brownson affirms the political conclusions
of the document, he rejects the Jeffersonian or Lockean way of reaching them.
It is certainly true, he argues, that "under the law of nature, all men are
equal, or have equal rights as men." But the reason that "one man . . . can
have in himself no right to govern another" is that a "man is never absolutely
his own, but always and everywhere belongs to his Creator." That is, we can
reasonably affirm that the natural law originates with a Creator, and that
we are dependent on Him for all that is and all that we are. It is this affirmation-the
virtual antithesis of the Lockean principle of self-ownership-that provides
the proper foundation of human equality, or the doctrine that we have "equal
rights as men." All governments that truly protect individual rights depend
on the assumption that man is not God. Likewise, all despotism originates
in the "sophism," "error," and "sin" that in some sense man is God.
Hence only the Catholic or Thomistic understanding of the relationship between
reason and revelation, or nature and the Creator, can make sense of America's
founding principles.

Brownson also affirms Aquinas' view that what human beings
can know through natural reason is largely available only to "the elite
of the race."For "the bulk of mankind a revelation is necessary to give
them an adequate knowledge even of the precepts of natural law," although
"in some men it can be known through reason alone." That is, some men need
revelation more than others in order to come to correct conclusions about
God and His law. But Brownson rejects the view of the classical philosophers,
who hold that a few men do not need revelation at all. The wisest of men,
in fact, should most clearly see the need for revelation, because they are
most aware of the limits of human reason. Those who know the natural law best
should also know best that its origin and legal character are not really explicable
without what we know about the Creator through revelation. They know, in
particular, that God Himself could not possibly be bound by natural law:
"To pretend, as some do, that God is tied up by the so-called laws of nature,
or is bound in His free action by them, is to mistake entirely the relation
of Creator and creature."

Yet Brownson, despite his acknowledgment of the inequality
of men's rational faculties, was convinced that the Catholic Church's defense
of the truth in America should proceed mainly by argument. He opposed the
Church when it distrusted reason or disparaged science, and he was a critic
of the American Catholic education of his time, insofar as it did not make
a place for both philosophy and theology. He complained that "we have found
no epoch in which the directors of the Catholic world seem to have so great
a dread of intellect as our own." To him, the Church seemed animated by "the
conviction expressed by Rousseau that ‘the man who thinks is a depraved animal.'"
In Brownson's own experience, nothing could be further from the truth than
the common churchman's conviction that a man must choose between being smart
and thoughtful or pious and orthodox.

Christopher Lasch has observed with admiration the extent
to which Brownson aimed to provoke argument in America over the truth of religious
doctrine. Brownson's concern with that truth led him to attack the insipid
idea that an American civil religion that suppressed doctrinal differences
should be promulgated. Teaching a vague, general faith that denies the importance
of human differences regarding fundamental questions amounts to a form of
tyranny. Hence, he saw in the work of Horace Mann-as he would have seen in
the pragmatism of John Dewey and Richard Rorty-a thoughtless conformism that
privileges comfort and control over truth. Brownson also rejected the deeper
Hobbesian doctrine behind pragmatism, which holds that peace is more important
than truth and justice. Because he preferred truth to comfort, Brownson's
thought is nobly antibourgeois; the people can and should be better than
hedonistic middle-class materialists. Like Tocqueville, Brownson understood
that metaphysics and theology tend to lose ground in democracies, and he
wrote, at least in part, to fend off that degradation in America.

Brownson's insights into the character of
American political life have exerted precious little influence. A handful
of pre-Vatican II American Catholic scholars, sensing the superiority of his
political thought to secular and Protestant liberalism, took him seriously
(among them Stanley Parry of the University of Notre Dame). But there have
not been many such scholars, and their books and articles are today largely
forgotten. None of them had the combination of depth of thought and literary
talent required to establish Brownson as a major figure in American political
thought-or to locate Brownson in critical relation to the dominant secular,
natural-rights, humanitarian, and progressivist tendencies in American thought.

If anything, things became worse after Vatican
II, when Brownson almost disappeared from view, even among American Catholic
scholars. Only a very few studies since then have taken his claims seriously.
Non-Catholic scholars, when they have found something to admire in Brownson,
have usually pointed to his passionate devotion to the search for truth and
not to what he actually thought he found at the end of that quest. One outstanding
exception to this rule was Lasch, who both admired what Brownson had to say
about truth being the moral foundation of democracy and applauded his refusal
to separate completely politics and religion.

But far more than Lasch, it is Father John
Courtney Murray, S.J., who can serve as the best touchstone for understanding
Brownson's thought today. Murray, of course, is the author of the classic
work of American Catholic political philosophy, We Hold These Truths
. It was Murray, more than anyone else, who was responsible for the character
of Vatican II's statement on religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae
). As far as I know, Murray never acknowledged a debt to Brownson, but the
similarities between their thought have been noticed more than once. There
exists an obvious and deep intellectual kinship between the two that arguably
points to certain core truths about the relationship between Catholicism and
the American nation.

Murray, like Brownson, claims that the American
founders built better than they knew because they were providentially dependent
on the Catholic tradition of natural law. What Murray considers "providential"
is "the evident coincidence of the principles which inspired the American
Republic with the principles which are structural to the Western Christian
political tradition." The founders built better than they knew, but they
also left their accomplishment vulnerable to erosion by choosing to describe
their work in terms derived from John Locke, whose political theory is ultimately
destructive of all government, order, and liberty.

The founding must thus be reinterpreted
in a better light than the one in which the founders viewed it themselves.
As it was for Lincoln, Murray maintains that the Declaration of Independence
must be used to illuminate the Constitution-and this illumination requires
deviating to some extent from Jefferson's intentions and self-understanding
in writing it. For Murray, the Declaration, a "landmark of Western political
theory," put "this nation under God." Like Lincoln, Murray believes that the
only way to save the Constitution from the moral superficiality or excessive
selfishness of secularism is to constitutionalize the Declaration. Brownson
might have objected to this project on the grounds that the Declaration, with
its theoretical and Lockean presuppositions, is actually more dangerously
atheistic than the Constitution's pedestrian and narrowly political "We the
people of the United States." That is why Brownson preferred to refer to America's
"unwritten," but no less real, constitution that was embodied in its customs
and tradition. Murray, in response, may well have pointed out that in the
years since Lincoln's death it has become all but impossible to defend a
correct understanding of the American order based entirely on an "unwritten
constitution." America, Murray might have followed Lincoln in saying, is
a country "dedicated to a proposition," not (at least consciously) to received
wisdom.

The part of the American proposition that is most imperiled
in our time is the belief that the principles we hold in common are true-that
is, that they actually correspond to the created nature of human beings. If
this faith in a "realist epistemology is denied," then "the American proposition
is eviscerated . . . in one stroke." Murray's realism holds that human beings
are oriented by nature toward the discovery of truth. That view now seems
to be denied everywhere, and one main reason for the denial is that the contract
theory of Locke was itself based on the denial of realism. Locke and his successors
(including, to some extent, Jefferson) believed that social and political
reality is created out of nothing by sovereign human beings. According to
Murray, we can most effectively defend our principles by abandoning Locke
in favor of the realist St. Thomas. Echoing Brownson, he asserts that our
founders' belief in Locke's teaching concerning the state of nature is no
longer credible. Their "serene, and often naive, certainties of the eighteenth
century" sound like nonsense to our ears. The deconstruction of Lockeanism,
then, points the way to a realism that would truly make sense of the American
proposition.

More even than Brownson, Murray contends that Americans
now need to employ reason to become conscious of their purpose. With the waning
of Lockeanism, our ability to appeal to our political "fathers" for guidance
is quite limited. The problem of human freedom "stands revealed to us" in
a way it was not to our fathers, because we, not they, are in a position
to see the "naked essence," the nihilistic individualism, at the core of
the modern experiment to which they contributed. We have no choice but to
confront what they did not have to confront.

Following the path opened up by Brownson, Murray contends
that the modern idea of freedom has been primarily destructive. It has left
human beings dissatisfied with all traditional, natural, or "given" answers
to the question, "What is man?" We no longer know why being human is good
at all. In The American Republic, Brownson articulates fears about
the Rousseauian theories that inform radical humanitarianism-fears that appear
to be confirmed by Murray's reflections almost a century later. Communism,
Murray claims, was "political modernity carried to its logical conclusion,"
by which he means that the anthropocentric thrust "that is implicit or unintentional
in modernity" became "explicit or deliberate in the Communist system."

Well before the revolution of 1989, Murray knew that communism
was the end of modern history, but not the end of history itself. Hope for
history's end has always been a misanthropic "mirage." At the end of this
destructive modern era, human beings feel, in Murray's words, a "spiritual
vacuum . . . at the heart of human existence." Murray observes that "postmodern"
man cannot help but engage in "anxious reflection" about how our "hollow emptiness
[should] be filled." We have no choice but to confront "the nature and structure
of reality itself," and by so doing make "a metaphysical decision about the
nature of man." In a way, we are better situated in our time than Brownson
was in his to see the futility of the modern ambition to cut man off from
the divine. We now know that we cannot do without metaphysical and theological
reflection; despite the best efforts of its children, the modern era simply
failed to destroy the thoughtful and anxious human individual. It is now
up to this individual to choose to recognize the truth about being and human
being-a truth embodied in natural law-and to reject the ideological lies
and Lockean abstractions that were devised to distract us from it.

While Murray seems at times to differ from Brownson in
his affirmation of the rational self-sufficiency of natural law, the two thinkers
actually agree that philosophic inquiry, properly employed, will discover
its own limits and thus uncover the point at which the natural law reveals
itself to the human mind. They also agree that a true understanding of human
liberty depends on revelation or belief in a Creator, and that this belief
can be affirmed by reason as the best explanation of the mystery of meaning
and existence. Revelation leads human beings beyond what they would know
by nature alone, teaching "the equality of all men, and the unity of the
human race." It is only through revelation that we can know the truth that
we are more than political and rational animals, that we are creatures with
a duty to the Creator. It is only through revelation, according to Brownson,
that we know that natural law is law.

By focusing on the truth and the being who can know it
by nature-and, finally, on the dependence of reason on revelation-Murray,
whether he knew it or not, followed in Brownson's footsteps. With Brownson
and Murray, we can say that there is an American tradition of Thomistic realism
that opposes itself to the dominant American tradition of contractualism and
pragmatism, while also resolutely affirming the achievement of American constitutionalism.
We might add to the American Thomist tradition the great literary artists
Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. Percy, for example, realistically affirmed
the truth and goodness of science while also rejecting scientific claims
that do not acknowledge the reality of the distinctive excellence, and destiny,
of human beings.

Brownson and Murray teach us the important lesson that
the beliefs we hold in common as Americans must really be true if our liberty
is to be defensible. Where Brownson goes beyond Murray is in his robust defense
of the necessarily national or territorial character of democracy. This was
arguably his keenest insight-and one that contemporary Catholics, in America
and elsewhere, inclined as they are toward skepticism of national sovereignty
and admiration of transpolitical institutions, would do well to ponder.

For Brownson, national solidarity is a natural human potential
rooted in necessary human dependence. It also accords with the real but limited
human powers of knowing and loving one another. The universality of reason
and even religion, given our natural possibilities and limitations, cannot
be the model for political order. The proper political form is thus the nation,
the modern equivalent of the polis. Brownson thought national solidarity
perfectly compatible with the solidarity of the human race through reason
and faith, as long as the state was properly oriented toward the truth.

Given our need to flourish as social but limited beings,
government deserves our love, loyalty, and obedience. "Loyalty," Brownson
writes, "is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human virtues, and
is the human element of that sublime love or charity which the inspired Apostle
tells us is the fulfillment of the law." Loyalty is more specifically human
or particular than the supernatural virtue of charity. And charity cannot
replace loyalty as a political or national passion. So Christianity elevates
"civic virtues to the rank of religious virtues [by] making loyalty a matter
of conscience." Brownson even asserts that "he who dies on the battlefield
fighting for his country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith."
More precisely, "Civic virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least
virtues without which there are no religious virtues, since no man who does
not love his brother does or can love God." Human beings approach the universal
through the particular, and love of the personal Creator cannot be separated
from other particular human beings. Human love is never for human beings in
general. All men are brothers, but men come to know brotherly love only when
they experience political solidarity with their fellow citizens.

Awareness of these truths is lamentably rare today among
Catholic thinkers, though there are prominent exceptions. The French Catholic
Tocquevillian, Pierre Manent, is one of them. In numerous books and essays,
Manent has established himself as one of our most accomplished defenders of
the nation in general, and his own French nation in particular. This is all
the more remarkable given that France, like most of the rest of Europe, is
currently in the process of enthusiastically dissolving its own sovereignty
in favor of the transpolitical entity of the European Union.

In a decidedly Brownsonian spirit, Manent notes that in
contemporary Europe, the political or republican dimension of human life,
genuine concern with the common good, has almost disappeared. Manent affirms
with Brownson that "man as a free and rational being cannot fulfill himself
outside a political community, with all the consequences (not all of them
pleasant) that this entails. It is in the political body, and only in the
political body, that we seriously put things in common." Whether described
as a nation, city, or polis, the political community is where deliberation
over justice occurs; it is thus qualitatively different from the family, and
it alone can serve as the model for distinctively human community.

Manent notes that despite its desire for self-sufficiency,
even modern democracy needs to be instantiated in a "body." It needs limits,
a "territorial framework," that may seem arbitrary from the heights of theological
speculation but is indispensable for the existence of political life. The
modern European, Manent explains, wants the principle of consent to govern
all of life-for everything to be the product of his will, for nothing to be
given or providential. The result is a paradox: "The European want[s] only
what he himself will[s]; he reject[s] as arbitrary and outdated the nation,
the political instrument that allow[s] him, by giving him limits, to exercise
his sovereignty or will." Yet the willful escape from limits paradoxically
thwarts the exercise of political will: "The European as a citizen finds
himself able to accomplish less and less." Hence, republican government-like
all government-must be territorial, and loyalty, more than consent, must
be the foundation of good government and political life.

The withering away of the state thus comes at the expense
of all that human beings rightly regard as good. The truth, as Manent points
out, is that people cannot "live long within civilization alone without some
sense of political belonging (which is necessarily exclusive), and thus without
some definition of what we hold in common." And what we hold in common, in
light of what we have inherited from the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, must
be partly particular, or exclusive to us as citizens, and partly universal,
or an expression of the solidarity of all human beings. The modern nation,
with its mixture of the exclusivity of citizenship and openness to universal
truth embodied in religion and transnational civilization and culture, mirrors,
if only very imperfectly, the complexity within human nature itself.

In some sense, then, Manent's work today serves the same
purpose in our time that Brownson's did in his. The political thinker, in
Manent's words, "legitimates the [nation] before the Church"; he "affirms
the human virtues" and "maintains the legitimacy of human affirmation." He
defends the naturalness of political life and the reality of the particular
human individual against empty and impotent cosmopolitanism.

But that affirmation must be under God. Manent knows, as
Brownson did before him, that the best political thinkers must affirm "the
universality of the Church against the particularity of the city" and display
"a skepticism toward every human self-assertion that remains particular."
That is, they must defend the republic, civilization, and the Church against
barbarism. But at the same time, and no less urgently, they must defend the
truth-and thus freedom of thought, the individual, and the Church-against
the despotism toward which all nations tend when they resist the influence
of the truth of revelation.

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government
at Berry College in Georgia. This essay is adapted from his introduction to
the forthcoming reissue of Orestes A. Brownson's The American Republic:
Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, Volume 1 of the series
Orestes Brownson: Works In Political Philosophy, edited by Gregory Butler
(ISI).