The debate at Public Discourse over whether and how we can sustain the American liberal tradition continues with a contribution from Nathan Schlueter (a Hillsdale College professor whose classes I enjoyed). Criticizing Vincent Phillip Muñoz for over-emphasizing the Lockean aspects of liberalism and Patrick Deneen for claiming that voluntarist moral philosophy is inextricable from liberalism, Schlueter writes:
We must break free of the tendency to treat liberalism as a monolithic concept resting upon a moral framework of radical autonomy and a legal framework of moral neutrality with respect to competing notions of the good. This form of liberalism (which can be called modern liberalism) is a latecomer to the liberal tradition, and finds little support in the prior tradition of liberalism, and no support in the principles of the American founding.
Instead of rejecting liberalism per se, he continues, we ought to recover what might be called “natural law liberalism” of the Founding Fathers, who drew from both social contract liberalism and classical liberalism while correcting their deficiencies. The principles of that tradition include the following:
Reason, properly understood, is a necessary and sufficient condition for political life. Reason can discover and has discovered within tradition permanent truths, including human equality and natural rights. But equality and rights cannot be properly understood apart from the positive basic goods that they serve and that constitute real human flourishing, goods like knowledge, friendship, and beauty. The achievement of these goods depends upon a plurality of associations (families, churches, educational, commercial, and cultural institutions). It also depends upon an overall political association and political authority that protects, supports, and coordinates the activities of individuals and associations for the sake of each and all (the common good). Finally, the entire social and political order and the goods it serves require a degree of solidarity, citizenship, and virtue in its members.
Visit Public Discourse for the rest of the essay.
December 7th, 2012 | 1:06 pm
“Reason, properly understood, is a necessary and sufficient condition for political life.”
The Neo-Thomists had developed a theory of Natural Law, based on Suarez’s interpretation, or rather, travesty of St Thomas. They had talked of a “natural order,” governed by Natural Law, consisting of truths accessible to unaided human reason, as something that can be kept separate from the supernatural truths revealed in the Gospel. This “two-tier” account of nature and grace was based on this view that the addition of “grace” was something super-added to a human nature that was already complete and sufficient in itself and apart from any intrinsic human need
On the contrary, as Jaques Maritain observed, “Integral political science . . . is superior in kind to philosophy; to be truly complete it must have a reference to the domain of theology, and it is precisely as a theologian that St. Thomas wrote De regimine principum . . . the knowledge of human actions and of the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to the ultimate end of the human being. . . the rule of conduct governing individual and social life cannot therefore leave the supernatural order out of account (The Things that are not Caesar’s, p. 128”
Maurice Blondel, too, insisted that we must never forget “that one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny. Because, since it concerns the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly self-contained (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order”
To hold otherwise is, inevitably, to acquiesce in the liberal privatisation of religion.
December 7th, 2012 | 2:25 pm
prof. schlueter’s description and defense of natural law liberalism (especially the segment beginning with the word “reason” quoted above) is magnificently clear and thorough. wow.
even so, i wonder if we still have the warrant for expecting so much of “reason.” much of public discourse these days is anything but reasonable. at the end of the day, we are each free enough to look natural law in the face and say “screw you.”
@michael
is it not plainly true that one CAN think or act as if we do not all have as supernatural destiny? for example, i forget our supernatural destiny all the time. most of my friends either don’t know about this destiny or don’t care. then again, perhaps i misunderstand you and blondel.
December 7th, 2012 | 2:40 pm
To be honest I don’t know enough of Aquinas, Suarez, Maritain, and the reason/revelation nature/grace debates to weigh in very intelligently here (which is why I didn’t state my opinion in the blog post). But I am inclined to be sympathetic to the argument that political science (touching as it does on justice, liberty, nature, rights, etc.) inevitably involves religious concepts– that is, the argument that reason is not sufficient. Eve Tushnet has written a bit about this (in an admittedly rambling manner) here and here if anyone’s interested.
December 7th, 2012 | 5:01 pm
I know that Dr. Schlueter is summarizing, yet Hume seems an unlikely example for a natural-law based political philosophy. He denied objective truth. While this philosophical skepticism lent to his skeptical outlook toward of political philosophies that claimed to bring a compressive doctrine, such skepticism also denies the principle that any objective, constitutive, inherently given relationality among beings, things and persons exists. Such an extrinsic ontological view of the relation of things–a complete dismissal of any causality and natural relations–is exactly the ontological framework for voluntarism.
Thus, “classical liberalism,” while making at least formalistic appeals to a natural-law, reaffirms the basic ontological assumption of more radical modern and post-modern variants of liberalism–namely, that human persons are inherently out of relation.
Thus, according to such an ontology, one must voluntarily initiate relation rather than discover and nourish given constitutive relations. Implicitly, this basic ontological assumption gives credence to the autonomous individual–human associations depend on the individual, there existence is contingent upon their usefulness. Thus, “conservative” adherents to liberalism view the “little platoons” as useful protectors of individual initiative against State-intrusion. Conversely, “progressive” adherents to liberalism tend to view local associations as oppressive to individual autonomy and seek protection in the State. More socially-progressive classical-liberals, or “conservatives,” also view local associations as hindrances to freedom, but see the market rather than the State, as the liberating political system.
Adherents to both the “conservative” and “progressive” variants of liberalism make superficial appeals to the “little platoons” but obfuscate such associations with the interest of the market or State. None of this is to glorify or sentimentalize localism. I share neither the “conservative” sentimentalism for small-town life nor the “progressive” sentimentalism of the tribal-village–idealizations that understand little of the realities, both pluses and negatives, that accompany both lifestyles . I am sympathetic to certain, more post-modern “progressive” concerns of repressive localism. Authority at any level–even the most local–can easily become oppressive or a hindrance to personal growth and maturity in some sense.
Freedom and authority–requisites for organized life at any level–familial, cultural, educational and political–requires a true awareness of the naturally dependent and given nature of human being. An authority who is profoundly religious–one who lives with an intense awareness of the relation with “Thou who make me” that constitutes his life and the lives of others–lives a gratitude that seeks neither power nor manipulation. Absent this awareness, authority–at any level–becomes a power that intrudes the lives of others.
All human vocations–political ones very much included–are provocations to give the whole of one’s self to truth, prioritizing reality over preconceived ideology. Absent the freedom to give oneself to truth, all associations become pluralities of power–that is unsustainable.
December 8th, 2012 | 5:00 am
Andrew
In the memorable exchange in 1910, in Blondel’s publication, L’Annales de philosophie chrétienne, between Maurras’s Jesuit defender, Descoqs and the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière, Descoqs, a follower of Suarez’s interpretation of St Thomas had allowed the political sphere a wide degree of autonomy and he was prepared to detach “political society” from “religious society.” Laberthonnière had retaliated by accusing Descoqs of being influenced by “a false theological notion of some state of pure nature and therefore imagined the state could be self-sufficient in the sense that it could be properly independent of any specifically Christian sense of justice.”
So far as I know, this exchange has never appeared in English, which is astonishing, as it was what united such disparate thinkers as Blondel, Maréchal, the Dominicans, Chenu and Congar and the Jesuits, Lubac and Daniélou. It was a fundamental moment for the Nouvelle Théologie, much as Keble’s Assize Sermon had been for the Oxford Movement.
What Cardinal Henri de Lubac denied in his controversy with Neo-Scholasticism was the claim that the natural and the supernatural have utterly separate ends in and of themselves. He spelled this out in two of the most important theological works of the last century, his 1946 work, « Surnaturel » , but then, more decisively, in his 1965 book, « Le Mystère du Surnaturel »
Unless, as Blondel insists, we “find only in the spirit of the gospel the supreme and decisive guarantee of justice and of the moral conditions of peace, stability, and social prosperity,” then there is no intrinsic link between religion and the political.
December 8th, 2012 | 10:29 am
Michael PS,
I don’t know this debate as well as I would like, but I’m curious if you have read much of Hadley Arkes on natural law. There is an endless amount to like about Hadley Arkes, but I can never quite understand why he would want to rationalize natural law theory independent of God as our creator. I’ve always assumed he does that for political reasons so that he can’t be pigeonholed as saying something that would only apply to believers. But logically it just doesn’t make any sense to me.
December 9th, 2012 | 5:46 am
Douglas Johnson
I only know Hadley Arkes through some of his srticles, but, from what you say, he would seem to belong to the New Natural Law School, as represented by John Finnis at Oxford and Robert P George at Princeton. It is based on the virtue ethics of Aristotle, taking “human flourishing” as its criterion. Fair enough, for as St Thomas says, “We only offend God, when we act against our own good” ["Non enim Deus a nobis offenditur nisi ex eo quod contra nostrum bonum agimus", ScG III. 122] The problem with it, as Aristotole recognised [Nicomachean Ethics I.6] is the difficulty in coming up with a uniform notion of “the good.” Moreover, it requires an agreed notion of “human flourishing,” and hence of human nature, which we simply do not have.
Personally, I am inclined to Pascal’s view that, “we are not in the state of our creation” and,”thus, without Scripture, which has only Jesus Christ for its object, we know nothing and see only obscurity and confusion in God’s nature and ours.” [nous ne connaissons rien, et ne voyons qu'obscurité et confusion dans la nature de Dieu et dans la propre nature.]
Of course, at the political level, “men possessing quite different, even opposite metaphysical or religious outlooks, can converge, not by virtue of any identity of doctrine, but by virtue of an analogical similitude in practical principles, toward the same practical conclusions, and can share in the same practical secular faith, provided that they similarly revere, perhaps for quite diverse reasons, truth and intelligence, human dignity, freedom, brotherly love, and the absolute value of moral good. [Jacques Maritain).” “Natural Law” will not fill that gap.
December 9th, 2012 | 4:01 pm
Michael PS’ criticism of developments in Thomism over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has a number of elements, none of which can be addressed fully here. Nevertheless, while I have no interest in defending Suarezian neo-scholastics of the nineteenth century at this moment, Michael’s take on Suarez himself seems inadequate.
1) Jacques Martain, who is quoted favorably a couple of times, appreciated the contributions of the Spanish Thomists. See _Man and the State_ (133-34): “I think that in order to bring to its full significance the political theory of Thomas Aquinas, which has been developed in so valuable a manner by Cajetan, Bellarmine, and Suarez in the XVIth and early XVIIth, we have still to add certain further clarifications…” Martain did not believe that Suarez’s account of natural law was a travesty; rather, he believes that the classical notion of natural law began to be deformed by Grotius (d. 1645).
2. Suarez certainly believed that revelation could illuminate and elevate our reflection on legal and political matters. Suarez believed with Thomas Aquinas that grace perfects nature. Thomas wrote De regimine as a theologian; Suarez wrote his major work on related themes wearing the very same hat. In the preface to his famous De legibus, Suarez wrote, “It need not surprise anyone that it should occur to a professional theologian to take up the discussion of laws. For the eminence of theology, derived as it is from its most eminent subject-matter, precludes all reason for wonder….For just as theologians should contemplate God on many other grounds, so also should they contemplate Him on this ground: that He is the last end toward Whom rational creatures tend and in Whom their sole felicity consists….He directs His creatures, and, having shown the way, leads them to Himself….He enlighten[s] them by His teaching, impel[s] them by His laws and, above all, succour[s] them with the aid of His grace.” Suarez establishes his freedom as a theologian to speak about law, including natural law, upon the very point that has made his theology so controversial: man’s end. Suarez is quite clear here that man’s “last end” is God and that it is in God that humanity finds its “sole felicity.” For Suarez, human beings–certainly as they were created in Adam–do not have some sort of perfect fulfillment based on their natural powers, with grace and the Beatific Vision as a mere super-addition. The Thomist tradition took seriously the integrity of nature, but they never considered nature a “closed” system. Indeed, all of creation was considered a divine gift, something not owed to anything that was not God.
3. Even if the Spanish scholastics became famous for defending the legitimacy of non-Christian political communities (those of the American Indians), Suarez did not believe that natural law had nothing to do with piety or religion. In his treatise on the law of nations (ius gentium), Suarez said that “the worship of God pertains, in an absolute sense, to the natural law.” The determination of that natural precept pertains to divine revelation. But those who were without the preaching of God’s revealed Word needed to give determination to this precept as well. Suarez notes, “the custom of conducting…worship through sacrifice is not, absolutely speaking, a matter of natural law; yet almost all nations seem to have agreed on that custom.” Suarez is not espousing what Maritain calls a “separated or anthropocentric humanism.” He is not attempting to articulate the possibility of a “kingdom of pure humanity,” which is not open to grace and which has a false anthropology wherein man lives by bread alone. Suarez, Bellarmine, and the other Spanish scholastics are quite explicit that a political community that is shaped by Christianity will be “elevated” by these graces, by acts of supernatural charity, and so on. But one of the key points for them is that this truth does not entail that non-Christian political communities are illegitimate. Man’s nature as a political animal and his rational powers are not destroyed by divine grace.
4) Thomas Aquinas himself speaks of a twofold perfection for rational or intellectual natures. See, e.g., Summa theologiae I, q. 62, a. 1, c.: “By the name of beatitude is understood the ultimate perfection of rational or of intellectual nature; and hence it is that it is naturally desired, since everything naturally desires its ultimate perfection. Now there is a twofold ultimate perfection of rational or of intellectual nature. The first is one which it can procure of its own natural power; and this is in a measure called beatitude of happiness….Above this happiness there is still another, which we look forward to in the future, whereby ‘we shall see God as He is.’ This is beyond the nature of every created intellect.” So, we should be careful about driving a wedge between Thomas and the Thomists just because the Thomists speak about a twofold human good. Does Michael PS think that the quotation that he offers from Pascal represents a perspective in conformity with that of Aquinas?
5) But Michael PS points to something very important. Nathan Schlueter’s account does resonate with the developments of Thomism in the work of Cajetan, Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Suarez, and others. We need to move past the criticisms of these figures from a few decades ago–which were often caught up in more immediate struggles in Catholic circles of that time–and recognize a teaching of the freedom and equality of all human beings, government based (in part) upon the consent of the governed, and even natural rights that represents a legitimate development of the teaching of the greatest medieval scholastics and canon lawyers. Indeed, closer examination of the Spanish scholastics (living just a few decades before Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke) may help us escape the false options that Schlueter has so persuasively encouraged us to avoid.
December 10th, 2012 | 3:54 am
Matthew Gaetano
Thank you for your very full and lucid response and I do accept that Suarez did, indeed, qualify his teaching in ways that were often overlooked by his successors.
Do I think “Pascal represents a perspective in conformity with that of Aquinas?” Yes, I do, for Pascal is talking, not about human nature, as such, but about the human person, in his actual, concrete historical condition. That is why he asserts that, “Man without faith cannot know the true good, nor justice.”
Father Peter Bernardi SJ gives a very illuminating analogy of the false picture of the relationship between nature and grace, embraced by the later Neo-Scholastics. “Imagine a two-story house with a ground floor that is partitioned into several rooms. This floor is completely furnished and fully liveable. The windows provide sufficient light to carry on the tasks of daily life. The family residing on the ground floor has no real need of an upper floor. However, there does exist a second floor to which access is gained when trapdoors are opened from above and portable staircases let down. Only then does the family come to know of the existence of this upper level of which they had no previous inkling. Furthermore, they are told that a superior life awaits them above and that they must choose to ascend to the second floor under threat of being thrown out of the house altogether. In short, there seems to be nothing in their native experience that would make such a move to a higher, supernatural life a compelling necessity except for the fact that a summons, a revelation “from above,” has been issued.”
I find this picture reflected in much contemporary Natural Law thinking.
His preferred image is that of the Pantheon. “In the architectural design of this ancient Roman building, the lines of force of the circular walls converge on the open space above, the primary source of light. Standing within the windowless building, one notices that no part of the cavernous interior is “compartmentalized,” but the eye is directed upwards to the incoming light. Though the lower part of the structure has solidity, it has no self-contained status. There are no “walls of separation” that divide one section from another. Furthermore, without the light that descends from above, it would be impossible to take adequate account of the lower levels.” This accords with St Augustine, St Thomas and Pascal, too.
December 10th, 2012 | 8:27 am
Thank you for your response, Michael.
I am nervous about how *others* describe the neo-scholastics. I suspect that, if we actually looked at what the major figures (Taparelli, Liberatore, Garrigou-Lagrange, Ramirez, and otheres) actually said, they would have a more sophisticated account of the natural and the supernatural than their detractors have suggested, as I’ve found to be the case with Cajetan and Suarez. But this is an inquiry for the future.
As much as Bernardi’s final analogy resonates in some ways with Thomas Aquinas’ statement that *true* justice and *true* felicity require God’s special help, I think that Pascal’s quotation (as stated) does not conform to Thomas Aquinas’ thought. Now, if he is only talking about our knowledge of human nature as historically constituted and the divine nature, I understand what he means about obscurity and confusion. But he first says, “we know nothing.” There were those among the radical Augustinians of Pascal’s era who did utterly collapse the distinction between our natural powers to know truth and those powers illuminated and elevated by grace to know supernatural truths (say, about the Trinity and the Incarnation). For Thomas, even in our fallen nature, we do *not* know nothing (I-II, q. 109, a. 1, end of corpus:
“Hence, we must say that, for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever, man needs Divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all things, but only in some that surpass his natural knowledge. And yet at times God miraculously instructs some by His grace in things that can be known by natural reason, even as He sometimes brings about miraculously what nature can do.”
Again, nature is not a closed system here. It depends, of course, on divine activity. But in order to have any notion of faith, one must have some notion of the capacities of our natural powers.
So, while I could accept Pascal’s statement with certain qualifications, I cannot affirm it as it was given above. And because of the context of Baianism and Jansenism, I am a bit more cautious. We don’t want to make errors about creatures, even out of a pious desire to magnify the Creator. After all, He was the one who made these things.
December 10th, 2012 | 9:06 am
Michael PS:
I think Matthew’s point is that nouvelle-theologie reactions to early-twentieth-century neo-scholasticism on the nature/grace question didn’t give an adequate account of the early-modern scholastic treatments of the same. Bernardi’s account may be true of some of the neo-scholastics, but is it true of Suarez, et al.? That’s the point in question.
On a related note, I think you’re right to connect the some of the NNL folks with the misleading, simplistic accounts of nature/grace in some of the neo-scholastics. But again, I think Gaetano is arguing that early-modern scholasticism could do a better job in the incredibly tricky areas where NNL and N-S have sometimes embarrassed themselves: the relation of faith/reason, nature/grace, the city of God/city of man, etc.
Glad we’re all talking about this!
December 10th, 2012 | 12:20 pm
Matthew Gaetano
I would accept that the Neo-Scholastics had more to say for themselves than a reading of the manuals would suggest. Nevertheless, Bernadi’s analogy is close to what many have taken from them.
I quoted Pascal, because I believe that he (like Maurice Blondel) was focusing on ” the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature.” This is clear enough, when he says, “The greatness and the wretchedness of man are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us both that there is in man some great source of greatness and a great source of wretchedness. It must then give us a reason for these astonishing contradictions ” Like his master, St Augustine, he does not always employ language with the precision of the Schools.
Matthew
Yes, I was principally concerned with current treatments of Natural Law, many of whose proponents appear unaware of the issues raised by the great debates of a century ago and which gave an impetus to Nouvelle Théologie. Nor are such considerations merely academic; one has only to consider Pedro Descoqs’s apologia for the “Catholic atheism” of Charles Maurras and l’Action Française.
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