Catholic Virtues,
American Virtues

On February 2-3, 2001, the Faith & Reason Institute sponsored a conference at the University Club in Washington, D.C., which examined the well-developed Catholic virtue tradition in light of current discussions of what constitutes character education. The presenters were Dr. Thomas Hubbs, Boston College; Dr. John Berkman, Catholic University of America; Dr. Kevin Ryan, Boston University; and Dr. Peter Berkowitz, George Mason University. Respondents included Dr. Russel Hittinger, University of Tulsa; The Rev. Benedict Ashley, O.P., St. Louis University; and Mr. Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Ralph McInerny of the University of Notre Dame gave the keynote address. Their remarks appear below. This conference was one of a series being sponsored by the Faith & Reason Institute as part of its program on "Catholics and the American Public Square," which is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia.

The Catholic Virtue Tradition and
the American Prospect

Dr. Ralph McInerny

Advancing into the Past

In 1832, Alexis de Toqueville came to America to study the prison system -- he went up the river to Sing Sing, and dutifully visited other penitentiaries as well. But it was the new republic that fascinated him, this nation formed ab ovo, as it seemed, with no chicken responsible for the egg. He took notes, he interviewed, he observed. And then wrote one of the most fascinating and profound books on our young country. Democracy in America has proved to be a durable work. Doubtless the author's methods fall far short of the demanding criteria of our social sciences, which no doubt is why his work has lasted. Toqueville's tools were intelligence, sympathy, observation. He was a cultural tourist, an envoy from a France that seemed to have lost its bearings. There is a wistful as well as admiring tone in Toqueville's reflections on America. What struck him most of all? Something so obvious it had escaped Chateaubriand. In the United States the free individual is his own master and his opportunities seem unlimited. The aristocrat who had come to study the condition of imprisoned Americans became the chronicler of American freedom. He did not ignore our vulgarity but he resisted defining us in terms of it. Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo? Toqueville knew his Horace, but he also knew that even Horace, like Homer, sometimes nods.

In that same year of 1832, Father Stephen Badin, the first priest ordained in this country, established a mission on the shore of a lake in what is now Northern Indiana. Eventually, he sold the land to Father Edward Sorin and it became the site of the University of Notre Dame de Lac where eventually the movie Rudy put into a contemporary key the kind of hope against hope represented by those two missionary priests. They brought to the new world the values of the old, just as Toqueville's America is, perforce, Toqueville's America, an account filtered through his French and Catholic culture.

While Toqueville was spending his wanderjahr in America, a troubled loner in Copenhagen was writing for someone he called the Individual. In Soren Kierkegaard's estimation, the political upheavals of the late 18th and early 19th century, undertaken in the name of freedom, threatened to imprison the individual in the crowd.

That remains the essential dialectic of democracy -- the free individual vs. the mass man, the responsible agent vs. the faceless cipher. The Founders saw the danger too. Why is it that free individuals abandon that freedom to become the hustled masses?

My remarks fall into three unequal parts. I first reflect on the significance of missionary activity in this new land. Then I turn to the realization, at least in part, of Toqueville's fears for America. Finally, I look to the future from the perspective of the recovered past and confused present.

1. Light to the Nations

Were the Puritans missionaries? Perhaps when we think of missionary activity in this continent we have to think of the north, the Great Lakes, the bands of Frenchmen going up and down the rivers and waterways, always a priest or two in the canoe. Pere Marquette, of course, and the North American Martyrs. In the southwest, it was the Spanish whose missions stretched from California and Texas through Mexico , Central America and all the way to the Rio del Plata in the south. Rivers and towns retain the names given them then, however mispronounced and anglicized. Contemporary Anglos in California and the southwest seem unaware of the vestiges of Spanish culture embedded in the names. Corpus Christi, San Antonio, San Diego, Nuestra Senora de los Angelos. Am I merely exhibiting the rueful resentment of a Catholic at the general amnesia about these facts? Why go back to pre-colonial missionaries?

Willa Cather is why. Cather, a native of Nebraska, an Episcopalian, wrote what may be the two best Catholic novels about the new world. She loved the southwest, spent summers there, and did a lot of camping and exploring around Santa Fe. And she would have noticed what the name of the town meant. She visited the cathedral, heard and read about Archbishop Lamy, and a seed was planted in her novelist's imagination. It grew into that remarkable novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Shadows on the Rock is set even earlier, in Quebec. Cather, who was raised in Red Cloud, Nebraska, educated at the state university, came east to flourish first as a magazine editor, then as a novelist. In the two novels I mentioned, she combined research and reading with an empathetic imagination that enabled her to enter the mind of Archbishop Lamy of Santa Fe as well as that of Monseigneur Laval of Quebec. Why would a non-Catholic American novelist choose such themes?

Cather realized, as the missionaries did perforce, that this continent had a pre-history. There were already people here. Someone might discover your back yard but you would be surprised if he wanted to rename it. The missionary stands at the point of conjunction of the native and the European. These represent the parameters within which the America that fascinated Toqueville developed. No wonder Democracy in America spends so much time on the religion of Americans. East coast colonists were religious refugees, in New England as well as in Virginia, and when the English colonies rebelled and united, the Founders took for granted the massive role that religion played in the lives of their fellow citizens and they set up barriers lest the right to worship should be impinged upon. The Louisiana Purchase, the relentless western movement, the northwest territory, the final push into the west and southwest -- what may seem to be the Protestantization of the land -- did not eradicate the Catholic past of the areas annexed and settled. But there is more. Toqueville made an astonishing prediction about the America he recognized as largely non-Catholic, even anti-Catholic.

America is the most democratic country in the world, and it is at the same time (according to reports worthy of belief) the country in which the Roman Catholic religion makes most progress. At first sight this is surprising.¹

Surprising, because "equality makes men want to form their own opinions; but on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and idea of unity, simplicity and impartiality in the power that governs society." In democratic times, men shake off religious authority, but if they subject themselves to it, they want it to be single and uniform. He opines that religious powers not radiating from a common center are repugnant to the American mind; Americans would prefer that there be no religion at all rather than several.

At the present time, more than in any preceding age, Roman Catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity, and Protestants to be converted to Roman Catholicism. If you consider Catholicism within its own organization, it seems to be losing; if you consider it from outside, it seems to be gaining. Nor is this difficult to explain. The men of our days are naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism.

One may detect an autobiographical note in such remarks² but Toqueville's general thesis that without the support of religion democracy will swiftly degenerate is a motif of his book. He ends the chapter I have been referring to with this extraordinary remark: "... our posterity will tend more and more to a division into only two parts, some relinquishing Christianity entirely and others returning to the Church of Rome." A similar suggestion is found in Newman's Apologia pro vita sua -- either Catholicism or atheism.

2. The Relinquishment of Religion

We find ourselves in a time when religious belief is considered a menace to democracy. A series of judicial decisions elevated a Jeffersonian obiter dictum on the wall of separation between church and state into a dogma, interpreting it to mean that the state must be forever vigilant against the encroachments of religion. A constitutional stricture against the establishment of a state religion was read as the need to disestablish religion and so privatize religious belief that it had no place in the public square. Moreover, what until yesterday was the common morality of the nation is now seen as the arcane deliverance of a religious sect. School children must be protected against the display of prohibitions against theft, lying, fornication and murder, the Decalogue now seen as a set of rules that some few might choose to accept but which have no claim on the wider society.

In my own private iconography I retain the image of candidate John F. Kennedy addressing the Houston Ministerial Conference to allay their fear that his religious faith would interfere with his role as president. Consider the scene. Protestant clergy functioning as judge and jury to pass on the fitness of a Roman Catholic candidate for public office. It was not, of course, a matter of establishing that Catholics believe things that Protestants do not. These ministers were concerned about the secular ends of the state.

Call this the tail end of a long period when the unstated assumption was that ours is a Protestant country, and that Catholics represent a threat to it. The irony of that episode in Houston lies in how quickly these same ministers, or their successors, were to find themselves regarded as a threat to the republic. These ministers were right, I think, to see that religion plays a special role in shoring up the secular ends of the state. They rightly did not want the dogmas of any religion imposed on citizens. And John Kennedy told them that if a conflict ever arose between his religious faith and the duties of president -- an eventuality he did not foresee -- he would resign. But what happens when common morality is regarded as a dogma that cannot be imposed on free citizens?

We can fast forward to the famous "mystery clause" in Justice Kennedy's decision in striking down a law that imposed some restrictions on abortion. No such impositions were constitutional, we were told, because every citizen has a constitutional right to define existence, the universe, life itself, as he sees fit. The fate Toqueville had feared -- antinomian individualism -- seemed to have befallen the United States of America.

There is no need here to draw out the truly absurd implications of Justice Kennedy's words. If I have a constitutional right to define the universe as I wish, obviously I can define the constitution out of existence or make it mean anything I want -- thus usurping the role of a justice. Surely here a nadir was reached in civic discourse. First, religious truths were taken to be a menace to society; then, the common morality played that role of an unbearable restriction on freedom; now, biology has become oppressive and can be redefined to any citizen's liking.

The recent unpleasantness of the Ashcroft nomination hearings have refreshed our minds on the fact that there are nihilists among us. Religion is still the stated foe, but it is any and every objective guideline for action that is under attack. Is this the end of our beginnings or the beginning of the end of our declension? Must the free individual become a cipher, lost in the mass? Is law merely the adjudication of rival irrational desires?

3. The Recovery of Virtue and the Recovery of Religion

It was Kierkegaard who said that the reason we have forgotten what it is to be a Christian is that we have forgotten what it is to be a man. It is of more immediate moment that the common morality, the natural law, regain its primacy -- in our hearts as well as in the courts. There are truths about ourselves and about what we should and should not do that are within the reach of any citizen. A sign of the inescapability of the common morality is that its supposed alternative is revealed to be incoherent absurdity. All we need do is imagine Justice Kennedy's recipe being applied to see that it is nonsense. But, alas, even philosophers can fail to be moved by the reduction to absurdity of their claims. Refutation seldom suffices.

Morality is not a matter of winning arguments -- no matter how important arguments are. Toqueville saw that the master assumption of democracy is the immortality of the soul. He was as aware as you and I of the difficulty of arguments on behalf of that truth. Acknowledging that, he saw immortality as the great basis of moral responsibility, a basis that had to be recognized if democracy were to survive. He went on to say that the essential thing was that politicians exhibit in their actions their conviction that the soul is immortal. That is, that they are answerable for their deeds to a tribunal higher than any on earth. Toqueville's point is basic: The most powerful argument for morality is virtuous men.

It is absurd to think of the free individual as an autonomous unit, naked before the state. Even Justice Kennedy knows where babies come from. They are born into families without whose nurture they would not survive a day. This dependence, materially, lasts for nearly two decades; spiritually, it marks us for life. Man is a political animal, but he is first of all, and essentially, a family animal His very existence depends upon the family. Political theory has toyed with the idea that states are formed when individuals come over various points of the horizon and converge on Philadelphia. Doubtless they are all feral, raised by wolves, as fit as Romulus to found a city. Save as a heuristic device, contract theory is absurd, and even as a device it is pernicious. Because people come to think it is more than a device and take from it the false assumption that our original position is as fully constituted individuals, without histories, without a culture, without families.

The natural home of virtue is in the home. Home schooling has flourished because parents are reluctant to entrust their vulnerable children to the relativistic and anti-religious assumptions that are abroad in public education. But surely this is an expedient, a pis aller. What is wanted are schools that support and enforce the common morality, the same morality that must govern any home if it is to survive. Our national history has to be rescued from the revisionists. The great men and women who have preceded us must be placed before our children's wondering eyes. Music must soothe rather than express the savage beast.

If it is the genius of our land to have recognized that there is a common morality which underwrites our common life, that morality was seen to have an all but necessary support and sanction in religion.

Jacques Maritain on America

In 1956, Jacques Maritain gave three lectures to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago which were published as Reflections on America. Maritain first visited this country about a century after his countryman, Alexis de Toqueville. He brought with him the assumption that Americans are materialists, greedy egoists, an obstacle to social and political progress. He had just published a work called Integral Humanism that provided a utopian blueprint some critics thought showed the influence of Marxism. This was a period in the French philosopher's life when he was junking his association with Action Francaise and moving rapidly to the Left. Those Chicago lectures represent a love letter to America, a country that had proved to be an astonishing surprise, upsetting all Maritain's prejudices about it. In a chapter called "The Grand Slander," he discusses a passage from D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent in which America is portrayed as saying No! To what Europe said Yes! "Was it [America] the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up?" The melting pot receives the spent peoples of elsewhere, come to the continent of negation, where they are given the freedom to pull down the soul of the world.

Lawrence was an interesting choice for Maritain to make. The truth is that Lawrence hated people, he loathed the sight of them on the street, he longed to lead the London masses into the Crystal Palace and turn on the gas.³ Like Ortega, he saw the rise of the masses as threatening, and public education as money wasted. Ortega grouses about all these people crowding into museums and theaters. Who are they? What do they know? Is the unfettered individual the only alternative to Mass Man? Maritain sees Lawrence as the type who seek the divine but are captives of the flesh. "To compensate for their frustration and resentment, they need a world-wide scapegoat, a symbolic continent great and powerful enough to arouse mankind's hopes, and perverse enough to betray them -- the nightmare of their America."⁴ For Maritain, by contrast, America represented a "real experience of concrete, existential democracy, not as a set of abstract slogans, or as a lofty ideal, but as an actual, human working, perpetually tested and perpetually readjusted way of life." [p. 92] The crowds on our city streets impressed him: these were free men. But between them and the federal government were dozens of intermediate communities and associations which leant concrete reality to his life. His family, his neighborhood, his city and state and region, his religion, his clubs and hobbies, voluntary associations of all sorts.

When the free man in a democracy is seen in this concrete way, the recipe to turn him into mass man is clear. You remove all those intermediates between the individual and state power turning him into a featureless unit with the value of 1 in political calculations. Children are no longer members of a family and in the care of their parents -- they are units like all others whose abstract rights can be invoked against all natural and concrete settings.

However shallow the reflections of D. H. Lawrence on America, his phrase can haunt us now -- the continent of negation, the death-continent. Abortion has turned us into a culture of death. The abortion ideology has eroded the sense of man on which our country was founded. Citizens have lost all attributes, or all other attributes are trumped by abstract membership in the widest society. The apparent glorification of the individual in which the individual's rights are trump is actually the production of mass man.

In the secular state, it must be the common morality that enables believer and non-believer, and believers of different sorts, to live together. No religious dogmas can define the community. Recent attempts to marginalize religious believers and portray them as a menace to democracy are not made in the name of the common morality. Au contraire. Morality itself becomes a target. Along with religion, it is feared as a restriction on the freedom of citizens. How can there be communication between those who see the common morality as fulfilling and perfective of human freedom and its denial as destructive? I suggested earlier that a powerful device is to accept the negation as good money and see where it leads. It leads to chaos and incoherence. This shows the inescapability of the common morality -- it shows that it is indeed common to both its defenders and its attacker.

But this natural, common morality is a frail reed without the sanction and support of religious belief. I remind you of Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty. The most powerful argument for religious tolerance was produced by an ecumenical council that brought together the bishops of the world. If ever one needed an example of the way faith fosters and protects the assumptions of secular government, that declaration is it.

So where are we on this threshold of the third millennium? It seems to me that we are somewhat in the position of Nick Caraway at the end of The Great Gatsby. The events of the novel have displayed the glitzy materialism and heedless immorality of the East, of Long Island, and Nick is ready to return to the Midwest. Geography isn't ethical, of course, but we are given an intimation of why Nick's going home is a moral decision. And of course Jay Gatsby, the hero of the story, was a native of Duluth. These are Nick's valedictory thoughts as he imagines the Dutch sailors who first saw Long Island and recognized it as "the green breast of the new world."

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder.

As I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

This evocation of America, of the wonder it evokes, may seem incommensurate with the Romantic agony of Jay Gatsby. But in the novel it stands for Nick's awareness that tolerance must have a limit. He wants the world in uniform, standing at moral attention forever. Hence, the look inland, inward, to the original inspiration of the country. Gatsby's hope is linked to the history of hope that defines us. Like Nick Caraway, we can face our future only if we first recover our past.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Notes

¹ Democracy in America. New York, Everyman's Library, 1994, Vol. II, chapter vi.
² Given a Jansenist upbringing, Toqueville later found himself unable to accept the dogmas of the Church. The controversy over his reception of the Viaticum on his death bed, turns on this fact. Cf. André Jardin, Toqueville, A Biography. Farrar, Straus: New York, 1988, esp. pp.522-533. Toqueville concludes the chapter from Democracy we have been considering, by saying that , "One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles and to purchase peace at the expense of logic." Some will accept religious authority but want to exempt some parts of the faith from their submission "and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience. But I am inclined to believe that the numbers of those will be less in democratic than in other ages, and that our posterity will tend more and more to a division into only two parts, some relinquishing Christianity entirely and others returning to the Church of Rome."
³ Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.
⁴ Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America. Dobleday Image: New York, 1958, p. 75.

Ralph McInerny is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and is a prolific writer.

Right Reasons is an occasional publication of the Faith & Reason Institute. Please do not reproduce without permission.

Faith & Reason Institute
1413 K Street NW Suite 1000
Washington D.C. 20005
202-289-2500
202-289-2502 fax
info@frinstitute.org

Home