Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?, A

Perspectives from The Review of Politics

Daniel Philpott, Ryan T. Anderson, Daniel Philpott, Ryan T. Anderson

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101732
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Conservatorismo e liberalismo

This volume is the third in the "Perspectives from The Review of Politics " series, following The Crisis of Modern Times, edited by A. James McAdams (2007), and War, Peace, and International Political Realism, edited by Keir Lieber (2009). In A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?, editors Daniel Philpott and Ryan Anderson chronicle the relationship between the Catholic Church and American liberalism as told through twenty-seven essays selected from the history of the Review of Politics, dating back to the journal's founding in 1939. The primary subject addressed in these essays is the development of a Catholic political liberalism in response to the democratic environment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Works by Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and Yves R. Simon forge the case for the compatibility of Catholicism and American liberal institutions, including the civic right of religious freedom. The conversation continues through recent decades, when a number of Catholic philosophers called into question the partnership between Christianity and American liberalism and were debated by others who rejoined with a strenuous defense of the partnership. The book also covers a wide range of other topics, including democracy, free market economics, the common good, human rights, international politics, and the thought of John Henry Newman, John Courtney Murray, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as some of the most prominent Catholic thinkers of the last century, among them John Finnis, Michael Novak, and William T. Cavanaugh. This book will be of special interest to students and scholars of political science, journalists and policymakers, church leaders, and everyday Catholics trying to make sense of Christianity in modern society.

Contributors: Daniel Philpott, Ryan T. Anderson, Jacques Maritain, Alvan S. Ryan, Heinrich Rommen, Josef Pieper, Yves R. Simon, Ernest L. Fortin, John Finnis, Paul E. Sigmund, David C. Leege, Thomas R. Rourke, Michael Novak, Michael J. Baxter, David L. Schindler, Joseph A. Komonchak, John Courtney Murray, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, Francis J. Connell, Carson Holloway, James V. Schall, Gary D. Glenn, John Stack, Glenn Tinder, Clarke E. Cochran, William A. Barbieri, Jr., Thomas S. Hibbs, Paul S. Rowe, and William T. Cavanaugh.

CHAPTER 1

The End of Machiavellianism

JACQUES MARITAIN

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) was born in Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg. His thinking was heavily influenced by his conversion to Catholicism. Before World War II, he moved to America, where he taught philosophy and Catholic theology at Columbia and Princeton and frequently lectured at other universities, such as the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Maritain understood himself to be a “critical realist,” emphasizing metaphysics over epistemology and rejecting rationalist and positivist accounts of knowledge. As a so-called neo-Thomist, he argued against a rigid and unreflective understanding of scholasticism. But, like Aquinas, he maintained that reason and revelation are not fundamentally in opposition and that philosophy can demonstrate the truth of certain religious beliefs, for example, the existence of God. Maritain sought to ground human rights and duties in a conception of natural law that derived its purpose from the divine. At the same time, he held that Catholic teachings were fully compatible with science and democracy.

I

My purpose is to consider Machiavellianism.¹ Regarding Machiavelli himself, some preliminary observations seem necessary.

Innumerable studies, some of them very good, have been dedicated to Machiavelli. Jean Bodin, in the sixteenth century, criticized The Prince in a profound and wise manner. Later on Frederick the Great of Prussia was to write a refutation of Machiavelli in order to exercise his own hypocrisy in a hyper-Machiavellian fashion, and to shelter cynicism in virtue. During the nineteenth century, the leaders of the bourgeoisie, for instance the French political writer Charles Benoist, were thoroughly, naively, and stupidly fascinated by the clever Florentine.

As regards modern scholarship, I should like to note that the best historical commentary on Machiavelli has been written by an American scholar, Professor Allan H. Gilbert.² As regards more popular presentations, a remarkable edition of The Prince and the Discourses was recently issued by the Modern Library.

Max Lerner, in the stimulating, yet somewhat ambiguous introduction he wrote for this edition of The Prince and The Discourses, rightly observes that Machiavelli was expressing the actual ethos of his time, and that “power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of, it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory.”³ This is perfectly obvious. But what matters, in this connection, is just that Machiavelli lifted into consciousness this ethos of his time and this common practice of the power politicians of all times. Here we are confronted with the fundamental importance, which I have often emphasized, of the phenomenon of “prise de conscience,” and with the risks of perversion which this phenomenon involves.

Before Machiavelli, princes and conquerors did not hesitate to apply on many occasions bad faith, perfidy, falsehood, cruelty, assassination, every kind of crime of which the flesh and blood man is capable, to the attainment of power and success and to the satisfaction of their greed and ambition. But in so doing they felt guilty, they had a bad conscience—to the extent that they had a conscience. Therefore a specific kind of unconscious and unhappy hypocrisy—that is, the shame of appearing to oneself such as one is—a certain amount of self restraint, and that deep and deeply human uneasiness which we experience in doing what we do not want to do and what is forbidden by a law that we know to be true, prevented the crimes in question from becoming a rule, and provided governed peoples with a limping accommodation between good and evil which, in broad outline, made their oppressed lives, after all, livable.

After Machiavelli, not only the princes and conquerors of the cinquecento, but the great leaders and makers of modern states and modern history, in employing injustice for establishing order, and every kind of useful evil for satisfying their will to power, will have a clear conscience and feel that they accomplish their duty as political heads. Suppose they are not merely skeptical in moral matters, and have some religious and ethical convictions in connection with man’s personal behavior, then they will be obliged, in connection with the field of politics, to put aside these convictions, or to place them in a parenthesis, they will stoically immolate their personal morality on the altar of the political good. What was a simple matter of fact, with all the weaknesses and inconsistencies pertaining, even in the evil, to accidental and contingent things, has become, after Machiavelli, a matter of right, with all the firmness and steadiness proper to necessary things. A plain disregard of good and evil has been considered the rule, not of human morality—Machiavelli never pretended to be a moral philosopher—but of human politics.

For not only do we owe to Machiavelli our having become aware and conscious of the immorality displayed, in fact, by the mass of political men, but by the same stroke he taught us that this very immorality is the very law of politics. Here is that Machiavellian perversion of politics which was linked, in fact, with the Machiavellian “prise de conscience” of average political behavior in mankind. The historic responsibility of Machiavelli consists in having accepted, recognized, endorsed as a rule the fact of political immorality, and in having stated that good politics, politics conformable to its true nature and to its genuine aims, is by essence non-moral politics.

Machiavelli belongs to that series of minds, and some of them much greater than himself, which all through modern times have endeavored to unmask the human being. To have been the first in this lineage is the greatness of the narrow thinker eager to serve the Medici as well as the popular party in Florence, and deceived on both sides. Yet in unmasking the human being he maimed its very flesh, and wounded its eyes. To have thoroughly rejected ethics, metaphysics and theology from the realm of political knowledge and political prudence is his very own achievement, and it is also the most violent mutilation suffered by the human practical intellect and the organism of practical wisdom.

Radical pessimism regarding human nature is the basis of Machiavelli’s thought. After having stated that “a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist,” he writes: “If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them.” Machiavelli knows that they are bad. He does not know that this badness is not radical, that this leprosy cannot destroy man’s original grandeur, that human nature remains good in its very essence and its root- tendencies, and that such a basic goodness joined to a swarming multiplication of particular evils is the very mystery and the very motive of struggle and progression in mankind. Just as his horizon is merely terrestrial, just as his crude empiricism cancels for him the indirect ordainment of political life toward the life of souls and immortality, so his concept of man is merely animal, and his crude empiricism cancels for him the image of God in man—a cancellation which is the metaphysical root of every power politics and every political totalitarianism. As to their common and most frequent behavior, Machiavelli thinks, men are beasts, guided by covetousness and fear. But the prince is a man, that is, an animal of prey endowed with intelligence and calculation. In order to govern men, that is, to enjoy power, the prince must be taught by Chiron the centaur, and learn to become both a fox and a lion. Fear, animal fear, and animal prudence translated into human art and awareness, are accordingly the supreme rulers of the political realm.

Yet the pessimism of Machiavelli is extremely removed from any heroic pessimism. To the evil that he sees everywhere, or believes he sees everywhere, he gives his consent. He consents, he aspires to become a clearsighted composite of fox and lion. “For how we live,” he says, “is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation.” Therefore we have to abandon what ought to be done for what is done, and it is necessary for the prince, he also says, “to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case.” And this is perfectly logical if the end of ends is only present success. Yet such an abandonment, such a resignation would be logical also, not only for political life, but for the entire field of human life. Descartes, in the provisory rules of morality which he gave himself in the Discours de la Méthode, made up his mind to imitate the actual customs and doings of his fellow-men, instead of practicing what they say we ought to do. He did not perceive that this was a good precept of immorality: for, as a matter of fact, men live more often by senses than by reason. It is easy to observe with Max Lerner that many Church princes, like the secular princes, and above all that Alexander VI whom Machiavelli gives often in example, were among the principal followers of Machiavelli’s precepts. But never has any catechism taught that we must imitate the Church princes in our conduct, it is Christ that religion teaches us to imitate. The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow men. This is a precept of the Gospel: “Do not ye after their works; for they say, and do not.…”⁴

The practical result of Machiavelli’s teachings has been, for modern conscience, a profound split, an incurable division between politics and morality, and consequently an illusory but deadly antinomy between what they call idealism (wrongly confused with ethics) and what they call realism (wrongly confused with politics). Henceforth, as Max Lerner puts it, “the polar conflict between the ethical and the ruthlessly realistic.” I shall come back to this point. For the present I wish to note two kinds of complications which arise in this connection in the case of Machiavelli himself.

The first complication comes from the fact that Machiavelli, like many great pessimists, had a somewhat rough and elementary idea of moral science, plainly disregarding its realist, experiential, and existential character, and lifting up to heaven, or rather up to the clouds, an altogether naive morality which obviously cannot be practiced by the sad yet really living and laboring inhabitants of this earth. The man of ethics appears to him as a feeble-minded and disarmed victim, occasionally noxious, of the beautiful rules of some Platonist and separate world of perfection. On the other hand, and because such a morality is essentially a self-satisfying show of pure and lofty shapes—that is, a dreamed-up compensation for our muddy state—Machiavelli constantly slips from the idea of well-doing to the idea of what men admire as well-doing, from moral virtue to appearing and apparent moral virtue: his virtue is a virtue of opinion, self-satisfaction and glory. Accordingly, what he calls vice and evil, and considers to be contrary to virtue and morality, may sometimes be only the authentically moral behavior of a just man engaged in the complexities of human life and of true ethics: for instance, justice itself may call for relentless energy—which is neither vengeance nor cruelty—against wicked and false-hearted enemies. Or the toleration of some existing evil—if there is no furthering of or cooperating with the same—may be required for avoiding a greater evil or for slowing down and progressively reducing this very evil. Or even dissimulation is not always bad faith or knavery. It would not be moral, but foolish, to open up one’s heart and inner thoughts to whatsoever dull or mischievous fellow. Stupidity is never moral, it is a vice. No doubt it is difficult to mark exactly the limits between cunning and lying, and even some great saints of the Old Testament—I am thinking of Abraham—did not take great care of this distinction. This was a consequence of what may be called the twilight status of moral conscience in the dawn-ages of mankind.⁵ Yet a certain amount of cunning, if it is intended to deceive evil-disposed persons, must not be considered fox’s wiles, but intellect’s legitimate weapon. Oriental peoples know that very well, and even evangelical candor has to use the prudence of the serpent, as well as the simplicity of the dove (the dove tames the serpent, but the lion does not tame the fox). The question is to use such cunning without the smallest bit of falsehood or imposture: this is exactly the affair of intelligence; and the use of lying—namely the large-scale industrialisation of lying, of which contemporary dictatorships offer us the spectacle—appears from this point of view, not only as moral baseness, but also as vulgarity of mind and thorough degradation of intelligence.

The second complication arises from the fact that Machiavelli was a cynic operating on the given moral basis of civilized tradition, and whose cruel work of exposure took for granted the coherence and density of this deep-rooted tradition. Clear-sighted and intelligent as he was, he was perfectly aware of that fact; that is why he would pale at the sight of modern Machiavellianism. This commentator of Titus Livius was instructed by Latin tradition, he was a partaker as well as a squanderer of humanist learning, an inheritor as well as an opponent of the manifold treasure of knowledge prepared by Christian centuries, and degenerating in his day. He never negates the values of morality, he knows them and recognizes them as they have been established by ancient wisdom, he occasionally praises virtuous leaders (that is, whose virtues were made successful by circumstances), he knows that cruelty and faithlessness are shameful, he never calls evil good or good evil. He simply denies to moral values—and this is largely sufficient to corrupt politics—any application in the political field. He teaches his prince to be cruel and faithless, according to the case, that is, to be evil according to the case, and when he writes that the prince must learn how not to be good, he is perfectly aware that not to be good is to be bad. Hence his difference from many of his disciples, and the special savor, the special power of intellectual stimulation of his cynicism. But hence also his special sophistry, and the mantle of civilized intelligence with which he unintentionally covered and veiled for a time the deepest meaning, the wild meaning, of his message.

Finally, the “grammar of power” and the recipes of success written by Machiavelli are the work of a pure artist, and of a pure artist of that Italian Renaissance where the great heritage of the antique and Christian mind, falling in jeopardy, blossomed into the most beautiful, delightful, and poisonous flowers. What makes the study of Machiavelli extremely instructive for a philosopher, is the fact that nowhere is it possible to find a more purely artistic conception of politics.⁶ And here is his chief philosophical fault, if it is true that politics belongs to the field of the “praktikon” (to do), not of the “poietikon” (to make), and is by essence a branch—the principal branch, according to Aristotle—of ethics. Politics is distinct from individual ethics as a branch from another branch on the same tree, it is a special and specific part of ethics, and it carries within itself an enormous amount of art and technique. It is organically, vitally and intrinsically subordinated to the molding intelligence, and imagination is much greater in political than in individual or even familial ethics. But all this amount of art and technique is organically vitally and intrinsically subordinated to the ethical energies which constitute politics, that is to say, art is there in no manner autonomous, art is there embodied in and encompassed with and lifted up by ethics, as the physico-chemical activities in our body are insubstantiated in our living substance and superelevated by our vital energies. When these merely physico-chemical activities are liberated and become autonomous, there is no longer a living organism, but a corpse. Thus, merely artistic politics, liberated from ethics, that is, from the practical knowledge of man, from the science of human acts, from truly human finalities and truly human doings, is a corpse of political wisdom and political prudence.

Indeed, Machiavelli’s very own genius has been to disentangle as perfectly as possible all the content of art carried along by politics from the ethical substance thereof. His position therefore is that of a separate artistic spirit contemplating from without the vast matter of human affairs, with all the ethical cargo, all the intercrossings of good and evil they involve, and to teach his disciple how to conquer and maintain power in handling this matter as a sculptor handles clay or marble. Ethics is here present, but in the matter to be shaped and dominated. We understand from this point of view how The Prince as well as The Discourses are rich in true observations and sometimes in true precepts, but perceived and stated in a false light and in a reversed or perverted perspective. For Machiavelli makes use of good as well as of evil, and is ready to succeed with virtue as well as with vice. That specific concept of virtù, that is, of brilliant, well-balanced and skilled strength, which was at the core of the morality of his time, as an aesthetic and artistic transposition of the Aristotelian concept of virtue, is always present in his work.⁷ He knows that no political achievement is lasting if the prince has not the friendship of the people, but it is not the good of the people, it is only the power of the prince which matters to him in this truth perversely taught. The Discourses⁸ eloquently emphasize the fundamental importance of religion in the state, but the truth or falsity of any religion whatsoever is here perfectly immaterial, even religion is offered as the best means of cheating the people, and what Machiavelli teaches is “the use of a national religion for state purposes,” by virtue of “its power as a myth in unifying the masses and cementing their morale”⁹: a perversion of religion which is surely worse and more atheistic than crude atheism—and the devastating effects of which the world may see and enjoy in the totalitarian plagues of today.

Here we are confronted with the paradox and the internal principle of instability of Machiavelli’s Machiavellianism. It essentially supposes the complete eradication of moral values in the brain of the political artist as such, yet at the same time it also supposes the actual existence and actual vitality of moral values and moral beliefs in all others, in all the human matter that the prince is to handle and dominate. But it is impossible that the use of a supramoral, that is, a thoroughly immoral art of politics should not produce a progressive lowering and degeneration of moral values and moral beliefs in the common human life, a progressive disintegration of the inherited stock of stable structures and customs linked with these beliefs, and finally a progressive corruption of the ethical and social matter itself with which this supramoral politics deals. Thus, such an art wears away and destroys its very matter, and, by the same token, will degenerate itself. Hence Machiavelli could only have rare authentic disciples; during the classical centuries of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, Mazarin and Richelieu, Frederick, Catherine of Russia and Talleyrand, the latter was perhaps the only perfect pupil of Machiavelli; finally Ma...