Christianity, Democracy, and the American Ideal

Some Americans claim we should exclude Christian values from the public square. On the contrary, argues philosopher Jacques Maritain, good Christians make good citizens.

They live by gospel values: honesty, integrity, and compassion. They obey the law. They resist the selfishness that unbelief and materialism breed. And they subordinate their own interests to the common good.

No wonder, says Maritain, that American democracy -- which arose from a Christian people -- has served so well and lasted so long.

Here Maritain shows that in a society unleavened by religious ideals, an enduring democracy can never take root. And once a religious people abandons its faith, even the greatest democracy must wither and die. Untethered from transcendent values, democracy becomes little more than a struggle to be won by the most powerful and the ruthless.

The hour is late. Too long have we stood by while politicians promise never to let their religious beliefs influence their political judgments. Too long has a false understanding of democracy cowed us into laying aside our Christian values when we vote.

As Maritain demonstrates in these lucid pages, Christians are vital to democracy. Good Christians make good citizens, and good citizens make strong democracies. If America and her ideals are to endure, says Maritain, Christians and their values must not be excluded from public discourse, but eagerly welcomed into it.

In looking at the contemporary relationship between Church & State, the compatability of the 'American Experiment' and liberal democracy with Catholic Christianity, the role of religion in public life and education, one is likely to encounter the Jesuit political scholar John Courtney Murray. Less recognized, but rather more substantial in my opinion, is the Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) -- without consideration of whom no discussion of these issues is complete.

As Michael Novak said in his "salute to Jacques Maritain":

In political and social thought, no Christian has ever written a more profound defense of the democratic idea and its component parts, such as the dignity of the person; the sharp distinction between society and the state; the role of practical wisdom; the common good; the transcendent anchoring of human rights; transcendent judgment upon societies; and the interplay of goodness and evil in human individuals and institutions. Indeed, in the thrust that this body of thought gave to Christian Democratic parties after World War II, Maritain gained the right to be thought of as one of the architects of Christian Democracy both in Europe and Latin America.

Against the secularist philosophies of his day, Maritain espoused an "integral humanism" -- that is to say, a fully Christian humanism which "considers man in the integrality of his natural and supernatural being" -- which he believed could, if embraced, rescue modern democracy from the materialist spirit by properly orienting it to the 'horizontal' and 'vertical' dimensions of mankind:

The end of political society is not to lead the human person to his spiritual perfection and to his full freedom of autonomy; that is to say, to sanctity . . . Nevertheless, political society is essentially destined, by reason of the earthly end that specifies it, to the development of those environmental conditions which will so raise men in general to a level of material, intellectual, and moral life in accord with the good and peace of the whole, that each person will be positively aided in the progressive achievement of his full life as a person and of his spiritual freedom."

Having authored over twenty books, Maritain's writings on these topics can be rather daunting. Hence I was pleased to discover Christianity, Democracy, and the American Ideal, a "Jacques Maritain Reader" by Sophia Institute Press. In the space of a hundred or so pages, James P. Kelly III -- President of the Solidary Center for Law & Justice and Director of International Affairs for The Federalist Society -- compiles small nuggets of Maritain's thought on a diversity of subjects, arranged by pertinent themes as "The Limits of Social Planning," "Christianity and the Common Good," "Faith-Based Initiatives," "The American Experience", and "Christian and Democratic Evolution."

The book itself is deceptively small. Most of these selections are no more than a paragraph long -- just enough, in my experience, to whet the reader's appetite. But Kelley has skillfully arranged the work such that one quickly picks up connections from one chapter to another, and is moved to carefully ponder what Maritain is saying in one passage before moving along to the next.

Those who really want to benefit from Maritain will avail themselves of Kelly's recommendations for "further reading and reflection" at the end of each chapter, conveniently listing key passages from Maritain's numerous works, as well as related papal encyclicals and counciliar documents.

This would make an excellent gift for any student of political philosophy or Catholic layman interested in the social doctrine of the Church -- and, perhaps, to many a political legislator as well.

Celebrating The Baptism of Jacques and Raissa Maritain

Yesterday, June 10th, was the anniversary of the baptism of Jacques and Raissa Maritain, an incredible couple who -- if any there were -- took the search for truth seriously. I find the story of their early years together nothing short of amazing, as accounted by Dr. Donald DeMarco:

Jacques Maritain was born in Paris on November 18, 1882. He grew up in that city, barely nourished spiritually on the lukewarm Protestantism of his mother. When he entered the Lycée Henri IV, he possessed no particular religious convictions. He enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1901 during France's rich and corrupt Third Republic, a time when rabid French anti-clericalism had turned the Church into an intellectual ghetto. The school's rigid empiricism had effectively excluded any respectful discussion of spiritual matters. One day, as Jacques walked hand in hand through a Paris park with his Jewish girl friend, Raissa, the two made a pact that if, within a year, they could not find any meaning to life beyond the material, they would commit suicide.

That despair dissolved when they heard lectures at the Collège de France given by Henri Bergson, whose theories of creative evolution exalted the spirit of man and his ability to discover the intelligibility of things through intuition. In 1905, Jacques and Raissa, now newlyweds, met a passionate Catholic named Leon Bloy ("A Christian of the second century astray in the Third Republic'') who led them into the Catholic faith. ¹

Gerard Serafin blogs Raissa's account of their spiritual conversion and baptism from their memoirs We Have Been Friends Together. In embracing the Catholic faith, the couple overcame many spiritual obstacles, not least of which was the material image of the Church itself:

"Although the speculative debate was ended for us, we still had many feelings of repugnance to overcome. The Church in her mystical and saintly life we found infinitely lovable. We were ready to accept her. She promised us Faith by Baptism: we were going to put her word to the test.

But in the apparent mediocrity of the Catholic world, and in the mirage which to our ill-seeing eyes seemed to bind her to the forces of reaction and oppression, she appeared to us strangely hateful. She seemed to us to be the society of the fortunate of this world, the supporter and ally of the powerful, to be bourgeois, pharisaical, remote from the people.

That Jacques and Raissa were able to look beyond their negative impressions of the Church, to consider its claims to truth and to seek reception in baptism, is a good lesson for those who find themselves in a similar position today.

In addition to the scorn and alienation of many of their friends and family, Jacques believed that upon entering the Church he would have to relenquish his pursuit of philosophy:

Our suffering and dryness grew greater every day. Finally we understood that God also was waiting, and that there would be no further light so long as we should not have obeyed the imperious voice of our consciences saying to us: you have no valid objection to the Church; she alone promises you the light of truth - prove her promises, put Baptism to the test.

We still thought that to become Christian meant to abandon philosophy forever. Well, we were ready - but it was not easy - to abandon philosophy for the truth. Jacques accepted this sacrifice. The truth we had so greatly desired had caught us in a trap. "If it has pleased God to hide His truth in a dunghill," Jacques said, "that is where we shall go to find it." I quote these cruel words to give some idea of our state of mind.

How fortunate for us, that Jacques would subsequently discover the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, and continue to enrich the Church with his philosophical investigations. Catholics of many stripes have been influenced by (and lay claim to) Maritain's thought: "neoconservatives", progressives, traditionalists, Catholic Workers -- we can consider ourselves blessed. To echo Michael Novak:

". . . so many of us feel immensely indebted to this layman, perhaps the greatest exemplar of the Catholic laity in the last two centuries: this master of many wisdoms, this metaphysician, this philosopher at once humane and Christian (and able to speak in either of those languages), this ethicist and philosopher of history, this political philosopher, this saintly and childlike man.²

Related Links:

• Biography of Jacques Maritain, by Chris Marvin [Philosophy on the Internet]
• Jacques Maritain Center University of Notre Dame. Directed by Ralph McInerny. A treasure-trove of readings and resources, including a number of selected "Readings for philosophers and Catholics.
• Raïssa Maritain: Philosopher, Poet, Mystic, by Fr. Michael Sherwin, O.R. Catholic Dossier 5, no. 4 (July-August 1999): 23-29.

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1. The Christian Personalism of Jacques Maritain Faith and Reason Summer 1991
2. A Salute to Jacques Maritain, by Michael Novak. The Catholic Writer: The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute 2 (1989): 65-82.

Challenging the "Democratic Faith" of Jacques Maritain

I read a rather provocative article today by Thaddeus J. Kozinski on "Jacques Maritain's "Democratic Faith": Heretical or Orthodox?" -- in which he criticizes Maritain's philosophy of "personalist democracy," reflecting an idealistic faith which has been rendered passe in light of America's moral degeneration. Kozinski argues that the proper attitude one should adopt in this day and age would be that of the ultramontane English Catholic, William George Ward ("Towards the prevailing national spirit ., . . our only reasonable attitude is one of deep jealously and suspicion; because it is charged with principles which, for the corruption of human nature, are sure to be more false than true, and from which we should keep ourselves entirely free, until we have measured them by their only true standard, the Church's voice").

According to Kozinski, Maritain's believed that in spite of our diverse cultural and religious backgrounds mankind, in reaction to the horrible experience of Facism and Nazism, could come together in agreement on the existence of the protection of certain goods ("truth and intelligence, human dignity, freedom, brotherly love, and the absolute value of moral good.") ¹ According to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, "What Maritain wished to affirm a modern version of Aquinas' thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divine law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being." But MacIntyre disagrees, contending that while those engaged in such discussion employ the same terminology ("freedom", "justice", "human rights", et al.) the intended meaning would be contingent upon one's philosophical background and worldview.

As MacIntyre has shown, rationality itself is a "practice" that takes its shape in a particular, lived-tradition of rationality, informed by religious, philosophical, anthropological, epistemological commitments that in turn inform the precise manner in which that rationality is practiced by the individuals habituated into a particular tradition. For MacIntyre, then, the post-World-War II consensus on the goods constituting the democratic charter was not really a consensus at all, even though the consenters evinced a common lexicon of "human rights" and "democratic values"; for, it was built on sand, on entirely disparate understandings of that lexicon in virtue of their disparate traditions of rationality: Thomist, Humean, Kantian, Rousseauian, Nietzchean, Deweyean, etc.. But even if all the consenters had indeed been rooted in the same tradition (perhaps as the children of a dysfunctional Enlightenment family!), it was not rooted in that one tradition of rationality without which, Maritain insisted, the particular goods of the democratic order would have never even been recognized, let alone become attainable, the scholastic tradition of Christian rationality. ²

Kozinski argues that in this day and age it is no longer possible to maintain any kind of democratic concensus on such matters as envisioned by Maritain. A prevalent example is the way our society (and our courts) have redefined human persons in a similar manner as the Nazis, so as to justify murder of the unborn, "all under the banner of the "freedom" and "rights" afforded by the democratic charter." He also argues, along with Dr. David Schindler, that the practical, secular consensus of liberal democracy and "neutrality" towards religion displays a tendency "to undermine the priority, in first public and then private life, of supernatural or spiritual reality, and even to invert the proper subordination of the mundane to the spiritual."

As it is impossible for one to serve both God and mammon, what would happen to a religious believer who attempts to serve a democratic faith that requires the sacrifice of the public, temporal significance of his religious faith? It would be perfectly natural for him to interpret his obligatory devotion to the publicly celebrated, legally enforced, and socially respectable democratic faith as less important than his voluntary devotion to his publicly neglected, legally ignored, and socially eschewed religious faith. The consequence of prolonged habituation in such a regime is obvious. It is not possible, without a heroic amount of grace, effort and vigilance, to hold both the "theologically-neutral" theological premise of the democratic charter and the theologically charged premises of a Christian political theology. For this reason we should be very hesitant to accept the purported neutrality of even Maritain's Christ-inspired democratic charter. Maritain, of course, would never had wanted any part of such a trivialization of Christian belief -- on the contrary, he explicitly called for a new Christendom! But one mustn't ignore the possibility that he may have promoted this very obsoletion when he denied the need for truth as a basis for social order in the modern world.

I have not read enough of Maritain's political philosophy to sufficiently respond to Kozinski's indictement at this point in time, although I question whether Maritain was truly dismissive of the need for truth as a basis for social order. (In fact, Kozinski himself admits towards the end that he may be off-base in his reading of Maritain, simplifying his thought to make his critique easier). In any case, I may address his points later after I have read some more of Maritain's work.

One more thing that I would like to touch on is the matter of Kozinski's proposed remedy to the "imminent dangers of pluralism":

The American spirit, in spite of its original goodness, has now been taken over by evil forces, forces that can not be exorcised by anything other than an unadulterated, vigorous, politically-relevant faith in Jesus Christ and the Church that He founded, a Church that must be, for the sake of both the Church's honor and the temporal common good, the publicly recognized guide for men in both individual and social life. And for the latter to occur, we need to work for a nationwide conversion to the Catholic faith.

Kozinski's proposal for the establishment of a visible "Kingdom of Christ" and the physical subordination of all mankind to the Church is widely held and advocated by "traditionalist Catholics". However, it is also one that many Catholics would disagree with. Being the first article I'd ever read by Mr. Kozinski, I decided to research him further and came across this brief correspondence with Fr. Neuhaus in First Things. ³ Fr. Neuhaus's responds to Kozinski on "the distinction between the ideal and what is prudentially judged to be possible or desirable" and directs him to his article on The Liberalism of John Paul II (First Things May 1997) for further explication. ⁴

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1. See Christianity and Democracy, an address at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New York on Dec. 29, 1949.

2. See Macintyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Dec. 1989). Also, Edward T. Oakes' introduction: The Achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre First Things August/September 1996.

3. Responding to Neuhaus' three part column "Proposing Democracy Anew," October-December 1999, which I have added to our archive.

4. Cardinal Dulles' article Religious Freedom: Innovation and Development (First Things Dec. 2001) is also of relevance.