LIBERTY IN THE CATHOLIC TRADITION

Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty is often seen as a repudiation of the Church’s traditional teaching on liberty and, more positively, as a belated adoption of the insights and advances of modern political theory. A comparison of Leo XIII’s Libertas of 1888 with the Declaration of Vatican II, and indeed with Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris, lends credence to the view that Church doctrine has changed radically.

As for the second claim – that the Church has fallen into line with modern political and legal thought – this suggests a uniformity and clarity in modernism difficult to find.

In this essay, I want to recall aspects of Catholic teaching on human freedom, go on to say a few words about recent controversies among Catholics, and finally call attention to some of the profound theoretical problems which attend some modern views on human liberty.

The Biblical truth that God made man in His image has long been interpreted by theologians as meaning that man alone among earthly creatures can, like his creator, freely direct himself to the good. Thus, in the prologue to the second or moral part of his Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas uses the notion of man as God’s image to establish the nature of man’s moral agency: deliberate voluntary action.

Such action can be impeded in two ways, by ignorance and by violence. The freedom of an action is obviously affected if, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing. A large topic, needless to say, the discussion of which requires a distinction between culpable and inculpable ignorance. Traditional discussions of violence, on the other hand, immediately face a paradox. If the human act as such is self-generated, a forced act is not a human act. A forced human act thus appears to be logically impossible. Of course, a moral theory that had no room for violence would scarcely interest us. Room is made for it by distinguishing between the inner act of will and its execution. No one can force our consent, but can quite easily be prevented from executing our choices and be carried hither and thither “against our will.”

If the Summa theologiae be taken as a highwater mark of Catholic doctrine on human freedom, it can be said that its analysis of human agency continues to be held in respect by philosophers, both Catholic and non-Catholic. Alan Donagan’s presentation of it in his contribution to the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy is a case in point.

But if the philosophical aspects of the traditional theory of human action are of continuing interest, in its theological dimension the theory goes beyond the dreams of mere philosophers. To the question “Why did God make you?” the Baltimore Catechism provided the crisp answer, “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.” In the Catholic tradition, freedom is for something. As God’s image, it is man’s task freely to direct himself to that which God has ordained as fulfilling of him. By contrast, other terrestrial creatures are determined to their respective ends, though in the hierarchy of animal life, there is an intimation of freedom in the higher animals. On the Catholic view, the point of man’s freedom is not to find the already written role he is to play in the drama of salvation. Rather, the end of human activity is given, but the articulation of that end and of the means of realizing it must be fashioned by the human agent. There is a common Christian vocation, but the Calendar of the Saints shows the all but infinite variety of ways in which it can be realized.

Man’s end is to love God. Thus the fulfillment of his freedom is to be liberated from all that impedes that love, that is, to be freed from sin. This is the liberty of grace. Freedom from all obstacles to the attainment of our end is freedom from need and suffering. St. Bernard of Clairvaux developed the degrees of this freedom in his work. On Grace and Free Will. It is, so to speak, by descending from this vision of man that a philosophical discussion of freedom takes place within the Catholic theological tradition.

By this I mean that the impetus to develop a theory of free human agency, and the motivation for interest in available philosophical discussions, is always found in man’s true and complete end. It must never be forgotten that many of the key concepts of secular and philosophical discussions were developed by believers, thus exemplifying the Anselmian adage fides quaerens intellectum.

When the Church discusses human liberty in a way meant to be intelligible to all, believers and unbelievers, she should not be taken to be entering the real world at last. The real world, man’s true destiny, is the Christian vocation, salvation through Christ, eternal happiness with God. Any discussion of man that does not take into account man’s true ultimate end may be true to some degree but is fundamentally inadequate. The Church’s insistence on Natural Law is precisely an insistence on a common moral basis for discussion of human action. There are truths about human agents which can be grasped independently of Revelation. Nonetheless, from the Catholic point of view, discussions based only on such truths must seem exiguous. Moreover, apart from the sustaining context of religious belief, such natural truths can all too quickly fall into oblivion.

For all that, a common natural discussion is possible and my intention here is to give the wider context into which for the Catholic they fit. The natural discussion is carried on in terms proper to it. It is because natural truths cannot conflict with Revelation that the Church despite her supernatural vision, insists on these common natural moral truths.

The notion that the Church has profoundly changed her doctrine on liberty and political freedom invites a first and obvious remark, namely, that Church teaching, taken broadly, consists both of abiding truths and contingent applications of them in different historical circumstances. The great historical event of modern times affecting both Church teaching and the attitude of individual Catholics is the French Revolution. Raised in a country that is itself the result of a revolution, we Americans are likely to have a positive, even a Hollywood, conception of the French Revolution. Serious positive assessments of it have come from such stalwarts of orthodoxy as Hilaire Belloc. But there was also a strong strain of intellectual resistance to and theoretical condemnation of the French Revolution by individual Catholics. The names of Chateaubriand, de Maistre, de Bonald and Donoso Cortes come to mind. What others saw as excusable excesses, these men saw as essential to the Revolution. The emergence of the modern secular state, of liberal democracy, which we instinctively regard as an unequivocal good, was seen as an attack on religion and on man’s supernatural vocation.

But it was not merely individual Catholics who condemned the underlying political philosophy of the French Revolution. Its errors came to be gathered under the title of Liberalism which was condemned in various official Church documents, including Leo XIII’s 1880 encyclical mentioned above. In French intellectual history, the famous condemnation of Action Française seemed to mark a radical shift in universal church teaching.

Jacques Maritain, once more or less associated with Action Française, became an expositor of and apologist for the condemnation. For such theologians as the Jesuit Cardinal Louis Billot, the condemnation was a bitter blow. The chapter in his De Ecclesia Christi (Rome, 1929) entitled De errore Liberalismi et variis eius formae: “On the error of Liberalism and its various forms,” sounds startling to Catholic ears only slightly more than half a century later. Surely the tone of Billot is utterly different from that of the Council Fathers in the early 1960’s. Maritain, in his Carnet de Notes, recounts a visit made by the Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange to Billot that gives something of the flavor of that feisty man. Billot resigned as cardinal because of the condemnation of Action Française.

Maritain himself provides a good example of the opposed tendency that was to be expressed in the Declaration on Religious Liberty. The publication of the great French Catholic philosopher’s Integral Humanism opened Maritain up to attacks from those who thought as Billot had. Maritain’s Personalism was said to incorporate many flaws of the modern theory. In 1943, a controversy raged over Maritain’s Personalism and its effect on the traditional doctrine of the common good. Maritain wrote The Person and the Common Good in order to clarify his position and, implicitly, to answer his critics. That is a long story, still awaiting its historian, but it connects with Maritain’s fundamental effort, namely to put together the traditional doctrine of Natural Law and the modern theory of Human Rights.

Earlier efforts culminated in Man and the State, the Walgreen Lectures delivered at the University of Chicago. The Declaration on the Rights of Man made in 1789 and 1793 are ringing generalizations that were very quickly used to justify the Terror, an historical fact that should give one at least theoretical pause. In 1948 came the International Declaration of the Rights of Man and it is precisely this document Maritain confronts in his Walgreen Lectures. The way he states the problem is of profound importance. The right to life, liberty and personal security seem beyond discussion, but of course they require a view of the human person and society to sustain them. It is just because there is no single social arrangement to confer such rights that Alsadair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, denies that there are any human rights in the sense desired. Similar misgivings were already expressed in the writings of Michel Villey. Maritain, while drawing attention to the various and conflicting views of man and society held by the signatories of the Declaration, attempted to show (a) that the true basis of them is Natural Law and (b) that the acceptance of the Declaration, despite radically different ways of explaining and understanding it, suggested an implicit recognition of that true basis. More recently, John Finnis, in Natural law and Natural Rights, has confronted the same issues. The work of these men enables us to state the difficulty attending the claim that the Church has belatedly accepted the modern view of political freedom and human rights. If the Church speaks of human rights in verbally the same way as other do, we must not take this to be an acceptance of the theoretical bases others might advance for such rights.

Guy de Broglie, S.J., in a little book published in 1964, Le Droit Naturel à la Liberté Religieuse, wisely discusses some of the issues in the then still pending conciliar declaration. His chief concern is to reconcile liberal and anti-liberal Catholics by arguing that the acceptance of the Declaration in no wise entails the false divinising of Liberty that the Church had previously condemned. Catholics who espouse liberalism favor the conclusions which follow from it, not its principles, which are antithetical to Catholicism. De Broglie does not think much of the inner coherence of the antagonistic theory and argues that its conclusions can be reached more surely from traditional Catholic principles. By presenting matter in this way, he hopes to establish a reconciliation between liberal and anti-liberal Catholics.

However forlorn that hope may seem, it can be said that De Broglie captures the essence of the Vatican II declaration. Rights familiar to many as flowing from principles antithetical to Catholicism are shown to follow from Catholic principles and are proposed to the faithful on that basis. De Broglie enables us to see why many thought the Declaration on Religious Liberty was a departure from past Catholic teaching and why, although there is some reason for their judgment, it is fundamentally wrong. Just as Maritain could accept the 1948 Declaration only because he was able to produce a Natural Law justification of the rights claimed, so the Council Fathers could speak of liberty in terms familiar to modern ears only because they were able to found their talk of liberty in the traditional teaching of the Church.

Such efforts invite misunderstanding from friend and foe alike. Talk of human rights is of relatively recent origin and it developed in intellectual environments hostile to religious belief. The enshrinement of liberty was meant to be an act of defiance and we see all about us the problems arising from it. What cannot be overlooked is that modern talk of liberty and rights arose out of a view of the carrier of those rights which is both incompatible with Catholicism and wobbly on exclusively natural and philosophical grounds. The bearer of human rights is is seen as an atom without a nature. His freedom does not flow from what he is and what he is for. It becomes a claim against other contrary free projects. The theory does not protect us from the interpretation that there is no right use of liberty, no uses which can be theoretically excluded as impermissible. All substantive claims about what man is and what he ought to do are taken to be subjective, mere opinions, such as that to act on them in a way that affects others is unjust. Whether the view of society which arises out of the grouping of such atoms can be merely formal and still justify the merely formal or procedural concept of liberty is a philosophical difficulty that cannot be wished away. Meanwhile, our laws and judicial decisions make mincemeat out of the residual substantive beliefs that were essential to the founding of the country.

Consider only the topic of the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty. The history of the interpretation of the relation of Church and State shows a movement from non-establishment on a federal level toward judicial hostility to religion. Religious beliefs and practices are increasingly viewed as inimical to the secular state and are actively opposed as "divisive." Religious liberty has almost come to mean freedom from religion, with the state the instrument of the agnostic. That this is brought about by judges who hold religious beliefs suggests the danger for believers in accepting both the principles and the conclusions of their enemies. A faith that finds its foundation in symbols and parables would do well to be more wary of the modern tendency to flourish abstract terms. The rhetoric of liberty should not jeopardize the long theological tradition that developed a teaching on free and responsible human agency that still speaks to us today.

<< ======= >>