The proper bafflers are the ambiguists. Their flashes of
insights are frequent enough; but in the end the fog closes down.
They are great ones for the facts, against the fundamentalists, and
great ones of “conscience,” against the cynics. They insist on the
values of pragmatism against the absolutists; but they resent the
suggestion that they push pragmatism to the point of relativism of
moral values.
— John
Courtney Murray, S.J. (September 12, 1904-August 16,
1967)
We should not let the year end without noting the fiftieth
anniversary of the publication of an American classic of political
philosophy, one that combines both an appreciation of the unique
nature of the American project with a profound understanding of the
eternal verities of natural law reasoning, a mode of thought and
discourse embedded in the nation’s founding documents but otherwise
banished from the halls of our great secular
universities.
In 1960 the venerable publishing house of Sheed and Ward
released We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the
American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S.J. It was a
series of essays exploring “the American Proposition” which Abraham
Lincoln cited in the opening lines of his Gettysburg
Address.
Father Murray understood that, even in the 1950s, “the
serene, and often naïve, certainties of the eighteenth century have
crumbled.” Thus, the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of
Independence “may be legitimately questioned.”
“What ought not to be questioned, however, is that the
American Proposition rests on the forthright assertion of a realist
epistemology,” asserts Murray. “The sense of the famous phrase is
simply this: ‘There are truths, and we hold them, and we here lay
them down as the basis and inspiration of the American project,
this constitutional commonwealth.’” Over and against positivists,
Marxists and pragmatists, the Founding Fathers thought that “the
life of man in society under government is founded on truths, on a
certain body of objective truth, universal in its import,
accessible to the reason of man, definable, defensible.”
“If this assertion is denied, the American Proposition is,
I think, eviscerated at one stroke,” argues Murray. “For the
pragmatists there are, properly speaking, no truths; there are only
results. But the American Proposition rests on the more traditional
conviction that there are truths; that they can be known; that they
must be held; for, if they are not held, assented to, consented to,
worked into the texture of institutions, there can be no hope of
founding a true City, in which men may dwell in dignity, peace,
unity, justice, well-being, freedom.”
Murray says “we hold these truths because they are true.
They have been found in the structure of reality by that dialectic
of observation and reflection which is called
philosophy.”
In the Catholic world prior to Vatican II, the issue of
American religious pluralism was problematic. Indeed, Father
Murray’s writings were restrained from time to time by Rome. Yet,
as can be seen in the teachings of Benedict XVI and John Paul II,
the American constitutional system is now viewed as a positive
good, not out of any tolerance for moral relativism, but due to a
greater appreciation of the handiwork of James Madison, the First
Amendment, “a great act of political intelligence” according to
Murray.
As a matter of historic fact, “pluralism was the native
condition of American society.” Yet, the first truth to which the
American Proposition makes appeal in the Declaration of
Independence (“that landmark of Western political philosophy”)
basically asserts “the sovereignty of God over nations as well as
over individual men,” hardly a Jacobin or laicist position. Recall
that language of inalienable rights coming from a
Creator.
Murray takes a phrase from Boswell’s Dr. Johnson to
characterize the first two articles of the First Amendment,
forbidding the establishment of a state religion and protecting the
free exercise of religious practice, as “articles of peace,” not
articles of faith in our pluralist society. Although today, decades
later, it may seem like a commonplace observation, he believed that
the “goodness” of the amendment was “manifested not only by
political but also religious experience. By and large (for no
historical record is without blots) it has been good for religion,
for Catholicism, to have had simply the right to
freedom.”
Absolutists, calling for walls and moats and the
elimination of religion from the public square, forget that the
First Amendment was designed to protect religious freedom, not to
undermine it.
“The American Catholic is on good ground when he refuses
to make an ideological idol out of religious freedom and separation
of church and state, when he refuses to ‘believe’ in them as
articles of faith,” writes Father Murray. “He takes the highest
ground available in this matter of the relations between religion
and government when he asserts that his commitment to the religion
clauses of the Constitution is a moral commitment to them as
articles of peace in a pluralist society.”
We Hold These Truths is not merely a
book about limited “Catholic” interests in the American political
system but a sustained defense of reason and rationale discourse in
a civil society. In it Murray argues for the necessity and
universality of natural law reasoning which provides a cogent basis
for governing the commonwealth.
“The doctrine of natural law has no Roman Catholic
presuppositions,” says Murray. “Its only presupposition is
threefold: that man is intelligent; that reality is intelligible;
and that reality, as grasped by intelligence, imposes on the will
the obligation that it be obeyed in its demands for action or
abstention.”
Rejecting John Locke’s abstract, isolated individualism,
Murray believes that natural law “regards the community as a
‘given’ equally with the person.” Moreover, “Man is regarded as a
member of an order instituted by God, and subject to the laws that
make the order an order-laws that derive from the nature of man,
which is essentially social as it is individual.”
“Law is not simply the protection of rights but their
source, because it is the foundation of duties,” says
Murray.
Murray had a keen intellect, steeped in the classical and
Western traditions once common among Jesuits of his stature. He was
comfortable arguing politics, theology, national defense policy and
history. He challenged assumptions of both the Left and Right. He
offered precise and subtle arguments that have been used and,
sometimes, misused by both sides in debates over different issues
over the years. But his faith in the inherent reasonableness of God
and man is a welcome tonic to the corrosive anti-intellectualism,
power politics and relativism of the present age.
