The following essay was first published by Real Clear Politics as a part of their “1776” series, in February 2020.

 

In declaring their independence from Great Britain, Americans famously asserted their unalienable rights. Much less conspicuously, but no less tellingly, they listed ten moral virtues and duties consonant with those rights.

In announcing their political separation from the Empire, they begin by acknowledging a duty to observe “a decent respect of the opinions of mankind” by stating the causes for their decision. “Decent” means fitting, appropriate; the opinions of mankind are fittingly respected because human beings are by nature social, equipped with the capacity for understanding one another, for giving reasons for their conduct. Any important public action entails the duty to explain oneself, to justify the action before the bar of reasoning men and women.

To justify oneself, in turn, requires Americans to state their standard of justice. That standard is unalienable natural rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Justice numbers among the four cardinal classical virtues, defined and elaborated by Plato, Cicero, and other philosophers well known to the Declaration’s signers. Just conduct consists of actions defending natural rights in a civil society; to assert those rights, to separate oneself from those who would violate them, logically entails respecting those rights in all other persons, inasmuch as “all men are created equal,” all equally entitled to enjoy their natural rights undisturbed by tyrants.

Governments that secure such rights are established by the consent of the governed. This means that consent cannot mean mere assent or willingness. It can only mean reasoned assent. Reasoned assent to natural right implies a modest degree of another classical virtue, wisdom. In this case, it is what Aristotle calls ‘theoretical’ wisdom, understanding general or abstract principles. Americans recognize their duty to understand what human nature is—not only the ‘nature’ (really the character, including the habits of mind and heart) of Americans, or the English, or the French, but of human beings as such.

Aristotle identifies a second kind of wisdom: practical or prudential wisdom, the ability to figure out commonsense ways to secure the rights of human nature established in theory. ‘Prudence,’ the Declaration states, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Long-established governments have lasted for some good reasons; they have stood the test of experience, of practice, Much of the Declaration of Independence is given over to showing why the causes for which the signers owe mankind an enumeration are not light and transient. They are profound and long-lasting, and to fail to foresee their likely results would be to fail to exercise the virtue of prudence.

Closely related to prudence is a third classical virtue, moderation. Like all of mankind, Americans have exhibited patience in enduring “sufferable” evils as subjects of the British Empire. Only “a long train of abuses” revealing an intention by the regime of that empire to “reduce them under an absolute Despotism” gives them not only the right but also the duty to “throw off” that regime, sever themselves from that empire, and concomitantly to frame a new order that will secure their natural rights. Both prudence and moderation justify a right to revolution and, simultaneously, the duty to found a regime that will work better in practice.

The fourth classical virtue is courage. Without it, wisdom, justice, and moderation by themselves will leave you high and dry. As a baseball manager once said of a rival, “Nice guys finish last.” Accordingly, Americans announce their intention to defend their rights with “manly firmness.” It should be noted that manliness in their minds had no ‘gender.’ Abigail Adams was no less “manly” in her firmness than her husband, John. He knew that and he said it. Looking back on the American Revolution, he wrote that those were times that tried women’s souls as well as those of men, and that American women had exhibited no less courage than their husbands and sons. Several decades later, gallant Tocqueville went so far as to say that America owed much of its success in self-government to “the superiority of her women” to those seen in European ballrooms and salons, where the sterner virtues had gone out of fashion.

The virtue of civility treats naturally equal human beings as equal citizens in a regime designed to give every citizen representation in government—government by consent. The Signers held up the virtue of civility against barbarism, by which they didn’t mean primitiveness. They mean Machiavellianism, the intention to rule by force and fraud or, in their own words, cruelty and perfidy. By this standard, the English monarch’s policies regarding the American colonies were barbaric, however ‘civilized’ his pomp and circumstance may have made him seem. Aristotle understands human nature to be not only rational but also political or civil. By ‘political’ he means the capacity to rule and be ruled in turn, as good husbands and wives do in a justly ordered household, and as citizens do among themselves. Political or civil rule contrasts with parental rule—rule over children for ‘their own good.’ The civic equivalent of this would be kingship, one-man or one-woman rule for the good of the subjects, often described as the ‘children’ of the monarch. Political or civil rule also contrasts with the rule of masters over slaves, which is established, Aristotle observes, for the good of the aster, not the slave. The virtue of civility treats naturally equal human beings as equal citizens in a regime designed to give every citizen representation in government—government by consent. Civility animates the regime of republicanism, which will replace British tyranny.

Americans also esteem a virtue less classical than Biblical: humility. They have petitioned the British monarch in “humble terms.” The Bible teaches that humility is a virtue because, when God created all men equal in their humanity, He created them equal before God, and under God. In Hebrew, the word for humility, anav, appears frequently in association with the greatest of all Israelite founders, Moses, the great lawgiver. Moses’s humility enables him to bring forth the Ten Commandments not as his own laws, products of his own wisdom, but as God’s laws. In describing their right to independence as established by the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the Signers of the Declaration show a similar humility. They do not strut proudly before mankind as ‘exceptional’ Americans. They announce their intention to claim their rights on the foundation of laws seen in the nature created by God. They are not divine creators but human receivers of God’s gifts.

While petitioning the monarch in humble terms, they also appeal to the “magnanimity” of the “British brethren,” the people of Great Britain. Magnanimity—literally, greatness of soul—crowns and epitomizes the classical virtues. Aristotle describes the magnanimous man as one whose soul is big enough to endure the rigors of political life without resentment, without the petty retaliation exercised by men of micropsychia, smallness of soul. The Americans see that their action will take the British people by surprise. Britain’s mighty empire, a source of understandable national pride, will be diminished. Having given up on showing humility before the king—humility isn’t groveling—Americans ask from his people nothing less than greatness of soul. They can demand no less from themselves, as well, and accordingly hold the British people “enemies in War” but “in Peace friends.” They see that a war of independence will provoke angry passions in their own hearts against that people, even as they now feel such passions against King George and the British parliament. They vow to greet former battlefield enemies with magnanimity, once peace has been restored.    It has never been simply the case that Biblical humility and classical magnanimity comport easily with one another. The signers of the Declaration of Independence pair them. They can do so because they understand humility as a virtue attendant to due deference—in civil society, to a monarch insofar as he adheres to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, in civil society and in nature to God and His laws, to be obeyed by peoples and monarchs, commoners and aristocrats alike.

Finally, to one another the Americans pledge “our sacred Honor.” If Americans owe a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, they owe honor to one another, loyalty in a great and good shared action, namely, the establishment of just self-government in their country. They will not betray one another. They will respect the opinions of others but in this task each will deserve the good opinion of his countrymen.                                

“First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” George Washington served as the exemplary Americans to Americans. First in war, he showed courage on the battlefield, and civic courage, after the war, when he faced down a nascent military coup. First in peace, he showed a decent respect for mankind in his Farewell Address, avoiding military alliances in Europe (then a cauldron of war), and leading his countrymen to a constitution designed to secure justice for all American citizens. He proved to them that he possessed the wisdom to establish government by consent. And he won first place in the hearts of his countrymen with his unflagging civility, his humility in reprehending any suggestion that he made a monarch, a temptation King George never though he could resist. Perhaps above all, in his greatness of soul and sense of honor—’aristocratic’ virtues he humbly placed in the service of the republicanism Americans had fought for, and won, he proved that goodness strengthens a great man’s greatness.                                                                                                                                                                    

In all this, Washington became a living embodiment of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, their foremost practitioner, and the example for Americans of the virtues Americans esteemed. Throughout the soul-trials of regime change in war and regime-building in peace, Washington and his fellow Americans never considered these virtues uniquely American, but rather as the shared patrimony of all human beings, under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. 

Robert R. Reilly: America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020.

 

America is indeed ‘on trial’ today, arraigned by the newest iteration of the American Left, which denounces the American founding, but especially (in their preferred mode of argumentum ad hominem) the Founders themselves as demeaners of women, enslavers of Africans, destroyers of innocent indigenes. It is the less conspicuous, but in a way more insidious arraignment of America by the American Right that Reilly addresses. He rightly ignores the nasty vaporings of neo-Nazis and dolts generally, defending his country instead against thoughtful ‘conservatives,’ very often fellow Catholics, who misread the philosophic and theological sources of the Founders’ thought, damning their efforts as fundamentally ill-founded, corrupt and misguided from the start. Many American Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, now withdraw from public life into private enclaves (or more precisely conclaves), refusing to engage the supposedly irredeemable ‘culture of death’ all around them. In this they are less than Pauline, more like desert monks. Such writers as Catholics Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and Michael Hanby, along with the Baptist Russell Moore, claim that the American Founders took the purpose of government to be the liberation of the autonomous individual, despite the plainly stated argument of the Declaration of Independence, which holds the purpose of government to securing the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as defined by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, neither of which suggest ‘autonomy.’ [1]

With vigorous, manly style, Reilly sets them straight. Although he’s been compared to the traditionalist conservative, Russell Kirk, Reilly argues quite differently. Rather than attempting to minimize the Founders’ appeals to natural right in the name of a quasi-Burkean traditionalism, Reilly affirms the rationalist core of the American founding. That core formed part of a tradition, to be sure, in the sense that divine revelation and philosophic reflection both enabled men to discover it over time. But it isn’t traditional in the sense of being a mere amalgam of long-standing customs, conventions. It can withstand the scrutiny of rational inquiry. America may be on trial, but in his role as her defense attorney Reilly partakes of the old way of arguing cases, reasoning not simply from law and precedent but from principles discovered and elaborated by human reasoning.

“This book is about the lineage of the idea that made the United States possible. It traces the origin of certain truths without which the American Founding would have been inconceivable.” The Signers of the Declaration of Independence write, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” Not everyone can so hold them; for example George III, his soul blinded by libido dominandi, might very well not. “The tension between the primacy of reason, as it was theologically, philosophically, and politically elaborated, versus the primacy of will, as it was expressed in these same areas, is the driving engine of this book,” and the distinction matters politically because “primacy of reason means that what is right flows from objective sources in nature and the transcendent, from what is, as Plato proposed. Primacy of will, on the other hand, means that what is right flows from power, that will is a law unto itself. It is a conflict of might makes right versus right makes might.” Whether in the hands of one, few, or many, this distinction spells the difference between justice and injustice.

But more, since the Declaration is a syllogism, it cannot be conceived by persons who have little or no conception of reason, of thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction. To explain the pre-rational world, Reilly has recourse to the classic account by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City. “In the ancient world,” the world prior to philosophy but without widespread understanding of divine revelation, “men could not conceive of themselves outside” the political order; that is, the ancient cities and empires “provid[ed] man with his only source of meaning,” making no distinction between the laws, conventions, customs of the city and nature. One sees this even today whenever human beings fall into the grip of tribalism. “To enslave or slaughter a member of another tribe fit perfectly within the order of the tribal view” because tribe or city had its own gods, rivals of the gods worshiped by all other tribes and cities. “If a city lost a war, the ancients assumed that its gods had been defeated and subjugated by the greater powers of the victors’ gods”; the losers deserved nothing better than “mass execution or enslavement,” there being no known “moral grounds on which to object to this,” no word for ‘human being’ or ‘mankind.’ In 1793, sometime Vermont senator and Vermont Supreme Court chief justice Nathaniel Chipman reported on how many of the Amerindian tribes would butcher and scalp “old men, women, and children,” not as “secret acts of violence” but as “public transactions, performed, under what is, to them, the law of nations.” Two centuries later, the Hutus killed Tutsis in Rwanda, under the same principle. And less than a decade before the publication of Reilly’s book, a tribal chieftain in Iraq’s Al Anbar province said of an enemy tribe, “There’s no way to let them live. I’m not going to leave any of them alive…. We’re going to destroy them all.”

In the ancient world, the tribal religion was pantheist and indeed animist. “For the ancients, the divine order, far from transcending the world, was part of it.” If everything is a manifestation of God, then there are no substantial differences between men, animals, and things. This mindset encourages what we now call ‘magical thinking,’ whereby “questions were decided by divination, not reason.” Politically, “nothing is secular; there is no room for the notion of a secular state.” Those who assume humanity has put such thinking aside should consider the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ enunciated by some environmentalists, a divinization of Planet Earth that “will lead ineluctably to a redivinization of the state” in the form of a world government. This government will claim legitimacy on the grounds that the world is a giant organism crying out in need for a ruling brain, a brain that might well sacrifice large swathes of the human population ‘for the sake of the whole.’ That this will be called necessary only registers another belief of the pre-philosophic ‘ancients,’ that “everything is subject to fate, and fate [is] inscrutable,” that there is only the eternal cosmos, no “personal, providential God who values the individual person.” The individual person has no more value, in this mindset, than a single cell in a human body, subject to the impersonal functions of digestion and assimilation.

“Greek philosophy overthrew the tribal view of man with the idea that the mind can know things, as distinct from merely having opinions about them, because reality exists objectively, independently of what anyone may think about it It is accessible to the intellect and can therefore be truly known as it is. Through reason, man can ascertain the truth of things.” Politically, this means that the source of ‘the good’ for human beings “exists outside and above the political order and is therefore not determined by it,” that human societies differ in kind from ant and ape societies. It may have been Heraclitus who said that “the universe is an intelligible whole,” understandable by human beings, and intelligible “because it is ruled by and is the product of ‘thought’ or wisdom,” by logos—speech or reason. “Therefore, “all human laws are nourished by this original divine law” which orders all things intelligibly, that is, by the principle of non-contradiction.

Reilly cites Aristotle as the philosopher who best articulated this insight. “Aristotle taught that the essence, or nature, of a thing is what makes it what it is, and why it is not, and cannot be, something else.” Animistic shape-shifting and twenty-first-century ‘self-inventing’ cannot occur because they cannot be real. The purpose of any person or thing defines what is good for him, or it. Aristotle remarks that it isn’t good for an acorn to be prevented from developing into an oak. What is good or natural “is not imposed from the outside, and it cannot be altered.” Whereas “in plants or animals, this involves no self-conscious volition,” only physical laws or instinct, “Man is the only creature that has conscious knowledge of the end for which he was made. In classical Greek thought, a ‘freeman’ is one who is moved to act according to an understanding of the nature of things,” the one who “truly knows what he is doing.” “Since man freely chooses his behavior, he is the only one for whom the natural law is moral.” “Aristotle said man does not make himself to be man” through political or any other activity. “Man does not fabricate his end or telos. Human nature is a given,” a matter of ‘what is,’ of obligation. The end or purpose of man is happiness, which Aristotle defines as “the realization and perfection of virtue.” Philosophy perfects the person because philosophy is the highest and most comprehensive perfection of the distinctively human characteristic, the reason that enables persons to choose, to act freely instead of by physical laws or instinct alone. “Thanks to Greek philosophy… reason came to be the arbiter of right and wrong,” capable of seeing the distinction between what is good and what is bad for human beings and any other natural beings it can study with care. With philosophy, man “can discern natural causality and ascribe to things their true causes, rather than assigning magical properties to everything.” “To do what is unreasonable is wrong”—intellectually mistaken and morally misguided. The Catholic Church (Reilly reminds his fellow Catholics) regarded irrationality to be “the essential character of sin or vice,” doing so because Thomas Aquinas integrated Aristotelian philosophy with the teachings of the Gospel. “Sin is an offense against reason,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church declared in 1849.

Philosophy also directs the mind to ‘abstraction,’ which is a very good thing if understood to have limits. Abstraction enables human beings to do one of the things God commanded Adam to do: name the creatures in the Garden according to their kinds. In so doing, God was telling Man to understand the general ‘in’ the particular. A non-philosopher does that as readily as a philosopher, but only a philosopher is likely to do it when considering abstractions or generalities themselves—characteristically, as Reilly recalls, when Socrates proposes to define justice by abstracting from all existing cities and describing a “city in speech,” a city that sets a standard by which all existing cities may be justly judged. Ardent citizens regard philosophers with suspicion precisely because philosophers think that there’s a city better than the existing city, that the existing city doesn’t set the standard of conduct. Christians fall under the same suspicion, when they speak of the City of God, preferring it to the City of Man. Without some standard, some set of principles beyond those upheld by the rulers of the British Empire, the argument of the Declaration of Independence would make no sense.

That argument includes among its major premises the self-evident truth that all men equally share an unalienable right to pursue happiness. As Reilly puts it, “the higher standard that the Founders invoked against the depredations of the British Empire was what is right by nature. It is the objective standard to which they appealed against the arbitrary exercise of British power.” But, Reilly argues, for the classical philosophers true human happiness can be attained only by the very few, by the philosophers who seek and find the knowledge of the highest things, the grandest generalities, that all men desire but most men never really know. The Christian Thomas Aquinas counters that to strive for any end that cannot be secured is futile; “therefore,” Reilly remarks, “the happiness to which all men are naturally ordered as their final perfection cannot consist in the happiness of only a few.” The Founders invoke a principle enunciated by Aristotle, by ‘Athens,’ but satisfied only by Jesus, by ‘Rome,’ which Reilly understands to be the ‘capital’ of Christianity, no longer the capital of the old empire. The road to Rome passes through Athens, but by way of Jerusalem.

Before following Reilly on the path to Jerusalem, one should pause and consider whether the Thomistic argument against the classical-philosophic understanding of happiness is sound. If all men desire to know, as Aristotle observes, that doesn’t mean that all men strive for the highest, the most general knowledge. Nor does it mean that it makes no sense to embark on a quest that is impossible to complete fully. Omniscience is humanly impossible, but that doesn’t make the quest for knowledge vain. This is true of any desire; hunger for the very finest food on all occasions is practically impossible to satisfy, but that doesn’t mean that the quest to satisfy our hunger for such food is vain. If few human beings can satisfy the human quest for knowledge, and especially for theoretical wisdom, to the extent philosophers can, and if indeed they cannot satisfy their quest for knowledge of ordinary things, and especially for practical wisdom, to the extend that (for example) a great statesman can, this is no reason not to try, no reason to consider the quest futile. Everyone can learn a few things, else no one would survive for long.

In Jerusalem one finds the principle of transcendent monotheism. Defeated, and indeed exiled from Jerusalem itself, Israelites “did not consider their God defeated,” inasmuch as “there was no other god to defeat him.” “If the Hebrews were overcome by the Babylonians and taken as their captives, it was not because their God had failed them, but because they had failed their God,” who is “wholly transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent.” Such a god doesn’t ‘infuse’ the laws of His people into His people; he justly imposes them ‘from above,’ in the knowledge of what is good for them according to their character, which is innate. Because He is one, not many; because he is above and beyond, not within and bounded; because He is a person, not a principle; he can both command His people and dialogue with them, enter into a covenant with some or all of His rational creatures. His creatures are rational because He is rational and He has created one kind among them in His “image.” “The Genesis revelation that ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him’ (1:27) formed the basis of Western civilization,” “the fount from which sprang the sanctity of the individual person as invested with the divine image in his reason, free will, and immortality.” Moreover, even if only one kind among the created things is a person, created in the divine image, all of God’s creation is good: “Matter is good”; “because it was made by God, creation is stable and reliable,” unthreatened “by some evil demiurge who is equal to him and with whom he is constant struggle for supremacy,” as in Manicheanism. “In Israel’s revelation of creation, God’s handiwork is so well made that man can come to know the Creator by studying his works,” as the Jewish Christian Paul argues. Evil comes not from God, nor from matter, but “from man’s free will.” ‘History’ comes about not by fate, by necessity, but by the interplay between a freely-willing God and his freely-willing creatures. In ruling, God provides; He does not simply determine. Human beings are not God’s wind-up toys. If they were, they could not have been made in God’s image.

When Man does sin against his Creator, what can he do to pay his debt? Nothing: the penalty of sin is death. By their own efforts human beings cannot long avoid dying. “What would this created, finite being have to offer the infinite Being, whom he had offended?” Happily for him, the God he has offended is indeed providential, extending His grace to the creature He created in His image. God does not want to destroy the creature who made the wrong choice by means of the capacity for choice, for free will, which his Creator bestowed upon him. God promises Man a Messiah. In being told that by God, Man now sees the course of events not as cyclical but as linear. The course of events has a purpose—not to be sure, thanks to some intrinsic ‘law of history,’ some immanent force driving them to an inevitable ‘end,’ but rather as a providential intention formulated in response to man’s freely-chosen offense.

What has any of this have to do with the American founding? “God’s transcendence also had a dramatic effect on the political character of man’s rule, which could no longer properly be theocratic.” Whether under a republican or a monarchic regime, Israelite government consisted of rulers who led the people in battle and judged cases in court, but left the sacred rites of the Israelite cultus to the priests, who in turn left ruling to the rulers. “When King Saul overstepped these boundaries and presumed to perform the sacred rites, the prophet Samuel upbraided him.” This “Judaic desacralization of the ruler, in contradistinction to the character of political rule surrounding the Hebrews, was an essential step in establishing the integrity of the secular sphere and in introducing the distinction between the religious and the civic, without which constitutional rule could not eventually develop.”

‘Rome’ or Christianity consists of “the nuptials of Jerusalem and Athens.” As in any good marriage, those united remain distinct within the terms of the union. The Gospel of John begins with the beginning: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Loos was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him.” Logos means speech, ‘word,’ and reason. Thus “Revelation confirmed Heraclitus’ intuition that logos makes the universe comprehensible because all things were made by and through Logos.” Unlike Heraclitean logos, however, this is Logos with a capital ‘L,’ a person not “an intelligible principle or a cosmic force,” a ‘who’ not an ‘it.’ “The face of Logos made visible is the transforming experience of a Hellenized Christianity or of a Christianized Hellenism,” which “moved the classical world from an impersonal Logos,” from the pure-thought-thinking-itself ‘god’ of the philosophers to the Creator-God. “The Christian view was thus comprehensive: it explained man’s origins in God’s creation, the existence of evil from Original sin, and the final triumph of salvation in Christ over evil and death.” Man doesn’t feel fully at home on earth, but he now has “the reassurance that he was meant for elsewhere,” somewhere “outside of history in personal union with a transcendent, loving God, something man could not dare to have hoped for, much less imagined, until God revealed himself in Christ as desiring nothing more than to share his inner life with his creatures, to impart to them his divinity.” In sum, “revelation involves Reason” as the supreme Person Who reasons and acts in accordance with His Reason, which is His ‘nature,’ the core of His being, His essence. God as the sender of Man’s Messiah, in the form of Man, offers all men the assurance that they can achieve the highest knowledge, the fullness of wisdom that many seek but none can find without that Messiah, the Son who alone has the power to unite them with their Father. No individual human being, tribe, no race, no nation is excluded from this assurance because all men are created equal, created in God’s Image. “Christianity contains an invitation to reason because God’s rationality guarantees reason’s integrity”; “if God is Logos, reason and revelation are not at an impasse.” This is the Christian solution to the problem of happiness raised by the classical philosophers.

Both the consonance of faith and reason and the distinction between them may be seen in a simple illustration. If I say to you, ‘I am now holding in my closed hand a round object,’ you may believe me or disbelieve me; if you disbelieve me, you may deny my claim or you may simply suspend your belief until I offer evidence of it. If I say, ‘I am now holding in my closed hand a square object,’ the same choices apply. But if I say to you, ‘I am now holding in my closed hand an object that is a round square,’ you cannot have faith in my claim because it is self-contradictory, unreasonable, indeed inconceivable. You must assume that I am lying, delusional, or ignorant of the meaning of the words I am speaking. No one can have faith in any statement that is irrational, although one might have faith in an irrational statement he does not see to be irrational, having mistakenly interpreted that statement in rational terms. It is of course noteworthy that any rational claim very much depends for its validity upon the truth of its premises. I may ‘posit’ atheism as a premise and spin out a set of claims that follow logically from that premise, but the truth or fundamental rationality of my argument will depend on whether there really is no God. To affirm that there is a Creator-God and moreover that I shall obey Him are two choices, both acts of faith within the limits of reason in that they are not affirmations of self-contradictory premises. Whether those premises are themselves validated by the argument from design, the ontological proof, or other products of ‘unassisted’ human reason, or whether they are rather brought to me by the Holy Spirit, who is rational but not part of the human nature which is but an image of Him, is a separate issue, one beyond the ambitions of Reilly to address because he doesn’t need to address it in order to defend the American founding by tracing its philosophic and theological antecedents.

Christianity’s “validation and elevation of the profoundest insights of Greek philosophy also confirmed the limits of the political, at which Socrates and Aristotle had hinted.” “Each person could participate in the divine order of salvation as an individual, not through his participation as a citizen of his state or the mediation of a semidivine ruler, but through union with Christ,” whose “identity as a personal Savior was totally incompatible with the ancient cosmological view of the universe and the political legitimacy it bestowed on the ancient city or empire.” Not surprisingly, “Just as Socrates was killed for his insistence on his citizenship in the city in speech, so too were the early Christians martyred for insisting on the primacy of their citizenship in the heavenly city.” In this sense, with Christianity “the primacy of the political is over,” and not only for philosophers. “Man is no longer subsumed by the polis; rather the polis exists to serve man.” In another sense, politics has been reoriented from the regimes of human beings to the regime of God. In both senses, God is not Caesar. This does not denigrate Caesar. It puts him in his rightful place. “The secular is not antithetical to Christianity; it is a product of it. Christianity created the secular. It insists on it,” forming “the ultimate basis for the constitutional principle of the separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority.” Human beings cannot and should not attempt to install God’s regime on earth any more than “Socrates expected the Athenians to instantiate his ‘city in speech’ on the Greek peninsula.” In teaching the Socratic lesson to humanity generally, not only to potential philosophers, “Christianity saved politics from itself, or rather from trying to be something other than itself” by enabling constitutionalism and condemning “man’s self-deification.” 

When man understands himself as Man, made in the image of God but not himself a god, “Man’s self-rule now becomes conceivable, inimitably tied to his ability to discern a rational moral order in creation,” accountable to his Creator. Human beings are created equal before their Creator. The possibility of a good Samaritan—a good person who serves God but is not a member of God’s chosen people—can now be thought, and not only by philosophers but by the ordinary people Jesus addresses. “A tribal religion with a universal truth, Judaism now becomes transformed in Jesus to a universal religion without tribes.” God’s true chosen people henceforth are those who obey the commands of the Father, thus becoming brothers and sisters of His Son—not a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Galatians (4:6-7). “The Our Father was a revolutionary prayer when Christ said it, and it remains so today,” and it underwrites the revolution effected by the American Founders, even as they invoked the blessings of God’s providence as they declared their choice to attempt it. “Without Christianity, slavery most likely would have remained the norm of mankind”; without Christianity (as Tocqueville saw) there would most likely be no democracy in America, or anywhere else.

As noted, there would also be no constitutionalism as we know it, not only because God enters into a covenantal relationship with His people but because Christianity distinguishes two parallel sovereignties, respected in the Roman Empire after Emperor Constantine’s conversion. Because Roman imperial subjects enjoyed “dual citizenship under both sovereigns,” those sovereigns needed to negotiate limits on one another. “The fundamentals essential to constitutional order grew out of this dual perspective.” Both sovereigns owned property, thus possessing the means to defend themselves against one another and against foreign attack, as Tocqueville emphasizes in The Old Regime and the Revolution. Both sovereigns ruled by what one of Charlemagne’s advisers called “the common agreement and consent of the subjects.” The balance of these powers was at times deranged, especially after the collapse of the Roman Empire, when monarchs scrambled for power against one another, running over Church property in the struggle. (In 1067, for example, William the Conqueror “asserted royal power over the making of canon law and any ecclesiastical disciplinary actions concerning his barons and officials.”) The Church struck back in the person of Pope Gregory VII, who “forcefully rearticulated the two-swords teaching in both word and deed,” desacralizing feudal princes by divesting them of the ecclesiastical authority they had usurped.

In England, Bishop Anselm of Canterbury pushed King Henry I into a compromise, the Concordat of London, in 1107, whereby the king gave up his right to invest bishops and abbots but also “made the bishop a baron, with all the attendant duties to the king.” The conflicts between Henry II and Thomas à Becket, followed by King John’s conflict with Pope Innocent III, ended in the Magna Carta, co-written by Stephen Langton, the pope’s candidate for archbishop of Canterbury. The Magna Carta established Church freedom from rule by the monarch and the feudal barons along with the familiar rights of due process, trial by jury, and taxation by the consent of those taxed. When Magna Carta “received its definitive form” in 1225, Langton, now the archbishop, “pronounced that violators of the charter of any rank would automatically be excommunicated.” 

It was the great English common lawyer Sir Edward Coke who brought the principles of Magna Carta to Virginia in the form of its first charter, drafted in 1606; similar language was integrated into the charters of six other colonies by the middle of the century, and in the decades before American independence Congregationalist minister and Yale rector Elisha Williams argued on the basis of its principles, which he understood to be not merely the legal rights of Englishmen but “the inherent natural rights of Englishmen,” secured and confirmed by Parliament “but not derived from nor dependent on their will.” The Massachusetts patriot Samuel Adams made a similar argument, four years before the Declaration of Independence.  After independence, five states introduced Magna Carta language and principles into their constitutions. 

More generally, Catholic Christianity justified the right not only for the Church to excommunicate but for the people to overthrow a ruler or rulers who violated the contract, formal or implied, between ruler(s) and subjects. Manegold of Lautenbach, later the bishop of Chartres, insisted that “King is not a name of nature but a title of office,” a title and an office rightly revoked “as soon as he begins to act the tyrant,” failing to “govern and rule [the people] according to the principle of righteous government.” Similarly, John of Salisbury’s Politicratus, published in 1159, assigns to the king the role of ruling equitably—that is, judging cases “rationally” by “seek[ing] to apply like rules of right and wrong to like cases, being impartially disposed toward all persons, and allotting to each that which belongs to him.” John “defended tyrannicide against any prince who usurps the law.” A bishop of Grubbio, Peter Damian, wrote, “All political authority derives from God, but resides essentially in the people”; Reilly calls this “the foundation of popular sovereignty” as later instantiated in the American founding. 

Even ecclesiastical or canon law contributed to constitutional thinking in the secular orders, as it too was “based on Christian presuppositions of both natural and divine law” derived from the idea of the imago Dei. In his A Concordance of Discordant Canons—usually called simply the Decretum—Gratian sorted out the many existing canon laws by means of Thomas’s Aristotelian dialectic; “reason is the basis of the law,” that is, not only the secular law but the law of the Church. Divine law, from Scripture, and natural law, from reason as embedded in conscience, did not contradict one another, “as they ultimately came from the same source.” Human law should be aligned with divine and natural law as closely as the circumstances of a given people allow, in accordance with the procedures of both deductive and practical or prudential reasoning. Custom too is “subject to natural law,” having “no standing if it did not conform to reason and conscience.” As time went on and cases under the canon law accumulated, the decretists further harmonized human law with the two higher laws. Although partly derived from Justinian’s code, which had been rediscovered late in the eleventh century, canon law was never subject to imperial approval when it came to establishing new church associations. These “were constituted by the voluntary consent of their members,” Reilly emphasizes, and were likely the first entities to be called “corporations,” entities legally “independent from emperors, kings, and feudal lords.” “Medieval society became honeycombed with many such voluntary, self-governing associations,” a development unique to Christendom. Even the pope’s authority over the church “was to be exercised only within the law that established it—including divine and natural law.”

Perhaps the most important principle taken directly from the Code of Justinian was Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari— What touches all must be approved by all. Although its application under the Code was quite limited, for the canonists it came “to underpin the practice of self-government within religious orders, dioceses, abbeys, and the entire Church, especially as it applied to taxation and legislation.” It was “gradually elevated to the status of a constitutional principle” for secular governments, cited by John Dickinson in his The Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer, an influential tract in the years prior to the Declaration of Independence. The principle animates government by consent, and specifically the right to vote, a right exercised in the selection of the pope by the cardinals. Medieval family law, too, also “developed to reflect the requirement of consent, especially on the mutual consent of both spouses for the validity of a marriage”—a theme in more than one Shakespearean comedy. As for political representation in secular government, it too came out of Church canon law, beginning in the twelfth century. It was Thomas’s order of priests, the Dominicans, who emphasized the principle of consent and brought it with them to England when they arrived in 1221. From the Catholic Church in England this principle circulated into the secular realm. Thomas himself, following Aristotle, advocated a mixed-regime with a strong monarchic branch and, sure enough, by 1295 the Model Parliament was formed under King Edward I. Parliaments became common on the European continent by the beginning of the fourteenth century. 

So did a degree of religious toleration. Because, as Pope Innocent IV wrote, “by nature all men are free,” and infidels are men, they may not be deprived of their property, as “these things were made not only for the faithful but every rational creature”—a teaching, it might be added, consistent with the Noachide commandments. University of Paris chancellor Jean Gerson “reaffirm[ed] the case that infidels enjoyed certain rights by natural law.” King Louis X of France (1289-1316) concurred, adding that the term “Franks” means “free men,” and therefore France has a particular interest in counteracting servitude within its borders. “France signifies freedom,” Louis proclaimed; serfdom should be abolished.

It is true that the Christian-Catholic marriage of reason and revelation was attacked from within the Church early, as seen in Tertullian’s well-known rhetorical question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The more portentous assault came centuries later in the doctrine of nominalism, whose “corrosive effects fatally fractured medieval Christendom, though the formal break within the Church did not come until Luther in the sixteenth century.” Nominalists contend that “natures or essences do not exist in reality but are only ‘names’ or contrivances inhabiting the mind, with no correlation to what exists outside of it.” Adam was merely making things up as he went along. “Nominalism undermined the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of medieval constitutionalism and the very concept of law as based on natural law and reason and replaced it with will (voluntas).” Whereas for Aristotle and Aquinas, “reality exists in individual things, but those individual things are defined by their natures or essences,” and while “reason abstracts the idea of human nature from existing human persons,” human nature “is actually—in the exact metaphysical sense—present in individual men,” the nominalist William of Ockham’s via moderna denies “any intrinsic connection between words and reality, denies any human sharing of God’s knowledge via the act of naming, and claims that ideas are ‘subjective,’ existing only in our minds.” According to nominalists, there are no species by nature; “the creation of each dog is… an individual act of God’s will unrelated to any other act of his will”; and as for human ‘knowing,’ “nothing in reality seems intelligible in itself” but is rather “given its intelligibility by man’s mind.” “Naming becomes an exercise of the will.”

“Nominalism ineluctably leads to voluntarism, the view that God’s will is the first and only cause of things”; God’s will “is unbound by anything, including reason.” There are no real laws of nature. If Aquinas argues that “God is Logos or Reason itself” and His will “follows upon intellect,” Ockham “flips the relationship between intellect and will”: “God’s will becomes primary, and his intellect subordinate to it as a mere instrument.” Thus Ockham does for Christianity what Mohammed al-Ghazali did for Islam. As al-Ghazali puts it “Fire does not burn cotton; God does.” Morally this means that “intrinsically, acts are neither good nor bad, except insofar as god makes them so. God does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it.” When God pronounced his Creation good at the end of creation week, he meant that Creation had ‘turned out’ in accordance with his will, his commands, not that it conformed to his rational plan. With this, “classical natural law was displaced by political theology drawn from Scripture.”

Nominalism produced two main lines of thought, one atheistic and the other theistic. Niccolò Machiavelli saw that “if nature no longer defines what is good for man (and there is no certain God to define it either), then man can.” “Man’s will fills the vacuum left by nature; he can define his own end.” Martin Luther adopts a God-centered nominalism, believing that “man’s actions are irrelevant to this salvation because there is no necessary connection between moral goodness and redemption.” Only faith, not nature, provides moral guidance, since “once one is rid of essences, there is not an ‘ought’ in sight” and “moral truth is relocated to the will”—very often the will of a human ruler or set of rulers.

In the Machiavellian way, “Reason is no longer a legislator. Law becomes law not because it is a work of reason but because it is the will of the stronger.” If reason and nature no longer provide any guide, man is entitled (in the phrase coined by Machiavelli’s follower, Francis Bacon) “to conquer nature.” “The modern project of making man autonomous, or even remaking him, by gaining power over the world begins here.” This clearly opposes both the American Founders’ standard, the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, and their constitutionalism, which secures the unalienable rights ordained by those laws. Machiavelli’s lo stato—the modern, centralized state that replaces the ancient polis, the ancient empire, and the feudal societies—has no theoretical limits, only those imposed by chance and necessity, both manipulable by men of vulpine cleverness and leonine will.

Luther’s way is God-centered, and therefore has a substantial moral content beyond the human will, namely, divine revelation. Nonetheless, the “spiritual upheaval” induced by his Christian nominalism and voluntarism “led to political upheaval” and then to the statism intended to quell such upheaval. Castigating Aquinas (whom he may not have read) because he was “responsible for the reign of Aristotle”—whom he called a “muddy-minded pagan”—”the destroyer of godly doctrine.” Luther reduced natural law to conscience. To put it in terms of classical philosophy (which of course Luther would never do), Luther wants noēsis or the apprehension of the truth to occur without any reasoning. In Luther’s words, “God is He for Whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard…. What God wills is not right because He ought, or was bound, so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because He so wills it.” God’s reasons being inscrutable, inaccessible to human reason and known only by faith in His revealed Word, there is no point to human reasoning, especially since the human nature which includes the capacity to reason has been thoroughly corrupted by sin. “The child sins in his mother’s womb,” and he doesn’t improve thereafter; “sin is his nature; he cannot help committing it.” Politically, this means that “absent strong government, ‘men would devour one another.'” This is an unusual teaching. If government is exercised by men, why is it not equally corrupt and, given its superior power, an even worse devourer? 

“Luther’s extraordinary polemics against reason must be understood in light of his intention to discredit it so thoroughly that no alternative but faith remained. Luther did not abandon the use of practical reason in the secular sphere but left secular reason out of the sacred sphere.” To philosophize about Scripture is akin to practicing witchcraft, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, esteemed by Aquinas, is especially evil, given its commendation of moral strengthening through habituation or good works. In translating Romans 3:28 to read “man becomes justified by faith alone,” Luther adds the word “alone.” The world is no longer a field in which man prepares himself for the next world. And indeed faith itself involves no free choice, only divine predestination. “This new doctrine was in contravention of the long-standing Church teaching that the reception of the gift of faith was indeed an intrinsically free and rational act of the will in cooperation with grace,” inasmuch as “grace can be refused.” Not so: God’s grace acts like the lightning with which He knocked Saul off his horse in preparation for transforming him into Paul. “Here is a thunderbolt,” Luther wrote, “by which free choice is completely prostrated and shattered.” Human beings lack ‘agency’; they are agents of God, Who acts through them. If so, then evil thoughts, sentiments, and actions are, as Luther writes, “incomprehensible”—”secrets of his Majesty,” “inaccessible to human reason” but nonetheless just because, as Reilly summarizes, “will, not reason, is the source of right.”

Politically, Lutheranism “spelled the end of Christendom, which fell apart from the centrifugal forces Lutheranism unleashed.” Canonical law went up in smoke—quite literally, as Luther burned a copy of it in December 1520. With that symbolic act, “up in flames went the ecclesiastical corporation that had hemmed in secular authority” because “the Church as a corporation disappeared,” and the metaphor of the ‘two swords’ no longer governed. “It was the institutional structures of the Church that had given teeth to its oversight of temporal power. The demolition of these structures left it toothless. A single sovereignty could now monopolize man,” and the “Lutheran churches became state churches.” As Luther’s ally Philip Melanchthon put it, “the prince is God’s chief bishop (summum episcopus) in the church.” Theocracy took on either of the two regimes described by Machiavelli: monarchy or republicanism, James I or Oliver Cromwell. Either way, there was no right to revolution, inasmuch as God ordains the regime you have, although a people may resist passively if commanded “to do something against the will of God.” In this, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was indeed a good ‘Lutheran.’

It is easy to see how this dispensation leaves Christian states vulnerable to Machiavellian atheism. “If God is a positivist, so too is the ruler in his name.” Further, “once the state reabsorbs religion and no longer has a moral reference point beyond itself”—beyond Scripture as interpreted by the State’s established church—”it becomes pure power.” As a Christian, Luther himself would have decried such a result, and he tried to prevent it by substituting his “two kingdoms” doctrine for the “two swords” doctrine. He wrote, “Where the temporal authority presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it encroaches upon God’s government and only misleads souls and destroys them.” Indeed so, “but the two-kingdoms teaching was not an effective substitution for the two-swords teaching” because “it existed only as an idea,” with “no institutional structure to replace the one [Luther] had destroyed.” As a founder, Luther understood what a regime is in terms of its politeuma, its rulers (God-ordained princes), in terms of its purposes (salvation effected by God, peace effected by princes), and in terms of its Bios ti, its way of life (as laid down in Scripture) but not in terms of its politeia, its ruling institutions. He left them to the ‘secular’ rulers. “It is not hard to see the great attraction of this teaching to German princes,” Reilly comments, drily. [2] “Luther inadvertently opened the door to the politicization of religion. Machiavelli walked through that door” in the persons of such monarchs as the Tudors in England, Louis XIV in France, Frederick the Great in Luther’s Prussia. This was surely an unintended consequence. “Ockham and Luther were not aiming at absolutism; if anything, they were trying to counter what they saw as absolutism in the Church.” But “they did not seem to consider that their undermining of the Church’s authority and the abandonment of natural law would ultimately clear the path to political absolutism,” opening politics “not only to Luther’s Christian prince but to Machiavelli’s amoral one.”

The American Founders were neither Catholics nor Lutherans, for the most part. How then did they establish “a natural law foundation for the American republic”? Reilly suggests that Calvinism and Anglicanism both inclined to unify the lex naturae and the lex spiritualis, even if sometimes too closely. Nonetheless, the theoretical distinction lent itself to church disestablishment with the assertion of religious freedom as a natural as well as a civil right. Both Calvinism and Anglicanism esteem reason, even as they (like Catholicism) acknowledge the Christian doctrine of original sin. “Luther did not foresee the consequences of his teaching of sola fide in a world sine fide. He could only envisage Christian princes.” Calvinists and Anglicans were well aware of un-Christian princes, as indeed were the Catholics and Anabaptists who had confronted the Roman Empire. Because he writes primarily for Catholics, Reilly relegates his discussion of Calvinism to a footnote, but he provides a good discussion of the greatest Anglican writer, Richard Hooker.

To restore a Protestant understanding of popular sovereignty, social contract, and consent, all of them erased by Luther’s voluntarist conception of God, Hooker “first had to reaffirm a God in whom intellect preceded will in the notion of the Divine Logos.” This enabled him to “reconnect with medieval natural law and the doctrine of free will,” “return[ing] to things their essences.” In this he opposed “the extremes of sixteenth-century English Puritanism” (rather as his younger contemporary, William Shakespeare, would do), “endeavor[ing] to save the Reformation from itself by restoring essential aspects of pre-Reformation thought.” He did so by arguing that reason is necessary because only it can settle disputes, theological or secular. “Reason is man’s participation in the Divine Logos.” Law’s essence is reason, not will; “God is a teleologist,” endowing His creatures with purposes inherent in their natures; rulers must rule reasonably, in accordance with limitations placed upon them by constitutions to which their subjects have lent their consent. Consent is natural because human beings are naturally social; accordingly, there is a “voluntary compact at the foundation of government” and rulers rule on a foundation of popular sovereignty, itself under the laws of nature ordained by God. [3] Reilly finds the influence of Hooker’s restoration-Reformation in the political thought of John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and the American statesman James Wilson.

Between Hooker and the American Founders, however, stands the great Machiavellian defender of princely absolutism, Thomas Hobbes. His secular absolutism should never be confused with the divine-right absolutism advanced by Luther, although they share common ground in nominalism. Reilly cites his teacher, Father James Schall, who writes that “the divine will, presupposed to nothing but itself, presupposed to no divine reason in Ockham…. becomes the political will in Hobbes, again a will presupposed to nothing but itself.” Hobbes saw that divine-right absolutism led to uncompromising civil and international war on the basis of rival claims concerning Scripture—Catholic against Protestant, Protestant sect against Protestant sect. He hoped that ‘secularizing’ absolutism would end such conflicts, at least within the secular nation-states if not among them. If “Hooker opposed Puritan extremism on the basis of traditional Christianity and classical philosophy,” Hobbes “opposed Puritanism on the basis of his denial of both.” Unlike Hooker, Hobbes happily accepted the Lutheran claim that human nature is no good, that nature itself is “only an enemy to be overcome and mastered.” (Indeed, the young Hobbes had conversed with Francis Bacon.) 

Hobbes opposes Hooker at every turn. To Hooker’s affirmation of laws of nature instantiating the rights to life and liberty, Hobbes “derive[s] the law of nature from self-preservation, as he found it imperiled in the state of nature.” Hooker regarded civil law as “legitimate only insofar as it reflects natural law,” but Hobbes regards civil law as natural law, “constitut[ing] its own authority,” with “nothing higher than it.” Indeed, insofar as civil bespeaks man’s conquest of the natural state of things, “it is completely conventional,” not really natural at all. For Hobbes, unlike Hooker, there is “no rational common good” except for “the necessity of self-preservation,” and to secure that necessity not merely governments but absolute governments must be instituted among men. Man is not social, not a-social, but anti-social; hence men live in a constant state of war with one another, unless an absolute monarch masters their nature. “For both Aristotle and the Scholastics,” and Hooker, “the summum bonum is happiness. For Hobbes, it was not, because there is no longer any way to tell what happiness is, other than the absence of strife,” and assertions about what constitutes happiness in fact only contribute to human strife. There is no telos, no purpose, in nature, only a summum malum, namely, violent death, the fear of which supports the rule of the monarch and indeed the monarch’s centralized State, all-powerful “Leviathan”—”that Mortal God,” as Hobbes famously describes it. 

Consistent with this, Hobbes rejects both the two-swords doctrine and the two-kingdoms doctrine. The claim that there is temporal government and spiritual government, he writes, depends upon “two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign,” Leviathan. Leviathan’s word, and Leviathan’s sword, are the only ones Hobbesian man recognizes as real. “In fact,” Reilly writes, according to Hobbes “the power of the sword constitutes the truth and, therefore, also the law”: “authority, not truth” in the sense of truth ‘above’ the sovereign will, “decides the law.” In the striking frontispiece illustration of Leviathan in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the giant figure of the monarch consists of an amalgamation of human atoms, gazing up at the head of the monarch who wields the symbols of temporal and spiritual authority. In that illustration “we see only people’s backs,” not their faces: “they possess no individuality” as persons, only as bodies organized as subjects of their ruler. In this way “Hobbes’s radical moral skepticism,” his denial of any moral authority independent of the human sovereign’s will, “serves, and ineluctably eventuates in, tyranny,” although of course in his own terms Hobbes calls tyranny nothing more than “monarchy misliked.” “Good and evil,” Hobbes writes, “are names that signify our appetites and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different”; there is no such thing as a shared “distinction of good and evil.” Even individual men’s desires change constantly throughout life in a constant grasping for power after power, “which ceaseth only in death.” Such mutable beings need a strong monarch to rule them, to impose names on recalcitrant men, lest they devour one another, as nominalist Luther says they must do. Hobbes finds no ground for original sin, and indeed despises the doctrine as one that blames men merely for being men; he nonetheless finds ample ground for human willfulness, and moves to bridle it in accordance with the supreme effectual will—the human absolute sovereign, not the biblical God. 

Even as “Saint Paul spoke of ‘one body and one Spirit” in Ephesians 4:4, “Leviathan’s one body seems a grotesque parody or profane substitute for the Mystical Body of Christ that Paul described,” subjugating “all things to himself and incorporat[ing] all the bodies of his subjects, not to glorify them,” as in the Church, “but to conform them to, and glorify, the ‘Mortal God'”. For Hobbes, “divine will and material causality are the same thing,” as man, “like everything else in the universe, [is] amoral matter in motion.” Therefore, political science is “a kind of physics” in which material and efficient causes prevail, formal and especially teleological causes being imaginary. Hobbes, following Bacon and Machiavelli, aims at undoing “the achievements of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome,” “subvert[ing] Greek philosophy by erasing the distinction between nature and convention,” “materializing the transcendent” God of Judaism, and “sabotage[ing] the Christian distinction between the sacred and the secular with a redeification of the state”—a “redeification,” however, that denies spirituality and asserts materialism.

Hobbes book, Leviathan, “pleased almost no one.” Against it, Robert Filmer and James I reasserted the divine right of kings; Robert Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez upheld Catholic natural law and natural right; Algernon Sidney carried on Hooker’s legacy.

For Filmer, “kingship is the immediate and unmediated result of the Creator’s will. It is miraculous. No acts of rational free will or consent by the members of the political community are required for its institution or justification.” On the contrary, consent to monarchic rule is the subjects’ obligation. The monarch is free “from constitutional limitations and the natural law’s rational constraints.” This was music to the ears of James I, who “in a way” returned to “the era of sacred kingship” sans any suggestion of papal authority, since James was a Puritan. Throughout modern Europe, “as churches became national”—that is, statist—”kings became absolute.” Reilly correctly notices that Catholic monarchs “were only too happy to join in.” 

The Filmer-James assertion of monarchic divine right to rule found its first important philosophic opponents in the Jesuits Bellarmine and Suárez, and the two pairs exchanged polemics. In England itself, James’s vigorous defense of his alleged prerogatives provoked Parliamentary indignation, “sowing the seeds of the English Civil War.” As for Filmer, he saw that “Scripture citations could be quoted by both sides of the argument ad infinitum without a decisive outcome,” and so “moved the argument onto the grounds of natural right.” But this natural right derived not from the consent of the governed but from the supposed absolute right of fathers to rule their children, a right Filmer then extended to kings, conceived as the ‘fathers’ of their people. Bellarmine countered that (in his words) “the authority of the king descends, not immediately from God nor by divine right, but only from the law of nations”—that is, by common consent. The people’s consent, in turn, “was founded upon the principle of equality,” as “there is no reason why amongst equals”—members of the same species—”one should rule rather than another.” No king is so far superior to his fellow human beings as to rightly claim absolute authority over them. “In a commonwealth all men are born naturally free and equal.” Following Aristotle’s understanding of the family, Bellarmine writes, “the servant is ruled for the benefit of the master; the citizen for his own benefit. A political head seeks not his own but the people’s good; otherwise, he is a tyrant.” Aristotle would not describe fatherly rule as political, reserving that form of rule to the relation of husband and wife, but he does consider fatherly rule as serving the good of the children, not the good of the father, and therefore not “absolute.” For Bellarmine as for Aristotle, revolution against tyrants is rightful. Any regime is “valid so long as [it] serve[s] the common good.” Suárez concurred, point for point, as did the vast majority of Catholic theologians who wrote on politics from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Indeed, the English Jesuit John Floyd condemned slavery on the basis of natural rights in 1620, rights slaves “may defend by force against even their owne Maisters.” 

Does this make the American Founders closet Catholics? Surely not, as Reilly is quick to say. True, the Maryland Catholic Charles Carroll, educated by French Jesuits, “would have been thoroughly familiar with Bellarmine and Suárez,” but Thomas Jefferson was no stranger to their writings, having read Filmer’s attacks on them in his book, Patriarchia. Reilly points instead to “the common world of discourse” the Founders shared with the Catholic critics of nominalism, Hobbesianism, and divine right. “It was a common patrimony that Bellarmine and Suárez helped to restore for everyone’s benefit—because its source was in natural law, accessible to all by right reason.” This is what Jefferson meant when he wrote that the Declaration of Independence reflected “the harmonizing sentiments of the day,” sentiments registered by Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney—who explicitly praises the two Jesuits. As Reilly demonstrates, all “Catholic and Protestant opponents to absolutism called upon the same constitutional traditions to defend representative government.” Contra latter-day critics such as Deneen and Dreher, “the fundamental principles of constitutional rule are not somehow fatally dependent on Enlightenment notions that are alien to them,” since those principles “preceded the Enlightenment.” 

It is hard to deny that the predominant influence on Jefferson as he wrote the draft of the Declaration of Independence was John Locke. Locke is central to the Deneen-Dreher argument, and they classify him as a proto-Enlightenment Hobbesian, albeit one who leans toward republican regimes, away from monarchy—a kinder, gentler Hobbes, as it were. In this, Deneen and Dreher follow the interpretation of Locke advanced by Leo Strauss, who understands Locke as a covert Hobbesian. Was Locke a Hobbesian nominalist who endorsed a paradoxically material form of voluntarism? Or was he a natural-law man? 

“What matters” for the discussion at hand is not so much what Locke’s covert teaching was but “how the Founders understood him and to what purpose they applied their understanding.” Locke explicitly endorses the right to liberty from arbitrary power, theism, the law of nature, natural human equality, government by consent, and the right to revolution. In resisting the rule of the British monarch, “the American Founders clearly saw Locke in the tradition we have been delineating. Jefferson and Adams explicitly placed him there,” citing him along with the classical philosophers as a proponent of what Adams called “the principles of nature and eternal reason.” Reilly readily agrees with those who see that Locke’s epistemological theory, published in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, and his empiricism generally do not comport with classical or Christian teleology. James Wilson saw this at the time of the American founding. But, following the argument of the redoubtable Harry V. Jaffa, Reilly refers not to the Essay but to Locke’s more political works, including the Second Treatise and the two essays on religious toleration. In these writings Locke did indeed distance himself from Hobbes, advocating representative government, the right to revolution, the capacity of human beings to govern themselves, and the natural sociality of human beings. In his Questions concerning the Law of Nature Locke derives right from natural law, and surely not from the will of the sovereign; whether Lockean natural law is the same as Ciceronian or Thomistic natural law is an arguable point; to answer it, a reader must walk the long and winding road of the philosopher’s exotericism. As Jaffa and others have observed, the Founders for the most part did no such thing, readily taking Locke to be anti-Hobbes ‘all the way down.’

“The Founders not only declared the inherited principles of human equality, popular sovereignty, the requirement of consent, and the moral right to revolution that we have been following since the Middle Ages but, for the first time in history, instantiated them, put them into practice, producing a constitutional republic that was the product of deliberation and free choice.” They could do so (as Tocqueville insisted) because unlike the French revolutionaries who followed them the Americans had substantial experience in self-government, exercising both the constitutional rights of Englishmen and claiming title to “all the rights of nature,” as Massachusetts lawyer and pamphleteer James Otis put it, as early as 1764. Tellingly for Reilly’s argument, Otis went on to base his claim on the distinction “between the primacy of reason and the primacy of will,” writing that “Parliaments are in all cases to declare what is for the good of the whole; but it is not the declaration of Parliament that makes it so. There must be in every instance a higher authority, viz., GOD”; “should an act of Parliament be against any of his natural laws, which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to eternal truth, equity, and justice, and consequently void.” Reilly adds (again following Tocqueville) that it was the Christian endorsement of natural law that gave it widespread credibility. Belief in a despotic God is unlikely to conduce to regimes of democratic and commercial republicanism. A God who prefers to rule by the consent of His people affords men what might be termed the conceptual space needed to think of themselves as citizens, not slaves or subjects.

“The Constitution does not declare principles; it provides for their implementation.” This explains why, “while there are no Christian principles per se embedded in the Constitution,” the Constitution nonetheless can be said to have been “embedded in Christianity”—perhaps especially in those forms of Christianity that recall the republicanism enjoyed for a time by ancient Israel. The United States Constitution would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to conceive had its Framers not lived within a Bible-saturated religious culture, whether or not each and every one of them endorsed Christian principles in the solitude of his own mind.  

By contrast, the founders of the First Republic of France often attacked the Bible. Reilly quotes Abbé Sieyès, who proclaimed that in the new regime “the nation is prior to everything”; “its will is always legal.” For the French revolutionaries, Rousseau’s “general will” is “the all in all.” The young John Quincy Adams criticized the revolution for that affirmation, at the time. The French revolutionaries supposed human nature to be malleable, thus perfectible. The means for human perfectibility turned out to be, in part, the mass murder not only of traitors to the republic but even “all people who are not enthusiastic” in their support of the new regime, as Saint-Just insisted, on his way to earning his title, the “Angel of Death.” John Adams and Alexander Hamilton both criticized the revolutionaries for their atheism, predicting that it would lead to more deaths than seen in the Inquisition—as it did. 

With this impressive account of American principles firmly in hand, Reilly can finally turn to its latter-day Catholic critics. Patrick Deneen’s “views recall William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who believed that the U.S. Constitution was a ‘covenant with Death, an Agreement in Hell.” Even the sternest critics of Philadelphia will find the image somewhat overwrought, however much the City of Brotherly Love fails to live up to its stated principle, especially as it contemplates its sports teams. “Both Garrison and Deneen fail to understand that the Founding principles are themselves the strongest case against public moral corruptions such as slavery and abortion.” But even Garrison didn’t distort the words of the Founders as Deneen does Madison’s argument in the tenth Federalist. There, Madison writes that “the diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is… an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests” in any society. This hardly constitutes an endorsement of, or even a logical opening for, the arguments in behalf of ‘diversity’ in hiring practices and in government which have become staples of the contemporary egalitarian ‘Left.’ Madison “never says that diversity is something government should positively encourage,” only that “a multiplicity of interests (not of factions) can be useful in helping to prevent the formation of a tyrannical majority” in a political union constituted “out of diversity.” Madison is arguing for government protection of “the free exercise of an individual’s abilities,” abilities that differ from person to person but which are uniformly held as the property of each person. In the decades following the Founding, the American politician who most ardently advocated diversity in the social rather than moral sense of the term was Stephen Douglas, and he did so against Lincoln, and in opposition to the principle of equal natural rights. To say, as Deneen does, that Madison, following Locke, urges Americans to “pursue their appetites” is to make nonsense of both.

“The key, as the Founding Fathers knew, is virtue,” and not in Machiavelli’s sense of the term. “They taught that freedom is not divorced from nature; it is rooted in and limited by nature,” “conformity with what is naturally good,” not “license or licentiousness.” “Only a virtuous person is capable of rational consent,” and only consent defined as rational assent can consent to the kind of government advocated by the Declaration of Independence, a government that secures unalienable rights. “People who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants.” Deneen’s claims are “the opposite of the Founders’ logic.” As a result, Deneen finds the conclusion of the syllogism “a bit mysterious and incomprehensible,” as indeed it must be for anyone who fails to understand its premises. 

“It should be noted that current Catholic discomfort with the Founding was not shared by Catholics at the time of its establishment. Father John Carroll, a cousin of Charles Carroll, who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, celebrated the new regime as the home of religious toleration, a regime in which Catholics “are members of Congress, assemblies, and hold civil and military posts, as well as others.” In this regime, “free toleration is allowed to Christian of every denomination,” a “blessing and advantage, which it is our duty to preserve and improve with the utmost prudence by demeaning ourselves on all occasions as subjects zealously attached to our government.” Carroll attributed this toleration to “the genuine spirit of Christianity” in the United States.

The deformation of principle seen in the United States in recent decades finds no source in the Founding. Rather, Reilly maintains, it derives from the doctrine of the primacy of the human will, advanced in America by the Progressives, who took their bearings not from natural right, not from the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, but from German historicism. Although different from Ockham, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and other nominalists in many ways, historicism shares with them the denial of natural right. In its latter-day form, historicism secularizes Christianity, aiming at “an intra-historical perfectibility” that would transform politics “into an engine of salvation with man as his own savior.” “In modern ideology, equality does not yet exist; it is at the end, not the beginning. It is man who will metaphysically transform reality in order to establish equality, which then leads to total freedom.” This ‘project’ will fail because it depends upon the very Christian natural law sensibility it seeks to erase and supersede. There is no guarantee that the attempt to transform reality in order to establish equality will lead to anything better than the mass murder and prison camps the regimes of modern tyranny conjured in the last century. “Yet we can avoid the cataclysm anytime we choose to, by returning to reality, to reason, to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’ Reality is resilient because, as Plato said, it is what is—not whatever one fancies. Logos wins in the end.”

 

 

Notes

1. For a discussion of the Founders’ understanding of self-government, as distinguished from ‘autonomy,’ see Will Morrisey: Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)
2.  “One should note that Luther modified his position” on the right to revolution “sometime after 1530,” and indeed one might further note that Luther’s stances on this and several other matters (for example, the value of a liberal arts education) could change with his mood of the moment. In his clearly-written introduction to Reilly’s book, Larry P. Arnn observes that even Luther’s nominalist and voluntarist views conflict with statements he makes elsewhere. 
3. For a fuller discussion of Hooker, see “Reason within the Limits of Religion Alone: The Achievement of Richard Hooker,” on this website; for a book-length discussion, see Robert K. Faulkner’s excellent Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).

Thomas Hutchinson: Strictures Upon the Declaration of the Congress of Philadelphia; In a Letter to a Noble Lord. London: 1776.

John Lind: An Answer to the Declaration of Independence. London: T. Cadell, 1776.

 

The signers of the Declaration of Independence said, “We hold these truths to be self-evidence….” If the truths are self-evident, why say “We hold,” rather than “These truths are….”? The answer is that not everyone will hold a self-evident truth to be self-evident. A “candid” or unbiased world may do so, but not everyone in the world is unbiased. Some minds are too clouded with passion to perceive the obvious—tyrants, for example. In a letter to Parliament in October 1775, George III anticipated the North American colonies’ declaration of independence. “The authors and promoters of this desperate conspiracy have in the conduct of it derived great advantage from the difference of our intentions and theirs.” Likely thinking of the 1774 Articles of Association, he continued, “They meant only to amuse, by vague expressions of attachment to the parent state and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt,” by now seen at Bunker Hill and elsewhere. The aim of the conspirators was to establish “an independent empire.” American Continental Congress representatives John Dickinson and James Wilson replied with their “Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies” in February 1776, calling the king’s argument malicious and false. 

One thing continued to led to another, however, and after the Congress did issue its Declaration of Independence several months later, Thomas Hutchinson, the colonial governor of Massachusetts, and the English barrister John Lind published refutations of the Americans’ argument. Seldom read today, they offer a clear picture of the view from London, a view that would prevail there for decades after the colonists and their French allies won the Revolutionary War. Both of the king’s defenders denied the truth of unalienable natural rights.

“Upon first reading” the Declaration, Hutchinson scoffs, “I thought there would have been more policy in leaving the World altogether ignorant of the motives to this Rebellion than in offering such false and frivolous reasons in support of it” (3). He claims to find Congress’s argument so weak that it can only be a cover for the Americans’ real motives: “I am of the opinion, that if no Taxes or Duties had been laid upon the Colonies, other pretenses would have been found for exception to the authority of Parliament” (3-4). For although “the body of the people in the Colonies” were “easy and quiet” in the years prior to the uprising, “fear[ing] no imaginary evils from [Parliament] for a hundred years to come,” some among them “had Independence in view” even before the taxes were imposed (4). They, not the king, are the ones designing tyranny over Americans. Moreover, “if the jurisdiction of Parliament is foreign to their Constitution, what need of specifying instances, in which they have been subjected to it? Every Act must be an usurpation and injury,” if that is the case (21). That is, Hutchinson’s initial rhetorical strategy is to deflect attention from unalienable rights with an ad hominem attack on the revolutionaries.

Thus, while deprecating the idea of natural rights, he flatly denies that the revolutionaries could believe it. A mere appeal to “what they called the natural rights of mankind, to choose their own forms of Government,” would not suffice to advance their design, he claims (4). The evidence of this came when in 1762 the Massachusetts Bay General Assembly demanded a percentage of the impost on sugar, thus implying that they thought such an impost constitutional. The push for American representation in Parliament only started two years later, after Parliament’s enactment of the Sugar Act, but was the proposal was withdrawn as “utterly impracticable” (6). Given the admitted constitutionality of taxation of colonies without their representation in Parliament, and the admitted impracticability of colonial representation, what other conclusion can be drawn, other than the existence of “a determined design” (6) to move toward independence? The scheme worked. “Many thousands of people who were good and loyal subjects, have been deluded, and by degrees induced to rebel against the best of Princes, and the mildest of Governments” (8). As a result, “the people have subjected themselves to the most cruel oppressions of fifty or sixty Despots,” their so-called representatives in the Continental Congress (8).

Hutchinson rejects the opening premise of the Declaration—that the colonists are a distinct people. Parliament, the “Supreme Legislative Authority,” rules all Britons, and is “indisputably bound to keep all parts of the Empire entire, until there may be a separation consistent with the general good of the Empire” (9). Parliament, not colonists, “must be the sole judge” of this good (9).

As for “unalienable” equal rights, what about slavery? (9-10). Does it not belie this claim, or at least display the hypocrisy of those who advance it?

With respect, then, to the premises of the Americans’ syllogism, Hutchinson doubts that there is any natural right of mankind to choose its own forms of government; he denies that the colonists are a distinct people, inasmuch as they are “Britons”; and he charges that the existence of slavery on American soil proves either that there is no unalienable right to liberty or, if there is, the Americans invoke it in flat contradiction to their own practice. 

As to the minor premises of the syllogism, there were no laws vetoed by the king that were “wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and the Declaration gives no examples of any such (10). “The laws of England are or ought to be the laws of its Colonies. To prevent any actions” that deviate from ordinary English common law beyond those alterations “that the local circumstances of any colony may make necessary,” all laws enacted by the colonial legislatures are to be laid before the King (10). If disallowed, “they then become of no force” (10). Further, “to pass laws which must have their whole operation, or which must cause some irreparable mischief before the King’s pleasure can be known, would be a usurpation of the People upon the Royal Prerogative” (11). With this, Hutchinson points to the fundamental political dispute between the colonists and the Empire: the Americans want a republican regime wherein they enjoy equal status to residents of England; the British want a mixed regime with the monarchy as the principal ruler of the colonies, along the lines of the Irish model.

Hutchinson (who was born in Boston but remained a Tory) understandably focuses on defending his own term as governor of Massachusetts. No inhabitant of that colony was deprived of representation in the state House of Representatives, argues; if a new settlement was not accorded representation, inhabitants could still vote in the nearest voting district. The royal governor has the right to select the place and time where the legislature will meet, and as for the dissolution of the House of Representatives in 1768, it was justifiable because “No Government can long subsist, which admits of combinations of the subordinate powers against the supreme” power (14). “The regular use of the prerogative in suppressing a begun Revolt, is urged [by the colonists] as a grievance to justify the Revolt” (15). And finally, regarding the colonists’ allegations concerning legislative abuses, the  refusal to encourage further population of the North American colonies with emigration is no fit topic for the colonists’ criticisms. “Shall any other than the supreme authority of the Empire judge upon what terms foreigners may be admitted to the privilege of natural born subjects?” (16) 

On the judicial powers, the king vetoed laws establishing such powers by the colonists because American creditors were attaching debtors’ assets unilaterally, leaving English creditors without recourse. “This frustrates our own bankruptcy laws” (17). (No doubt it did, but this does lend credence to the colonists’ claim that Americans and the English are two separate peoples.) Further, judges in most American colonies have always been dependent upon the Crown for continuance in office and for their salaries. This has changed in England, but it is the king’s prerogative to determine whether it shall be changed in America. Transporting accused traitors to England for trial is entirely appropriate, given the nature of the crime, which is treason against Great Britain, not against the American state in which the alleged crime occurred.

As to the king’s supposed abuses of executive power, he has sent no “new offices” except thirty or forty commissioners of customs—hardly the “swarms” alleged in the Declaration. On standing armies, the king doesn’t need Americans’ consent to keep them on American soil, only the consent of the English Parliament. And the military power exercised thereby is “superior” to the civil power only when aimed at suppressing a rebellion. Trials of British soldiers accused of murder have been removed from local American courts in order to protect the defendants against prejudiced juries. The trade embargo imposed upon the Americans is the result of the rebellion, not a cause of it. 

Hutchinson calls the Americans’ impassioned resistance to taxes imposed without their consent “a subject more dangerous to government than any other” (22). “They could find no fundamentals in the English Constitution, which made representation any more necessary in acts for taxes, than acts for any other purpose”; in fact, “there were no bounds to the power of Parliament by any fundamentals whatever” (23). To demand jury trials for offenses against excise taxes is to go beyond what many of the colonial governments themselves stipulate. And “all regulation of commerce must cease, and the King must be deprived of all the trees reserved for the Royal Navy, if no trials can be but by Jury” (24).

The Americans’ objections to the Quebec Act are equally insubstantial. The New England colonies have no “reason to fear” any change in their constitutions by the extension of Quebec to their borders (25). True, the Quebec constitution differs from theirs, but so what? The constitutions of the colonies differ amongst themselves. No colonial charter has in fact been altered, except for that of Massachusetts, the hotbed of rebellion, where a tightening of imperial rule has been imposed for good reason.

On such charges as “inciting domestic insurrection among us” and deploying “Indian savages” against us, Hutchinson ripostes, “Never was there an instance of more consummate effrontery” (28). “The acts of a justly incensed Sovereign for suppressing a most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion, are here assigned as the causes of this Rebellion. It is immaterial whether they are true or false.” (28) “To subjects, who had forfeited their lives by acts of Rebellion, every act of the Sovereign against them, which falls short of forfeiture [of life], is an act of favor” (28). 

It is in the graver charges against the monarch that Hutchinson walks on the unsteadiest ground. The Americans’ suspicions concerning the Quebec Act aren’t worries about mere ‘difference’. The Declaration objects to the abolition of “the free System of English Laws” there, “establishing therein an Arbitrary government and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” That would be a British revolution or regime change in North America, and not for the better. And on the matter of slave revolt and Indian allies, the American charge isn’t a jus ad bellum but a jus in bello complaint, one that Hutchinson waves away as immaterial by pretending it is the former rather than the latter. 

What could be the real cause of such deplorable behavior? “Gratitude, I am sensible, is seldom found in a community, but so sudden a revolt from the rest of the Empire, which had incurred so immense a debt, and with which it remains burdened, for the protection and defense of the Colonies” during the French and Indian War, “and at their most importunate request, is an instance of ingratitude no where to be paralleled” (31). The “real design” of the rebels has nothing to do with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind but to propagandize their fellow Americans. “This design has too well succeeded” (32). Deceived by the sophistries trotted out in the Declaration, the colonists now overlook “the absurdity in making the governed to be governors” (32). And those “discerning men” who do see through such fallacies “have concealed their sentiments, because under the present free government in America, no man may, by writing or speaking, contradict any part of the Declaration, without being deemed an enemy of the country, and exposed to the rage and fury of the populace” (32). Indeed so: the first American civil war was on. By appealing to natural right in addition to the English Constitution, the Americans had begun a revolutionary war.

John Lind writes not in defense of his own record as a colonial governor or as a member of the British government in any capacity, having none, but as an English citizen. An experienced lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, he adopts a rhetorical strategy that attempts to beat the Americans at their own game, namely, an appeal to popular sentiment. The sovereign, George III, should not issue a reply to the Declaration. By lessening His Majesty’s dignity, such a reply would grant too much to the very claims of equality the colonists assert. It would also be imprudent policy, as a royal answer would imply that foreign states have the right to interfere in the king’s “own internal government,” in violation of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia (5); the king must never reply to a document addressed to the world, “candid” or otherwise. What is more, “the Declaration of the American Congress is an insult offered to every one who bears the name of Briton” (7). “The blow given by the Congress appears indeed to be leveled at his Majesty; but the wound was intended for us” (7). Specifically, the king could not have aggrandized his own power by aggrandizing Parliament’s power, nor could he receive more revenues merely because Americans pay a percentage of them. The king defends the interest of Britons, who should pay no more than their fair share of taxes to support their colonies. In so doing, the king has “asserted our rights” against the selfish and rebellious Americans (9).

Lind accuses the Americans of attempting to make Britons “their dupes”—”blind instruments of procuring them that independence, at which they so long have aimed” (10)—first by using a step-by-step ‘salami’ tactic, attempting to slice away at rightful imperial ruling prerogatives over many years, then by “appealing to the passions,” by which he means such arguments as the Declaration propounds. “But they had forgotten, it should seem, that there is another appeal, to which, sooner or later, Britons do not fail to listen—An appeal to good sense” (11). “Happy should I be, were it possible to induce this deluded people to listen to the voice of reason; to abandon a set of men who are making them stilts to their own private ambition” (12). Not only does Lind address ‘the people’ against the Declaration’s appeal to them, but he will attempt to outface its appeal to reason, as well. The rational argument is on the king’s side.

Lind proceeds with a point-by-point criticism of the minor premises of the Declaration’s argument, reserving his critique of the major premises for the appendix. That is, in his appeal to “common sense” (a barb aimed at Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet, so titled), he will reject the deductive reasoning of the Americans for a more concrete and ‘pragmatic’ refutation. Lind was a friend of Jeremy Bentham, who despised the Declaration precisely because it began with an invocation of natural rights, which Bentham famously termed “nonsense on stilts,” and not on the principle of utility, which he deemed the only sound source of moral and political right. Lind’s strategy is clever, as it ignores or more precisely inverts the syllogistic structure of the Declaration of Independence, making it seem less rational than it is.

The king “has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” the Declaration charges. But it is the colonial governor who is authorized to approve colonial legislation. True, the king can still veto laws enacted by colonial legislatures, but this has always been so. The colonists “complain then, that they are not independent. To have an uncontrolled power of legislation,” by this definition, is to be independent” (15). Such a claim strikes at the core of British sovereignty over its colonies, and is legally inadmissible. According to the colonists, the king has “neglected” to assent to “laws of immediate and pressing importance.” This also is nothing new, simply a “constitutional power” of the monarchy (17). More, the king has resisted only such legislation as affect British shipping and trade, Crown prerogatives, and “property of the subjets of the empire in general” (17). “It was not, I suppose, to be endured, that local subordinate legislatures should pass laws injurious to all  subjects of the empire” (17). Given the constitutional right to review colonial legislative acts, it is more efficient to undergo review by the king than review by Parliament; the delays the colonists complain of would be even longer if their legislation were stuck in parliamentary committees. The fact that colonial assemblies regard the laws as “wholesome and necessary to the public good” is irrelevant, inasmuch as the legislation they enacted may as well have been “unsalutary and destructive of the public good” from “a regard to the common interests of the whole empire,” of which the American colonies form but a part (21).

The colonists claim that the king “has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people,” effectively denying them representation. But a refusal to increase the number of representatives in the colonial legislatures is no denial of representation. In England itself, the king’s consent is needed for this purpose. The king could as well increase the number of representatives in a colony, but this potentially could be more dangerous to popular rights; he might use this as a device for “acquiring unconstitutional powers” by packing the legislature with his own partisans (26). Americans should beware of getting what they are asking for. In the American case, however, the Massachusetts government was imbalanced in favor of the House, an imbalance which the admission of new municipalities’ representatives to the legislature would have skewed even more against the powers of the royal government. Like Hutchinson, then, Lind advocates the British mixed-regime republic against the American preference for a democratic republic.

Lind dismisses the complaint that the king has “called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records” as little more than whining. “Sickly and feeble must be the constitution of that patriotism, which these hardships… could fatigue into compliance with unpatriotic measures” (29). He joins with Hutchinson in expressing disgust at the “ungovernable mob” of Boston rebels (31). The British would eventually learn that the Americans were neither sickly, nor feeble, nor ungovernable, although they did prove ungovernable from London. Looking back on the controversy from the vantage point of some two-and-a-half centuries, Lind can be seen to exhibit what Aristotle calls “underestimation,” identifying it as one cause of revolutions.

On the charge that the king has repeatedly dissolved representative legislative houses, Lind counters that British monarchs have always had the right to perform “acts done in defense of the rights of the Parliament and the people of Great Britain (32)—as for example in 1768, when the Massachusetts legislature sent a letter to other colonial legislatures urging a “combination” that was “subversive of all government” (34)—specifically, opposition to the Townsend Acts, whereby Parliament had imposed import duties on tea and other products.  And again in 1774, the king rightly intervened when the Massachusetts legislature attempted to impeach the Chief Justice, Peter Oliver, a Parliamentary right. In the same year, the king dissolved the Virginia legislature “for practices little short of treason” (36); the Virginians had dared to support Massachusetts after Parliament had closed Boston Harbor in response to the ‘Tea Party.’ 

His Majesty’s delay in calling new elections after he had dissolved recalcitrant colonial legislatures is yet another constitutional prerogrative, Lind maintains. The people of those colonies and their representatives were still “inflamed,” and the king wanted “to give time for this madness to subside” (38-39). Lind denies the colonists’ claim that when legislatures are suspended the legislative power reverts to the people (as Locke argues). Against the claim that these dissolutions expose the colonies to foreign invasions and domestic convulsions, Hutchinson argues that the colonists ignore “the armies, the victories, and the treaties of that Prince whom they now so ungratefully revile” (40). And as for domestic convulsions, who but the colonial legislators have fomented them?

When it comes to the king’s alleged attempt to prevent the population of the colonies, Lind simply denies the charge and calls it “impossible” (41). And even if true, “How comes it, that local, subordinate legislatures should assume the power of making laws for naturalization?” (41) These are acts of Parliament; the king cannot repeal them, nor the colonial legislatures defy them, under the terms of the English Constitution. 

On the colonists’ objections to the Crown’s treatment of the American judicial system, “some of the Colonies wished to introduce innovations, to establish certain courts of justice upon principles which seemed to his Majesty to clash with the general principles of the Constitution” (45). True, the king has indeed made judges dependent upon his will alone for their tenure and salaries. In objecting to this, the colonists have “thrown off all sense of shame” (45). “The commissions of the Judges have always been during the good pleasure of the King” (46). Against this, “it was the policy of the colonies to keep the Judges dependent on the deputies of the people for a temporary, wretched, and arbitrary support”—an instance of “the overbearing spirit of a democracy,” namely, “the passions and prejudices of the multitude,” sentiments far more likely to lead to abuse than kingly power is (46). 

The supposed “swarms” of bureaucrats—customs commissioners and admiralty court judges—whom the colonists say have been sent to “harass our people, and eat out their substance,” serve in accordance with the king’s constitutional powers. Moreover, the colonists’ complaints about them instances their “convenient memory”: “Before [i.e., earlier in the Declaration] they complained that the means of justice were so remote, as to be scarcely attainable,” that Americans were being transported across the ocean for trial in England; “now they complain that the means of justice are brought to their own doors” (49). These officers have no new powers; their greater number only reflects the increase in colonial crime. Harass and starve out “our people,” indeed! “Will the Americans confess, that the class of smugglers is so numerous in that country, as to entitle them to be called—by way of eminence—the people?” (50)

Americans are such a bad lot that standing armies sent without their consent—again in accordance with established kingly prerogative, which need not take account of “local, subordinate legislatures” (51)—perform the rightful task of bringing them to heel. It is not to be forgotten, Lind repeats, that Great Britain went into debt to pay for the war against the French, “comply[ing] with the prayers of America, to conquer the enemies of America” (53). Once the French retreated, many of their Indian allies continued to fight, and that is why the standing armies have stood. And the notion that the king has made military powers superior to civil power in America by replacing a civilian with a military governor in Massachusetts overlooks the fact that “no new powers have been conveyed to the Commander in Chief” (55). That is, civilian colonial governors already had the authority to call out troops to quell insurrections and foreign attacks; to appoint General Gage as governor of Massachusetts is only to install with greater military expertise in that office.

Thus far, Lind’s lawyerly arguments have leaned on an interpretation of the English constitution that understands colonies as strictly subordinate to the imperial metropole, and understands the king to be the defender of the realm not only against foreign enemies but against any colonists who, in the name of self-government, defy his more-or-less absolute authority over them. Just as the state-centralizing Tudors had crushed feudalism in England, so the empire-centralizing Hanoverian dynasty of George III should move vigorously to quell any dissent against its rule. In his subsequent arguments Lind extends his accusation against the colonists, who challenge not only royal rule but Parliamentary rule as well. This is in keeping with his ‘populist’ rhetorical strategy.

In complaining that the king “has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws,” the American Congress “throws off its mask” (56). The “others” are none other than the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The Americans deny not only monarchic but Parliamentary authority. The nine accusations they level under this head all evince open rebellion against English constitutionalism. True, king and Parliament have quartered large bodies of armed troops in America. But troops that are stationed in a country must be quartered somewhere, must they not? And if the provincial legislatures fail to provide such quarters, Parliament must. The complaint that king and Parliament protect murderous soldiers by mock trials is a “frantic charge”: Exactly what do the colonists expect, if a soldier kills an “insurgent”? Shall the rightful authorities of the British Empire allow mob justice, or justice at the hands of a ‘hanging jury’ consisting of irrational colonists? (62) “To suffer the trial to take place in the scene of insurrection, in the midst of the insurgents; to appoint the insurgents themselves to be judges, would deserve a severer reproach” (63). 

By cutting off trade to the colonies, the king has taken “an act of self-defense” (64). “Let them return to their allegiance, and the Act is repealed by itself” (64). Once again, the colonists suffer from selective amnesia: “Have they forgot that they set the example,” by seizing British ships and condemning British captures (64) in Boston Harbor? 

The colonists’ celebrated complaint about British taxation “without our Consent” evokes from Lind a weary sigh at the frailties of humanity. “Such is the selfishness inherent in human nature, that men in general are but too apt to seize any pretense for evading the obligation of paying the servants of the public” (64-65). This is no new power but one exercised before and after England’s 1688 revolution. “They are not represented now? Were they otherwise represented then? No. Did they wish to be represented? Nor that either. But they wished not to be taxed. They were content to enjoy the benefits, but chose to decline bearing any part of the burdens, of Government” (68). There is an obvious problem with Lind’s argument, however. Independence from the British Empire won’t end the need for tax revenues in America. Therefore, the movement for independence on the basis of ‘no taxation without representation’ cannot simply be a desire to be rid of taxes.

It is true, Lind readily admits, that king and Parliament have denied colonists the right to jury trials. But only in the Courts of Admiralty, whose jurisdiction includes navigation and revenues derived from navigation. This is the same in England. Further, given the prevalence of smuggling and piracy in America, “no justice could be expected from juries” there, “because no juries could be found who were not partners of the guilt” (72), allies of the abusers of British merchants. At one time, the colonists “felt that their existence depended on the protection of Great Britain” (73), and so made no objection to such courts. Now that Great Britain has defeated their enemies, colonists bite the hand that shielded them.

King and Parliament have “transport[ed] us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses”? The offenses in question were acts of treason, such as burning His Majesty’s boatyards, ships, and arsenals. In calling these acts “pretended offenses” of “pretended Legislation,” the colonists do deserve credit for one thing: consistency. Unfortunately for their claims, the power to punish treason has been vested in English kings for more than two hundred years. As for the colonists’ complaint that Quebec has been placed under an “arbitrary government” which threatens “the free System of English Laws” in New England, “what have the revolted Colonies to do with his Majesty’s government of another Colony”? (78) The colonists much-bruited worries are themselves pretentious. “Whilst their leaders are alarming them with acts of pretended tyranny, they are really bringing them under subjection to the worst of all tyrants—artful, selfish Demagogues” (78-79) like Thomas Jefferson, John and Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry. Indeed, Quebec never had a free system of English laws in the first place before England knocked the French out of it and granted French Canadians the right to the free exercise of religion.

The colonists accuse king and Parliament of taking away their charters and altering fundamentally the forms of their governments. Too bad His Majesty and Parliament didn’t happen sooner, Lind declares. The Massachusetts colonists deserve to have their charter revoked, given their behavior. What changes that have been made to American colonial charters were made for the good of the colonists themselves. Parliament, acting on its constitutional right to revoke and re-write the charters, to “new-model the Governments of America” (87), have addressed such abuses as juries being packed with partisans of colonial independence and the control of colonial Councils—the executive branch—by colonial legislatures. Many colonial governors had complained of the latter practice, since Council members, like jury members, were often anti-British members of “a democratic party” (90) hostile to the British mixed regime. “Was it an unpardonable crime to rescue one branch of their Government from such a slavish dependence on another branch?” (90)

The claim that king and Parliament have “suspend[ed] our own Legislatures, and declar[ed] themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever” is grossly exaggerated. This occurred only in New York, Lind claims, and that legislature had refused to station British troops—an imperial prerogative, according to the English constitution. 

The final and most horrendous acts falsely attributed to the king by the colonists begin with the claim that the king has “abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.” On the contrary, Lind replies, punishing disobedience is one of the highest acts any government can perform. The Americans are the outlaws, not His Majesty. Plundering, ravaging, burning, killing are all acts first committed by the Americans. Captain Kidd (Lind expostulates) might as well have made the same argument against the Crown’s authority, but the Captain was less presumptuous, having never declared his independence from his mother country. Not only did the colonists initiate the violence, they tortured their enemies with tarring and feathering and, at Lexington, eye-gouging and scalping. “It was only under the terror which such daring outrages inspired, that their rebellious enterprises could have any chance of success” (101). 

The king has deployed foreign mercenaries to American shores in an act of “paternal tenderness” toward his own, English, people, whom he has spared from fighting their American brethren, insofar as foreigners have taken their places in that just struggle. The English army is too small, in any event, to put down such a widespread rebellion. And in impressing American sailors to fight against America, are traitors usually treated so well? “To urge the alleviation of punishment as a proof of tyranny, is a piece of folly reserved to the American Congress” (105). 

In exciting domestic insurrections and allying with Indian savages, the king is putting down what is itself a domestic insurrection. The colonial governors merely “offered freedom to the slaves of these assertors of liberty” in exchange for their military service under British command against their colonial masters (107). As for the Indians, the English have the right to deploy any troops they choose. Further, “the Congress were the first to engage the Indians in this dispute,” in 1775 at Ticonderoga and elsewhere in New England and Carolina. Like many others since, Lind ignores the Declaration’s identification of Indian savages, as distinguished from Indians generally. 

The Americans’ citation of their petitions for redress, stated “in the most humble terms,” have been “answered only by repeated injury,” draws out Lind’s concluding fulmination. “Here [in England] to deny the authority of Parliament is the utmost height of audacity; there [in America} it is the lowest pitch of humility” (111). The Americans “professed to ask only for ‘Life, Liberty, and Property.’ But when they came to explain their professions, it appeared, that by property they meant a total exemption from contributing any thing to the common burdens of the State; by liberty, a total manumission from the authority of Parliament, the Crown, or the Law; an entire abolition of all the customs of their ancestors, all the institutions of their forebears” (116). 

The problems with Lind’s conclusion are easily stated. The colonists have not claimed total exemption from contributing anything to the common burdens of the State, only exemption from contributing anything to the common burdens of a State in which they have no political representation. They are not rebelling against taxes enacted by their own legislatures. They claim manumission from the authority of Parliament and Crown insofar as Parliament and Crown have violated their unalienable natural rights; they claim manumission from the authority of English law insofar as that law is (mis)interpreted to serve as a prop for such violations, insofar as it does not contradict the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And as to the customs and institutions of their ancestors and forebears, they have respected them insofar as they do not impinge upon such natural rights as freedom of religion and of self-government free of such aristocratic privileges as primogeniture and rule by those holding titles of nobility.

In his brief appendix to the pamphlet, Lind addresses the major premises of the Declaration’s argument. “The opinions of the modern Americans on Government, like those of their good ancestors on witchcraft, would be too ridiculous to deserve any notice, if like them too, contemptible and extravagant as they be, they had not led to the most serious evils” (119). Theirs is an “absurd and visionary” theory, “repugnant to the British Constitution” (119). All men are not “created equal”; an infant hardly enjoys the natural power of a parent or the political power of a magistrate (120). Governments cannot secure the rights of life, liberty, and property; they can only exist at the expense of them—that is, men alienate their natural rights, the rights they enjoy in the state of nature, in exchange for the civil rights they obtain under government. And in practice the Americans have violated the right to life by invading Canada in an “unprovoked destruction of so many lives” (121); they have violated the right to liberty by suspending the issuance of writs of habeas corpus in cases involving American Tories; and they deny the pursuit of happiness by causing the social and financial ruin of those Americans loyal to their rightful sovereign, the British state. Thus the causes of the rebellion are in fact “light and transient,” as the colonists had consented, in the past, to the exercise of kingly and parliamentary powers. “In praying for the non-exercise of these powers, they acknowledged their legality” (125). And under those powers they flourished.

This argument is even less substantial than Lind’s constitutional arguments. The Declaration clearly states that all men are created equal in their unalienable rights, not in terms of natural or political power. Those rights are not rightly alienated by the social contract but secured by it; it is the natural power to retaliate against the violation of such rights that is alienated—and not even entirely, in all circumstances—in civil society. Therefore, the colonists have acknowledge the “legality” of English constitutional law only in the sense that it has been the existing, conventional law throughout the British Empire, but its existence as a legal convention has been turned against the colonists in contradiction of natural and divine law. It is telling that Lind invokes parental power, as this is indeed his model for royal and even Parliamentary rule over the American colonists, who rather insist that they are not children but men.