St. Bonaventura: On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology. Zachary Hayes translation. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute of Bonaventure University, 1996.

Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth. In Craig W. Kallendorf, ed.: Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

 

Having secured their position in the remains of the Roman world, Christian thinkers needed to come to terms with substantial achievements of that world—perhaps especially its philosophy, which inclined toward skepticism concerning ‘the gods.’ Christians were of course equally skeptical, indeed scornful, of pagan deities and the religious practices and institutions supporting their worship. But they surely could not tolerate skepticism directed at the God of the Bible. What other pre-Christian philosophic motifs, and what other pre-Christian arts, including the liberal arts, could be taken up without threatening one’s salvation?

Early in the third century AD, the Carthaginian theologian Tertullian answered, ‘not much’— a least when it came to philosophy. As he put it, famously, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A millennium later, however, Thomas Aquinas thought otherwise, deploying Aristotelian philosophy to understand much of God’s creation, the natural world, while subordinating that world, and that philosophy, to God and His revelation. His friend, Bonaventure (born Giovanni di Fidanza in the early 1220s) took at different route, in effect sacralizing all the arts, including the liberal arts, by explaining them as pathways to God. He calls this “reduction” by which he does not mean diminishment, as ‘we moderns’ tend to mean. Quite the opposite: He means tracing all the arts back to their origin in God. As translator Zachary Hayes puts it in his helpful introduction, “none of the arts, including philosophy, ought to be allowed to stand as an independent and self-sufficient discipline.”

Born in Italy and educated at the University of Paris, where he joined the faculty, “The Seraphic Doctor” eventually became General Minister of the Order of St. Francis. He was by all accounts a capable administrator as well as an accomplished theologian, so his interest in practice as well as theory, and thus in the arts, came readily to him. And both theory and practice are rightly sacralized because, as the Apostle James writes, “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the God of Lights.” Multiple gifts to mankind come from a single Source, “the fontal source of light.” 

This brings Bonaventure to the first of his many divisions of his topic. There is exterior light, “the light of mechanical art”; inferior light, “the light of sense perception”; interior light, “the light of philosophical knowledge”; and superior light, “the light of grace and of Sacred Scripture.”

Mechanical light illuminates the forms of artifacts. Following Hugh of St. Victor [1], Bonaventure considers such “servile” knowledge to include weaving, armor-making, agriculture, hunting, navigation, medicine, and drama. This may seem a decidedly heterogeneous list, but they are linked together by their purposes. “Every mechanical art is intended either for our consolation or for our comfort,” banishing “either sorrow or need,” and is accordingly “either useful or enjoyable.” The strict subordination of poēsis to philosophy, seen in Plato, remains in Bonaventure.

Sense knowledge “provides light for the apprehension of natural forms.” It takes the five forms provided by the five senses. He endorses St. Augustine’s account of the senses, which holds that sight is the purest form of inferior light. If mixed with air, this light becomes sensible to hearing; if mixed with vapor, smell; if mixed with fluid, taste; and if with “the solidity of the earth,” touch. Sense knowledge is physical, “thriv[ing] in the nerves, whose nature is to be clear and penetrable.” That is, the nerves provide accurate information and the information they provide comes from the outside, in. “Because of the well-defined nature of each sense, no apprehension would be possible without a certain similarity and correspondence between the sense-organ and the object.”

It is with the interior light of “intelligible truths” that philosophy deals. Bonaventure divides philosophic inquiry into three fields: rational, “the truth of speech”; natural, “the truth of things”; and moral, “the truth of conduct.” In terms of what we call academic ‘disciplines,’ rational philosophy “enlightens the mind,” enabling it to discern “the principles of understanding”—the discipline of logic; natural philosophy enlightens the mind to discern “the causes of being”—physics, but also mathematics and metaphysics; and moral philosophy enlightens the mind respecting the order of things, which is moral or practical philosophy. Each of these kinds of philosophy guides a certain human capacity or power. Rational or “discursive” philosophy directs the interpretive power; natural philosophy “directs itself“; and moral philosophy directs “the motive power.” Physics deals with “the generation and corruption of things; mathematics deals with “abstract forms in terms of their intelligible causes,” and metaphysics deals with “the knowledge of all beings according to their ideal causes, tracing them back to the one first Principle from which they proceeded, that is, to God, in as far as God is the Beginning, the End, and the Exemplar.” Moral philosophy concerns the lives of the individual, the family, and the political community.

Rational or discursive philosophy has three aims: “to reveal one’s thought,” in which case it pertains to grammar; “to move another to greater faith,” the act of teaching, in which it pertains to logic; or “to arouse love or hatred in another,” in which it pertains to rhetoric. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are of course three of the liberal arts; this is why for Bonaventure philosophy ranks among the ‘arts.’ Grammar enables the reasoner to apprehend; logic enables him to judge; rhetoric, to persuade. “Reason apprehends through appropriate speech, judges through true speech, and persuades through eloquent speech.” 

The exterior, inferior/sensual, and interior/intelligible forms of knowledge are all subordinate to the “superior light,” the salvific truth of sacred Scripture as given to us by the God of light. Scripture can be understood literally and spiritually. There are three ways in which it may be understood spiritually: the allegorical way, which teaches us what to believe, and whose masters are Augustine and Anselm; the moral way, which teaches us how to live, whose masters are Gregory and Bernard; and the anagogical way, which teaches how to “cling to God,” whose masters are Pseudo-Dionysius and Richard of Chichester. “But Hugh [of St. Victor] excels all three” of these pairs. At the end of times, all the lesser forms of knowledge will be destroyed, along with the world to which they pertain, followed by the new Heaven and the new Earth prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The lesser knowledges stem from God because the heavens and the earth as we know them were created by God. “All those lights had their origin in a single light” and “all these branches of knowledge are ordered to the knowledge of sacred Scripture,” “contained in it,” “perfected by it,” and “ordered to the eternal illumination by means of it.” Of them, the anagogical way of understanding Scripture brings us closest to God. 

This means that even the lowest form of knowledge, the knowledge of those who practice the mechanical arts, bring men closer to God. “Every artisan who fashions a work does so in order to derive, praise, benefit, or delight from it,” serving a “noble, useful or agreeable good.” “It was for these three reasons that God made the soul rational, namely, that of its own accord, it might praise God, serve God, find delight in God, and be at rest; and this takes place through charity,” through agapic love. “Behold,” then, “how the illumination of the mechanical arts is a path to the illumination of sacred Scripture,” manifesting as it does “true wisdom” on its own level. Accordingly, “sacred Scripture quite rightly makes frequent use” of similitudes derived from the mechanical arts. The same is true of the higher-level light of speech, reason, and persuasion—philosophy. In terms of natural philosophy, it points to the Son of God as the “art of the Father,” as Augustine calls Him, “the union of the rational soul with the material body,” the “Word of God as begotten and incarnate.” In terms of moral philosophy, which “is concerned principally with rectitude,” the rectitude of the will, its central term, right, has “three meanings.” First, it can mean something in the center of two “extreme points.” By this, Bonaventure doesn’t refer to Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue as the ‘mean between two extremes’ of deficiency and surplus but rather to God as the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, with Christ as the “Mediator between God and humanity,” both divine and human “so that this mediator might lead humanity back to God.” Second, the right conforms “to that by which it is ruled.” “That person…lives rightly who is guided by the regulation of the divine law,” aligning his will with God’s will, God’s commands. Finally, “something is called right when its summit is raised upward, as in the case of a human being with its upright posture.” Morally, this means the condition in which “the apex of the mind itself” is “raised aloft,” toward God. “This is what actually happens when our rational nature assents to the first truth for its own sake and above all things, when our irascible nature strives after the highest generosity, and when our concupiscible nature clings to the good.” Such a nature achieve union with God, “a union which takes place through charity.” Without charity, “all knowledge is vain because no one comes to the Son except through the Holy Spirit who teaches us all the truth, who is blessed forever.“

The Renaissance Humanists take a noticeably different approach to the liberal arts and, by implication, to the arts generally. At the same time, they are not to be confused with Machiavelli, who is sometimes lumped in with them. The Humanists do not sharply separate secular and spiritual life from one another, as Tertullian and Machiavelli both do, although for radically different purposes. Nor do they attempt to thoroughly integrate secular and spiritual life in the manner of Bonaventure. 

Professor of logic at the University of Padua, papal secretary, secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, Pier Paolo Vergerio published The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth in 1403. The free-born youth was Ubertino du Carrara, whose family ruled Padua. Vergerio recalls that Ubertino’s grandfather, Francisco the Elder, “the wisest man of his time in general knowledge,” identified “three ways that parents could help their children”: to call them by an honorable name; to settle them in a renowned city; and to instruct them in the liberal arts. Ubertino’s father had met the first two obligations, and Vergerio would assist him in the third, deploying a wise pedagogical strategy. He brings Ubertino into the liberal arts by treating like a teacher showing him the reasons for his own education. 

Of those obligations, “instruction in the honorable arts and liberal disciplines” is the most important because it enables even children of “obscure family origins and humble homelands” to overcome those disadvantages. Conversely, “if someone,” however well-born, “is not educated from youth in the liberal arts, or if he is infected with illiberal training, there is little hope that in later years, of his own accord, he can just cast aside the latter or take up the former without difficulty”; “the foundations for living well” must be laid “in youth,” the mind “trained to virtue while it is young and impressionable,” “preserv[ing] throughout life the impressions it takes on now.” A man of “lofty rank…cannot say or do anything in secret,” and so will be exposed as dishonorable if illiberal. Echoing Aristotle’s account of the great-souled or magnanimous man, Versilio tells Ubertino, “it is only fair that those who wish all the greatest things to be due themselves, be themselves obliged to excel in the greatest things.” “There is no more firm or solid rationale for ruling than this: that those who rule be judged by all to be the worthiest to rule.” Thus, Vergerio firmly links liberal education to aristocratic honor; unlike Machiavelli, a century later, he is far from advising a prince to learn “how not to be good.” On the contrary, he would have a young man who is an aristocrat ‘by convention,’ by inheritance, to aspire to become an aristocrat in Aristotle’s sense: among the few genuinely virtuous rulers.

The allusion to Aristotle is telling. Vergerio fixes his student’s attention on the classical more than the Christian virtues. Persons are “composed of soul and body”; “strength of body and intellect are “due to nature,” to which one should be grateful, “cultivat[ing] them through the right sort of studies in the liberal arts.” We, but “especially those to whom nature has given an intellect worthy of free men,” should “turn our attention particularly to those studies for which we are naturally inclined and suited, and to devote ourselves entirely to them.” Free men “should not be allowed to languish in sloth nor be caught up in illiberal affairs.”

What, then, are “the signs of a liberal temper”? A man of liberal temperament hungers for praise, being “inflamed by love of glory”; Vergerio does not expect that the young aristocrat will be a philosopher, inflamed by love of wisdom. As Plato and Cicero teach, the love of glory is “the next best motive” after the “wondrous longing for wisdom.” The young aristocrat obeys his elders, taking “good advice” from them, understanding that the young “lack experience in life and are unable to grasp rationally the true good of virtue and the face of moral rectitude.” He “always love[s] to do what is right” and, as Socrates observes in Plato’s Republic, his “naturally well-constituted mind…does not hate or scorn anyone but puts the best construction on whatever is said or done,” even as a good bodily constitution “digests everything easily and turns it into nourishment.” Indeed, Vergerio cites Socrates, who advised young men to “look at their own image in the mirror,” not in Narcissus-like self-absorption but with a mind either to make a homely appearance “attractive through their virtues or to avoid dishonoring a good appearance with vices.” Better still, he can gaze at “a living mirror,” emulating “the behavior of someone else of high character.” For their part, “older men in general should maintain at all times a consistent pattern of gravity and discretion, but especially in the presence of their juniors.” As John Locke would tell the father of the “Young Gentleman,” two centuries later, “ill patterns are surer to be followed than good precepts.” 

Youths “who are good should be strengthened and assisted through practice and precept,” while “those who are bad and blameworthy should be corrected.” Some youths of bad character “are only following their nature,” while “others lack experience” and still others “suffer from both deficiencies.” In addressing Ubertino, Vergerio particularly remarks that the young “are especially generous and liberal by nature because they have not experienced need and have not sought wealth for themselves by their own effort; it is unusual for one who has amassed wealth by his own efforts to waste it rashly,” but you, scion of Paduan lords (he implies) have obviously not expended any such efforts. Do not, therefore, confuse liberality with lavishness. Nor should you confuse magnanimity with high-spirited arrogance, becoming “rule to others, while exalting” yourself. Such youths “are quick to reveal secrets” because “they want to be seen as in the know”—lacking the discretion they will need if they are to become prudent rulers. “And because they are inexperienced at the same time, they think they tell the truth but are deceived in many things.” For these reasons, young men “should be discouraged most of all from the vanity of lying,” attempting “to get around old men with their deceptions.” Better that they “say little and to speak seldom, unless bidden to do so.” This will save them from “speaking at the wrong time” and from exposing their ignorance. 

With their lack of experience, the young are “excessively credulous.” They change their opinions easily, “since their humors are in motion due to growth and they have in abundance the heat which is the principal cause of motion,” “follow[ing] their passions above all” because “the rational powers and prudence that could moderate their desires are weak.” Accordingly, “we must take care that our young people are kept pure for as long as possible, for premature sexual activity weakens both bodily and mental strength.” Keep them busy, physically and mentally, “for leisure makes young people inclined to lust and every intemperance”; “solitude…caresses a weak mind with constant thoughts about such things and prevents it from finding diversion elsewhere.” Keep them away from wine, as well, but “above all”—and here Vergerio at last invokes piety—it is “proper for a well-educated youth to respect and practice religion and to be steeped in religious belief” (while not being “carried away into old wives’ tales”) “from his earliest youth.” But even this has a ‘humanist’ aims: “What human thing will be worthy of respect to one who holds the divine in contempt?” Warn young men against “utter[ing] curses against holy things” or “hold[ing] up sacred names to scorn” or “swear[ing] lightly of their own accord, for those who swear rashly usually swear often.” (As, one might add, also do liars.)

Youths should learn to accept criticism and admonishment. This advances self-knowledge. And “people who won’t listen to anything they dislike are the ones most vulnerable to deception,” surely a fatal flaw, especially among rulers. “Excessive parental leniency has generally softened and enervated young people,” a phenomenon “manifest in those who have been brought up in luxury under widowed mothers.” It is better to follow “the custom among certain nations” of bringing up children “outside their city, or at any rate among relatives and friends outside the home,” since “living in someone else’s home makes them less unruly and more inclined toward the better studies that we call liberal.”

By concentrating a young aristocrat’s mind on how to educate a young aristocrat, Vergerio aims at hastening the youth’s maturation. Having thus prepared his student for a liberal education by inclining him to want one, he turns to what liberal studies are. 

“We call those studies liberal…which are worthy of a free man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” Through liberal study, “people customarily seek honor and glory which for the wise man are the principal rewards of virtue,” even as “profit and pleasure are laid down as ends for illiberal intellects.” Vergerio thus defines the purpose of liberal studies ‘aristocratically’— presenting wisdom as the quest for honor and glory, as befits the likely inclinations of his student. (It should be noted that the Carraresi family had been a major patron of the arts generally, including the liberal arts as taught at the University of Padua.) “We will not be, I say, wise in old age unless we have first begun to be wise in youth.” As an example, Vergerio cites the exchange between an old man and a young man. The old man jibed, “one who is so wise in his youth will inevitably be senile in his old age,” to which the youth replied, “So you must have been remarkably wise in your youth.” Wisdom begins with wit. 

It won’t begin at all if suppressed “by threats and floggings.” “Excessive freedom unhinges good qualities” but “sharp unrelenting criticism saps intellectual energies and quenches the little fires that nature lights in children,” who “will dare nothing” if they “fear everything.” Special care should be taken with students inclined to melancholy; “it is a good idea to give them their head to enjoy freedom and fun.” As Aristotle and, later, Robert Burton knew “a great many clever people have this sort of complexion.”

In keeping with the aristocratic ethos, the arts “that have the greatest affinity with cultivating virtue and obtaining glory” are the liberal arts and the arts of war. Your father, he tells Umbertino, wanted him to study only the arts of war (as Machiavelli would advise). But “you have embraced both with such tenacious diligence and zeal that you have left your contemporaries far behind,” not to say your ancestors, as you attempt “to add new renown in letters to your family’s old glory in arms.” You aspire not only to patronize the liberal arts but to practice them. Here, Vergerio displays his own mastery of rhetoric, carefully separating his student from his student’s father, in effect becoming his new father. While an “old Roman emperor” called the liberal arts “a poison and a public plague,” political communities “would be far more blessed, Plato says, if philosophers ruled or if their rulers happened to be philosophers,” and while “to be sure, it is true that the disciplines of letters take away neither madness nor wickedness,” they “are a great help to those who were born for virtue and wisdom, and they often provide the means for uncovering stupidity or more destructive kinds of wrongdoing,” which Socrates’ dialectical questioning indeed did. Vergerio now begins to point his student beyond the love of honor, beyond the claim that wisdom aims at glory. Indeed, “the pursuit of knowledge gives birth to wondrous pleasures in the human mind and in due course bears the richest fruits,” including a respite from the troubles of the life of ruling. “When we are alone and free from all our other cares, what better thing can we do than resort to our books.”

“What has been entrusted to books endures forever.” Sculpture, painting, architecture—the arts Renaissance rulers prized and paid for—cannot really “describe the times,” as histories can, or “readily disclose motivation in all its variety.” But it is literature that “not only renders speech but also distinguishes styles of speaking and represents people’s thoughts.” As Socrates taught, a regime might readily be seen in a polis, but it is also present in a soul. A regime is a way of life, and “what way of life…can be more delightful, or indeed more beneficial, than to read and write all the time: for moderns to understand things ancient; for present generations to converse with their posterity; and thus to make every time our own, both past and future?” 

“What a happy family books make! Absolutely honest and well-behaved,” with no “fussing, shouting, rapacity, voracity, stubbornness in the face of authority.” Perhaps the family of books is more congenial than the Carrari?

It may be that a compromise can be worked out. The study of good books might enhance the family name. Those of “truly noble mind” and those “who are obliged to involve themselves in public affairs and human communities,” can attend primarily to history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric (“which is a distinct part of civics”). Moral philosophy can provide students with “correct views”; eloquence can enable them to win over “the minds of the masses”; history “helps us with both.” History teaches “things worth knowing from many centuries,” enabling us “to produce an example to illuminate every situation,” even as Aristotelian ethics guides us to considering right conduct in every situation. Of these arts, rhetoric is the one that “has now fallen almost totally into disuse,” not only in the law courts, where advocates now content themselves and the judges merely by citing laws against one another, but also in political communities, whether of the one or the few, in which princes and lords “want an opinion explained in few words and arguments brought nakedly into council, or in republics, where “the most brilliant speakers are thought to be those who speak artlessly and at great length.” Today, “in making speeches, nearly everyone uses those arts which may be more properly described as contrary to art.”

Beyond the public realm, many more liberal arts beckon. Poetics and music, closely related, were much esteemed by the ancient Greeks, who considered no one “liberally educated unless he knew how to sing and play the lyre.” And rightly so: “not all movements of the soul, but those which accord with reason, contribute to a harmonious life,” and “the use of musical modes is highly effective in relaxing the mind and calming the passions,” if it is used for that purpose. It can also be used for the opposite purpose, as the warlike Carrari surely know.

More comprehensive than knowledge of the human things, “knowledge about nature is especially appropriate to an in conformity with the human intellect, for through this knowledge we understand the principles and processes of natural things, along with “the causes and effects of the motions and transformations of those thing which are contained in heaven and on earth.” With arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, “we are able to explain many things that generally seem miraculous to the vulgar.” As for “the divine science,” metaphysics, Vergerio gives it rather short shrift.

Each of these studies “could absorb all a man’s efforts.” It is best “to be content with modest learning,” just as it is best to be content “with modest wealth.” A man should “embrace the study most suitable to himself,” since some souls “are abstracted from sensible and material things, and more suited to understanding immaterial substances and universals,” while others incline to “busy themselves with particulars,” being “suited to practical wisdom and natural science.” (“Aristotle, indeed, being concerned with the active, civic life, believed one should not over-indulge in the liberal arts nor linger over them in pursuit of perfection,” becoming “of little use to his city.”) “People should follow the studies appropriate to their natural bent,” while selecting only the best books within their field of study. Do not attempt to “take in everything at the same time,” rendering yourself incapable of retaining anything in particular. In this and in other matters, “the easiest person to deceive is yourself.”

Vergerio concludes with advice concerning non-liberal arts which, if properly managed, need not be illiberal but can support liberal studies, now reaffirming the authority of Umbertino’s father while effectively putting him in his place. Your father “glories most in his capacity for toil,” exhibiting praiseworthy physical courage. “One must believe he fears nothing—except, perhaps, the possibility that he might die an old man.” And indeed “we should not care overmuch for life,” “bear[ing] all things with equanimity and accept[ing] death calmly, whenever it comes, even hastening to meet it when circumstance or necessity demands.” “We ought not to fear that we have perchance lived too little, but rather that we have lived too little of the life we have lived.” Teach children “from their first years the capacity to dare great things and endure difficulties.”

As to leisure: music, yes, since singing and percussion are “quite seemly,” although “whistling is less suitable to a gentleman”; dancing exercises the body but often makes young men “lustful and vain”; chess is more consonant with manliness, offering “a semblance of fighting and hostile contest,” but dice “either fosters a greed unsuited to a free person or a softness unbefitting a man.” There will be times, however, when “one needs to do absolutely nothing and be entirely free from work, so as to meet once again the demands of work and toil.” As Charles de Gaulle asked his friend, “Malraux, do you know how to do nothing?” [2]

“I have written the foregoing for you, Ubertino, as I promised at the beginning, not to remind you that you should be doing something, but to show you to yourself.” If you “follow nature’s lead,” cultivating your “native gifts,” you will not “fail yourself” but proceed to fulfill the “brilliant promise” that I see in you. “Do not be false to those outstanding qualities you possess.”

As it happened, Ubertino had little chance. Two years after this book was written, the Carrara family was hurled from rule of Padua. His father and older brothers were killed, and it is unclear what became of Vergerio’s student. What is clear that, as Vergerio hints in his encomium to books, the Character and Studies endured far longer, enjoying many printings in the fifteenth century and after. Deprived of his professorship by the conquering Venetians, Vergerio found employment with the pope.

 

Notes

1. On Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, see “Reading with Hugh of St. Victor” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. “It isn’t easy for a man to force himself into a discipline of idleness, but it essential. Life is not work: to work without stopping sends a man mad. Remember that. And to want to do so is a bad sign: those of your colleagues who could not stop working were by no means the best.” Charles de Gaulle, quoted in André Malraux: Felled Oaks: Conversation with De Gaulle. Irene Clephane and Linda Asher translation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p.41.

 

Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part 2: Chapters 6-8. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2026.

 

In the first part of his book, Hancock addresses the serious deficiencies of modern “theory” or philosophy and modern theology, which have culminated in a hyper-egalitarianism that makes moral and political claims dependent upon establishing one’s status as a victim of some oppressive hierarchy. Since ruling itself presupposes hierarchy, these theoretical and theological systems may culminate in a call for no government at all—radical egalitarianism and freedom at once or, as in Marx, an initially powerful statism that will then put an end to itself, ‘wither away.’ Or it may culminate in an incoherent belief that some new hierarchy will itself be equalizing and liberating—a ‘welfare state’ in which apolitical administrators, supposedly apolitical, do not so much rule us but serve us, thereby relieving us of our victimhood. This amounts to an ‘aristocracy’ that, unlike the older aristocracies, justifies itself in term of egalitarianism from which it must obviously exempt itself. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Leo Strauss vindicate ‘aristocracy,’ by which they mean the need for persons who are capable of acting and of thinking beyond the limits of ‘democracy’ or social egalitarianism, precisely in order to defend democracy against its own ‘totalizing’ inclinations, especially against its tendency to curtail liberty of thought and action in favor of equality, of thinking, feeling, and acting ‘in lockstep’ with increasingly uncivil majorities in civil society. Majoritarianism implies a certain sheer weightiness, a sort of materiality imposed upon the mind. Modern ‘idealism’ is really a pantheism that cloaks materialism in highfalutin talk. Its adepts are a bit like that fast-talking ‘Music Man’ in the movies, a music man who doesn’t know much about the muses but, unlike the movie sophist/rhetorician, often fails to know that they doesn’t know.

In Part 2, Hancock turns from theory and theology to practice, but especially to the relation of practice to theory and theology. Following Tocqueville, he sees that “the contemporary idea of the equal dignity of every unique human individual derives historically from Christian teaching but now must be regarded as an irresistible datum of human experience.” That the idea is irresistible does not make it true, however, nor does any and all definitions of equal dignity faithful derivations from Christian doctrine. “How,” then, “can we articulate some solid middle ground between the complicit extremes of idealism and materialism, the vaulting ambition of cosmic god,” would-be masters of nature, “and the debased realism of needy beasts,” whose mastery, insofar as they achieve it, serves their bodily appetites? Human beings do indeed exercise a degree of “spiritual freedom”; we are not ‘determined’ by matter. But that freedom depends upon sustaining a “natural order of the soul and of the city,” the rule of reason, that is “exquisitely fragile and subject to disruption” by that very freedom, which can choose fine and wonderful things or coarse and disgusting ones—longings and notions “very difficult to reconcile with a  stable moral and political order,” and indeed rejecting stability and order for perpetual change assumed (but only assumed) to be progress.

The Hebrew Bible teaches that “human beings were created in the image of God.” The New Testament promises that Christians can become godlike by the process of theosis. [1]. That is, the Bible finds human individuality, not merely our ‘species-being,’ a thing of infinite value. (Hancock quotes C. S. Lewis: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.”) Strauss added an important caveat, however: the spirit of individuality, which is the spirit of modernity, can easily be turned to decidedly unspiritual and unphilosophic purposes, resulting in “the ravages of modern individualism and of the liberationist and identitarian delusions it prepares.” And while Hancock does not simply endorse Strauss’s stated preference for a return to “the spirit of ‘sound antiquity,'” with its ‘aristocratic’ valorization of virtuous civic life against modern individuality, he does acknowledge and endorse Strauss’s point. “There is nothing automatic in the coupling of Christian individualism or personalism with the sense of elevation and noble resignation inherent in classical virtue,” and, beyond the universally shared dignity of creation in the image of God, the worth of a human soul does depend upon the exercise of human virtues, here and now. That is, the “unquestioned authority of the idea of the dignity of every individual is far from simply good news,” even if it is indeed part of the Good News of the Gospels. In early Christianity, “the affirmation of the individual was given ritual structure and moral meaning by authoritative sacraments and commandments and by membership in a visible community of shared vocation,” the ecclesia or Church, the regime founded by Jesus Himself. And with that, Jesus also ensured that Christians would face some version of the same crisis He faced: martyrdom. His regime, the City of God, remains captive and stranger—a foreigner—so long as the earthly city, the City of Man, survives. “Membership in a heavenly city that somehow transcends the hierarchies of this world,” needs to be coordinated “with the practical imperatives of a particular human city,” as Jesus in fact said when he advised His disciples to be prudent as serpents. Under the conditions of ‘this world,’ it is as foolish (in a bad way) to live as if those conditions mean nothing as it is foolish (in a good way) to accept one’s status as a fool in the eyes of the world. Machiavelli will always suppose the Christian a fool, simply; an imprudent Christian will simply ignore him, a prudent one won’t, while knowing that Machiavelli doesn’t see the whole truth.

“Societies need competence” and indeed excellence if they are “to produce the physical and symbolic goods that sustain them,” and individuals need “concrete, more or less determinate standards by which to judge their own and their fellows’ contributions and deficiencies, and no amount of abstract talk about infinite personal worth will supply such needs or such goods.” Strauss (and Tocqueville) are right, too: “Christian love cannot dispense with classical virtue.” There is need for ‘aristocracy,’ and especially for the characteristic aristocratic/classical virtue of prudence, the virtue that mediates between the City of God and the City of Man, as the supreme Mediator, Jesus Christ, insisted.

Hancock astutely calls attention to Tocqueville’s phrase, “the laws of moral analogy,” in this regard. By this, Tocqueville means the connection between moral ideas and moral sentiments, “the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs,” the bond between theory and practice, which most emphatically does not mean the erasure of the distinction between theory and practice, the consequence of pantheism. Tocqueville’s example of the rupture of moral analogy is “the extremism of the French Revolution.” Under ordinary circumstances, under circumstances when the laws of moral analogy prevail, revolutionaries would not behead (for example) Marie Antoinette. They would not kill a helpless person. “When our conceptual universe falls out of alignment or loses attunement to what we know ‘in our bones’ as practical agents in the world, then we lose touch with our humanity”; “in imagining ourselves to be theoretical gods”—rigorous and incorruptible enforcers of the Rights of Man—we “become practical (ideological and revolutionary) beasts,” murderers in the name of justice. “Our idealistic abstractions do not remove us from the world of action but commit us to perpetual violence against our natural moral-political condition,” the only limit to that violence being exhaustion or defeat at the hands of some greater force. This “internal contradiction…lies at the heart of the modern democratic or rationalistic,” not rational, “project,” inaugurating an “addictive commitment to revolutionary transformation” incapable of limiting itself. 

Hancock is quick to observe that the laws of moral analogy are not laws in any formal sense, part of some “explicit and universal philosophical or theological system.” Rather, they are a reasonable sensibility that inclines human beings in their actions to “look up to, to defer to, or be aware of the superiority of something above” action, above practice. “Practice must find some realizable guide and compass in theory,” but without thinking of theory or of theology as programmatic, our actions as somehow similar to computer ‘printouts.’ That is, for its part “theory must never betray its practical touchstone,” leading us to imagine that the purpose of action is “some ineffably transcendent ‘ideal'” or “an ever-elusive, ultimately incoherent, and therefore self-undermining idea of ‘progress.'” Theory needs a practical “touchstone” because, first, theory consists of a set of generalizations about human nature as seen not only in human biology and human thought but in human practice and, second, because such generalizations, such theoretical ideas as we derive from such observations must be ‘brought down to earth,’ made consistent with the limits imposed existing circumstances. The worst enemy of practical reasoning is wishful thinking. “As Aristotle and Pierre Manent (one should add Jesus) remind us, the end we seek is always in an important sense in some way always present within the practical means by which we seek it—that is, in the practical habitual dispositions, the virtues, that, for the most part implicitly, shape our understanding of a good life and of a good society.” As Hancock emphasizes, “in an important sense, theory must rule practice, while at the same time practice must rule theory.“

It is important to recall another Aristotelian theme, here. Aristotle locates the origin of political life in the family in the sense that all three forms of ruling, of governance, can be seen there: the two forms of ‘command-and-obey’ rule—parents over children, rule for the sake of the good of those ruled, and masters over slaves, rule for the sake of the good of those who rule—and the one form of what he calls “political” rule—the reciprocal ruling and being-ruled of husband and wife. What Hancock thus suggests is the reciprocal or political rule of theory and practice, both in individuals and cities, the City of Man. He leaves the ruling conditions of the City of God, the mysterious monarchy of a triune God, to the theologians.

Tocqueville agrees with Hegel (whose disciples he otherwise detested) in claiming that “the best minds of classical antiquity were blinded, by the aristocratic conditions of their own societies, to the manifest injustice of slavery, and so were at pains to prove that slavery was somehow authorized by nature”—a “fundamental linkage between Christianity,” which both philosophers take to be opposed to slavery, “and the modern movement of generalizing equality.” In Tocqueville’s own words, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” or, as Hancock elaborates, “beneath the democratic revolution lies the Christian revolution.” Several qualifications to this might be advanced: Aristotle’s idea of “natural slavery” would strictly limit actual slavery; as the Apostle Paul makes clear, Christian slaves are not encouraged to rebel. More important in terms of the discussion at hand, however, is the point that democracy or natural equality, eventually leading to social equality, comes to earth via the teachings and example of a monarch, indeed the supreme Monarch, the King of kings, albeit one who acts ‘aristocratically’ in the role of a mediator between His Father and the human beings formed out of clay and animated with His breath, His spirit, thereby fashioning them in His “image” as beings capable of exercising logos, speech and reason. This divine making is the foundation of human equality and of human inequality, inasmuch as all men are not created equal in physical beauty or intellectual capacity. But in emphasizing the equality of human beings in their ‘humanness,’ Christianity acts monarchically, not aristocratically, monarchy, the rule of the one, and democracy, the rule of the many, being natural allies against the rule of the few. The danger in this is that “democratic ontology is thus fundamentally at odds” with moral analogy, “with the tempering of the abstract idea by the concrete experience, as well as the informing of the concrete experience by the idea that aims to transcend particular experience.” The command to be innocent or harmless as doves and prudent as serpents could counteract this tension, were it more generally heeded. But virtue is difficult, else it would not be virtue, as Strauss’s beloved ‘classics’ knew and taught. Hancock writes, “Christians must find a way to give due support to the pride that is inseparable from the nature of human agency or moral analogy and thus to restore confidence in the natural, mediated goods of practical virtues and bordered political communities.” Put Thomistically, divine grace perfects nature; it does not replace it.

Genuinely moral and political action cannot be determined either from ‘above’ or from ‘below,’ whether ‘above’ means a theory, a god, or the ‘end of History,’ and whether ‘below’ means the earth, the body, or the passions. Genuinely moral and political action presupposes choice, freedom. Such freedom “is an intrinsic good” or “at least somehow points to a good that is good in itself.” This means that freedom is “elevated,” ‘aristocratic,’ not ignoble or slavish. “Freedom is spirited and spiritual; it is associated with human pride and self-assertion” while “at the same time” aspiring “toward an undefined elevation, toward something beyond the all-too-human.” Acting “is central to freedom.” And “this free action is bound up with speaking, reasoning, deliberating,” which is why the document that constitutes the American federal government (for example) guarantees freedom of speech as a sine qua non of political freedom. Finally, political and rational freedom presuppose freedom to “breathe,” to live. “Even the simple and universal gift of life must be defended against those who would act even against the freedom to breathe—that is, against our very survival” as individuals and as political communities. Being rational and political, freedom has limits; it “is not altogether limitless, boundless, or undefined.” It “expresses itself within a meaningful horizon in which there is commerce,” or in Aristotelian terms a political relationship, “between the most elevated and the most common.” “Both voluntarist and lawful,” freedom “is ordered by virtue, and virtue is free.” It is lawful in the sense that it obeys the natural laws of moral analogy. In the Bible, God sets down the laws, enacts his commands; He is a Person (indeed, the Person of all person, the One who endows the many with personhood) who commands laws, which are impersonal but purposive rulers of the many human persons, who are nonetheless free to violate those laws, at least up to a point. To obey the Ruler and His rules, the supremely personal and the impersonal, is to live “a life that is right and good.” “This duality within the highest possibilities of meaningful existence corresponds broadly to the two great sources of the Western tradition, Jerusalem and Athens,” the Creator-God and the laws of nature and of nature’s God. The Creator-God is both eternal (“I am that I am”) and free (“I shall be as I shall be”). The laws He has built into His creation are necessary, unfree. A fully human life will choose to live in terms of both, not one or the other. “The divine must be understood in a way that supports both the lawful quality and the freedom or independence of human action; Providence, the ultimate guarantor of a truth whose face is not turned away from humanity, must be a friend of freedom.”

Two “difficulties” arise respecting such an appeal to an objective moral order. There is the “epistemic” difficulty of knowing that it is and what it is; there is the “substantive” difficulty of how to obey it, how it could be consistent with human freedom, the human capacity to reason. Hancock suggests that while “the moral law must indeed be understood as ‘objective’ in the sense” of existing “somehow above us,” authoritative, ‘better than we are,’ “it must not be understood as simply outside us, as absolutely ‘other’ with respect to our rational and spiritually self-aware humanity.” That is, “the appeal to a higher law is not alien to, but in fact, deeply continuous with, the full, responsible exercise of human agency.” As Daniel J. Mahoney argues, Christianity must “encourage citizens and believers alike to take seriously the full range of one’s political and civic responsibilities,” responsibilities seen in our membership in political communities, organizations with territorial boundaries that need to be defended against assaults aimed at violating the self-government, the freely set limitations citizens impose upon themselves within those boundaries. [2]  Mahoney “reconciles the word of God and moral law with the spiritual needs of humanity precisely because human spirituality is understood to embrace human liberty or the nobility of responsible choice and action” while “divine providence is understood as holding open the space of human prudence,” the guidance “of one’s own natural reason,” self-government. One may hold oneself responsible to, and be held responsible by, the Holy Spirit and His promptings.

Pierre Manent elaborates upon these themes, correcting the “hypertrophy of theory” with the “grammar of action.” That is, he counters what he understands to be the excessively abstract, impractical, utopian approach to politics in contemporary life not with a ‘pragmatism’ that seeks the most efficient path to satisfying self-defined self-interest but with moral and political action infused with prudential reasoning that recognizes the good that is, so to speak, built into human action itself, “the unsurpassable good inherent in action itself.” Such action will also be “holding open space in eternity for this good.” 

What does that mean? Hancock would have helped his reader had he followed Aristotle’s practice of providing examples of such action. Nonetheless, he circles around his meaning sufficiently to afford some glimpses of what he has in mind. This involves a political relationship between the “pride” of prudential reasoning in action and the Christian humility that acknowledges the impossibility of any rational solution to the political problem, absent divine intervention. Following Manent, who follows Aquinas, he eschews the Aristotelian philosophic standard, itself derived from Plato: the founding of “the best city” in speech and the description of “the best soul.” For Christians, the best person cannot be human, even if human beings were not afflicted with ‘original sin.’ What Christians can look to as a standard is the natural law. Very well then, what is the natural law?

The natural law begins with “universal motives” discernible in human beings: the pleasant, the useful, and the upright (the honnête). None of these motives is an idea. Each is actually present in our souls. This includes the upright, which orients itself ‘upward,’ toward nobility, toward ‘aristocracy,’ without itself being outside of ourselves. “Manent sees reason, in our present circumstances of theoretical hypertrophy, as investing too much in speculations on goods, beyond those we actually experience in some way in the practice of moral agency and practical deliberation.” All of these motives take us outside of ourselves; even the experience of pleasure frequently requires us to seek external things that give us pleasure—food, water, even air, which we seek in order to survive but not only in order to survive. Human motives bring human individuals to extend themselves, go beyond themselves. This going-beyond includes (as Aristotle and Aquinas insist) in “enhancing the ‘sweetness’ of social bonds and our interest”—themselves potentially pleasant, useful, and upright—in “our hope for a higher and more complete good.” Prudential and even theoretical reasoning can take us some distance in discerning the object of this hope, but only so far. “At some point, our quest for such a good exceeds the limits of reason, and so we must choose whether or not to let the divine truth come toward us,” to “allow God’s grace to supervene upon our natural practice of moral and political agency.” That is, at some point, having reasoned as assiduously as is possible for me to do, why would I not ask the God whose existence I cannot discover by a rigorously logical proof to show Himself? After all, if He does not exist, what harm in the exercise? I will remain within the bounds of Socrates’ humane zeteticism, carefully rejecting the inordinate pride of modern rationalism. 

Manent holds (in Hancock’s words) that “the divine truth can come toward us only as we assume practical responsibility for the common goods of the real communities of which we are a part.” Christian love (agape, caritas) inheres in the act of taking such responsibility for ourselves but especially for those around us—the sober, unsentimental love of neighbor. “Neither (1) modern rational mastery for the sake of humanity nor (2) the humble Protestant or postmodern abnegation of responsibility for human goods nor (3) classical or medieval speculation on a highest good altogether beyond practice can relieve us of our responsibility as rational, moral, and political beings for the only goods available to us by nature, and thus the only goods of which we can coherently speak—that is, the good inherent in our moral and political agency and inseparable from the very practice of that agency.” Human experience entails action, and action entails an aim, a purpose, “some substantial, actionable understanding of what is good.” That goes for action guided by theology as much as action guided by philosophy. As Hancock ingeniously puts it, “Theology, no less than philosophy, must be respectfully attentive to a certain necessary ‘grammar of action'”; Christians “must humble themselves in order to enter into what might be called the essential pride of human action, the active human contribution to the good.” That contribution, which is the natural law inherent in action, “consists of human participation in eternal law; indeed, the natural law consists of human participation in the active and productive realization of eternal law.” Although there are passages in the New Testament that seem to claim that human souls are little more than rocky battlegrounds for conflicts between far more powerful spiritual persons, demonic and divine, our souls are more than that because our souls think and will, desiring the good, however we may misconceive the good or simply fail fully to apprehend it.

Political life illustrates and ineluctably involves this natural human quest. Life in a ‘city’ or political community centers on the regime of the city—who rules it, what its ruling offices or institutions are, and most pertinently for the purposes of this argument, its purpose and its way of life, all of which incline citizens or subjects to form a certain character, an ethos, both individually and as a community. Inevitably, political life or activity fosters disagreements about specific actions the city might take or indeed about the regime itself. This debate about “the meaning of justice” “constitutes the city.” As Aristotle teaches, the underlying parties in the debate are the few who are rich, the oligarchs, and the many who are poor, the democrats. But the debate cannot be reduced to that conflict, as it involves many claims to rule, including birth, liberty, wealth, virtue, and military valor. Try sorting out all those claims in a coherent theoretical system and you will fail, becoming not a person of wisdom but a terrible simplificateur, an ideologue. What happens in a real city is rather a practical solution, sometimes long-lasting, imposed by politicians or ‘statesmen.’ If the politicians are statesmen in the valorizing sense of the term, the practical solution they arrive at will take account of the reasonable claims of all groups within the citizenry before arriving at their authoritative decision and issuing their authoritative commands. “The judgment or decision that resolves this problem is seen”—seen by the citizens themselves—as neither “derivable from some theoretical principle…nor as an arbitrary act of the will.” In Manent’s words, this “complexity” “holds out the promise of the good” which is “inescapably bound up with the mind’s and soul’s engagement with the plurality of substantive claims that emerge from our natural political existence,” the “practical commensuration of theoretically incommensurable goods,” giving each good its due as ‘its due’ is defined within the unifying regime of the city. “The highest human good, the good actualized in the statesman’s responsibility for the political community, appears thus to consist in reflective or rational responsibility for the practical viability and cohesion and consistency of the irreducible plurality of human goods.” Hancock characterizes the “implicit understanding that graces the practical operation of a good that is common” finds in that commonality a good that is “higher” than (apparently) the particular goods advanced by the citizens. This is the highest practicable good, the highest humanly possible, because there is no theoretical way to make the various particular goods commensurate with one another on the level of theory.

How does this comport with Christianity, which most assuredly does assert a highest good for individuals, namely, the salvation of individual souls? No regime that interferes with the achievement of that good could itself be as good as it might be, although it may provide other substantial ‘this-worldly’ goods. More specifically, how can Christianity ‘play out’ within the modern state, and indeed in the liberal-democratic state, given the origins of the modern state in the political philosophy of anti-Christian Machiavelli? Manent suggests that pre-Machiavellian, Christian Thomas Aquinas would find in “the collaboration of human prudence and divine Providence” a much more solid spiritual and intellectual foundation for the limitations on state action that liberalism insists upon, even as the democratic dimension of liberal democracy inclines toward limitless expansion of state power. Those limitations are enforced, especially in modern republicanism, by enabling citizens to stand up for themselves, to exercise their virtues against statist encroachment. In so doing, the exercise of the classical ‘cardinal virtues’—courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice—point human beings toward a good beyond the Aristotelian telos or purpose—the free exercise of those virtues, bringing human happiness—and toward the good that transcends humanness, the good bestowed by divine grace and seen in ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity. “Faith as an act of partnership with a universal personal God achieves an eminent expression in the great politics of the providential nation-state, a task that compels the Christian statesman to attend to the partial truths asserted by the major claimants in today’s contest for the soul of civilization.” In effect, such Christian statesmanship would wrest the nation-state from the grip of its inventor, Machiavelli, and his progeny. In this, “the excessive or overflowing meaning of the practical on the one hand”—the “logic of action”—and “of the divine on the other”—the overflowing grace of God—meet in reciprocal action, politically, and “color each other.” Whereas there has been a conflict between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, “the good that is at work in both” might enable their coordination against their common enemies—coordination, not synthesis, inasmuch as each endeavor has its own integrity. Thus does Manent invite his readers “to recognize the spiritual good that beckons beyond the visible arena of practical liberalism.”

The common enemy is the conception of nature posited by modern philosophers, notably Machiavelli’s follower, Thomas Hobbes, who defines nature, including human nature, as “radically individuated biological being,” a materialism that somewhat dubiously (as David Hume saw) “reduces to the individual’s boundless assertion of ‘rights.” Since the ‘is’ of a nonteleological and strictly materialist nature cannot really issue in an ‘ought’ of rights, “the governing law of modern liberalism is lawlessness; modern liberalism is a flight from law—a perpetual, obsessive, ever-self-radicalizing flight from law as the essential structure of human action.” But this cannot be true because by nature human action is “archic”—commanding, initiating, ruling, and “always assert[ing] a reason for its rule.” Reasons are debatable, therefore at least open to reasonable discussion, and although only an extraordinarily naive person would expect rational deliberation to predominate in most political debates, the openness to such debate is there and the adjustment of competing demands, many of them irrational and unjust, at least requires some sort of attempt at justifying each claim in terms of the public good, usually as that is defined by the prevailing regime. The honnête has a chance; otherwise, it would have a much slimmer chance. Pleasure, utility, and uprightness are, as Manent writes, “objective components of human nature,” so they will have their say in a liberal democracy. This is the nature that connects the ‘is’ with the ‘ought.’

With respect to uprightness, the noble, its “stability and universality” are “grounded in a dynamic triangular structure of the city, the soul, and the divine.” In the city, nobility makes the virtue of justice possible; the noble and the just are “the two essential dimensions of the “honnête.” Pleasure and utility are likely to be brought to the bar of the honnête, at least some of the time, as seen in the way the spirited guardians enforce the rational judgments of the philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic. The reverse is also at least partly true, as “no person is noble who does not act with some reasonable regard for the plain utility or reasonable interests of his neighbor or fellow citizen.” In the soul, nobility must stand up for itself, become part of the habitual life of the soul, if it is to maintain itself, “preserve the conditions” of the “noble action” it craves—virtue being “the principle as well as the end of virtuous action.” To fortify itself with support from lower and solid ground, “the noble is grounded by the useful, and the useful is ennobled by the noble”—reciprocal ruling and being-ruled. More, “it is because man is capable of elevating himself above the goods of the body and of scorning even life—of which beasts do not have any idea—that he knows how to multiply these same goods to a degree that they cannot conceive of.” And with respect to the divine, “the instrumentality of the noble to justice or the common good…holds the noble open to a higher good beyond the self-satisfaction of the soul as well as the necessities of the city.” Manent follows Aquinas in going “beyond Aristotle in tracing the natural passage from the noble to the supernatural,” in “humbling…the classical, aristocratic pretension to achieve a philosophic transcendence that escapes the gaps and circles of the practical (moral and political) good.” As a philosopher, Aristotle inclines “to identify this ultimate end with purely theoretical activity.” For Christians, however, the ultimate end of practice is to meet a Person, although one’s success in that effort does not depend primarily upon oneself.

 

Notes

1. See “Theosis,” a review of Archimandrite George Kapsanis: Theosis: The True Purpose of Life, on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. See “The Humanitarian Temptation,” a review of Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, reviewed on this website under the category Bible Notes.

Frank S. Meyer: The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1961.

 

Born in 1909, Frank S. Meyer worked as a member of the Communist Party USA throughout the 1930s until his departure in 1945. Turning against Marxist ideology he became a major influence on postwar conservatism, an ally of William F. Buckley, Jr. and regular contributor to National Review. His book rests firmly on his experience in ‘The Party.’

Communists, he observes, cannot be understood by assuming that they think and feel as others do. “Reality looks different” to them because they have not merely been instructed but molded, their souls reoriented by the Party regime to which they have pledged allegiance, a regime animated by a “secular and messianic quasi-religion” instituted not merely to understand the world but to change it, as Marx adjured. Lenin followed in this line, in effect saying, “Give me an organization of professional revolutionaries and I can transform the world.” As with any regime, the Party aims at producing a certain human “type,” in this case the “one Communist type,” a dedicated member of a cadre, that is, the political equivalent of battle-hardened soldiers around whom the mass of men can form. And as in any political regime, the cadre member may not be one of the apparent rulers. “Cadre Communists can be found in apparently the humblest of positions when there is a reason for their activities at that level”: “a dramatic spy or a policy-subverter in a high government post, a world-renowned writer or speaker or a Communist trade-union leader with great public prestige and power, may be little more than an office boy to obscure and unknown men with no formal position in or out of the Communist Party.”

The cadre man has strictly subordinated his individuality, emotions, and will to an intellect “totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism,” a doctrine that defines freedom as “the recognition of necessity”—recognition of History’s inexorable ‘dialectical’ advance toward communism through the rule of the Party commanding a state structured on socialist lines. Socialism is the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ the urban, industrial working class, itself ruled by its ‘leaders,’ who constitute the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat. In the words of Josef Stalin, “It is not given to all to withstand the stress and storm that accompanies membership in such a Party.” To gain admission to a cadre, one must exhibit absolute devotion to the cause of the ‘working class’ as embodied in the Party along with an ability to persuade oneself that he is maintaining “close contact with the masses” when “in actual fact, most of those who constitute the cadre have very little contact with the masses.” From there, a process of “Bolshevik hardening” or “Bolshevik discipline” commences, preparing cadre members to become “the forerunners of the ‘man of a new type,'” capable of committing such acts as “organiz[ing] a movement of Asian coolies under circumstances of incredible terror and deprivation or direct[ing] a system of slave camps which systematically dehumanizes and destroys millions upon millions of helpless people.” 

Thanks to this hardening, this discipline, “fine and devoted human beings can become conscious agents of organized evil.” The Party “considers every moment of life material for the process of molding its members.” Cadre leaders carefully observe, analyze, and criticize members’ “intellectual and psychological personality traits, operating at all times, at every moment of personal as well as political life” to reaffirm and strengthen their “consciousness” that the historical dialectic is inexorable, the Party infallible. Marxism demands “the unity of theory and practice,” that “all activity be considered as a school and all schooling as a continuation of activity.” Lenin himself went to considerable lengths in advancing this claim, writing a treatise on epistemology, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which purports to demonstrate that the mind is nothing more than a particular organization of matter, a constellation capable (again, if properly hardened and disciplined) of understanding the operational patterns of all other organizations of matter—especially the organization of society along the lines of class, an organization animated by class struggle.

“Social interactions have for the Communist the scientifically predictable character of Newtonian physical reactions” and, like other objects studied by modern science, are “manipulable.” Modern science “implies not knowledge for the sake of knowing but knowledge for control.” A Communist must not only know socio-economic and political events, but he must also know (in Lenin’s famous phrase) what is to be done in response to them. He gains that knowledge from the Party leaders, the master-scientists. Marx and Lenin themselves satisfied this requirement by writing polemics. Even their most nearly ‘theoretical’ works (Capital, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) “are full of polemics”; “their essential inspiration is polemical,” the atheist equivalent of the Christian’s spiritual warfare. “Thought for thought’s sake or for the sake of pure knowledge is, from the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, not merely sterile; in the last analysis it is impossible.” 

This claim in turn justifies the use of social pressure “as an irreplaceable tool of training.” Social pressure “forces to the surface, out into the open where they can be handled, all he psychological and intellectual contents of the personality which must be remade—ideas, habits, prejudices, attitudes” in weekly sessions of “criticism and self-criticism”—again, in imitation of some Christian Church, the institution of the Confessional. This is the deployment of the “dialectic” to the human personality—not, however, in the one-on-one individual Church confession or Freudian psychoanalysis (individuality is too ‘bourgeois’) but in a group session ruled by the cadre leader. Eventually, “the evolving Communist begins to apply this same method to himself,” a thoroughgoing habituation presented as a means of ever-increasing ‘consciousness.’ “Whether externally applied or internally generated, however, this questioning, probing testing process maintains a pressure upon the personality which transforms the solidity of the previous intellectual outlook and psychic set into a state of flux in which it can be remolded.”

Admittedly, “the emotions present something of a problem.” They cannot simply be eliminated or reliably repressed. In the end, however, most of them “are susceptible of being channeled in directions of value to the Party.” With careful observation, supervision, and pressure, such powerful feelings as “filial devotion, love, or friendship” can be transferred to the Party, its Leader, and Party ‘comrades.’ Meyer offers the example of shame. This must not “exist in connection with [the cadre member’s] subordination to the decisions and discipline of the Party,” but it should surely prevail when a Party member exhibits any deviation from “his subordination to the decisions and discipline of the Party.”

None of this implies that Communists regard Marxist-Leninist ideas the way they regard the ideas of other systems of thought—as mere ‘superstructures’ concealing the material interests of one’s class. “The assignment of a secondary role to [the Communist’s] consciously held theoretical outlook can lead to serious misunderstanding of the Communist personality as well as to disastrous misjudgment of the power of Communism” because “for the Communist, life takes place in terms of the categories of Marxism-Leninism as surely as the normal eye sees in terms of color or the monochromatic in lights and shades,” providing him with “certainties and clarities which fit with precision into the well-ordered patter of his total outlook.” And so, “the Communist leader will not hesitate to tell a physicist that the principle of indeterminacy represents unclear thinking and imperfect science, or to instruct the novelist in the principles of his craft.” Conversely, the true Communist who is a physicist or a novelist will take such strictures “more seriously than he would those of leaders in his own profession.” And if he encounters anything that doesn’t fit into the system? Dismiss it as yet another of the “unsubstantial vaporings” emitted from the swamp of human illusion. You already have, or someday can have, the answer “to every meaningful question” (emphasis added). Whatever cannot be understood in terms of Marxist-Leninist science does not really exist and deserves no serious inquiry.

In this, Marxism-Leninism resembles other modern materialisms and positivisms, also animated the Machiavellian “concept of thought and life as control.” But unlike the competing ‘bourgeois’ doctrines, Marxism-Leninism maintains that “control over existence is not simply a goal of thought but its essential being.” It is also unlike those doctrines because for Marxism-Leninism “theory is not reducible to practice, but indissolubly united with it in a relationship where neither exists without the other, where each determines the other, permitting independent validity neither to abstract theory nor to empirical practice” in “a strange marriage of rationalism and empiricism.”

In line with this epistemology, the central moral question for the Communist is not ‘What is the Good?’ or (assuredly) not ‘What would Jesus do?’ but “Will this act help or hurt the revolution—the Party?” Morality implies freedom, choice. Sure enough, according to the Party, the Marxist is “truly free” because he recognizes the dialectical necessity that is History and accepts it. “It is this recognition and acceptance…not the physical fact of being a proletarian, which gives freedom and power.” ‘Freedom’ means freedom from ‘bourgeois’ morality and from any consideration not “strictly derived from strategical and tactical considerations.” “In every situation [the Communist] must ask himself: ‘What is the objective situation, what forces do we have, what allies can be won, what is the first thing to be done, what mechanisms are available or can be created?”

Struggles with one’s ‘conscience,’ with childhood trauma, or with any of an individual’s “inner personal struggles” betoken only “distorted reflections of social reality.” Religious self-examination and psychoanalysis are equally bogus. While Marxism “cannot deny the biological antecedents of society,” it takes the Faustian view of them: In the beginning was not the Word; in the beginning was the act—not, it should be needless to say, the act of God but the act of man. “Man qua man is neither the result of a creative act of God nor of the process of evolution. He comes into being as a result of his own act,” the act of producing “their means of subsistence”—labor. Labor is the source of all value because such production is what makes man man. 

Pack up your troubles, then. Get busy with agitation and propaganda as fused with “activity.” By itself, action is merely “reformist,” unrevolutionary because it lacks the ideational guidance propagated by the Party. Communists distinguish agitation from propaganda: agitation aims at the masses, unifying them emotionally behind the useful ’cause’ of the moment; propaganda raises the consciousness of “the riper elements” of the masses, through “more restrained argument affecting the understanding.” But by themselves, agitation and propaganda are “sectarian,” incapable of “produc[ing] substantial results, because ideas can only move the recipient when they are unified in his experience with practice.” 

How to begin? Begin with your friends and acquaintances. “Everyone with whom the Communist is in contact is, at a greater or less remove, a potential recruit,” preferably someone of whom he has “thorough knowledge.” “His approach moves from the particular to the general, starting with the already accepted beliefs, the attitudes, and the personal problems of the individual concerned; he introduces the Party position slowly and gradually, step by step, as a development which seems to arise naturally from analysis of that person’s own problems.” Writings, discussion groups, classes organized by the Party all come later and are “ancillary to the central technique of personal discussion.” A final invitation to join the Party depends upon the circumstances prevailing in the regime in which the Party operates. If secrecy is necessary, the Party will be more cautious than it needs to be in most ‘bourgeois democracies,’ most of the time.

The moment of the invitation is “the crucial moment” in the process because this is when the person targeted is likely to balk. The danger is not merely that of losing the potential recruit. “Those lost at this point can become almost as inimical to the Party as ex-Communists” or, if they continue to hover on the margin as “useful but cynical and critical sympathizers,” the Party’s time and efforts have been squandered. “Therefore, at this stage extraordinary efforts are made by the Party to assist the recruiter.” Call in the “leading Party members…to help personally in conversation and discussion”; use such “emotional methods” as participation in mass meetings and inclusion in “social events with Party and fellow-traveling dignitaries.” (You’ve seen Jane Fonda in the movies, but would you like to meet her?) 

“In my years in the Party, I had considerable experience both with direct recruits of my own and as a Party leader called in to assist with others’ recruits.” Meyer learned that “the final block” against joining the Party “seem[ed] to have forms as multifarious as human character and experience.” A reluctant or critical spouse; a personal dispute with a Party member; moral qualms; worries about the possible impact of Party membership on one’s career prospects or the prospects of one’s children: “Whatever the problem might be, there is almost certain to be a problem.” It is up to the recruiter and his Party associates to find a path to persuasion.

The Party also must find a path in the larger sense, the path to the future. “Communist leadership…is up against a continuing contradiction between two incompatible goals: the building of a mass Party and the molding of an iron Party.” These goals, then, are in a dialectical relationship. Under some circumstances, the Party will spread its net widely; under others, “smaller, but better” becomes the slogan and the Party undertakes to purge itself of dross or at least to pressure its members into stricter conformity with the Party ‘line.’ Between 1936 and 1941, the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Party turnover reached about eighty percent in the CPUSA. While mass recruitment is a desideratum, “the primary aim is the creation of a steeled cadre, flexible enough to take any tactically desired stand on current questions, accreting strength as it moves through opposite and contradictory campaigns and feeds upon generation after generation of the rank and file of the formal Parties.” Acceptance of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, after years of vituperation against fascism, requires exactly the sort of discipline the Party needs at its core. Weaklings need not stay. The lukewarm must be spit out of its mouth. Or, shifting the metaphor, “the Communist examines an individual very much as a carpenter examines a piece of lumber.” 

As for the piece of lumber itself, it finds itself in “a world of trans-valued values.” Persons “never suspected of being Communists” turn out to be just that. Some supposedly Very Important Person will be dressed down by a seemingly “more or less insignificant figure.” The Communist has taken an oath “to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious Socialism,” to “remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the Party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” Although Marxism lays claim to the final form of rationality, of science, the actual appeal is more to the spirited element of the soul, to thumos rather than logos: “duty, responsibility, and the privilege of being one of those who have elected for History.” Or, to lower the tone, it is an appeal to that part of men and women that wants to ‘know the score,’ wants to be on the inside, not on the outside, “dragged by events.” In exchange for this privilege (and to be sure, there is as much snobbery attached to Party membership as there is to membership in a ‘country club’) , one must accept the Communist Party as “the be-all and the end-all of life, the center of all human purpose,” rightfully demanding of him “no partial segment of his life but all of his life.” 

“The whole of Communist training…drives towards the acceptance of the revolution as the end to which all things and all persons must be strictly subordinated as means.” For example, Party recruits need indoctrination, and dialectic rules the Communist schoolroom “through a guided discussion directed toward a predetermined end”—that is, in imitation of the way ‘History’ itself works, according to Marxism. “Conflicts, tensions, and their resolutions are the very stuff of the transformation of traditional man into Communist man.”  As the more senior Party member, the teacher-leader is always correct, putting forth “not their personal opinions, their judgments…but their scientific analysis.” This, again, is how all the Party meetings work, not only the ones that take place in classrooms; the leader “will utilize his superior command of dialectics” to assert his unquestionable authority. For those that waver, the Party reserves sessions of “criticism and self-criticism.” While “the first time the neophyte is himself subject to ‘self-criticism,’ it is probably the most painful thing that has ever happened to him,” but that is the point: toughen up. The compensation for such humiliation comes with “feeling the power of the Party, a power with which he identifies himself,” as a small cadre of Party members “carry out plans which have been worked out in detail beforehand,” successfully bending a much larger organization—say, a teachers’ union—to commit itself to the Party line without knowing it. 

Training of Party members within a cadre is “qualitatively different from pre-cadre training in one important respect: the decisive role of self-imposition of pressure.” To be sure, “external” pressures are still there, “but the force of the Communist ethos has been absorbed into the personality itself.” “A Communist is still not ‘tested’ until his will has become fused with the will of the Party.” The test comes when a cadre member deviates, however slightly, from Party commands and practices, any “clash between personal judgment and Party judgment.” For example, if the Party line abruptly reverses course, you will follow the new course. “To reverse one’s self before other human beings, Party or non-Party, without losing one’s self-respect, necessitates full inner acceptance of the rightfulness and power of the Party,” the “god of a godless world.” “Only by a god can such acceptance be demanded and only to a god can it be given without the utter destruction of self-respect.” Meyer had met several of the Party luminaries of the day—CPUSA chairman Earl Browder, French Communist Party chairman Maurice Thorez, East Germany Party General Secretary Walter Ulbrich of East Germany and Bulgarian Communist and erstwhile General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov. He reports that each regarded himself as being in “a state of tutelage” to his superiors. Such men take “what anywhere else would be regarded as unmitigated abuse,” subjecting subordinates to the same, “as necessary,” all “with extraordinary little of the emotions of abasement or resentment, on the one hand, or aggressive ego-satisfaction, on the other.” To do less is to succumb to “subjectivity,” the thoroughgoing Communist’s “cardinal sin.” “To put anything before the Party is subjectivity.” Thus, the true Communist “can only be understood if we understand the end to which he is devoted as the compass is drawn to the magnetic pole: the conquest of the world for Communism.”

True enough, the Party is “in actuality the creature of the rulers of the Soviet Union.” But the rulers of the Soviet Union are held up as the leaders of the Party, not of the regime of Russia’s nation-state. “The faith triumphant, the Soviet Union, is…but an aspect of the faith. It is the faith, whole and entire, Communism, the Party, which inspires the Communist’s universe and is the object of his devotion.” Tyranny, the Gulag, purges of Party members, mass murder of ‘class enemies,’ aggressive war against other states, “even Khruschev’s exposure of Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956” are only “necessary casualties of the historical process, unfortunate but unavoidable” features of the dialectic. “Emotionally they simply are not real, even when [the Communist] has actually seen horrors with his own eyes. Facts that do not fit the theoretical outlook of Marxism-Leninism have only a shadowy existence,” since “reality rests only in the doctrines of Communism and the institution of the Party.” Such men are products of “the extirpation of every remnant of philosophical, moral, aesthetic principle or instinct natural to the human being, and the substitution of the principles and instincts of the Communist world-view.” It is the final conquest of nature, of human nature itself. 

It is easy to assume that Meyer’s book is a well-informed, vigorously argued ‘period piece,’ consigned to irrelevancy by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is true that the center of the worldwide Communist movement is no longer Moscow. But it still has a center, does it not?