Some people in
the nineteenth century considered Orestes Brownson a bit of a crank. He kept insisting that he wanted to know what
was true, not what was convenient, expedient, or popular. That creates a bit of a problem when what you
come to believe is true is inconvenient, not very expedient, or unpopular,
especially when it annoys other people who don’t care to be reminded that truth
is always true and prefer to go with opinions, preferably their own.
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| Orestes Brownson in his later years. |
Thus Brownson,
when (like G.K. Chesterton) he converted to Catholicism on the grounds that he
believed it to be true, annoyed quite a number of people, many of them
socialists . . . just like the people that Chesterton annoyed by his conversion (as were, it seems, a significant number of capitalists, capitalism being almost as bad as socialism). George Bernard Shaw really got incensed about
it. Of course, GBS got incensed about everything. (To give the Devil his due, Shaw usually had plausible sounding arguments to back it up, even if you didn't agree with him. Unlike some people, he didn't just rant and rave and attack others.)
After converting
to Catholicism in 1844, Brownson went to work countering false European notions
of democracy that put sovereignty in the people as a whole, with a true
American — and Catholic — understanding that put sovereignty in each and every
human being (unlike capitalism, which puts sovereignty in just an élite few). As might be expected, this
got Brownson accused of hypocrisy by both liberal and conservative Catholics as
well as capitalists and socialists.
Brownson had,
after all, used his Quarterly Review
to promote religious/democratic/utopian/etc. (take your pick) socialism and give it credibility to counter the growing problem of capitalism. Even before newspaperman and socialist Horace
Greeley gave space to "Associationist" Albert Brisbane, Brownson published Brisbane’s articles
and those of other Fourierists in the Review. Had it not been for Brownson’s initial
patronage, it is likely that Fourierism would not have caught on nearly as fast
as it did.
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| De Lamennais in his later years. |
Fourierist socialism
was not, however, Brownson’s primary concern following his conversion. He considered Neo-Catholicism, the body of
thought developed by the Abbé Félicité de Lamennais (before de Lamennais renounced
Christianity) to be the most attractive, and therefore the most dangerous, form
of socialism.
This is because
Neo-Catholicism was the most successful at presenting itself as “true
Christianity.” Many authorities down to
the present day, in fact, continue to hold up de Lamennais as the founder of
liberal or social Catholicism — two terms that should really not be considered
the same.
As a Catholic,
Brownson contended that Neo-Catholicism was not truly Christianity at all. Rather, it had appropriated Catholic symbols,
and imputed to them non-Catholic meanings.
Thus, Neo-Catholicism —
. . . rejects in name no Catholic symbol; it only rejects the
Catholic sense. If it finds fault with
the actual Church, it is because she is not truly Catholic, does not understand
herself, does not comprehend the profound sense of her own doctrines, fails to
seize and expound the true Christian idea as it lay in the mind of Jesus, and
as this enlightened age is prepared to receive it. The Christian symbol needs a new and a more
Catholic interpretation, adapted to our stage in universal progress. (Brownson,
“Socialism and the Church,” Essays and
Reviews, op. cit., 499-500. Cf.
“Religious Union of Associationists,” The
American Whig Review, March 1847, 492-502.)
It was not,
however, the hijacking of the outward forms of Catholicism by de Lamennais and
his disciples that most concerned Brownson.
It was the “theory of certitude” and the European-socialist form of
democracy it engendered. De Lamennais’s
theory of certitude is that God grants reason only to the collected mass of
humanity, not to individuals. Individual
human beings must accept truth on faith, not on reason.
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| First Vatican Council |
The idea that
truth must be accepted only on faith is a notion condemned in the First Vatican
Council, the Oath Against Modernism, and Humani Generis, among other Magisterial
documents. The official position of the
Catholic Church is that God creates human beings with the capacity to reason,
and human beings create the collective with their reason through “abstract
thinking.” Even faith is to be grounded
on reason.
Some years after
Brownson critiqued de Lamennais’s theory of certitude, a Catholic priest,
troubled by what he read in Brownson’s
Quarterly Review, asked Brownson how as a Catholic he justified his
position on democracy, freedom of religion, and separation of Church and State
in light of Mirari Vos, the first social encyclical. In “La Mennais and Gregory XVI,” published in
the July 1859 issue of the Review, Brownson explained at length that what the pope condemned
in the 1832 encyclical were the ideas prevalent in Europe, not America.
European notions
of democracy, freedom of religion, and separation of Church and State were
rooted in the theory that the State or the collective is sovereign — as in de
Lamennais’s theory of certitude — not actual human beings as was the case in
the United States. As a result, the
European notion of democracy ultimately either inserted God into the equation
artificially by faith (instead of reason guided and illuminated by faith), or
removed Him altogether.
Brownson expanded
on this in what many consider his greatest work, The American Republic (1865).
Writing “as a Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real
principles are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either in nature or
revelation,” and because “I could not write otherwise if I would, and would not
if I could,” he stated his thesis:
The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is
chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. . . . Its idea is liberty,
indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so
much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the
State, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the
individual — the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and
individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out
in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights
of man and those of society. The Greek and Roman republics asserted the State
to the detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or
assert individual freedom to the detriment of the State. The American republic
has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage
to the other.
Thus — as far as
Brownson was concerned — socialism is based on a theory utterly foreign to
Christian (or any other kind of) truth.
It puts the collective created by man above man created by God, and
offends against the dignity of each human person. It also offends against God by putting
Collective Man at the center instead of God.
Christian
socialism? Religious socialism? Democratic socialism? Call it what you will, it is not compatible
with truth.
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