As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, the
authorities generally list four primary causes of the decay of the Church of
England and the beginning of the Oxford Movement. All of these are interrelated, and it is
actually impossible to discuss them intelligently in isolation. These are 1) Getting involved in politics, 2)
Erastianism, or the State moving into determining religious beliefs, practices,
and policies, 3) A confusion of the religious identity of the Church of England
itself, and 4) The rise of liberalism.
We went briefly into the first three causes of problems in
the Church of England in the previous posting.
As John Henry Newman was chiefly concerned with liberalism, we realized
it deserved a series of postings all to itself — if only to define the term!
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
It turns out that in the early nineteenth century
“liberalism” was at least three things, two of which are similar, and the third
(which sounds similar, and is the same as far as many people are concerned)
that is actually the complete opposite of the other two. The failure to distinguish between the three
main types of liberalism has resulted in massive confusion down to the present
day.
Now, the reader should be made fully aware in advance that
the following designations are not universally accepted. They may not even be accepted anywhere other
than on this blog. We figure that’s
okay, because as far as we know, the only other commentator to make the
distinction between the three different types — and then not very clearly — was
Alexis de Tocqueville, and he did it primarily by inference. We find it in Democracy in America (1835, 1840) in de Tocqueville’s description
of how people go about some great undertaking in France, England, and the
United States:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions,
constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies,
in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds. . . . If it
be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the
encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of
some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in
England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. (Alexis
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.2.v.)
Extrapolating from this and from other comments in both
volumes of Democracy in America, we can
fairly conclude that liberalism, far from being one thing, is three: 1) French
or European type, 2) English type, and 3) American type. Confusing matters greatly is the fact that
the American type of liberalism was originally an idealized — yet paradoxically
more realistic — English type of liberalism.
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| Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
English and American liberalism, however, became separated
as English society became progressively more elitist and stratified. This made English liberalism increasingly
resemble French or European type liberalism.
This evolution of English liberalism possibly explains one
of the comments of G.K. Chesterton, made at a time (1908) when he was becoming
disillusioned with the reality of socialism as the liberal vision was being
applied in England. In the United States
some vestiges of American type liberalism still remained and would make its
last stand in the 1912 presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt.
America’s vision was the true, Aristotelian reality of
individual sovereignty and widespread capital ownership. It was not the false Platonic ideal of elitist
capitalism or collectivist socialism, both of which concentrate capital
ownership. The “American Dream” of the
nineteenth century recognized (as Cicero said to his friend Atticus in
reference to Cato’s sometimes misplaced idealism) that people live on the
imperfect “dunghill of Romulus,” not in the perfect world of Plato’s Republic
demanded by capitalists and socialists alike.
Nevertheless, American type liberalism was fast
disappearing in the U.S. and was virtually extinct in England, as Hilaire
Belloc would point out in The Servile
State (1912). As Chesterton said,
The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often
a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism.
But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals. (Gilbert
Keith Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy, 1908.)
So, what was Chesterton talking about, with a paradox that,
much like his autobiography, seems to have obscured more than it revealed? The answer is possibly found in what
“liberalism” had come to mean at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
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| John Henry Newman |
French or European
Liberalism. This is the liberalism
against which John Henry Newman struggled both as an Anglican and as a
Catholic. It is the liberalism of the
French Revolution, of modernism, of “the democratic religion” that was the
original term for socialism. It is why
so many conservatives and orthodox religious leaders condemned liberalism and
democracy at the same time that they supported and relied on genuine, American
type liberalism for social stability, and English type liberalism to maintain
their economic and political supremacy.
In Newman’s day the merger of French or European
liberalism with the English type of liberalism was just beginning, and its distinction
from the American type was becoming obvious.
French or European liberalism, the basis of all forms of socialism, is
the theory that the abstraction of the collective has rights (especially
private property), which are doled out or withheld as expedient to meet the
demands and needs of the State. Pope
Pius XI referred to this liberalism when he declared,
Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a
movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded
to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be
reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of
society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.” (Quadragesimo Anno,
§ 117.)
Pius XI made this even clearer in Divini Redemptoris, in which he refuted scientific socialism
(“atheistic communism”) as comprehensively as he had religious and democratic
socialism in Quadragesimo Anno. Keeping in mind that the harsh criticism of
“liberalistic individualism” in this passage is not an endorsement of socialism
of any kind (condemnation of socialism being one of the main points of the
encyclical!), Pius XI explained,
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| Pope Pius XI |
But God has likewise destined man for civil society according
to the dictates of his very nature. In the plan of the Creator, society is a
natural means which man can and must use to reach his destined end. Society is
for man and not vice versa. This must not be understood in the sense of
liberalistic individualism, which subordinates society to the selfish use of
the individual; but only in the sense that by means of an organic union with
society and by mutual collaboration the attainment of earthly happiness is
placed within the reach of all. In a further sense, it is society which affords
the opportunities for the development of all the individual and social gifts
bestowed on human nature. These natural gifts have a value surpassing the
immediate interests of the moment, for in society they reflect the divine
perfection, which would not be true were man to live alone. But on final analysis,
even in this latter function, society is made for man, that he may recognize
this reflection of God's perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to
the Creator. Only man, the human person, and not society in any form is endowed
with reason and a morally free will.
Man cannot be exempted from his divinely-imposed obligations
toward civil society, and the representatives of authority have the right to
coerce him when he refuses without reason to do his duty. Society, on the other
hand, cannot defraud man of his God-granted rights, the most important of which
We have indicated above. Nor can society systematically void these rights by
making their use impossible. (Divini Redemptoris, §§ 29-30.)
The bottom line: in French or European type liberalism
sovereignty resides in the collective, an abstraction created by man, not in
man created by God. Since this raises up
collective man and sets the State in the place of God, it is, as Pius XI noted,
“utterly foreign to Christian truth,” or to any other kind of truth, for that
matter.
The idea that the collective can have rights that actual
human beings do not is the basis for socialism.
Yes, some forms of socialism permit private property, but that right is
presumed to be a grant from the State or the community. It is not considered something inherent in
the human person by nature.
#30#
