The Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson

By Michael P. Federici

This collection of thirteen original essays by Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–1876), a major political and philosophical figure in the American Catholic intellectual tradition, presents his developed political theory in which he devotes central attention to connecting Catholicism to American politics. These writings, which date from 1856 to 1874, cover not only his conversion to Catholicism after experimenting with a variety of religious and political beliefs but also slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the era of Jacksonian democracy, and a host of social, political, and economic issues. During this time, Brownson became one of the nation’s leading thinkers and critics. Although faced with a dominant Protestant culture, Brownson argued for a political and social culture influenced by his deeply held Catholic faith. He defended Catholicism from the common charge that it was incompatible with American constitutionalism and, in fact, argued that it was the only spiritually viable foundation for American politics. He defended the political theory and institutions of the American framers, applauding their realistic view of human nature and the importance of both virtue in political leaders and checks and restraints in their constitutional structures. He opposed the rising influence of populist democracy by explaining its flawed assumptions about human nature and the possibilities of politics. Michael P. Federici's well-written introduction situates these essays within a coherent theme and explains how these essays are especially relevant to contemporary debates about populism, race, American exceptionalism, and the relationship between religion and politics. The book will interest students and scholars of American political thought, as well as those with an interest in religion and politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780268104603

Michael P. Federici

Michael P. Federici is professor of political science and international relations at Middle Tennessee State University. He previously served on the faculty at Mercyhurst University. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and his B.S. in Economics from Elizabethtown College. Federici has written or edited several books, including The Challenge of Populism, Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order, The Political Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, Rethinking the Teaching of American History, and The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics.

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INTRODUCTION

Measured by the appearance of scholarly books published in the last seventy-five years or so, interest in the political theory of Orestes Brownson (1803–76) has risen, and for good reason.¹ He wrote dozens of insightful essays that address fundamental problems of political and social order. His best-known work, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny (1865), is an insightful and original analysis of the American republic and the meaning of American constitutionalism. Brownson was especially interested in the spiritual and religious foundations of political order. In particular, he was one of the few nineteenth-century Americans to examine important problems related to political order and Catholic Christianity. He articulated an American perspective on republican constitutionalism and its dependence on a Catholic political culture during one of the most tumultuous times of American history. His most prolific and mature writing corresponds to the two decades surrounding the Civil War, a conflict that took the lives of two of his sons. He was well placed historically and, although an autodidact, well equipped intellectually to consider essential issues involving American identity and American political order. Few in his day could match his spirited defense of the Constitution, the church to which he converted in midlife, and the Union that he ardently defended during the Civil War.

Brownson’s writings fill twenty volumes, made up primarily of essays that he published over the course of his adult life and that cover a wide range of subjects related to politics, religion, education, economics, and social issues like marriage and family. The first half of his life was a spiritual odyssey, during which he moved from one faith and political ideology to another, including Presbyterianism, Universalism, socialism, scientific progressivism, transcendentalism, and finally Catholicism. Once he converted to Catholicism, at roughly age forty, he became an ardent defender of the faith until his death in 1876. The Catholic Brownson was especially interested in the compatibility of Catholic Christianity and American constitutionalism, something that many Americans questioned if not rejected. He did more than posit their compatibility; he intellectually synthesized them in a way previously unknown to the American public. His synthesis was bold if not audacious given the cultural hegemony of Protestant Christianity in nineteenth-century America.

A common thread runs through most of Brownson’s writings—the search for a viable spiritual foundation for the American political order. That search led him to the conclusion that Protestant Christianity, the dominant religious tradition in America, was destructive to American constitutionalism, and Catholic Christianity was the only intellectually, spiritually, and practically viable foundation for the American republic. Moreover, he believed the realization of an authentically Catholic public philosophy or civil religion in America would ignite the worldwide expansion of the Christian ideal of society² and be the instrument of Christ’s final triumph over evil. Evaluating such a controversial claim gets to the heart of Brownson’s political theory, and it requires an understanding of particular aspects of his thought, including his views on popular sovereignty, democracy, public opinion, representation, religious liberty, church-state relations, natural aristocracy, and the Civil War.

The essays included in this volume, ranging from 1856 to 1874, are representative of the intellectually mature and Catholic Brownson. They cover the final phase of his political theory in which he devotes central attention to connecting Catholic Christianity to American politics. Brownson’s political theory provides important insights regarding the spiritual foundation of the American constitutional order. His contention that Catholic Christianity is the only viable spiritual authority for the American republic requires readers to consider the philosophical and cultural efficacy of such a claim, as well as its validity in light of the counterclaims of others, who believe that political regimes should rest on secular foundations or religious pluralism.

Brownson based his conclusions about an American public philosophy or civil religion, on a constitutional theory that emphasized the American framers’ distinction between pure democracy and republican constitutionalism.³ He understood that these forms of government were not only significantly different institutionally but were also fundamentally at odds in their respective assumptions about human nature and the prospects for popular government. The rise of popular government involved a tension between competing types of democracy that both Tocqueville and Brownson identified and the American framers understood. The variety of government connected to a purer and more direct form of democracy was part of a larger effort to emancipate human beings from outer authority of any kind, monarch, church, class, and tradition included. These sources of authority were considered unnecessary because of humans’ natural goodness. Brownson lumped Protestant Christianity into this movement. He believed that it fostered the idea that human beings were capable of democratic self-government, meaning that when pushed to an extreme they could govern without constitutional checks and restraints or without a corresponding transcendent spiritual authority to guide them. Moreover, Protestantism was animated by sectarian division and lacked the ability to unify the nation because, like democracy, it tended to elevate the individual above the church and natural law. Only a Catholic understanding of human nature and political life could sustain the American constitutional system, and consequently only a culture dominated by authentically Catholic citizens could save the American republic from populist degeneration.

It is no coincidence that while he was a Protestant, Brownson was also a democrat. Once he converted to Catholic Christianity, he became a republican constitutionalist. Also of note, in his Civil War essays, Brownson tends to consider the Union and the church in similar ways. Separation from the Union was as inexcusable as separation from the church. Secession was tantamount to suicide, and it meant forfeiture of state sovereignty and individual rights. Likewise, Brownson follows Lincoln in arguing that the nation could not exist part slave and part free. In short, unity, if not uniformity, was a defining characteristic of American constitutionalism. Brownson may not have been a cultural monist, but his political theory had monistic tendencies that are evident in his view of the Civil War and in his conception of America’s role in the world. In Mission of America, he argues for American expansion throughout North, Central, and South America in the name of fulfilling God’s will on earth. It is difficult to reconcile Brownson’s sober Catholic view of human nature with his idealistic desire for American expansionism, just as it is difficult to square his support for the American framers’ theory of constitutionalism with his insistence on national superiority during the Civil War. These inconsistencies are partly explained by his lifelong belief in the transformative possibilities of politics. His religious conversion was accompanied by a political conversion, but he remained strident, and at times radical, in his tenor and vehement insistence that cultural reform would transform political life. What changed in the course of his conversions was the substance of his political and religious beliefs but not the anxious temperament with which they were advocated.

Brownson’s political theory presumes the primacy of the unwritten constitution, what he sometimes called the providential constitution, and its relationship to the written constitution. Every society has two constitutions, one written and one unwritten. The unwritten constitution precedes the written constitution and gives it life and historical texture. As Brownson explains, the nation must exist, and exist as a political community, before it can give itself a [written] constitution.⁴ The US Constitution is not a historical abstraction constructed from the idyllic fancy of ideological revolutionaries or a state of nature. The 1787 Constitutional Convention and ensuing ratification by the states were not what founded America. The written document is a more formal and legal recognition of the America nation, but the nation existed as a political community long before the Constitutional Convention.

America developed organically over time. Following Joseph de Maistre, Brownson claimed that constitutions are generated, not made.⁵ It was in the domain of the unwritten constitution that Brownson identified the inadequacies of Protestant Christianity and the virtues of Catholic Christianity. Aspects of Protestant Christianity share with democracy the romantic deification of man and faith in the momentary, undeliberative will of the people, even though some Protestants espouse the natural depravity of human nature. In short, both Protestant Christianity and democratic theory fail to provide a transcendent standard that can serve as the basis for checking and restraining human will and appetite. Without such a standard, Brownson believed, American republicanism would degenerate into a populist democracy because it would lack a unifying element. Protestantism is culturally divisive. Catholic Christianity, by contrast, has a different philosophical pedigree. The individual and the state are subordinate to God’s natural law, as Aquinas argued. For laws, including constitutions, to be legitimate, they must emanate from the natural law that serves as a unifying force giving moral authority to political law. Catholic Christianity is compatible with constitutional republicanism because the latter requires a spiritual foundation rooted in authentic transcendence. Only Catholic Christianity provides the spiritual substance, the moral character, and the cultural and intellectual capital to maintain a republican form of government in America.

This volume of Brownson’s political theory and its introduction focus on his later writings, especially thirteen essays that represent his mature political thought: The Day-Star of Freedom, The Church and the Republic, Mission of America, The Convert, The Great Rebellion, State Rebellion, State Suicide, The Federal Constitution, The President’s Message and Proclamation, Liberalism and Progress, Beecherism and Its Tendencies, The Papacy and the Republic, The Democratic Principle, and Constitutional Guaranties. The Convert includes Brownson’s autobiographical reflections on his spiritual life and conversion to Catholic Christianity. It provides insights into his search for a transcendent ground for his personal faith and for the American republic. When The Convert is considered alongside his late political writings, the connection between his personal quest for spiritual meaning and his quest as a political theorist for American constitutional meaning becomes apparent.

In his Civil War essays, Brownson demonstrates his penchant for uniformity and spiritedness that seem to exclude the possibility of a unity enriched by diversity. Especially when it came to slavery after secession, he was unwilling to support compromising with evil, even if it meant extreme violence and civil war. He insisted on the unconditional surrender of the Confederate states, arguing that the United States are in the right and the southern rebels wholly in the wrong. He called the Confederacy a league of conspirators and rebels, adding that there never was a more causeless rebellion, one more unprovoked, more unjustifiable, or more guilty (GR, 256). He was deeply angered by the failure of the Southern states to use legal and peaceful means to create a separate nation. If they had called a constitutional convention, they would likely have been granted the authority to organize into a separate nation. Brownson’s anger was manifest in polemical tirades. For example, he stated that the American citizen who seeks to overthrow the American government is not only a traitor, but a liberticide, a dis-humanized monster not fit to live or inhabit any part of this globe: he has no suitable place this side of hell (GR, 260). And yet Brownson was not intent on destroying Southern culture apart from slavery. He appreciated aspects of the South that he hoped would outlive slavery.

Brownson’s spirited views of secession stemmed from his underlying belief that slavery violated the natural law and was therefore un-Christian. As was Lincoln, Brownson was for a time willing to tolerate slavery for the sake of union. After the Southern rebellion, however, the preservation of the Union required the elimination of slavery. It is in this context that Brownson universalizes the war, suggesting that the cause of self-government throughout the world is at stake. He gives the war a larger humanitarian cause by stating that America is the asylum of the oppressed and the home of freedom (GR, 264). In these instances of exaggerated national and historical importance, Brownson maintains his radical demeanor and personality.

Brownson’s search for existential and political identity assumes, in common with the classical and Judeo-Christian tradition of political theory, that political order is a function of the individual order in the souls of political leaders and the governed. This connection between moral order and political order is what some political theorists have called Plato’s anthropological principle. What was new in Brownson was his insistence on connecting American political order to Catholic Christianity. Brownson believed that only Catholic Christianity could provide a viable spiritual foundation for the American political order. Taken in the context of nineteenth-century America, a nation mainly consisting of Protestant Christians, Brownson’s claim is curious, some might say ludicrous. Before evaluating his claim, it is necessary to review his arguments and place them within his larger political theory.

BROWNSON ON SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL ORDER

Even before his conversion to Catholicism in 1844 at the age of forty, Brownson was searching for a spiritual foundation for the American political order. Yet the early Brownson had politically radical tendencies and a passionate temperament that he never completely abandoned. He was a humanitarian, a social democrat in the tradition of Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Saint-Simon.⁶ Just a few years before his Catholic conversion, he wrote one of his most radical essays, The Laboring Classes (1840).⁷ While he shared with the older classical and Judeo-Christian tradition of political thought Plato’s anthropological principle, he tended to romanticize human nature and the social and political potential of democracy. His early writings are filled with idealistic expectations of a transformed world. The experience of the 1840 presidential election, including the widespread rejection and criticism of his argument in The Laboring Classes, shook Brownson’s confidence in radical democracy.⁸ From at least the time of his essay Constitutional Government (January 1842), Brownson began a political conversion that closely paralleled his religious conversion.⁹ The converted Brownson was a Catholic constitutionalist committed to the preservation of American political institutions and the mission of building the Christian ideal of society in America and the world. Once realized in America, the Christian ideal of society would be spread to all corners of the globe as history progressed toward Christ’s permanent victory over Satan and a new order of civilization was cast. With these sentiments Brownson exhibited both American and Catholic exceptionalism. His conversion led to more conservative political attitudes, but he maintained a fervor for his new politics that equaled that of his younger years.

Brownson rejected the modern liberal idea that spiritual matters are best left to private life. In fact, he was convinced for the better part of his life that some form of Christianity was the proper spiritual foundation for the American republic. In Brownson’s view, all political regimes need moral authority and order to govern effectively. Legitimate authority must come from a transcendent source. Governments based on popular sovereignty are no exception. To foster liberty, they must establish an order that is attuned to the transcendent source of order. Brownson explains that liberty is not in the absence of authority, but in being held to obey only just and legitimate authority. . . . There is no true liberty without order, and no order without a constituted authority (C, 183–84). This realization marked a fundamental change in Brownson’s political theory. As he describes his transformation, Government was no longer the mere agent of society, as my democratic masters had taught me, but an authority having the right and the power to govern society, and direct and aid it, as a wise providence, in fulfilling its destiny. I became henceforth a conservative in politics, instead of an impracticable radical, and through political conservatism I advanced rapidly towards religious conservatism (C, 184).

As individuals can only be free when they submit to God’s authority, citizens can only be free when they submit to legitimate political authority that derives its legitimacy by subordinating itself to a higher spiritual authority. Not all political regimes are legitimate. Temporal institutions like the state can achieve legitimacy only if they recognize their dependence on the spiritual authority of the church. The federal government, Brownson writes in the context of the Civil War, derives its powers from God (SRSS, 277). By contrast, the Confederate states lacked moral authority because they were engendered by the desire to maintain slavery, an evil prohibited by the natural law.

Brownson recognized that by the middle of the eighteenth century, Americans were beginning to accept the belief, rooted in Rousseau’s political thought, that the inorganic people (i.e., the people as an unorganized mass of individuals [CG, 422]) are the standard by which political life should be attuned. In other words, vox populi vox Dei. This democratic sentiment was present in both the North and the South, and it undermined the framers’ constitutionalism because it implied, to use Madison’s language in Federalist 10, that the people’s will did not have to be refined and enlarged by representatives and political institutions. Brownson insisted that the people are not sovereign in the form of a momentary majority that speaks directly and without the mediating role of representatives and institutions. The clearest example of popular sovereignty is political convention, an indirect, mediated expression of the people’s will.

Brownson, like St. Augustine, distinguished between the temporal and the spiritual domains of life. If politics is disconnected from spiritual reality, then political rulers, laws, and the people have no foundation for justice. Politics becomes attuned to Thrasymachus’s dictum that Might makes right. For political life to be conducted in accordance with justice and the summum bonum, political rulers and citizens must be infused with the spiritual substance of Christianity. This relationship between virtue and politics does not mean, however, that political rulers should be religious leaders. For each domain of life to serve its proper role, church and state must be institutionally separated. Brownson was, therefore, opposed to the institutional or constitutional unity of church and state. Yet he advocated the spiritual and cultural union of church and state.¹⁰ Brownson explains that religion, to be able to assist the secular order and supply its deficiencies, must be independent of that order, and hold, not from it, but from an order above it. The church is nothing, and can do nothing, save as a distinct and independent power holding immediately from God (CG, 426). One of the reasons Brownson believed that the American republic was best situated to realize the Christian ideal of society was because it acknowledged the separation of church and state and at the same time placed the spiritual authority of the church above the secular authority of the state.

The standard that guides political life, including the rule of law, has a moral component that is ultimately transcendent and stems from the same universal authority that guides an individual’s spiritual life. Consequently, what the framers called pure democracy is incompatible with an authentic Christian republic, because the former rejects the primacy of spiritual authority over temporal authority. In a pure democracy, sovereignty rests with the momentary majority, what Brownson called the inorganic people. The inorganic people, however, cannot provide the spiritual ground for political and social life any more than an individual can provide sufficient spiritual nourishment without the grace of God. Nor can the people, as a secular undifferentiated mass, be the representatives of transcendence; they must be checked and guided by a genuine spiritual authority that emanates from the church. In this regard Brownson advocated a Christian civil religion led by a Catholic natural aristocracy.

Pure or direct democracy suggests that the momentary will of the people provides the foundation for justice, but as Brownson points out, the American constitution is not designed simply to confer powers on the government, but also to place restrictions on it, and therefore on the will of the people themselves as the political sovereign (CG, 418). In this regard, Brownson’s political theory is consistent with the American framers’ constitutional theory articulated in The Federalist.¹¹ In fact, Brownson’s political theory can be viewed as a defense of the framers’ political theory against the contrary democratic ideologies of his age.¹² His understanding of the relationship between the people and their representatives echoes Edmund Burke’s Speech to the Electors at Bristol and Madison’s Federalist 10. Brownson states that,

Within the limits of the constitution, the representative is remitted by the people themselves to his own discretion and honest judgment of what is or is not for the public good. In making up his judgment as to the measures he will propose, the policy he will adopt, or line of conduct he will pursue, he is free to consult the state of public opinion and the interests and wishes of his constituents, and if a wise and prudent statesman, he will do so, but not as to the law he is to obey or execute. Nothing can relieve him from the responsibility of forming his own judgment and of following it unflinchingly, whatever may be the popular clamor. (CG, 416–17)

Brownson’s distrust of the people as an inorganic undifferentiated mass stemmed from his Catholic anthropology. Men are fallen creatures. Original sin plagues every society and state; utopia is impossible. The governed and the government must be adequately checked by constitutional constraints and by a culture that is imbued with the Christian ideal of society (MA, 76). In short, the problems that Brownson identified with the American political order cannot be permanently solved. What can be done to improve the condition of justice in American society depends on the creation of a Christian civilization that is dependent on attunement to a divine standard above human beings by which political rulers and others can measure the life of politics. Only Catholic Christianity provides such a standard because it accepts the reality of a transcendent God and the subordination of political authority to him. Protestant Christianity is too individualistic to direct political affairs; it grants to each individual the status of sovereign authority in spiritual matters that leads to the idea that in political life the individual will is supreme. In short, Protestant Christianity inverts the proper relationship between spiritual and political authorities.

Brownson believed that Protestantism and democratism were connected. Both placed the source of authority in the individual. The inorganic people do not need to be subject to constitutional checks and restraints because, as the fathers of modern democratism (e.g., Rousseau, Paine, Jefferson) suggested, the will of the people is the will of God. Moreover, democracy, rather than uplifting society to the Christian ideal, tends to reduce all things to a low average, and to substitute popular opinion for truth, justice, reason, as the rule of action, and the criterion even of moral judgment (L&P, 346). Popular will and public opinion are not only fickle but subject to manipulation by demagogues, the press, and special interests. Brownson asserted that

everybody knows that what passes for popular opinion is not the opinion even of the people, nine-tenths of whom are incapable of forming an opinion for themselves, but the opinion of the journals, demagogues, and unscrupulous politicians. The process of manufacturing public opinion is very simple, and well understood, and no sensible man has the least respect for it. It is purely an artificial thing, made to order. Two or three men are sufficient to manufacture it for an entire state. An able editor denounces a policy as unpopular, and with a little effort he succeeds in making it so, and woe to the man that dares to resist it. (CG, 414)

Brownson’s insistence that Catholic Christianity is the only viable public philosophy for America raises an interesting question regarding the American framers. The Catholic Brownson had few if any reservations about the American constitutional system. He often stated, as he did in The Papacy and the Republic, that the constitution of the American state needs no change (P&R, 387).¹³ But one wonders how the framers, who after all were not Catholics, created a political system that could evolve into a republic supported by a Catholic civil religion. Brownson believed that the American republic was rooted in the Catholic tradition. He argued that the American political system relied on common law that is of Catholic origin (P&R, 380). In Mission of America he wrote, Our Protestant ancestors founded the American order, not on their Protestantism, but on the natural law, natural justice and equity as explained by the church, long prior to the Protestant movement of Luther and his associates, and they followed out those great principles of natural right, justice, and equality, which Catholic councils, doctors, and jurisconsults during fifteen hundred years had labored to render popular (78).

The American political system also recognized the supremacy of the spiritual order and the subordination of the temporal (P&R, 386). Brownson was convinced of this hierarchy, because in America religious liberty was secured by the Constitution. The American principle was religious liberty not religious toleration (D-SF, 27). The constitutional recognition of religious liberty meant that the American state is not an infidel or a godless state, nor is it indifferent to religion. It does not, indeed, as the state, profess any particular form of Christianity, but it recognizes the importance and necessity of religion, and its obligation to respect and protect the religion of its citizens (D-SF, 32). The framers were neither democrats nor atheists but constitutional republicans, who recognized a spiritual authority above the people and the government—what Walter Lippmann and others called the higher law.¹⁴ Moreover, they acknowledged the notion that the temporal political order ought to be attuned to the permanent things, those universal values that give life meaning, purpose, and spiritual fulfillment. The founding of the American political order on natural law, natural reason, and justice undermined Protestant Christianity because Protestantism asserts the total depravity of human nature, declares all acts done in a state of nature to be sin, and denies nature to make way for grace, and reason to make way for faith (MA, 78). Moreover, Protestant Christianity emancipates the state from all moral law, from all obligation to maintain individual rights, and is neither more nor less than political atheism (D-SF, 34). While Brownson identified these ideological characteristics with evangelical Protestantism, he did not consider, or was unwilling to consider, a form of Protestantism that was compatible with American constitutionalism. In Beecherism and Its Tendencies, he called Protestantism a subjective religion that is essentially unintellectual, illogical, and irrational (B&T, 354). This caricature of Protestantism is a weakness of Brownson’s political theory generally and a significant obstacle to the acceptance of his argument for a Catholic civil religion in America. Brownson further depreciated Protestant Christianity by concluding that either Protestantism must get the upper hand and eliminate the American system, or the American system must get the upper hand and eliminate Protestantism. The latter is what has happened (MA, 78).

BROWNSON’S CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY

As has been noted, an important part of Brownson’s political theory is his rejection of democratism in favor of constitutional republicanism. The difference between the two corresponding regime types is significant and illuminates Brownson’s continuity with the American framers. A democratic republic places the will of the people above the Constitution; it considers the momentary popular will to be tantamount to the summum bonum. The US Constitution represents the legitimate and sovereign will of the people, but advocates of democracy place the momentary will of the people above law itself.¹⁵ The will of the momentary majority, in their view, is the will of God. But for Brownson the people are only sovereign as an organic people expressing itself in the Constitution and through constitutional representatives. Those representatives have no obligation to follow the momentary will of the people. As Brownson put it, We deny that the representative is bound to obey the instructions or the will of his constituents, save as given in the constitution (CG, 416). Accepting the momentary will of the people as the highest standard makes the Constitution a dead letter. Why have a constitution if the people, motivated by some momentary passion, can override its requirements?

What further disturbed Brownson is that the written constitution can become the plaything of the unwritten constitution if populist ideas are infused into the hearts and minds of the people. The customs, habits, attitudes, and moral vision of the people are what give the Constitution life, or what nullify its dictates. In nineteenth-century America, egalitarian ideologies began to replace constitutional attitudes. Humanitarianism, what Brownson sometimes called Jacobinism, took hold on the American mind, which meant that the passion of the moment rode roughshod over the Constitution. The tendency of our age, wrote Brownson, is to place what is called humanity above constitutions and laws, and to assert for the people, indeed for one’s party, the authority and infallibility Catholics assert for the church of God (CG, 417). He continued that the people will preserve the constitution, when it is not in their way, or when it serves their purpose; but whenever it opposes an obstacle to their will, pet passion, or fanaticism, they will brush it away as a mere cobweb, and rush on with resistless fury to the realization of the end which, for the moment, they have in view, be it good or bad (CG, 421).

How can this problem be rectified? How can Americans achieve fidelity to the Constitution by placing the sovereign will of the people, as expressed in the Constitution, above their momentary passions? It is worth repeating that what is insufficient about the American political order, in Brownson’s view, is not the written constitution but the unwritten constitution—the attitudes, customs, and character of the American people. To change the unwritten constitution requires not new public policies or constitutional amendments but an institutional authority that recognizes the supremacy of spiritual things and has the authority to represent the higher things. In Brownson’s view, only the Catholic Church can fill this role in America. Brownson also identified common characteristics in evangelical Protestantism, like Beecherism, and populist democracy. In both instances individuals are bound to no creed, obligated to defend no doctrine (B&T, 368). Evangelicalism and populism are so elastic that they lack standards against which individual will and appetite can be restrained. Just as Church doctrine and creed provide limits and standards for moral behavior, a constitution provides legal limits and standards to check and restrain political behavior and power. When both religious and political authority exist in this way, the harmony of church and state exists, and one authority reinforces the other. In Brownson’s mind, Protestantism and democratism tend toward moral and political anarchy.

CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA

To make the argument for a Catholic public philosophy in America, Brownson had to respond to critics who charged that Catholic Christianity was incompatible with American political institutions because it was undemocratic. It was a common argument in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America that Catholicism was detrimental to American constitutionalism, because a church based on the papacy and clerical hierarchy is akin to monarchy and therefore antidemocratic. Some of the most strident antipapist sentiment came from advocates of populist democracy like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Even advocates of aristocratic constitutionalism like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were virulent antipapists. Beyond demonstrating the compatibility of Catholicism and American republicanism, Brownson sought to prove that Catholic Christianity could provide the spiritual leadership and substance that would transform the American republic into the Christian ideal of society.¹⁶

Brownson argued in The Papacy and the Republic that without the papacy or the Catholic Church, which is essentially papal, the republican or democratic form of government has nothing to stand on, and is and must be an impracticable government. . . . This is true of any civil government, but especially true of a republican or democratic government like ours. Brownson added that the state, like any human institution, cannot stand alone. God alone is self-existent and self-supporting (P&R, 374). The state requires a spiritual foundation. Brownson does not advocate theocracy; in fact he explicitly rejects it. But he does insist that justice and happiness (in the Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia) are the ends of government and that justice preexists the state. Justice and happiness are determined by the universal moral order, of which God is the author and into which man is born. For political rulers and states to govern in accordance with justice, and to foster happiness, they must be attuned to the transcendent order. The church provides an institutional foundation for advising political leaders and citizens about spiritual matters that the state is obligated to govern. For example, marriage is both a spiritual/religious matter and a civil or political matter. The state must determine what constitutes marriage and related matters. Without the assistance of the church, political leaders in a governing system based on popular sovereignty are prone to identify the legal boundaries of marriage based on popular sentiment or ideological preference. Brownson asserts that marriage is a divine institution (P&R, 383–84). Consequently,

it pertains to the spiritual order, and its conditions, its rights, and its duties are determined by the law of God, and the state must be governed in its action in regard to it by the decisions of the spiritual authority, which alone is competent to say when it is or is not lawful, to establish impedimenta dirimentia [separation], to grant or withhold divorce, to declare its dissolubility or indissolubility. The question of marriage is of the gravest importance, for on it depends the family, and on the family depends society, and ultimately the state itself. Evidently the question is not within the jurisdiction of the temporal power. (P&R, 383)

If the state determines issues of marriage without the guidance of the church, it usurps the functions of the spiritual authority (P&R, 384). The danger of relegating marriage to the temporal authority is that it ceases to be anything more than a partnership of interest and passion; it loses its transcendent moorings and obligations. In Brownson’s words, Withdraw marriage from the spiritual order, and you leave it without any moral obligation, and relieve its violation from all taint of sin or guilt before God. The spouses are not bound in conscience to mutual fidelity, and may be as unfaithful as they choose, providing they are willing to run the risk of the civil penalties the legislature may impose; for the state cannot itself create a moral obligation, or by its own authority alone bind the conscience (P&R, 384).

The practical consequence of depreciating marriage as a civil union governed solely by the state is that marital fidelity ceases to have a spiritual and moral foundation. The state may consider infidelity a civil offence, but once it is separated from the church’s sovereignty and moral teachings, it loses the stigma of a morally and socially destructive sin that offends God, destroys Christian happiness, and disrupts social harmony. Brownson cites efforts to radically transform marriage by accepting free-love, divorce, with liberty to remarry, polygamy, and polyandry as gaining ground in American culture. He also notes the harm done to children as a result of the despiritualization of marriage and the consequent increase in the use of contraception and the number of abortions. He summarizes the problem in rather bleak terms: The sexual passions, unrestrained by religion, and fostered by idleness and luxury, and the desire for amusement and dissipation in the well-to-do; and the burden of child-bearing, and the care and expense of bringing up and providing for a large family of children with the poor—have, to an almost incredible extent, smothered the maternal instinct, and made the prevention of conception, and fœticide, almost general (P&R, 385). Brownson claimed that secularizing marriage has done more than anything else to corrupt the American republic, a point that reinforces his view that the unwritten constitution is primary and that the health of the American republic depends on a Catholic civil religion.

How does Brownson’s view of marriage relate to the larger question of the Catholic civil religion? He recognized that the American people have increasingly become influenced by liberal and humanitarian ideologies that are destructive to their moral sense and to political order. Democracy provides no remedy for this cultural crisis. It tends toward the divine right of the people and substitutes the inorganic will of the undifferentiated mass for God’s will. Likewise, Protestant Christianity has been powerless to stop this spiritual degeneration because it bases its morality on individual conscience that is itself apt to succumb to popular pressure. The spiritual inadequacy of democracy and Protestant Christianity has contributed to the destruction of moral standards. Under such circumstances government is impotent to reform the people, or to recall them to truth and virtue, and maintain among them the supremacy of right and justice (P&R, 386). This spiritual crisis engenders a political crisis and a challenge to constitutional government because populist morality is at odds with authentic constitutionalism. In the moral crisis of populism

the people, led away by their passions, by greedy or ambitious demagogues, and by the various sects into which they are divided, which hold from and are sustained by them, and which, therefore, are themselves in the temporal order, and in no sense represent the spiritual order, or have any spiritual authority, will not suffer the state to keep in its action within its own order or constitutional limits, within which it is independent and supreme,—for though its order is subordinated to the spiritual, yet within its order it has no superior,—but constantly force it to usurp spiritual functions, to define and apply the law of God for itself, by its own authority alone, and thus to violate both civil and religious liberty. (P&R, 386)

Brownson’s understanding of the problems of order, articulated in The Papacy and the Republic, added a dimension of analysis that went beyond, in specificity, what was typically provided by the American framers. Like the framers, Brownson recognized the value of republican institutions in checking and restraining human will and appetite. The framers, however, did not provide much intellectual capital for the unwritten constitution; they failed to pay adequate attention, as Brownson did, to the need for the American political order to be supported by a spiritual foundation that ethically prepares the American people and their political rulers for the work of constitutional government. The framers may have assumed the existence of adequate cultural supports for constitutional government. Whatever the case may have been, they paid more attention to political institutions than to civil religion or political culture. Constitutional checks and restraints, the institutional structures of republican government, can protect the nation from majority tyranny and demagogues to a degree. Yet without a culture, and especially without a leadership class equipped to fend off the ideological and moral forces that are destructive to constitutional government, republican institutions will degenerate, as they have, and as Brownson knew they would. In such a climate, the written constitution becomes a dead letter. He explained in The Federal Constitution, that the constitution of the government should correspond as nearly as practicable to the inherent, unwritten providential constitution of the state; and if it does not so correspond, it will not work well, and the government can maintain itself only by armed force, as in the greater part of the European governments (FC, 301). He was not inclined to view the Civil War as evidence that America had reached this point. He placed the blame for the war squarely on the supporters of slavery.

Brownson’s response to the crisis of American order is clearly articulated in The Papacy and the Republic. There he conjectures that what the state needs, is a spiritual authority above and independent of it, competent to define what are or are not the rights of men, that is, the rights of God, and to enforce through the conscience of the people respect for them and obedience to them. Things would be different if the American people were genuine Catholics, in which case

they would never have compelled nor suffered the state to usurp spiritual functions; and few, if any of the evils that impair the efficiency of our government, even threaten the very existence of the civil and religious liberty it professes to guaranty, could ever have occurred. Neither secularism nor sectarianism could have controlled legislation. The state would have confined itself to its own order, and taken the definition of the rights and powers of the spiritual order from the church. (P&R, 388)

Only the Catholic Church can provide the moral capital necessary to sustain the American republic. Catholic Christianity can supply the power which the constitution presupposes or needs to secure its practical efficiency. An independent moral authority is necessary to sustain a just political order. Catholic Christianity can serve this function because it provides the religion and morality that can save republicanism by subjecting the people to the divine law, and through them force the government to govern in subordination to the spiritual order. He rejects populist democracy because moral authority must be from above, not from below; hold from God, not from the people; be independent of them, and govern them instead of being governed by them (P&R, 388).

Brownson coupled his argument for a Catholic civil religion/public philosophy with a denouncement of the viability of Protestant sects. He held they cannot serve as a viable spiritual support for the American republic, and they are destructive to the American political order. This aspect of Brownson’s argument was somewhat dogmatic, lacking the insight of his argument for a positive spiritual foundation for the American republic. Brownson, referring to Protestant sects, wrote,

Their assumption of spiritual authority, or pretension to count for something in the spiritual order, when in fact they count for nothing in that order, imposes on the people, misleads, perverts them, and moves them to force the government to usurp spiritual functions, and to violate the principle of equal rights, on which our republic is founded, and on which it must stand if it stands at all. This follows from the fact that all sects, when not created by the civil power, which has no authority to create or establish a sect, are simply self-constituted societies or voluntary associations, and represent no authority but that of the views, and sentiments, or opinions of the individuals voluntarily associated. They are all, comparatively speaking, of yesterday, are outside of the apostolic church, and severed from the body of Christ; they are fallible by their own confession, and consequently are unable to speak with the voice of the Holy Ghost; for the Holy Ghost is the spirit of truth, and can neither err nor authorize error. A fallible church is simply no church at all, that is, no church of God, instituted, commissioned, or assisted by him; it may be a man-made church or synagogue of Satan, but nothing more or better. (P&R, 389)

Brownson was not making a theoretical argument as much as he was appealing to dogmatic faith. Remove the references to doctrine and Brownson’s argument appears rather thin. Brownson needed to address the spiritual substance of Protestant Christianity. Although he seemed convinced that his experience as a younger man demonstrated the shortcomings of Protestant Christianity, the point is not self-evident. It is not clear that he has confronted the best arguments and the deepest spiritual substance that Protestant Christianity has to offer. While he did understand that religious conversion would have to precede acceptance of Catholic ideas, he gave no assurance that conversion to Catholic Christianity would become commonplace in America. Moreover, looking back from the vantage point of contemporary America, in which Catholic Christianity has become the plurality religion, American Catholics suffer from the same spiritual emptiness, the same ideological closure to truth, and the same cultural corruptions that plagued Brownson’s day. If anything, the problem of social and political disintegration has degenerated even further away from Brownson’s Christian Ideal of Society. And yet Brownson was confident enough in the prospects for a recovery of order in America that he speculated about what might be called the American Catholic empire.

AMERICAN EXPANSIONISM AND THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC EMPIRE

Brownson is confident that the United States will expand its borders. Moreover, he is uncharacteristically idealistic for someone of sober philosophical assumptions. He considers himself an anti-Jacobin. Yet he writes that America . . . is the future of the world (MA, 71) and that modern civilization must give way to a higher and a more Christian order (MA, 72). Divine Providence, he suggests, has given us an important mission, and has chosen us to work out for the world a higher order of civilization than has hitherto obtained. We look upon ourselves as a providential people, as a people with great destiny, and a destiny glorious to ourselves and beneficent to the world (MA, 76). What did Brownson hope would be accomplished by expanding America’s borders throughout the whole American continent? American expansion, he notes, is desirable only inasmuch as it benefits the new territories annexed to the Union, and secures our frontiers, and protects us in the peaceful elaboration and extension of the new social order of the world. The manifest destiny of this country is something far higher, nobler, and more spiritual,—the realization, we should say, of the Christian ideal of society for both the Old World and the New (MA, 76).

It may be that Brownson never completely let go of some aspects of his early political radicalism and hope for a transformed world. Or it may be that his desire for a new world, a higher order of civilization, the new social order of the world (MA, 76), the new order of civilization (MA, 71), was incorporated into his Catholic worldview. Whatever the case may be, Brownson’s writings were, in places, filled with nationalistic hubris that coincided with religious hubris. He was, in these instances, articulating a Catholic civil religion that was infused with what might be called Catholic exceptionalism. The following passage is a representative example of Catholic exceptionalism.

But the responsibility of Catholics in this country is greater than that of any other class of citizens. It is only through Catholicity that the country can fulfil its mission, and it is through Catholics that Catholicity reaches and assists the country. The salvation of the country and its future glory depend on Catholics, and therefore they must prove themselves superior in intelligence, independence, public spirit, all the civic virtues, to non-Catholics, or else they will do nothing to save and develop American civilization:

It is this consideration, that more depends on us than on non-Catholics, that we wish to impress on the minds and hearts of our Catholic brethren. Looking to the future, we Catholics are the American people, and we hold the destinies of the country in our hands. If we suffer the country to fail in its mission, we have no excuse. We have all that our non-Catholic fellow citizens lack. We have faith, we have religion, we have principles, we have the truth, we have instruction, we have grace to assist us, and need not be at a loss to know how we should act on any of the great questions that come up. We are the only class of American citizens that can fully understand and appreciate the lofty mission of the United States, and therefore the heaviest responsibility rests on us. We ought to be able to exhibit on all occasions, superior wisdom, intelligence, and virtue, and we will add, superior capacity. We ought to be able to enlighten every public question that comes up, and to give a right direction to the public mind. (MA, 82–83)

This expansive and romantic aspect of Brownson’s political theory is difficult to reconcile with his self-professed political conservatism. Political conservatives, especially those who ground their political theory in the older tradition of classical and Christian political thought, refrain from placing such idealistic expectations on human civilization. They avoid projecting the entire endeavor of human civilization and divine purpose in history onto one particular nation or religious faith. Brownson, however, seems unable to resist the temptation to conceive of a transformed world in which Christ’s victory over Satan is complete. He asks, Why should not his religion [Catholicism] become as general in society, pervade as thoroughly all departments of public and private life, as gentilism did in the old Roman world? (MA, 80).

There seems to be more than a glimmer of hope in Brownson’s later writings that Christ’s promise to conquer evil would unfold in the American republic and expand with the growing American empire. The new order of civilization, Brownson submits, can find its seat or its people only with us (MA, 71). He recognizes that other civilizations have accomplished great things, but only America has been chosen by divine Providence to carry out God’s important mission, the most glorious mission ever given to any people (MA, 76). At the very least, Brownson’s acceptance of American expansionism ought to be predicated on the actual achievement of the Christian ideal of society in America. Brownson’s nationalistic hubris is inconsistent with a genuine Christian and Catholic understanding of political life. While he is careful to reject the conversion of foreign lands by force, he exudes a spiritual arrogance that is absent in the authentic Catholic-Christian personality. This weakness in Brownson’s political theory tends to undermine the legitimate insights he makes regarding the spiritual ground for political order.

SECESSION, CIVIL WAR, AND UNION

Brownson’s writings on the Civil War are extensive. They fill a volume in his collected works, and the topics covered include slavery, emancipation, secession, states’ rights, nullification, the return of the rebellious states, and Lincoln’s use of executive power during the war. His views on these matters hinged on his understanding of the American Union. Brownson rejected the claim made by many Southerners that the United States was the product of a voluntary compact sanctioned by individual states. He rejected as well the assumptions of social contract theory, including the contention that civil society originates in convention (as opposed to preceding it)—a point included in John Adams’s preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution and social contract theory generally. The legitimacy of secession depended on the notion that, just as states were free to join the union in 1787, they were likewise free to leave it in 1861. Yet Brownson’s conception of the Union, like Lincoln’s, was that it was indissoluble and that states had no right to secede. State sovereignty could only be exercised through the Union; states had no sovereignty independent of the Union. Yet while they were part of the Union, they held more power than the national government and possessed rights. For a time, Brownson even supported John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification. Two factors, however, led Brownson into the unionist camp: slavery and secession. The latter, he believed, was caused by the former.

Brownson was a consistent opponent of slavery, but he opposed the abolitionist party because it was animated by the spirit of humanitarian democracy. Many abolitionists were willing to sacrifice the Union for the sake of disassociating themselves from a regime that permitted slavery. Like their counterparts in the South, abolitionists believed that their view was representative of the majority will within their sectional domain; therefore, it was the legitimate authoritative standard by which their community should be governed. By contrast, Brownson’s notion of the providential constitution required preservation of the Union and a reconciliation of sectional differences. In other words, because the American state and its constitution were the work of Providence (not pure human agency in convention), America was an organism, not a mere organization (FC, 304). Secession was tantamount to dissecting vital parts of the organism. The consequence was its destruction. Furthermore, the right to secede assumed that the rational power of man was greater than the mystical work of Providence, and the democratic impulse was the standard by which to measure the common good.

How, then, did Brownson reconcile his view of secession with the American colonies’ rebellion from Great Britain? Did not the colonies secede from England and create a new political system? Brownson argued that the American Revolution was not a revolution in any meaningful sense of the word. The consequence of the separation from Great Britain was not a transformed social structure. The cultural foundations of the colonies were not overturned. Nor did separation lead to a radical change in political structures. The colonists appealed to the principles of the British constitution and argued that their rights as British subjects, as set forth in Magna Charta and the bill of rights, had been violated. A new government was created but Brownson contended that,

in reorganizing government, and providing for the administration of justice, our fathers took care to observe as far as possible the law of continuity, and to admit no break, no innovation, even, that could be avoided. Whether they were justified or not in throwing off the authority of the British crown was a momentous question for them, but is none for us, for the acknowledgment of American independence by the British sovereign legitimated their act and condoned any offence against loyalty or legality which they might have committed. (FC, 291)

The Confederate states differed from the American colonies in two significant ways. They did not, according to Brownson, abide by the law of continuity because they reverted back to a conception of sovereignty that existed under the Articles of Confederation. The articles failed precisely because they were out of sync with the unwritten constitution. They broke the nation into pieces and ran counter to the American people’s desire to exist as one people as a nation, not a confederation of nations (FC, 294). Also unlike the American colonies, the Confederate states were not recognized by the United States as independent, a fact Brownson failed to acknowledge, which had more to do with who won the war than it did the legitimacy of the rebel cause.

As a constitutional matter, it was the prerogative of the states to determine the issue of slavery as long as they remained a part of the union. As a moral concern, he considered slavery a flagrant violation of those fundamental rights of man on which our republic professes to be founded, no less than that brotherhood of the human race asserted by the Gospel (GR, 250). Once secession (which Brownson considered treasonous) occurred, the rebel states forfeited their authority to govern slavery, as well as other matters. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution meant not only that the national government was superior to the states but also that the American people were one united people as opposed to a collection of subnational communities. Brownson crystallized the point in stating that sovereignty is and must be one and indivisible (SRSS, 277). The states have sovereignty and rights, but the Confederate states forfeited their authority to govern as well as their rights when they seceded. The rebellion … kills the whole state, and every thing dependent on it. The people of the seceded states ceased to be Americans. As a consequence, The federal government has authority to govern them, either as a territory or as a conquered province (SRSS, 271). The return of the seceded states to the Union was possible but only after unconditional surrender.

While Brownson was willing to give the national government great license in dealing with the Confederate states, he opposed President Lincoln’s plan for the reorganization of the Southern states, because he believed it expanded executive power at the expense of congressional authority. Specifically, Brownson argued that the president cannot organize . . . territory under a civil government, or say on what terms its inhabitants may or may not regain a civil organization, for that, under our system, is the prerogative of congress alone (PM&P, 314). Brownson went so far as to claim that the executive action is revolutionary and indefensible, as much so as the act of secession itself (PM&P, 32). Brownson was more willing than most Union supporters to criticize Lincoln’s handling of the war. Even when he agreed with the president’s policies, he insisted that they be created and implemented in accordance with the Constitution.

In the final analysis, Brownson’s contribution to American political thought is significant, because he raised essential questions regarding political order and provided insights into its spiritual foundations. At an early point in the evolution of American constitutionalism, he saw the dangers of a constitutional order that has lost contact with the moral foundation on which its ability to govern justly rested. Brownson turned to Catholic Christianity as the source of a public philosophy/civil religion that could provide a viable spiritual foundation for the American political order. The strength of his argument was in identifying both the compatibility of Catholic Christianity with American constitutionalism and the virtues of Catholicism as a support for American constitutionalism. In addition, Brownson’s identification of the need for a spiritual foundation for the American republic is one of his greatest contributions to American political thought. Even if his particular prescriptive response is flawed, it is no small achievement to have discovered and characterized one of the central threats to the future of American constitutionalism and constitutional government generally.

The weakness of Brownson’s argument is that he was too narrow in his conception of what constitutes a viable American public philosophy or civil religion and too insistent on a specifically Catholic civil religion. Protestant Christianity cannot be ruled out in all its variegated forms as a source of spiritual enrichment for the political and social order, especially given its central role in the historical development of American politics and culture. T. S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture, for example, argues for a Christian culture that avoids the limitations of a sectarian civil religion. Eliot’s cultural dividing line is not between competing types of Christianity but between Christianity and secularism. Eliot insists that what is needed most in the pursuit of a just society is a community of Christians animated by an aristocracy of practicing Christians. Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership and his American humanism provide an alternative to Brownson’s religious sectarianism and Eliot’s Christian community. Babbitt was convinced that by the early twentieth century Christianity and tradition generally had lost their influence in American and Western culture. Consequently, Babbitt argued that genuine spiritual sustenance ought to be embraced, whether its source be religious (Eastern or Western) or humanist. Babbitt and the political philosopher Eric Voegelin are two thinkers who recognized the benefits of a more ecumenical approach and provided a significant theoretical foundation for the restoration of ethical and spiritual health to the American and Western political order.¹⁷

Brownson’s argument for a Catholic republic is at odds with historical and cultural trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Babbitt and Voegelin serve as examples of scholars who were sensitive to the fact that the restoration of order in Western civilization does not depend on any particular institutional form or religious sect. Rather, the weight of past spiritual achievement—of whatever religious, philosophical, or artistic variety—can be imaginatively relived and become a living force in contemporary life, assuming the existence of cultural and historical continuity. Babbitt and Voegelin demonstrated the problems with doctrinal formulations of transcendent reality. Brownson seemed unaware of the problem of losing consciousness of experiences of order once they become reified into doctrines, what Voegelin called doctrinalization.¹⁸ In the context of the Cold War, Voegelin, like Eliot, noted that the true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side.¹⁹ Brownson’s dividing line excludes individuals and traditions that embody valuable and authentic experiences of order that should not be rejected because they are contained in an institutional form that does not fit Brownson’s ideal of a Catholic society. Brownson was careful enough to note that his conception of a Christian society has never existed in history. Yet his argument seems to suffer from those remnants of his early radicalism that insist on the good life taking a particular institutional or ideological form. In short, Brownson tended toward monism—the insistence on one way of thinking or one form of political and social existence. At times,