Intelligence Report
American Foundations #3

ALTHOUGH THE LIBERAL POLITICAL TRADITION is full of references to the “natural law”, “virtue” and “human happiness”, these time-honored concepts denote something quite different to men and women schooled in the Christian and classical philosophical tradition. This difference rests upon divergent liberal and classical conceptions of the human intellect and of the human person. Classical and Christian thinking about man and society begins with the work of  the “speculative intellect”, the part of the intellect that thinks about abstract universal spiritual substances such as God and the human soul. The speculative intellect endeavors to apprehend, understand, and conceptualize the inner nature of things, what they are (and what they are capable of becoming) when their innate potentials are actualized.  The speculative intellect provides a universal definition of what a thing is, its essence. It is by knowledge of what a thing is, and of what its potentials are, that the speculative intellect is further able to derive knowledge of its ends, of what it capable of becoming.

practical intellect”, which follows it. The job of the practical intellect, working from knowledge acquired from the speculative intellect, is to derive practical means calculated to achieve human ends, viz., the actualization of human potentials necessary to live a good life culminating in human happiness, which is the goal of politics. In short, the speculative intellect provides knowledge of human nature, its powers, operations and potentials, which all point towards its end: Happiness. Political thinkers tend to agree that happiness is the end of politics.

Liberals like Machiavelli and Jefferson, et al, begin their study of politics and human behavior without first attempting to know what a human being is. Rather, they began their study of politics with the presumption (based on common sense observations) of what a human being appears to be: an ungrateful and fickle deceiver who acts selfishly out of geed for profit:

“One can make this generalization about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit” (Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 17).

If this is true, every prince, according to Machiavelli,  must be ready to act against virtue, if necessary.

“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous” (The Prince, Chapter 15).

clearly the student of politics must know somehow the facts about the soul, as the man who is to heal the eyes or the body as a whole must know about the eyes or the body; and all the more since politics is more prized and better than medicine” (Aristotle, Ethics Book I, Chapter 13).

Therefore,

[1] before he begins his study of politics.

[2]

When, in 1789, the American founders privatized religion and then subsequently made education a public affair, they initiated a long process of ever-increasing secularization that is still bearing its irreverent and unholy fruits. Due to the excommunication of philosophy from Protestant culture and the privatization of religion as a result of the First Amendment, the young Christian nation was left without a sufficient anecdote for what was beginning to happen in the federal and state governments and in the public schools: Education, increasingly divorced from religion and subjected to a sophisticated regiment of secular practical reason (the philosophy of liberalism) alienated from both (1) speculative philosophy (metaphysics) and (2) the bulwark of Christian faith, education under these circumstances could not provide sufficient reasonable answers to pressing questions such as the spiritual nature of the human person and the divine origin of the universe[3]. The combined lack of philosophy and theology, in the schools and broader political arena, inevitably led to a rising tide of materialism in the social, behavioral, and life sciences, which were not long after inundated with Marx, Freud, and Darwin, without Augustine, Aquinas or Aristotle to help.

Pope Benedict XVI recognized the ill-fated bifurcation of theology and philosophy, of speculative reason from practical reason:

“Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers (incorrectly) thought they were confronted with a (Catholic) faith system conditioned by philosophy….The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial, form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself” (Regensberg Address, Sept. 12, 2006).

As if to prove Benedict’s point, Martin Luther (a leading Reformer) did little to mask his contempt for speculative reason and scholastic metaphysics.

Elsewhere,

[4], were soon to see who their real enemies were — men whom they oftentimes thought were their friends.

It was not long after, in the 18th century,

“When Kant stated that he needed to set (speculative) thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme (of divorcing faith and reason) forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason[5], denying it access to reality as a whole” (Pope Benedict XVI).[6]

Kant, and then 18th century deists and associated philosophers, like Luther before them, upheld practical reason but, unlike Luther, they further extracted the supernatural elements from the faith thereby leaving only a rational moral system based on practical reason and experience alone without the corresponding support of the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith.[7] First, the Reformers extracted metaphysics and then the 18th century philosophers extracted faith itself and all of its sacred mysteries. In the process, Jesus was “presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message” (Pope Benedict XVI) and Christianity was brought into

“…harmony with modern reason, (seemingly) liberating it (Christianity)… from seeming philosophical and theological elements such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God (a few others include the incarnation virgin birth and resurrection” (Pope Benedict XVI).

According to Kant, and to later thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson[8],

“What (the New Testament) is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason.…Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason (no faith), classically expressed in Kant’s ‘Critiques’” (Pope Benedict XVI, Regenesburg Address).

Thus, there was no longer any recourse to faith or to metaphysics. Jefferson despised metaphysics as much as Kant or Luther. According to Jefferson, metaphysics was for the “insane”:

“The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin (Protestants and Catholics), are, to my understanding, mere relapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.”[9]

When it came to faith and reason, the Protestants, in Jefferson’s mind, did not fare any better than the Catholics:

“It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.”

[10]

Revealed mysteries such as the Trinity are simply “artificial scaffolding” that must be “done away with” by the “dawn of reason” freed from both the speculative intellect and the “atrocious attributes” of faith. For Kant, and later for deists and epicureans such as Jefferson[11], normative judgments, such as the morals of Jesus, are derived by practical reason alone and thus have nothing to do with mysteries of revealed religion and therefore do not require faith. Moreover, because they lack a metaphysical foundation, practical moral judgments, made by men such as these, are not derived from universal norms rooted in human nature (as much as they might claim to be), nor are they derived, as stated, from the sacred precincts of the Christian faith. In short, the leading political “lights” of the 18th century had reverted to practical pagan Roman philosophy devoid of the Christian faith and shorn of its Athenian metaphysical moorings established by Aristotle. All that is left is practical thinking!

reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do”.[12]

It seems that Ben Franklin had no qualms about violating a previously held principle as long as he could find a “reason”, any suitable reason. This helps explain why Mr. Franklin understood “venery” to be a virtue when exercise with moderation[13] while metaphysicians like Aristotle thought it a vice, and Christian theologians and common folk think it a sin.  Even the great Cicero, pagan philosopher of Rome, recognized this problem:

[14]

– So much for morality derived from practical reason.

Classical moral philosophy of men like Cicero and mystical spirituality articulated by the Masters of the Spiritual life, such as Saint John of the Cross, quite escape carnal minded men.

[15]

From the 18th century forward, American political leaders infected with liberalism derived their moral judgments from practical reason by means of practical mental calculations severed from philosophical understanding of the human soul and further divorced from the Christian faith. They increasingly embraced the darkness of the New Order of the Ages, which they mistook for light and thought it their duty to pass it on to the rest of us. As long as the practical intellect can convince its owner that (1) his motives are derived from pure civic love of country and pursuit of science, that (2) his passions are under the control of (practical) reason, and (3) as long as he is able to avoid the appearance of any impropriety, then he can account himself virtuous without actually being virtuous as understood by authentic philosophers (not mere dilettantes) and Christian theologians.

“A prince, therefore, need not necessarily have all the good qualities.., but he should certainly appear to have them…. He should know how to do evil, if that is necessary” (The Prince, Chapter 18).

“Our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, also wrote to you, speaking of these things as he does in all his letters. In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures” (2 Peter 3: 15-16).

Even Martin Luther had to acknowledge that liberty of interpretation when left in the hands of “every man” led to unforeseen difficulties, as when the peasants of Germany rose up against their overlords on the authority of their own private interpretation of scripture.

“They cloak this terrible and horrible sin with the Gospel, call themselves ‘Christian brethren’, receive oaths and homage, and compel people to hold with them to these abominations. Thus they become the greatest of all blasphemers of God and slanderers of his holy Name, serving the devil, under the outward appearance of the Gospel, thus earning death in body and soul ten times over. I have never heard of a more hideous sin. See what a mighty prince the devil is, how he has the world in his hands and can throw everything into confusion”.[16]

It is not difficult to understand the disdain in which the confused emotionally charged farmers and frontiersmen (the democratic minded “New Lights” awakened by first Protestant revival), or the cold sect of intellectuals and judgmental Puritans (the more stern and authoritarian minded “Old Lights”,) were held by many of the founding fathers who prided themselves as “natural aristocrats”[17] on the sophistication of their philosophy, their intellectual attainment, genteel manners, calm comportment, their warm cordiality, broad toleration and acquired talent.

“Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper — alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin”.

Jefferson insisted that he knew the mind of Jesus better than any apostle, doctor, father, saint or clergyman.  Not even Luther attempted anything as brazen. In Jefferson’s own words:

“We must reduce our volume (of the bible) to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”

So from the Jeffersonian perspective the apostles, the first pillars of the church, and the evangelists, who wrote the gospels, were ignorant men whose additions to the bible are anything but inspired because, according to Jefferson, and men like him, the evangelist’s scriptural writings are equivalent to a pile of “dung”.  Deists, like Jefferson, arrogantly claimed to have wisdom enough to know the true teachings of Jesus Christ (something they denied to the apostles and church fathers) based upon the use of practical reason, which they held to be superior to both Christian philosophy and theology, to speculative reason enlightened by, and working in unison with, supernatural faith.

So, there is a false philosophy according to men and a true philosophy according to Christ. The Philosophes, materialists, Epicureans and Deists were all self-styled “philosophers”, but what they taught by deceit according to human traditions, and elements of the world was not according to Christ.  Because the native Christians were often frontiersman and yeoman farmers unschooled in Christian philosophy, they were not only ridiculed by the sophisticated whiged Philosophers, who enjoyed Roman toga parties in their classically designed estates situated along the shores of the Potomac, they were also deceived into accepting a secular government by educated men using such concepts as God and virtue as well as the name of Jesus in their writings. The Christian philosophy of such men as Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, men who honored God and stood in awe of the Trinity and the ethereal mysteries of the faith were ridiculed and disdained by their Protestant brothers, but, as time would tell, to the latter’s chagrin.

“The interesting fact historically is that these two anti-rationalist traditions-that of the liberal skeptic and the Protestant revelationist- should originally have come from two opposite views of man. The Protestant dependence upon revelation arose from a great pessimism about human nature. . . . The immediately apprehended values of the liberal originate in a great optimism. Yet . . . after all, is not the dominating tradition in North America a Protestantism which has been transformed by pragmatic technology and liberal aspirations?[18]

sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap–let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;–let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars”.[19]

[1] ibid

[2] Classical political philosophy is an exercise of the practical intellect, which is subsequent to and dependent upon metaphysics apprehended and understood by the speculative intellect; it is an integral approach to politics.  Liberalism begins with the practical intellect, with man as he appears to be, and thus is a more limited approach.

[3] The secular philosophers of the modern world were craftily challenging them, but they did not have the gift of philosophy to sustain them in the match and religion was not allowed in the public arena where the debates were occurring.

[4] A period in the early 18th century typified by emotional release experienced in Protestant communities.  The Great Awakening emphasized, broader private interpretation of scriptures by members of the congregation vis a vis top-down control that had been exercised by clerical elites.  The Great Awakening might simply be referred to as the further democratization of the Protestant faith in America.  An appeal to the masses to wake up and express their faith, an appeal to bring vivacity and spirit to the Gospels, to make them more alive and less intellectually cold.  The Great Awakening thus occurred at an opportune time for the American Revolution, which was also an appeal to the masses for more democracy, an appeal to wake up against the elitism of English monarchs and aristocrats who were stifling the common spirit.

[5] That is, Kant not only dumped metaphysics (a feat easily accomplished because of what the Reformers had previously done to metaphysics), he went much further, and reduced faith a matter of practical reason. After removing speculative reason and the mysteries of the faith, all that was left was practical reason. Kant thus fused faith and reason until they were no longer distinct.

[6] http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html

“We certainly fall into error if we think reason can know a world beyond the senses. Indeed, Kant insists that such knowledge would corrupt practical reasoning, by imposing an external incentive for moral action—fear of eternal punishment and hope of heavenly reward, what he will later call “heteronomy.” Nonetheless, human reason still has an unavoidable interest in belief in God, immortality and freedom. Kant develops this claim more systematically in the second Critique” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

[7] This was the state of morality when seized upon by the deists, epicureans, materialists, among America’s founding elite who accepted the moral code implicit in Christianity because it was “reasonable” but rejected the central mysteries, such as the incarnation and resurrection, because, they insisted, they were not reasonable.

[8] Jefferson, upon retirement, made it his project to decide which parts of the bible were the true teachings of Jesus and which were added later by the “untutored apostles.”  He cut verse by verse from the Gospels using practical reason as his guide to abstract all the sacred mysteries that ran contrary to his practical reason (but not to metaphysics, which Jefferson lacked).  As a result of this sacrilegious exercise Jefferson was able to distinguish “what is really his (Jesus’) from the rubbish in which it is buried.”

[9]  Thomas Jefferson, letter to Rev. Jared Sparks, November 4, 1820.

[10] Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823.

[11] In a letter to William Short (1819), Jefferson proclaimed his allegiance to the philosophy of Epicurus: “As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
[12] http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page18.htm

[13] Franklin Autobiography: http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm

[14] Marcus Tullius Cicero: Second Book “Of The Treatise On The Chief Good And Evil” (Treatise de Finibus).

[15]   Saint John of the Cross: Chapter Four, “The Ascent of Mt. Carmel”.

[16] Against the Robbing and Murdering Herd of Peasants (May, 1525).

[17] According to Jefferson their was both a natural and a pseudo aristocracy:  “There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents… There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.”

[18] George P. Grant, “Plato and Popper,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (May 1954): 191-92.

[19] Abraham Lincoln, July 27, (1838) The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm