Book Review: "America on Trial" by Robert Reilly (Part One)

From Ignatius Press:

The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country's moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy.

In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. These concepts were extraordinary when they first burst upon the ancient world: the Judaic oneness of God, who creates ex nihilo and imprints his image on man; the Greek rational order of the world based upon the Reason behind it; and the Christian arrival of that Reason (Logos) incarnate in Christ. These may seem a long way from the American Founding, but Reilly argues that they are, in fact, its bedrock. Combined, they mandated the exercise of both freedom and reason.

These concepts were further developed by thinkers in the Middle Ages, who formulated the basic principles of constitutional rule. Why were they later rejected by those claiming the right to absolute rule, then reclaimed by the American Founders, only to be rejected again today? Reilly reveals the underlying drama: the conflict of might makes right versus right makes might. America's decline, he claims, is not to be discovered in the Founding principles, but in their disavowal.

The Catholic World Report published a symposium of reactions to America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, but I encourage you to read the book--like I did--before you read the 13 responses by philosophers, historians, and others. Form your own opinion first on what Reilly has attempted and achieved before being influenced by them. I saw the symposium, scanned the summaries of the responses, and stopped--then went to Eighth Day Books and bought my copy. When I was last in the store Tuesday this week (for a discussion of Book III of Boethius' The Consolations of Philosophy with a group of friends) Warren was sold out, but I'm sure he'll be getting more copies soon.

Robert R. Reilly, whom I saw speak at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference in Wichita  (cancelled this year by COVID of course) a few years ago on his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in this book offers an exploration of the philosophical and intellectual sources that inspired the Founders of the United States of America in their quest for independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation. 

He goes all the way back to the pre-philosophical era, explores Greek philosophy focusing on Aristotle, Jewish monotheism, and the Latin/Roman Catholic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Revelation focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas, and continues his philosophical lessons through to the eighteenth century. 

Aristotle and Aquinas, with their confidence in our ability to reason based on the reality we experience around us are his heroes in these chapters. The Catholic synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Revelation meant that we could, in a limited way of course, try to understand God and His creation with confidence, determine what is good, true, and beautiful, and live according to the Natural Law He created in the world, demonstrating the continuity between His Natural Law and His Revelation. This synthesis, Reilly argues, provided the foundation for the equality of all before the law, Divine and human, and the rights of all of God's creation to justice, including the consent to be governed. 

Along the way he offers an important defense of the Middle Ages, so often misidentified as the age of the "divine right of kings". Although it created many struggles between the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the rulers of countries and empires, Reilly suggests that the "two swords" theory of the Middle Ages created a balance of rights and responsibilities for the ordinary person that a single sword--the state controlling both secular and religious order in each country--takes away. This recalled to my mind how the 17th century courts of the Inquisition were considered more just by those being tried in the Civil in those Catholic countries that still--even though as Reilly later points out, many Catholic rulers adopted the single sword model--maintained some semblance of the "two swords" theory with two Court systems. There was a greater presumption of innocence and a higher standard of proof of guilt in the Church Courts of the Inquisition, such that those accused of secular crimes would fake religious crimes to change the court they would be tried in--the BBC even said so!

Then he demonstrates how William Ockham in philosophy and Martin Luther in theology, through their nominalism and voluntarism, destroyed this synthesis and shifted the basis of knowledge and action from Reason to Will: even God's Reason. Larry P. Arnn of Hillsdale College addresses Reilly's view of Martin Luther in his Preface, counselling Lutherans and other Protestants to respond carefully and charitably, noting that Reilly quotes Martin Luther accurately and judiciously.

Reilly asserts that the English theologian Richard Hooker re-established Aristotelian realism in the (High) Church of England but I found that chapter not as convincing as Reilly intended. Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity did not restore the "two swords" to England--the Church of England was as Erastian after as before--and even if James I praised Hooker's work that king upheld the theory of the Divine Right of Kings and the right of the monarch to rule the Church and the state without the consent of the governed. Yes, Hooker helped restore Natural Law to some extent, but the history of the Church of England demonstrates the limits of his legacy. His section on the relationship of the Church to the State, as Reilly notes in a later chapter, was not published until after both his and James I's deaths, because it was too controversial during that reign.

Reilly adds Thomas Hobbes to his triumvirate of the enemies of Reason and the Natural Law as he examines that gloomy philosopher's Leviathan as an effort to avoid civil war through absolute earthly obedience to the monarch, even above obedience to God. Heaven is no rewarding destination, only enforced peace on earth. The control of the state is necessary to hold in check the common, individual desires of each citizen to keep them from killing each other in the pursuit of worldly goods and security. Like Ockham and Luther, Hobbes deplored the thought and influence of Aristotle.

(Reilly mentions Machiavelli in his discussions of these contrasting views of political authority, but evidently judges him and The Prince to be a little outside the English background of the Founders.)

Juxtaposing James I of England's doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings to arguments by St. Robert Bellarmine and Father Francisco Suarez defending the sovereignty of the people and their right to consent to be governed, echoing Medieval theories. He cites parallel statements of Bellarmine, Suarez, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence on the "Source of Political Power", "Power of the People and the Requirement of Consent", and "Right to Revolution and Self-Determination". Reilly notes that our Founding Fathers weren't citing these arguments because their authors were Catholics (whom most of them detested and feared) but that they acknowledged the truth and effectiveness of these arguments as they were cited in Robert Firmer's defense of the Divine Right of Kings in his attempts to refute them. Lastly, he describes the influence of Algernon Sidney and his Discourses Concerning Government on the Founders, again noting the congruence between the two Jesuit scholastic theologians and Sidney.

The chapter on John Locke ("Problem and Solution") is a crucial one for Reilly's argument as he works to separate Locke's epistemological theories from his political theories. Again, part of his effort is to demonstrate what in Locke's philosophical and political works influenced the Founders. Reilly defends Locke from charges that he valued freedom and liberty only for the sake of hedonistic pleasures and shows that Locke has the common philosophical view of happiness as the fulfillment of Natural Law and Reality. He compares and contrasts Hobbes and Locke to demonstrate that the latter's thoughts are congruent with "orthodox" philosophies of Reality and Natural Law. Locke's epistemological skepticism did not extend to the afterlife, as he hoped for Heaven on his deathbed and wanted the Psalms read to him. That chapter was convincing to me.

I continue this review another day as this post is getting long! Since my background in Philosophy is scanty--one class at WSU that started with the thought of A.J. Ayer and scattered reading on my own--Reilly's systematic review of this history has been thought-provoking and fascinating to me.