Liberty, the God That Failed: Policing the Sacred and the Myth-making of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama

709 Pages·2012·10.109 MB·English

by  Christopher A. Ferrara

L ,
IBERTY
T G T F
HE OD HAT AILED

Policing the Sacred and the Myth-making of
the Secular State, from Locke to Obama

Christopher A. Ferrara

ANGELICO PRESS * New York
LIBERTY, THE GOD THAT FAILED

© 2012
Christopher A. Ferrara

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferrara, Christopher A.
Liberty, The God That Failed

Includes Index.

ISBN: (paperback)

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First Edition
First Printing

Angelico Press

Visit us online at http://www.angelicopress.com

Cover Illustration:
For a true democrat the best guarantee against the
independence of man is still the freedom of the citizen.

-Augustin Cochin
To my father, a man of quiet greatness, whose abiding
faith, unwavering love, and unshakeable fidelity to duty
preserved his family from shipwreck in a tempest-ridden
world. He is truly the namesake of Saint Joseph.
Contents

Introduction 1

I. CHRISTENDOM DECONSTRUCTED

1 The Logic of Christendom 14
2 A Brief Defense of Christendom 24
3 The Heavenly City Demolished 34
4 Triumph of the “Moderate” Enlightenment 91

II. THE FIRST AMERICAN REVOLUTION

5 The House that Locke Built 116
6 Imposing the Revolutionary Will 125
7 New Yokes For Old 154
8 The Acorn Becomes an Oak 179
9 Slouching Toward Sumter 219

III. THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION

10 The South Rises 260
11 The “Peculiar Institution” 278
12 Loosing the Dogs of Civil War 312
13 The North Rises 329
14 The South Falls 344
15 Purging the Temple: Confederates and Indians 407

IV. THE FIRST SECULAR STATE

16 The Godless Constitution 440
17 A House Divided 472
18 The Constitutional Subjugation of Religion 479
19 The American Confessional State 520
20 Mind-Forged Manacles 535
21 The God that Failed 543

Notes 567
Bibliography 635
Index 664
Acknowledgments

A book is not written by the author alone, but rather is a cooperative
effort that engages friends and colleagues who put up with the author’s
obsession and help him along his way. I am indebted to Gary Johannes,
Ronald McArthur of Thomas Aquinas College, John Obriski, and John
O’Malley for their attentive reading of all or parts of manuscripts of this
book, which averted gaffes and pointed to needed improvements in the
text. All remaining defects are solely my fault.
Brian McCall of the University of Oklahoma College of Law raised a
decisive caveat concerning the problematical term “State,” thus prompting
a clarification that averted what would have been an inevitable libertarian
caricature of the entire work. Jeffrey Langan of Holy Cross College
provided a lead to pivotal material concerning the late repentance of John
Adams and his end-of-life commiseration with Jefferson. James Bogle,
author and barrister of London’s Middle Temple, pointed me to the
amazing saga of the San Patricios. Many others provided suggestions and
pointers too numerous to mention.
I owe a special debt to John Rao of Saint John’s University, one of the
world’s great historians, who was an endless source of historical orientation
in conversations that guided the direction of my arguments. I am most
grateful to him for the privilege of annual participation in the Lake Garda
conferences of the Roman Forum, which have provided much of the
stimulus for the research and thought that drove this work to completion. I
am honored that he and his accomplished wife, Anne, consider me a
colleague as well as a friend.
I am also grateful to Miguel Ayuso Torres of the Comillas Pontifical
University and Danilo Castellano of the University of Udine for their
encouragement and support of my attempt to address “the North American
myth.” Part of the material on these pages first appeared in a paper I
presented in Madrid, which Prof. Ayuso Torres did me the honor of having
published in the Spanish journal Verbo.
A principal debt is owed to John Riess of Angelico Press, who saw
merit in the book and was keen on giving it a public life—not in spite of,
but because of, its effort to avoid conventional “conservative” and
libertarian narratives of what has gone wrong with the politics of the
Western world, especially in America. Howard Walsh of Keep the Faith,
Inc. was—as he has been for so many years—instrumental in supporting
the work that makes a book possible.
Above all, I am indebted, as always, to my heroic wife Wendy, who
endured the years of distraction this project entailed. Her accomplishments
far exceed anything that could appear on a mere printed page.

Introduction

The renowned Anglican convert to Catholicism, Henry Edward
Cardinal Manning, once observed that “All human differences are
ultimately religious ones.”1 This is a truth even secular reason is forced to
recognize. As the proto-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a professed
admirer of Satan, admitted in his Confessions of a Revolutionary: “It is
surprising to observe how constantly we find that all our political questions
involve theological ones.” In reply, the renowned Catholic counter-
revolutionary of the mid-nineteenth century, Don Juan Donoso Cortés,
wrote: “There is nothing in this to cause surprise, except it be the surprise
of Proudhon. Theology, being the science of God, is the ocean which
contains all the sciences, as God is the ocean in which all things are
contained.”2 Recently the Anglican scholar John Milbank has remarked the
urgent need to “reassert theology as a master discourse,” the only discourse
“able to overcome nihilism itself.”3
The history of Western civilization over the past three centuries is a
chronicle of the decline of men and nations in consequence of a theological
decision with profound political effects. That decision was the definitive
refusal to conduct the art of politics according to the fundamental
theological premise that an almighty and eternal God has revealed Himself
in the person of Jesus Christ. What confronts us now is the prospect of life
in a terminal civilization that has rejected the ancient dictum, in force
throughout the West for more than a thousand years, that “Christianity is
the law of the land.”4 We are the victims of what Christopher Dawson
described as “the reversal of the spiritual revolution which gave birth to
Western culture and a return to the psychological situation of the old pagan
world…”5
The collapsing societies of the West groan under the consequences of
what one liberal commentator has characterized as “a fundamental
orientation toward politics chosen by early-modern Europeans in order to
free themselves from the intellectual and spiritual influence of the Catholic
Church…”6 That is, the condition of contemporary Western civilization
reflects the final destruction of the Christocentric social order that endured
in one form or another from Imperial Rome under the Emperor Constantine
in the 4th century until the fall of the Imperial House of Hapsburg under the
Emperor Charles I at the dawn of the 20th century. By Christocentric social
order is meant civil society with its organs of government, commonly
2 LIBERTY, THE GOD THAT FAILED
referred to collectively by the modern and misleading term “the State.” A
brief explanation of our unavoidable use of that term is in order.

A Problematical Term

For purposes of this study, we shall use the term “State“—as opposed
to “modern state” or “modern nation-state”—to refer to the civitas (political
community or civil society) or res publica (republic or commonwealth) of
Greek and Catholic political philosophy comprising the bimillenial Greco-
Catholic tradition of political thought. Although it is of relatively modern
derivation (around the 13th century), “State“—a foreshortening of the Latin
status rei publicæ or “state of the republic”—has supplanted the traditional
terminology in all modern translations of the works of Plato, Aristotle and
Saint Thomas, as well as vernacular translations of papal encyclicals
treating of the civitas/res publica and its just constitution. We are thus
compelled to adhere to the modern usage “State,” but understood strictly as
referring to the classical concept so as to avoid libertarian caricatures of
what is under discussion.
In its modern sense, the one intended by libertarians and other
liberals, “State “ means merely the organs of government severed from civil
society—a disjunction that serves the libertarian critique of the modern
nation-state whose emergence has resulted precisely from the operation of
liberal principles, as we shall see. But a severance between government and
civil society is quite contrary to the Greco-Catholic conception of the civitas
as a “body politic” wherein the Church, government and citizenry are
organically united in a moral totality while preserving their distinct
identities and functions. The classic expression of the body politic metaphor
appears in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (c. 1120-1180), the medieval
political philosopher whose writings are the most substantial contribution
to medieval political thought between Augustine and the Aristotelian
synthesis of Saint Thomas Aquinas. According to the metaphor, the Church
is the soul of the body politic, the prince its head, ruled by the soul, the
judges and governors of the provinces the eyes, ears and tongue, the
financiers the stomach, the citizens in their various capacities the limbs, and
so forth.7 This is not to be understood in the crude libertarian sense of
“collectivism” but in the Christian sense of the civitas as an orderly or
“perfect” (meaning only self-sufficient) society of individuals ordered to the
eternal destiny of each and the common good of all, including the highest
common good, which is beatitude.
In the sense of merely organs of government disjoined from both civil
society and the Church, the modern secular nation-state with its central
government represents a radical departure from the Catholic view of the
rightly ordered civitas. In the classical sense we employ here, the State is
that civitas which orders its laws and institutions (however imperfectly) to
the precepts of Christianity and the final end of man in eternal beatitude or
eternal punishment and which respects the Catholic principle of