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The American Republic

b >> by O. A. Brownson >> The American Republic




This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and
lifeless abstraction, but the highest theological and
philosophical truth, without which there were no reason, no man,
no society; for God is the first principle of all being, all
existence, all science, all life, and it is in Him that we live
and move and have our being. God is at the beginning, in the
middle, and at the end of all things--the universal principle,
medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His existence
being directly or indirectly impugned. In a deeper sense than is
commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit
domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam. The English
constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of
reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with
the others for the mastery. For a long time the king labored,
intrigued, and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which
he was held by the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and
people united and humbled the crown; and now the people are at
work seeking to sap both the crown and the nobles. The state is
constituted to nobody's satisfaction; and though all may unite in
boasting its excellences, all are at work trying to alter or
amend it. The work of constituting the state with the English is
ever beginning, never ending. Hence the eternal clamor for
parliamentary reform.

Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that
remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with
the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede
to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so
doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done
in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for,
and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe. The special
merit of the American system is not in its democracy alone, as
too many at home and abroad imagine; but along with its democracy
in the division of the powers of government, between a General
government and particular State governments, which are not
antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters, and
neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.

Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government
without creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be
introduced into any European state. There may be a union of
states in Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain,
and Austria is laboring hard to effect it in her heterogeneous
empire; but the union possible in any of them is that of a Bund
or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund, similar to what
the secessionists in the United States so recently attempted and
have so signally failed to establish. An intelligent Confederate
officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in operation
three months before it became evident that the principle on
which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat.
It was that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States
seceded, more than the superior resources and numbers of the
Government, that caused the collapse of the Confederacy. The
numbers were relatively about equal, and the military resources
of the Confederacy were relatively not much inferior to those of
the Government. So at least the Confederate leaders thought, and
they knew the material resources of the Government as well as
their own, and had calculated them with as much care and accuracy
as any men could. Foreign powers also, friendly as well as
unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain their
independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the
loyal States. The failure is due to the disintegrating principle
of State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy. The
war has proved that united states are, other things being equal,
an overmatch for confederated states.

The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals.
As equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of
Zollverein, in which each state retains its individual
sovereignty; if as unequals, then someone among them will aspire
to the hegemony, and you have over again the Athenian
Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the Persian war, and
its fate. A union like the American cannot be created by a
compact, or by the exercise of supreme power. The Emperor of the
French cannot erect the several Departments of France into
states, and divide the powers of government between them as
individual and as united states. They would necessarily hold
from the imperial government, which, though it might exercise a
large part of its functions through them, would remain, as now,
the supreme central government, from which all governmental
powers emanate, as our President is apparently attempting, in his
reconstruction policy, to make the government of the United
States. The elements of a state constituted like the American do
not exist in any European nation, nor in the constitution of
European society; and the American constitution would have been
impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered it that the
nation was born with it, and has never known any other.

Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and
applied it in the best way she could. At first it was a single
tribe or people distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after
the Sabine war, a second tribe was added on terms of equality,
and the state was dual, composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and
the Tities or Quirites, and, afterward, in the time of Tullus
Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or Luceres, making the
division into three ruling tribes, each divided into one hundred
houses or gentes. Each house in each tribe was represented by
its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number of
senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
fixed. Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
cities. The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes
into gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and
in the tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic
centralism; but the division was not a division of the powers of
government between two co-ordinate governments, for the senate
had supreme control, like the British parliament, over all
matters, general and particular.

The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the
tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in
the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of
government; but only a division between the positive and negative
powers, not between the general and the particular. The power
accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them--who is,
perhaps, too fond of explaining the early constitution of Rome by
analogies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the
constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an obstructive
power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it
absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.

There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in
the American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or
confederated municipalities. These municipalities, modelled
chiefly after that of Rome, were elective, and had the management
of their own local affairs; but their local powers were not
co-ordiinate in their own sphere with those exercised by the
Roman municipality, but subordinate and dependent. The senate
had the supreme power over them, and they held their rights
subject to its will. They were formally, or virtually,
subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the
Roman emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of
freedom. Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies
rather than as subjects, and at first these municipal
organizations secured the progress of civilization in the
provinces; but at a later period, under the emperors, they served
only the imperial treasury, and were crushed by the taxes imposed
and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal agents of the
empire. So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial
edict to compel them to enter the municipal government; and it
became, under the later emperors, no uncommon thing for free
citizens to sell themselves into slavery, to escape the fiscal
burdens imposed. There are actually imperial edicts extant
forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves. Thus ended the
Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover in
Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a
more favorable result.

Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in
common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric
elements retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to
realize that philosophical division of the powers of government
which distinguish it from both imperial and democratic centralism
on the one hand, and, on the other, from the checks and balances
or organized antagonisms which seek to preserve liberty by
obstructing the exercise of power. No greater problem in
statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater contribution
to civilization to be made. Nowhere else than in this New World,
and in this New World only in the United States, can this problem
be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the
Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.

But the United States have a religious as well as a political
destiny, for religion and politics go together. Church and
state, as governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on
which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the
spiritual order--in the principles revealed or affirmed by
religion--and are inseparable from them. There is no state
without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or
the Incarnation. An atheist may be a politician, but if there
were no God there could be no politics. theological principles
are the basis of political principles. The created universe is a
dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and
all its parts cohere and are essential to one another. All has
its origin and prototype in the Triune God, and throughout
expresses unity in triplicity and triplicity in unity, without
which there is no real being and no actual or possible life.
Every thing has its principle, medium, and end. Natural society
is initial, civil government is medial, the church is
teleological, but the three are only distinctions in one
indissoluble whole.

Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the
Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through
the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh. True, he
communes with God through his kind, and through external nature,
society in which he is born and reared, and property through
which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only
media of his communion with God, the source of life--not either
the beginning or the end of his communion. They have no life in
themselves, since their being is in God, and, of themselves, can
impart none. They are in the order of second causes, and second
causes, without the first cause, are nought. Communion which
stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end,
instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of
life. As religion includes all that relates to communion with
God, it must in some form be inseparable from every living act of
man, both individually and socially; and, in the long run, men
must conform either their politics to their religion or their
religion to their politics. Christianity is constantly at work,
moulding political society in its own image and likeness, and
every political system struggles to harmonize Christianity with
itself. If, then, the United States have a political destiny,
they have a religious destiny inseparable from it.

The political destiny of the United States is to conform the
state to the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine
Idea in creation. Their religious destiny is to render
practicable and to realize the normal relations between church
and state, religion and politics, as concreted in the life of the
nation.

In politics, the United States are not realizing a political
theory of any sort whatever. They, on the contrary, are
successfully refuting all political theories, making away with
them, and establishing the state--not on a theory, not on an
artificial basis or a foundation laid by human reason or will,
but on reality, the eternal and immutable principles in relation
to which man is created. They are doing the same in regard to
religious theories. Religion is not a theory, a subjective view,
an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle, a law, and
a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace,
practical conformity to what is universally true and real. The
United States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad
havoc with religious theories as with political theories, and are
pressing on with irresistible force to the real or the Divine
order which is expressed in the Christian mysteries, which exists
independent of man's understanding and will, and which man can
neither make nor unmake.

The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new
religion nor to found a new church. All real religion is
catholic, and is neither new nor old, but is always and
everywhere true. Even our Lord came neither to found a new
church nor to create a new religion, but to do the things which
had been foretold, and to fulfil in time what had been determined
in eternity. God has himself founded the church on catholic
principles, or principles always and everywhere real principles.
His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on catholic
dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are universal
and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in the
Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces
and sustains all things. Founded on universal and immutable
principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the
church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of
men. Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith,
for they are founded in the highest reality, which is above him,
over him, and independent of him. Religion is above and
independent of the state, and the state has nothing to do with
the church or her dogmas, but to accept and conform to them as it
does to any of the facts or principles of science, to a
mathematical truth, or to a physical law.

But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her
dogmas are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and
unalterable, the relations between the civil and ecclesiastical
authorities may be changed or modified by the changes of time and
place. These relations have not been always the same, but have
differed in different ages and countries. During the first three
centuries of our era the church had no legal status, and was
either connived at or persecuted by the state. Under the
Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her
prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and
ecclesiastical questions, and were made, in some sense, civil
magistrates, and paid as such by the empire. Under feudalism,
the prelates received investiture as princes and barons, and
formed alone, or in connection with the temporal lords, an estate
in the kingdom. The Pope became a temporal prince and suzerain,
at one time, of a large part of Europe, and exercised the
arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian
sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects.
Since the downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern
centralized monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater
part of her temporal possessions, and deprived, in most
countries, of all civil functions, and treated by the state
either as an enemy or as a slave.

In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the
national church is held in strict subjection to the civil
authority, as in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of
the state; in the other states of Europe, as France, Austria,
Spain, and Italy, she is treated with distrust by the civil
government, and allowed hardly a shadow of freedom and
independence. In France, which has the proud title of eldest
daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not freer than
they are in Turkey. All religious are said to be free, and all
are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen. The
emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to
concede the church just as much and just as little freedom in the
empire as he judges expedient for his own secular interests. In
Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South
American states, the policy of the civil authorities is the same,
or worse. It may be safely asserted that, except in the United
States, the church is either held by the civil power in
subjection, or treated as an enemy. The relation is not that of
union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave detriment
of both religion and civilization.

It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the
mixture of civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in
the Middle Ages; and a total separation of church and state, even
as corporations, would, in the present state of men's minds in
Europe, be construed, if approved by the church, into a sanction
by her of political atheism, or the right of the civil power to
govern according to its own will and pleasure in utter disregard
of the law of God, the moral order, or the immutable distinctions
between right and wrong. It could only favor the absolutism of
the state, and put the temporal in the place of the spiritual.
Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the entire
separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors
condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864.
Neither the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United
States, can understand practically such separation in any other
sense than the complete emancipation of our entire secular life
from the law of God, or the Divine order, which is the real
order. It is not the union of church and state--that is, the
union, or identity rather, of religious and political
principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the disunion
or antagonism of church and state. But this is nowhere possible
out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state organized
on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting from
its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church,
or the religious order really existing, in relation to which all
things are created and governed. Nowhere else is it practicable,
at present, to maintain between the two powers their normal
relations.

But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly
practicable in the New. The state here being organized in
accordance with catholic principles, there can be no antagonism
between it and the church. Though operating in different
spheres, both are, in their respective spheres, developing and
applying to practical life the one and the same Divine Idea. The
church can trust the state, and the state can trust the church.
Both act from the same principle to one and the same end. Each
by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the
other. It is true the church is not formally established as the
civil law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be;
because there is nothing in the state that conflicts with her
freedom and independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable
canons. The need of establishing the church by law, and
protecting her by legal pains and penalties, as is still done in
most countries, can exist only in a barbarous or semi-barbarous
state of society, where the state is not organized on catholic
principles, or the civilization is based on false principles, and
in its development tends not to the real or Divine order of
things. When the state is constituted in harmony with that
order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal
constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment,
or what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a
superfluity. The true religion is in the heart of the state, as
its informing principle and real interior life. The external
establishment, by legal enactment of the church, would afford her
no additional protection, add nothing to her power and efficacy,
and effect nothing for faith or piety--neither of which can be
forced, because both must, from their nature, be free-will
offerings to God.

In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the
true religion; but all false religions being one-sided,
sophistical, and uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the
state, which tend, by their silent but effective workings, to
eliminate them. The American state recognizes only the catholic
religion. It eschews all sectarianism, and none of the sects
have been able to get their peculiarities incorporated into its
constitution or its laws. The state conforms to what each holds
that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion; and
what ever is not catholic it leaves, as outside of its province,
to live or die, according to its own inherent vitality or want of
vitality. The state conscience is catholic, not sectarian; hence
it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all religions,
the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic in
its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to
oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true. The church
being free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has,
in the freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the
security it can ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of
the case receive from external institutions, or from social and
political organizations.

This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all
nations may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained
their majority. The church, as well as the state, must deal with
men and nations as they are, not as they are not. To deal with a
child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a
civilized nation, would be only acting a lie. The church cannot
treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to
reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped. She must adapt
her discipline to the age, condition, and culture of individuals,
and to the greater or less progress of nations in civilization.
She herself remains always the same in her constitution, her
authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline with the
variations of time and place. Many of her canons, very proper
and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many
which are needed in the Old World would be out of place in the
New World. Under the American system, she can deal with the
people as free men, and trust them as freemen, because free men
they are. The freeman asks, why? and the reason why must be
given him, or his obedience fails to be secured. The simple
reason that the church commands will rarely satisfy him; he would
know why she commands this or that. The full-grown free man
revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all obedience as in
some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic command.
Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be
expected of the people reared under the American system, not
because they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but
because they insist that obedience shall be rationabile
obsequium, an act of the understanding, not of the will or the
affections alone. They are trained to demand a reason for the
command given them, to distinguish between the law and the person
of the magistrate. They can obey God, but not man, and they must
see that the command given has its reason in the Divine order, or
the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they will not yield
it a full, entire, and hearty obedience. The reason that
suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the
reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized
men, or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their
civilization does not suffice for them in its maturity. The
appeal to external authority was much less frequent under the
Roman Empire than in the barbarous ages that followed its
downfall, when the church became mixed up with the state.

This trait of the American character is not uncatholic. An
intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal
conviction, after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its
logic in the Divine order--the obedience of a free man, not of a
slave--is far more consonant to the spirit of the church, and far
more acceptable to God, than simple, blind obedience; and a
people capable of yielding it stand far higher in the scale of
civilization than the people that must be governed as children or
barbarians. It is possible that the people of the Old World are
not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion any more than
they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have been
trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed
to look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in
the reason of things. They understand no reason for obedience
beyond the external command, and do not believe it possible to
give or to understand the reason why the command itself is given.
They regard the authority of the church as a thing apart, and see
no way by which faith and reason can be harmonized. They look
upon them as antagonistic forces rather than as integral elements
of one and the same whole. Concede them the regimen of freedom,
and their religion has no support but in their good-will, their
affections, their associations, their habits, and their
prejudices. It has no root in their rational convictions, and
when they begin to reason they begin to doubt. This is not the
state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied
under the political regime established elsewhere than in the
United States. In every state in the world, except the American,
the civil constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or
less, the logic of things; and, therefore, in no one of them can
the people receive a thoroughly dialectic training, or an
education in strict conformity to the real order. Hence, in them
all, the church is more or less obstructed in her operations, and
prevented from carrying out in its fulness her own Divine Idea.
She does the best she can in the circumstances and with the
materials with which she is supplied, and exerts herself
continually to bring individuals and nations into harmony with
her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the nations is
a struggle, a warfare.

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