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Imprimis, On Line
May, 1995
IMPRIMIS (im-pri-mis), taking its name from the Latin
term, "in the first place," is the publication of
Hillsdale College. Executive Editor, Ronald L.
Trowbridge; Managing Editor, Lissa Roche; Assistant,
Patricia A. DuBois. Illustrations by Tom Curtis. The
opinions expressed in IMPRIMIS may be, but are not
necessarily, the views of Hillsdale College and its
External Programs division. Copyright 1995. Permission
to reprint in whole or part is hereby granted, provided
a version of the following credit line is used:
"Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly
journal of Hillsdale College." Subscription free upon
request. ISSN 0277-8432. Circulation 590,000 worldwide,
established 1972. IMPRIMIS trademark registered in U.S.
Patent and Trade Office #1563325.
---------------------------------------------
Volume 24, No. 5
Hillsdale College,
Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
May 1995
---------------------------------------------
"A New Vision of Man:
How Christianity Has Changed Political Economy"
by Michael Novak
Author, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
---------------------------------------------
One of the 20th century's greatest religious writers,
Michael Novak, addresses the relationship between
religion and economics. He argues that Christ
revolutionized the human conception of the political
economy in at least seven important ways.
This presentation was prepared for a July 1994
seminar in Crakow, Poland on "Centesimus Annus and the
Free Society," and for a November 1994 seminar
sponsored by Hillsdale's Center for Constructive
Alternatives seminar, "God and Man: Perspectives on
Christianity in the 20th Century."
---------------------------------------------
For centuries, scholars and laymen have studied the
Bible's impact on our religion, politics, education,
and culture, but very little serious attention has been
devoted to its impact on our economics. It is as if our
actions in the marketplace have nothing to do with our
spiritual beliefs. Nothing could be further from the
truth. My aim here is to demonstrate how Judeo-
Christianity, and Jesus, in particular, revolutionized
the political economy of the ancient world and how that
revolution still profoundly affects the world today.
I wish to propose for your consideration the
following thesis: At least seven contributions made by
Christian thinkers, meditating on the words and deeds
of Jesus Christ, altered the vision of the good society
proposed by the classical writers of Greece and Rome
and made certain modern conceptions of political
economy possible. Be warned that we are talking about
foundational issues. The going won't be entirely easy.
Be warned, also, that I want to approach this
subject in a way satisfying to secular thinkers. You
shouldn't have to be a believer in Jesus in order to
grasp the plausibility of my argument. In that spirit,
let me begin, first, by citing Richard Rorty, who once
wrote that as a progressive philosopher he owes more to
Jesus for certain key progressive notions, such as
compassion and equality, than to any of the classical
writers. Analogously, in his book, Why I am Not a
Christian, Bertrand Russell conceded that, although he
took Jesus to be no more than a humanistic moral
prophet, modern progressivism is indebted to Christ for
the ideal of compassion.
In short, in order to recognize the crucial
contributions that the coming of Christ brought into
modern movements of political economy, one does not
have to be a Christian. One may take a quite secular
point of view and still give credit where credit is
due.
Here, then, are the seven major contributions made
by Jesus to our modern conceptions of political
economy.
To Bring Judaism to the Gentiles
From Jerusalem, that crossroads between three
continents open to the East and West, North and South,
Jesus brought recognition of the One God, the Creator.
The name this God gave to Himself is "I AM WHO AM"--He
is, as opposed to the rest of us, who have no necessary
or permanent hold on being. He is the One who IS; other
things are those who are, but also are not. He is the
Creator of all things. All things that are depend upon
Him. As all things spring from His action in creating
them, so they depend upon Him for their being
maintained in existence, their "standing out from"
nothingness [Ex + sistere, L., to stand out from].
The term "Creator" implies a free person; it
suggests that creation was a free act, an act that did
not flow from necessity. It was an act of intelligence,
it was a choice, and it was willed. The Creator knew
what He was doing, and He willed it; that is, "He saw
that it is good." From this notion of the One
God/Creator, three practical corollaries for human
action follow.
Be intelligent. Made in the image of God, we should
be attentive and intelligent, as our Creator is.
Trust liberty. As God loved us, so it is fitting
for us to respond with love. Since in creating us He
knew what He was doing and He willed it, we have every
reason to trust His will. He created us with
understanding and free will; creation was a free act.
Since He made us in His image, well ought we to say
with Jefferson: "The God who gave us life gave us
liberty."
Understand that history has a beginning, and an
end. At a certain moment, time was created by God. Time
is directed toward "building up the Kingdom of
God...on earth as in heaven." Creation is directed
toward final union with its Creator.
As many scholars have noted, the idea of
"progress," like the idea of "creation," are not Greek
ideas--nor are they Roman. The Greeks preferred notions
of the necessary procession of the world from a First
Principle. While in a limited sense they understood the
progress of ideas, skills, and technologies and also
saw how these could be lost, in general, they viewed
history as a cycle of endless return. They lacked a
notion of historical progress. The idea of history as a
category distinct from nature is a Hebrew rather than a
Greek idea.
Analogously, as Lord Acton argued in the essays he
prepared for his History of Liberty, liberty is an idea
coincident with the spread of Christianity. Up to a
point, the idea of liberty is a Jewish idea. Every
story in the Bible is about a drama involving the human
will. In one chapter, King David is faithful to his
Lord; in another unfaithful. The suspense always lies
in what he will choose next. Nonetheless, Judaism is
not a missionary religion; normally one receives
Judaism by being born of a Jewish mother; in this
sense, Judaism is rooted in genealogy rather than in
liberty. Beyond this point, Christianity expanded the
notion of liberty and made it universal. The Christian
idea of liberty remains rooted in the liberty of the
Creator, as in Judaism. Through Christianity, this
Jewish idea becomes the inheritance of all the other
peoples on earth.
Recognition of the One God/Creator means that the
fundamental attitude of human beings toward God is, and
ought to be, receptivity. All that we are we have
received from God. This is true both of our creation
and our redemption. God acts first. We respond.
Everything is a gift. "Everything we look upon is
blessed" (Yeats). "Grace is everywhere" (Bernanos).
Thus, offering thanksgiving is our first moral
obligation.
It is difficult to draw out, in brief compass, all
the implications for political economy of the fact that
history begins in the free act of the Creator, who made
humans in His image and who gave them both existence
and an impulse toward communion with their first
breath. In this act of creation, in any case, Jefferson
properly located (and it was the sense of the American
people) not only the origin of the inner core of human
rights: "...and endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights, including...," but also the
perspective of providential history: "When in the
course of human events..." The Americans were aware of
creating something "new": a new world, a new order, a
new science of politics. As children of the Creator,
they felt no taboo against originality; on the
contrary, they thought it their vocation.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
When Jesus spoke of God, He spoke of the communion of
three persons in one. This means that, in God, the
mystery of being and the mystery of communion are one.
Unlike the Greeks such as Parmedides, Plato, and
Aristotle, who thought of God or the Nous as One,
living in solitary isolation, the Christian world was
taught by Jesus to think of God as a communion of
three. In other words, the mystery of communion, or
community, is one with the very mystery of being. The
sheer fact that we are alive sometimes comes over us at
dusk on an autumn day, as we walk across a corn field
and in the tang of the evening air hear a crow lift off
against the sky. We may pause then to wonder, in
admiration and gratitude. We could so easily have not
been, and yet we are, at least for these fragile
moments. Soon another generation will take our place,
and tramp over the same field. We experience wonder at
the sheer fact: At this moment, we are. And we also
apprehend the fact that we are part of a long
procession of the human community in time; and that we
are, by the grace of God, one with God. To exist is
already something to marvel at; so great a communion is
even more so. Our wonder is not so much doubled; it is
squared, infinitely multiplied.
This recognition of the Trinity is not without
significance for political economy. First, it inspires
us with a new respect for an ideal of community not
often found on this earth, a community in which each
person is separate, distinct, and independent, and yet
in which there is, nonetheless, communion. It teaches
us that the relation between community and person is
deeper and richer that we might have imagined.
Christians should not simply lose themselves in
community, having their personality and independence
merge into an undifferentiated mass movement. On the
contrary, Christianity teaches us that in true
community the distinctness and independence of each
person are also crucial. Persons reach their full
development only in community with others. No matter
how highly developed in himself or herself, a totally
isolated person, cut-off from others, is regarded as
something of a monster. In parallel, a community that
refuses to recognize the autonomy of individual persons
often uses individuals as means to "the common good,"
rather than treating persons as ends in themselves.
Such communities are coercive and tyrannical.
Christianity, in short, opens up the ideal of
catholicity which has always been a mark of true
Christianity. Katholike means all of humanity, the
whole human world. In this world, persons, and even
cultures, are distinct, and have their own autonomy and
claim on our respect. E pluribus unum. The many form
one; but the one does not melt the many into the lowest
common denominator. The many retain their individual
vitality, and for this they show gratitude to the
community that allows them, in fact encourages them, to
do so. Person and community must be defined in terms of
each other.
The Children of God
In Plato's Republic, citizens were divided in this way:
A few were of gold, a slightly larger body of silver,
and the vast majority of lead. The last had the souls
of slaves and, therefore, were properly enslaved. Only
persons of gold are truly to be treated as ends in
themselves. For Judaism and Christianity, on the
contrary, the God who made every single child gave
worth and dignity to each of them, however weak or
vulnerable. "What you do unto the least of these, you
do unto me." God identified Himself with the most
humble and most vulnerable.
Our Creator knows each of us by name, and
understands our own individuality with a far greater
clarity that we ourselves do; after all, He made us.
(Thomas Aquinas once wrote that God is infinite, and so
when He creates human beings in His image, He must in
fact create an infinite number of them to mirror back
His own infinity.) Each of us reflects only a small
fragment of God's identity. If one of us is lost, the
image of God intended to be reflected by that one is
lost. The image of God reflected in the human becomes
distorted.
In this respect, Judaism and Christianity grant a
fundamental equality in the sight of God to all human
beings, whatever their talents or station. This
equality arises because God penetrates below any
artificial rank, honor, or station that may on the
surface differentiate one from another. He sees past
those things. He sees into us. He sees us as we are in
our uniqueness, and it is that uniqueness that He
values. Let us call this form of equality by the clumsy
but useful name, equality-as-uniqueness. Before God, we
have equal weight in our uniqueness, not because we are
the same, but because each of us is different. Each is
made by God after an original design.
This conception of equality-uniqueness is quite
different from the modern "progressive" or socialist
conception of equality-sameness. The Christian notion
is not a levelling notion. Neither does it delight in
uniformity. On the contrary, it tries to pay heed to,
and give respect to, the unique image of God in each
person.
For most of its history, Christianity, like
Judaism, flourished in hierarchical societies. While
recognizing that every single person lives and moves in
sight of God's judgment and is equally a creature of
God, Christianity has also rejoiced in the differences
among us and between us. God did not make us equal in
talent, ability, character, office, calling, or
fortune.
Equality-uniqueness is not the same as equality-
sameness. The first recognizes our claim to a unique
identity and dignity. The second desires to take away
what is unique and to submerge it in uniformity. Thus,
modern movements such as socialism have taken the
original Christian impulse of equality, which they
inherited, and disfigured it. Like Christianity, modern
socialist movements reject the stratification of
citizens into gold, silver, and lead, as in Plato's
scheme. But, since they are materialistic at root,
their traditional impulse has been to pull people down,
to place all on the same level, to enforce uniformity.
This program is inexorably coercive, unlovely, and
depressing.
Compassion
It is true that virtually all peoples have traditions
of compassion for the suffering, care for those in
need, and concern for others. However, in most
religious traditions, these movements of the heart are
limited to one's own family, kin, nation, or culture.
In some cultures, young males in particular have to be
hard and insensitive to pain, so that they will be
sufficiently cruel to enemies. Terror is the instrument
intended to drive outsiders away from the territory of
the tribe. In principle (though not always in
practice), Christianity opposes this limitation on
compassion. It teaches people the impulse to reach out,
especially to the most vulnerable, to the poor, the
hungry, the wretched, those in prison, the hopeless,
the sick, and others. It tells humans to love their
enemies. It teaches a universal compassion. It teaches
people to see the dignity even of those who in the eyes
of the world have lost their dignity, and those who are
helpless to act on their own behalf. This is the
"solidarity" whose necessity for modernity Rorty
perceives.
In the name of compassion, Christianity tries to
humble the mighty and to prod the rich into concern for
the poor. It does not turn the young male away from
being a warrior, but it does teach him to model himself
on Christ, and thus to become a new type of male in
human history: the knight bound by a code of
compassion, the gentleman. It teaches him to learn, to
be meek, humble, peaceable, kind, and generous. It
introduces a new and fruitful tension between the
warrior and the gentlemen, magnanimity and humility,
meekness and fierce ambition.
A Universal Family
Christianity has taught human beings that an underlying
imperative of history is to bring about a law-like,
peaceable community, among all people of good will on
the entire earth. For political economy, Christianity
proposes a new ideal: the entire human race is a
universal family, created by the one same God, and
urged to love that God. Yet at the same time,
Christianity (like Judaism before it) is also the
religion of a particular kind of God: not the Deity who
looks down on all things from an olympian height but,
in Christianity's case, a God who became incarnate. The
Christian God, incarnate, was carried in the womb of a
single woman, among a particular people, at a precise
intersection of time and space, and nourished in a
local community then practically unknown to the rest of
the peoples on this planet. Christianity is a religion
of the concrete and the universal. It pays attention to
the flesh, the particular, the concrete, and each
single intersection of space and time; its God is the
God who made and cares for every lily of the field,
every blade of grass, every hair on the head of each of
us. Its God is the God of singulars, the God who
Himself became a singular man. At the same time, the
Christian God is the Creator of all.
In a sense, this Christian God goes beyond
contemporary conceptions of "individualism" and
"communitarianism." With 18th-century British statesman
and philosopher Edmund Burke, Christianity sees the
need for proper attention to every "little platoon" of
society, to the immediate neighborhood, to the
immediate family. Our social policies must be
incarnate, must be rooted in the actual flesh of
concrete people in their actual local, intimate worlds.
At the same time, Christianity directs the attention of
these little communities toward the larger communities
of which they are a part. On the one hand, Christianity
forbids them to be merely parochial or xenophobic. On
the other hand, it warns them against becoming
premature universalists, one-worlders, gnostics
pretending to be pure spirits, and detached from all
the limits and beauties of concrete flesh. Christianity
gives warning against both extremes. It instructs us
about the precarious balance between concrete and
universal in our own nature. This is the mystery of
catholicity.
"I Am the Truth"
The Creator of all things has total insight into all
things. He knows what He has created. This gives the
weak, modest minds of human beings the vocation to use
their minds relentlessly, in order to penetrate the
hidden layers of intelligibility that God has written
into His creation. Everything in creation is in
principle understandable: In fact, at every moment
everything is understood by Him, who is eternal and
therefore simultaneously present to all things. (In God
there is no history, no past-present-future. In His
insight into reality, all things are as if
simultaneous. Even though in history they may unfold
sequentially, they are all at once, that is,
simultaneously, open to His contemplation.)
Our second president, John Adams, wrote that in
giving us a notion of God as the Source of all truth,
and the Judge of all, the Hebrews laid before the human
race the possibility of civilization. Before the
undeceivable Judgment of God, the Light of Truth cannot
be deflected by riches, wealth, or worldly power. Armed
with this conviction, Jews and Christians are empowered
to use their intellects and to search without fear into
the causes of things, their relationships, their
powers, and their purposes. This understanding of Truth
makes humans free. For Christianity does not teach that
Truth is an illusion based upon the opinions of those
in power, or merely a rationalization of powerful
interests in this world. Christianity is not
deconstructionist, and it is certainly not
totalitarian. Its commitment to Truth beyond human
purposes is, in fact, a rebuke to all totalitarian
schemes and all nihilist cynicism.
Moreover, by locating Truth (with a capital T) in
God, beyond our poor powers fully to comprehend,
Christianity empowers human reason. It does so by
inviting us to use our heads as best we can, to discern
the evidences that bring us as close to Truth as human
beings can attain. It endows human beings with a
vocation to inquire endlessly, relentlessly, to give
play to the unquenchable eros of the desire to
understand--that most profoundly restless drive to know
that teaches human beings their own finitude while it
also informs them of their participation in the
infinite.
The notion of Truth is crucial to civilization. As
Thomas Aquinas held, civilization is constituted by
conversation. Civilized persons persuade one another
through argument. Barbarians club one another into
submission. Civilization requires citizens to recognize
that they do not possess the truth, but must be
possessed by it, to the degree possible to them. Truth
matters greatly. But Truth is greater than any one of
us. We do not possess it; it possesses us. Therefore,
humans must learn such civilizing habits as being
respectful and open to others, listening attentively,
trying to see aspects of the Truth that they do not as
yet see. Because the search for Truth is vital to each
of us, humans must argue with each other, urge each
other onward, point out deficiencies in one another's
arguments, and open the way for greater participation
in the Truth by every one of us.
In this respect, the search for Truth makes us not
only humble but also civil. It teaches us why we hold
that every single person has an inviolable dignity:
Each is made in the image of the Creator to perform
noble acts, such as to understand, to deliberate, to
choose, to love. These noble activities of human beings
cannot be repressed without repressing the Image of God
in them. Such an act would be doubly sinful. It
violates the other person, and it is an offense against
God.
One of the ironies of our present age is that the
great philosophical advocates of the Enlightenment no
longer believe in Reason (with a capital R). They have
surrendered their confidence in the vocation of Reason
to cynics such as to the post-modernists and
deconstructionists. Such philosophers (Sophists,
Socrates called them) hold that there is no Truth, that
all things are relative, and that the great realities
of life are power and interest. So we have come to an
ironic pass. The children of the Enlightenment have
abandoned Reason, while those they have considered
unenlightened and living in darkness, the people of
Jewish and Christian faith, remain today reason's
(without a capital R) best defenders. For believing
Jews and Christians ground their confidence in reason
in the Creator of all reason, and their confidence in
understanding in the One who understands everything He
made--and loves it, besides.
There can be no civilization of reason, or of love,
without this faith in the vocation of reason.
The Name of God: Mercy
Christianity teaches realistically not only the glories
of human beings-- their being made in the image of God-
-but also their sins, weaknesses, and evil tendencies.
Judaism and Christianity are not utopian; they are
quite realistic about human beings. They try to
understand humans as they are, as God sees them both in
their sins and in the graces that He grants them. This
sharp awareness of human sinfulness was very important
to the American founding.
Without ever using the term "original sin," the
Founders were, in such documents as The Federalist,
eloquent about the flaws, weaknesses, and evils to
which human beings are prone. Therefore, they designed
a republic that would last, not only among saints, but
also among sinners. (There is no point in building a
Republic for saints; there are too few of them;
besides, the ones who do exist are too difficult to
live with.) If you want to make a Republic that will
last, you must construct it for sinners, because
sinners are not just a moral majority, they are
virtually a moral unanimity.
Christianity teaches that at every moment the God
who made us is judging how well we make use of our
liberty. And the first word of Christianity in this
respect is: "Fear not. Be not afraid." For Christianity
teaches that Truth is ordered to mercy. Truth is not,
thank God, ordered first of all to justice. For if
Truth were ordered to strict justice, not one of us
would stand against the gale.
God is just, true, but the more accurate name for
Him is not justice, but rather mercy. (The Latin root
of this word conveys the idea more clearly:
Misericordia comes from miseris + cor--give one's heart
to les miserables, the wretched ones.) This name of
God, Misericordia, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is
God's most fitting name. Toward our misery, He opens
His heart. Precisely as sinners, He accepts us. "At the
heart of Christianity lies the sinner," Charles P<>guy
wrote.
Yet mercy is only possible because of Judgment.
Judgment Day is the Truth on which civilization is
grounded. No matter the currents of opinion in our
time, or any time, may be; no matter what the powers
and principalities may say or do; no matter the
solicitations pressing upon us from our families,
friends, associates, and larger culture; no matter what
the pressures may be--we will still be under the
Judgment of the One who is undeceivable, who knows what
is in us, and who knows the movements of our souls more
clearly than we know them ourselves. In His Light, we
are called to bring a certain honesty into our own
lives, into our dealings with others, and into our
respect for the Light that God has imparted to every
human being. It is on this basis that human beings may
be said to have inalienable rights, and dignity, and
infinite worth.
Jesus, the Teacher
These seven recognitions lie at the root of Jewish-
Christian civilization, the one that is today evasively
called "Western civilization." From them, we get our
deepest and most powerful notions of truth, liberty,
community, person, conscience, equality, compassion,
mercy, and virtue. These are the deepest ideals and
energies working in our culture, as yeast works in
dough, as a seed falling into the ground dies and
becomes a spreading mustard tree.
These are practical recognitions. They have effects
in every person and in every moment of life, and
throughout society. If you stifle these notions, if you
wipe them out, the institutions of the free society
become unworkable. In this sense, a U.S. Supreme Court
Justice once wrote, "Our institutions presuppose a
Supreme Being." They do not presuppose any Supreme
Being. They presuppose the God of Judaism and
Christianity. And not only our institutions presuppose
these realities. So do our conceptions of our own
identity, and the daily actions of our own lives.
Remove these religious foundations from our intellects,
our lives, and the free society--in its complex checks
and balances, and its highly articulated divisions of
power--becomes incoherent to understanding and
unworkable in practice.
For the present form of the free society,
therefore, we owe a great deal to the intervention of
Jesus Christ in history. In bringing those of us who
are not Jewish the Word that brings life, in giving us
a nobler conception of what it is to be human, and in
giving us insight into our own weaknesses and sins,
Jesus shed light available from no other source. Better
than the philosophers, Jesus Christ is the teacher of
many lessons indispensible for the working of the free
society. These lessons may be, and have been
secularized--but not without losing their center, their
coherence, and their long-term persuasive power.
But that alone would be as nothing, of course, if
we did not learn from Jesus that we, all of us,
participate in His life, and in living with Him, live
in, with and through the Father and the Holy Spirit in
a glorious community of love. For what would it profit
us, if we gained the whole world, and all the free
institutions that flourish with it, and lost our own
souls?
---------------------------------------------
Michael Novak, former U.S. ambassador to the Human
Rights Commission of the United Nations, currently
holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and
Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, D.C.
He is the author of a dozen books, including: The
Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, This
Hemisphere of Liberty, Freedom with Justice, The Spirit
of Democratic Capitalism, and Belief and UnBelief.
The Polish Solidarity movement and the Czech
underground studied translations (often secretly and
illegally) in the 1970s, as did members of pro-
democratic movements in South Korea, Chile, Argentina,
Venezuela, and the Philippines, and China in the 1980s.
Pope John Paul II's Centesimus Annus, published in
1991, is widely regarded as having been influenced by
Mr. Novak's writings, and in her memoirs former British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher noted that they
"proved the intellectual basis of my approach to those
great questions brought together in political parlance
as 'the quality of life.'"
In May of 1994, Mr. Novak was awarded the
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
###
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