Michael Novak's Patriotism
KRAYNAK, ROBERT P.
Michael Novak's Patriotism How Christian is America? BY ROBERT P KRAYNAK Many intellectuals dream of changing the world, but only a few end up exerting much influence. One of those few is...
...In South America, he was a guiding power in defeating liberation theology...
...He sought instead a genuine synthesis of liberty and Catholicism, referring to himself as "a liberal Catholic" and a defender of "neoliberal Catholicism...
...These are powerful and convincing prudential arguments about the best means for attaining the temporal common good...
...Posing as eternal truth, it was merely the Catholicism of the late medieval world, codified in the sixteenth century at the Council of Trent and surviving anachronistically into the twentieth century...
...In this endeavor, Novak is largely successful because he is able to cite an abundance of material showing that most of the Founders professed a belief in God as the creator and judge of the universe, defended the notion of God-given natural rights, and insisted that the Christian religion was a necessary foundation for republican virtue...
...Above all else, capitalism contributes to human dignity by enabling the poor to overcome the historic misery and degradation of poverty...
...The Open Church has recently been reissued with an introduction in which the Novak of today criticizes the Novak of the 1960s...
...Following the lead of Lord Acton's reporting on Vatican I in the 1870s, Novak uses the distinction between the two outlooks to explain the weakness of the old school and the superiority of the new...
...In Rome, the pope has explicitly cited him as an influence...
...It is not merely a system of greed, selfish individualism, and acquisitiveness...
...The least controversial aspect of the book is Novak's presentation of documentary evidence showing that the American Founders were not secular Enlightenment rationalists, as they are often portrayed, but creators of a unique American blend of Biblical faith, practical reason, and human liberty...
...While stressing the harmony of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the American founding, On Two Wings addresses directly some of the difficulties in sustaining the convergence thesis...
...Although he spoke respectfully of the chief opponent of reform, Cardinal Ottaviani, Novak devoted most of his report to the Council's leaders, Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, and triumphantly discussing such modern theologians as Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, Bernard Lonergan, and the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, whose once-forbidden thought was warmly received by the council...
...Over the next twenty years, he became disillusioned as the reforms enacted in the name of Vatican II did not bring about the concrete embodiment of faith in modern society that he expected...
...Against the anti-modern traditionalism of the pre-Vatican II Church, the radical Michael Novak of the 1960s argued for the compatibility of Christian faith and the modern world...
...Novak's larger thesis is that the Founders were not merely Deists, but men who believed in the revealed religion of the Bible and "Jewish metaphysics...
...Indeed, capitalism is not materialistic in its essence, because it relies most of all on human capital, especially intellectual capital in human invention and new discoveries...
...But, whatever the label, Novak indicates that his thinking grew out of disillusionment with the false optimism of the utopian left and admiration for modern liberty in the political and economic spheres, combined with traditional religion in the cultural sphere...
...Novak also criticizes his radical excesses: his support for experimental liturgies, his approval of dissent in the Church, his questioning of priestly celibacy—and he expresses deep regret for not spotting the rising star of Vatican II, Bishop Karol Wojtyla, who later became Pope John Paul II...
...Stated most boldly, Novak's goal, like Murray's before him, is the Catholic refounding of America on principles of Thomistic natural law, now interpreted to mean the rights and dignity of the human person...
...Commission on Human Rights...
...In Novak's account, the old school lived under the illusion of unchanging truths, which it held as abstractions from the real world and which shielded it from encounters with modern ideas...
...The corruption of the Catholic clergy revealed in the recent priest-sex scandals—and the feeding frenzy as the media have turned with incredible viciousness on the whole Church—suggest that there are irreducible tensions between the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and the norms of democratic America...
...His prudential arguments show that democracy and capitalism are compatible with divine law and God's grace operating in the world at the present moment...
...As a Catholic, Novak has paid special attention to the social teaching of the Church as it has been handed down in encyclicals, councils, and doctrines...
...The young Novak had few doubts about the superiority of the new school: "The Catholic faith is committed to this world, not to a platonic other world...
...At each point, he has been a tonic for the errors of the age...
...The reformers of Vatican II believed God's grace was not an abstraction outside the world but an embodiment in the world of persons and institutions— including the modern world...
...The Polish pope has become Novak's hero for saving the Church from the disastrous misunderstandings of Vatican II and for developing the true theology of the human person and the correct understanding of human liberty...
...He complained bitterly of a Church that had become little more than "a child of the present age" and cited the decrease in Mass attendance and religious vocations as well as the debasement of liturgical music and disrespect for the Eucharist as evidence of decline...
...He specifically raises objections to his thesis in a chapter entitled, "Ten Questions about the Founding...
...But he was not satisfied with this pessimistic argument because it implied that capitalism is "not a Christian system, nor a highly humanistic one...
...Novak's vivid report is coherently organized around the distinction between two schools of Catholicism: the old school of pre-Vatican II thinking, which Novak refers to as "non-historical orthodoxy," and the new school, which he calls "historical orthodoxy...
...For Novak, the historical school's openness to change and demand for faith rooted in concrete experience constituted the "spirit of Vatican II...
...More, capitalism makes possible the Christian virtue of charity by creating the wealth for voluntary self-giving...
...While the Founders imbibed this Jewish or Hebraic worldview through their Protestant Christianity, they combined it with their practical reason as statesmen and came up with something that closely resembles the Catholic Whig philosophy of Thomas Aquinas—the belief in ordered liberty under God and law...
...He was a key figure in the intellectual coalition that supported Ronald Reagan's transformation of American politics...
...If Novak were more willing to concede that Christian faith permits a prudent or practical alliance with American democracy but does not have an inherent harmony with it, then he might be encouraged to speak more openly about the irreducible tensions between Catholicism and the American way of life...
...The crucial question he avoids, however, is whether there is an ultimate harmony, convergence, or fusion between Catholicism and any earthly political regime...
...Born in 1933 into a Slovak-American family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Novak went off to the seminary expecting to become a priest—but wound up instead living a remarkable career as a journalist, political activist, philosopher, and theologian...
...But Novak has never been willing to limit himself to prudential arguments for democratic capitalism...
...Among the most challenging are "Does America subordinate religion...
...Against the anti-democratic views of liberation theology and socialism, the neoliberal Michael Novak of the 1980s argued for free-market economics in order to maintain high ambitions for human society...
...To see how these elements came together, one must read the impressive recent collection of Novak's writings, Three In One: Essays on Democratic Capitalism, 1976-2000...
...Novak's commitment to "incarnational humanism" prevents him from engaging this traditional doctrine at the deepest level...
...In hindsight, Novak sees his first steps to the right in the 1980s, when what he tentatively called "neoliberal-ism" gradually culminated in "neocon-servatism...
...It seems blasphemous to take the loftiest Christian doctrines—the Incarnation, the Trinity, the redemptive suffering of Christ, the divine gift of grace for salvation—and use them as props for an economic system...
...In Poland and Slovakia, he has been awarded the new states' highest medals for his contributions to the fight against Soviet communism...
...The author of Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, Robert P. Kraynak teaches political science at Colgate University...
...Has not the American emphasis on natural rights since the founding contributed to the spiritual decline Novak bemoans...
...It also recognized the need for doctrine to fit the experience of living people...
...With disarming candor, Novak now says that he is ashamed of what he wrote back in the 1960s...
...By avoiding this question, Novak never really faces the traditional Christian doctrine that distinguishes (in St...
...At first, Novak could think of little more in the way of theological support for capitalism than the doctrine of original sin: Capitalism works because it accepts the fallen nature of man and channels the selfish and acquisitive side of human nature to constructive ends...
...And against the anti-religious prejudices of left-wing academics, the Michael Novak of today argues the necessity of a Catholic understanding of the world in order to preserve the political and economic benefits of the American system...
...As Novak indicates in a fascinating autobiographical essay, "Controversial Engagements," he gradually realized that the positive theological case for capitalism could be made by developing the doctrine of "incarnational humanism" that he learned as a seminarian from the fathers of the Holy Cross...
...The editor, Edward W. Younkins, has selected essays that bring out the distinctively Novakian mission of trying to find a theological or spiritual basis for democratic capitalism...
...The Open Church is an eyewitness account of the second phase of Vatican II, which included the crucial debates of 1963 about the structure and role of the Church in the modern world...
...At a deeper level, we need to ask whether a scheme of natural rights is really compatible with the primacy of duties to God and to one's neighbor commanded by Christianity...
...By expanding incarnational humanism to include free-market economics, Novak became a theological enthusiast for capitalism...
...Grace also works in economics," he assured us—with the implication that one can be doing God's work by setting up a business that employs others, that a business career can be a "vocation" in the sense of a calling from God, that the invention of new products can reflect the divine image in man as a creative being, that markets can be spiritual because they have analogies with the Trinity in their unity and differentiation of people, and even that the contempt shown for business by left-wing academics is like the mockery endured by the suffering servant in Isaiah...
...This fusion of spirituality and economics rubs many people the wrong way...
...It was the "school of fear" that relied on ignorance of history and escapism into the supernatural...
...Looked at in retrospect, Novak's career has followed the typical pattern of a neoconservative intellectual—a journey to the right as his left-wing activism turned into disillusionment and his thought matured...
...Capitalism thus serves human liberty by limiting the centralized power of the state through its emphasis on the private sector...
...But the books he wrote—The Open Church (1964), Belief and Unbelief (1965), and A Theology for Radical Politics (1969)—reveal that even his youthful radicalism was based on theological premises...
...Novak also drew parallels between the Open Church and the Open Society in defending Vatican II's endorsement of religious liberty and constitutional democracy...
...Yet the ultimate goal of On Two Wings is more ambitious than documenting the religious professions of the Founders...
...During the 1960s, Novak championed a progressive Catholicism and New Left politics that put him at odds with American bourgeois democracy and the Vietnam War...
...Marshaling powerful prudential arguments that capitalist economics has a moral dimension, Novak explained with admirable clarity that capitalism is more noble in practice than it is portrayed in theory...
...Most people, Novak points out, work in a free-market system not out of greed but to provide for their families, to own their own homes, and to develop their local communities...
...We still need from Michael Novak the definitive statement he is uniquely qualified to provide...
...ambassador to the U.N...
...But at each point, as well, his enthusiasm has carried him beyond the point that even his most sympathetic readers can accept...
...Thus the reforms of Vatican II sought to create a greater role for laymen in the Church, establish collegiality between bishops and the pope, create a role for married deacons, end the dominance of the Latin tradition, redefine the Church as the People of God instead of the Mystical Body of Christ, and advance ecumenism with non-Catholics...
...Incarnational humanism takes the traditional Christian notion of the Incarnation—that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ—and expands it by finding the divine presence in the seemingly mundane activities of politics, business, sports, scientific discovery, and human invention...
...The author of more than thirty books—on politics, economics, literature, and even sports— Novak is currently a scholar in residence at the American Enterprise Institute...
...We learn that Novak began his quest when he realized that socialism had never lived up to its promise of helping the poor but continued to mesmerize modern intellectuals because it served as a substitute faith for those who no longer believed in God...
...We still need a complete account of the converging and conflicting demands of being a profoundly faithful Catholic and a deeply patriotic American—an account of how to live as a citizen of two worlds while giving to each its proper love and devotion...
...It presupposes the "communitarian individual" rather than the isolated and selfish individual (thus resembling team sports, especially baseball...
...Are the consumer culture and bourgeois character of democratic capitalism really compatible with the spiritual perfection required by the highest religious commands...
...His life-long project, one might say, has been the arduous struggle to reconcile his two great loves: Catholicism and American public philosophy...
...Thomas Aquinas ("the first Catholic Whig") and also finds in Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord Acton, Pope Leo XIII, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, and John Paul II...
...Novak's aim here is to fulfill what is often called the "John Courtney Murray project," which sought not only to demonstrate the harmony of American principles and Catholicism but also to prove that those principles were best grounded in the truth of Catholic natural law...
...Much of Novak's Confession of a Catholic is repeated in the new introduction to The Open Church, but with even harsher judgments on himself...
...and "If Aquinas was the first Whig, why did a regime of religious liberty appear so late...
...To defeat socialism, one needed a religious argument for capitalism to match socialism's appeal as a secular religion...
...That combination of new understanding and old text might stand as a primer for future generations: the education of a Catholic neoconservative...
...Another label Novak applies to his mature thought is "Catholic Whig" —the tradition of ordered liberty under God that he traces to St...
...One of those few is Michael Novak...
...There is a sense in which Novak has always been pursuing the same end...
...He did not distinguish carefully enough between the "spirit of Vatican II" and the actual written documents of the Council—many of which made crucial distinctions between the unchanging core beliefs of Catholicism and those aspects which are legitimately open to change or development in the modern world...
...Novak is aware of the difficulties faced by his extremely ambitious project, and he makes an impressive effort to surmount them...
...The Novak of the 1960s believed in the aggiornamento—the updating of the Catholic Church—that the Second Vatican Council seemed to promise...
...Taken together, these elements —political liberalism, economic freedom, and religious conservatism—became the three legs of what Novak calls "the spirit of democratic capitalism...
...By contrast, the new school acknowledged the changing nature of truth and the historical development of doctrine...
...Yet, even in 1983, Novak made it clear he did not want to return to the pre-Vatican II Church...
...And his insistence on spiritualizing economics and politics seems to blur the traditional Christian distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms—and thereby exaggerate the harmony of Catholicism and the American way of life...
...But it is a big step from there to the claim that democracy and capitalism are absolutely required by divine law and God's grace...
...The terms are similar for Novak because the essence of his mature position is a synthesis in which the classical liberalism espoused by John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founding Fathers is joined with a streamlined version of the Judeo-Christian tradition...
...Augustine's formulation) the City of God from the City of man, and views all decisions about politics, economics, and society as prudential choices about a merely temporal good...
...This problem persists in his latest work, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, although it is the most judicious and possibly the best of all his books...
...Moreover, the strategy of spiritualizing capitalism masks the genuine contribution Novak made to political economy...
...He's been everything from a professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Notre Dame, to the winner of the Templeton prize, to the U.S...
...As he demonstrates repeatedly, capitalism can promote moral and political virtues...
...and he has always sought a theological basis for public policy...
...It implies that "grace is everywhere," a quotation Novak took in his early years from Georges Bernanos and never let go...
...In 1983, he wrote a Confession of a Catholic, attacking the legacy of Vatican II and asking, "What went wrong...
...But Novak's enthusiasm for the spirit of the Open Church was short-lived...
...With considerable ingenuity, he even shows that capitalism can bring about social justice and a pluralist version of the common good...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 34
