The Eagle's Flight. - 'On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding' - book review

Charles R. Kesler

On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, by Michael Novak (Encounter, 250 pp., $23.95)

In his engaging new book, Michael Novak explains why Americans of the founding era thought themselves favored, and consequently tested, by God-and argues that, without such faith, the fledgling Republic would never have gotten off the ground.

The author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and other celebrated works, Novak has labored for several decades to blend democratic theory, free-market economics, and Catholic theology into a powerful new synthesis. By putting the classics back into classical economics, he has helped to revive the Whig philosophical tradition, and especially its solicitude for the cultural conditions of individual freedom. Novak's Whiggism is, to be sure, more Catholic than the original, but it commends itself to anyone who cares about the blessings of liberty.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the most famous, though by no means the first, observer to wonder why in the American Revolution the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion had been allies, while in the French Revolution they had been bitter enemies. Novak's book addresses the same issue in a new context: He is dismayed by the secularism that dominates most 20th-century interpretations of the Founding, and worries that historians and political scientists are infusing the spirit of the French Revolution into their accounts of the American. Novak seeks to rescue our past not only from the contemporary philosophes who despise or, at best, ignore religion, but also from those conservative thinkers, supposedly friendly to religion, who persist in seeing the Founding as an almost exclusively secular affair.

In fact, Novak devotes the best parts of this book to arguing with his friends-in particular, conservative Catholics and followers of Leo Strauss. He wants to show the Catholics that the U.S. fulfills Catholic principles even better than the confessional state longed for by ultra- traditionalists; and he wants to persuade the Straussians (he singles out Walter Berns, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) that America is not simply a bourgeois emanation of the Enlightenment or a philosophers' plot against religion.

In short, Novak loves this country and wants his friends to understand why it's lovable. Happily, he writes at a moment when the ranks of scholars questioning the secularist orthodoxy have swelled. In differing yet complementary ways, Ellis Sandoz, James Hutson, Harry V. Jaffa, and many others have been busy correcting the record. Novak borrows from and builds on their work. In a well-rounded treatment of the Founders' personal piety and character, he doesn't limit himself to the few (Jefferson, Franklin, Paine) famous for their heterodoxy, but considers such mainstream figures as John Witherspoon and John Dickinson as well. He cites a plethora of writings and events that exhibit how indispensable Christian zeal was to the Revolution. He even scours medieval and post-Reformation Catholic political thought in order to find dignified Christian antecedents for the doctrines of natural rights and the social contract.

Yet for all its virtues, the book leaves the reader somewhat unsatisfied. In Brideshead Revisited, some college lads return from a long night of drinking, which overcomes one of them; another explains charitably that it was neither the quantity nor the quality of the wines that was at fault. The real problem, he asserts, is that the wines were "too various." A similar problem bedevils On Two Wings: The excellence of individual parts shines through, but the whole disappoints because the parts are too various.

Novak begins by arguing that the American eagle took flight on the two wings of Enlightenment reason and "Jewish metaphysics." By the former, he means primarily the teachings of John Locke; by the latter, he means that "the language of Judaism [became] the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race." Americans saw themselves as a second Israel, fleeing corruption and tyranny for a promised land of republican liberty. Novak notes perceptively that "the idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" became a "religious lingua franca" that enabled the founding generation to bypass Christian doctrinal disputes about the meaning of the New Testament, and to unite in a moral-political covenant.

This "Hebrew metaphysics" encouraged Americans to see history as linear, "a narrative of purpose and progress" in which human beings are free, the created world is intelligible, and man is called on to "inquire, invent, and discover" in imitation of the Creator-and to redeem liberty and human dignity by suffering and daring in behalf of republican government.

Here Novak's interesting Whiggism is on full display. But questions remain. For example, Jews and Christians alike do see history as linear and purposeful; but as progressive? Novak soon retreats from this overstatement, acknowledging that history is "measured for progress (or decline) by God's standards"-that is to say, he admits that progress is not guaranteed, because man is free to obey or to disobey God's standards.

Novak's more controversial assumption is that creativity is an essential feature of human personality. But for Thomas Aquinas (whom Novak, following Lord Acton, calls "the first Whig"), creativity is not the distinguishing quality that Novak highlights. For Aquinas, the arts are basically an imitation of nature, meaning an imitation of the created order. Novak shifts the emphasis from imitation of the created order to imitation of the Creator-to a freer kind of making, one that tends to put nature aside. He explains this, and similar shifts, by a Whiggish appeal to progress: The experience of many centuries has led to a more complete understanding of these matters. But if history can be a story of decline, how can Novak be so sure that it confirms improvement?

At any rate, in the second chapter Novak explains that the American eagle rose into the sky on the wings of "plain reason and humble faith." Earlier, he had identified the two wings as the Enlightenment and Jewish metaphysics. Now Enlightenment reason and "plain reason" are not the same thing, and neither are Hebrew metaphysics and "humble faith." Does this eagle have two wings or four? Novak reconciles these accounts by reducing the Enlightenment to "the practical world of the eighteenth century," a world of "moral example" and common sense that the Founders considered continuous with the Biblical and classical worlds. Besides, the Founders "were not Enlightenment philosophers but men of affairs," statesmen who acted not "as philosophers" of any sort "but as nation builders, expressing the will of a religious people."

There is good sense in this, but by failing to confront the specific character of Enlightenment reason, Novak ends up leaving "plain reason" or common sense rather vague. He seems to confine it to the knowledge of particulars, as though common sense did not include some knowledge of universals. His case for the Founders' prudence would have been bolstered if he had made clear that the Enlightenment was first a radical contraction of reason-the principled renunciation of common sense-and only then reason's wild apotheosis.

And did this political "reason," however understood, conflict with religion? Novak argues that the Founders understood America's republican principles not to be anti-Christian (as many of today's Straussians and Catholic ultras claim) but, on the contrary, to be "harmonious with" or even to "spring from" Christian beliefs. He makes a very powerful case for both of these claims. John Adams, for example, called the Bible "the most republican book in the world"; Benjamin Rush declared, "A Christian cannot fail of being a republican." Novak shows persuasively that "the added lift of faith" enabled America and its Revolution to soar.

After a narrow but illuminating discussion of religious liberty, Novak devotes the remainder of the volume to the explication of "a religious theory" of natural or human rights, and then to a defense of his theses against typical criticisms. He traces the medieval evolution of personal rights, while admitting that these never amounted to full- blown natural rights; and he appeals to the Thomistic account of human dignity. America's "matching of the politics of liberty to the theology of liberty had never before been achieved," he concludes.

Here, toward the end of the book, Novak brings out the heavy artillery of theology-because he realizes that he hasn't disposed of the problem of the Enlightenment. He now has to confront "the very flatness and insipidity of Locke's ethical vision" and "its frequent reduction of the higher to the lower," which rendered it "unlikely of itself to inspire nobility of spirit." Accordingly, the Founders' doctrine of natural rights will need "auxiliary supports" or somehow "to be rooted in human dignity"-and for most of the Founders, Novak argues, the source of human dignity was religion.

By the end of Novak's book, then, reason seems to be dependent on faith not just for an "added lift," but for internal consistency and goodness. "The actual ground on which the Founders turned to natural rights was the ground of faith," he writes, "where they grasped the dignity of every individual" and hence his inalienable rights. Even the Enlightenment turns out to be a secret believer: "To the extent that the Enlightenment depends upon the principle of 'created equal,' it depends upon Jewish metaphysics and Christian faith." It now looks as though the American eagle is a one-winged bird after all; or, at any rate, it has only a single wing unclipped.

A better interpretation, which Novak actually sketches alongside this primary one, takes seriously the human capacity for "reflection and choice" appealed to in The Federalist. The common sense of the American Founding surely arose from its recognition that human beings are distinguished from other animals by this capacity. Our dignity thus rested on our special rank in nature-a truth that plain reason could grasp as self-evident. Our rank in nature was also, however, a special rank in Creation, between the beasts and the angels. Reason and revelation concurred in seeing our rights in light of our rank, and hence insisted that human rights are inseparable from human duties.

Michael Novak is one of our most valuable philosophers of freedom, and he understands well that "the American theory of rights is religious as well as reasonable." In this important book-uneven though it may be-he proves the point convincingly.

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