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

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.