Positive Liberty

As Rowe mentioned downblog, he and I recently had the chance to see The Birth of Freedom, a one-hour documentary produced by the Acton Institute. The aim of the film was to illuminate the Christian ancestry for the freedoms of the modern West, and to suggest that if we do not keep this ancestry in mind, we risk losing everything we’ve gained. The film made a number of claims that sat badly with me, both logically and empirically, yet I found them woven together so well and presented so confidently that it was a little breathtaking.

Now, there certainly were Christian elements, and vitally important ones, in the history of individual liberty. It’s hard to understand how we could have anything like the modern idea of liberty without several concepts that come to us directly from Christianity or Judaism. These elements’ origins are sometimes undersold or downplayed, particularly among libertarians of an Ayn-Randish bent. It is unfortunate that this should be so.

Some of the elements I have in mind here are the idea that there are higher standards of justice than mere promulgated law; that individuals possess a worth and dignity beyond what the state or the society imputes to them; and that every individual has supreme, inviolate purposes of his own, rather than being made for the purposes of others. We owe the origins of these ideas to Christianity, and to Judaism before it.

Yet there are right ways and wrong ways to argue for the importance of Christianity in the intellectual history of freedom, and I felt that the documentary made some highly doubtful factual assertions in trying to prove the case.

The first assertion with which I had difficulty was the claim that John Calvin was a social contractarian. The film gave not the slightest evidence for this claim, most likely because none exists.

Calvin’s own beliefs about government were, so far as I can determine, totally unrelated to social contract theory — indeed, he never even considers it as an alternative. Instead, he finds government to be a natural institution of God, one hardly separable from the ecclesiastical authority. In this he was more or less exactly like his sixteenth-century contemporaries, virtually none of whom had entertained the idea that governments were a human creation. He writes,

With regard to the function of magistrates, the Lord has not only declared that he approves and is pleased with it, but, moreover, has strongly recommended it to us by the very honourable titles which he has conferred upon it. To mention a, few: Exod. 22:8, 9; Ps. 82:1, 6; John 10:34, 35; Deut. 1:16, 17; 2 Chron. 19:6, 7; Prov. 8:15. When those who bear the office of magistrate are called gods, let no one suppose that there is little weight in that appellation. It is thereby intimated that they have a commission from God, that they are invested with divine authority, and, in fact, represent the person of God, as whose substitutes they in a manner act. . . .

[I]t is not owing to human perverseness that supreme power on earth is lodged in kings and other governors, but by Divine Providence, and the holy decree of Him to whom it has seemed good so to govern the affairs of men, since he is present, and also presides in enacting laws and exercising judicial equity. . . . [Paul] says that “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God;” that rulers are the ministers of God, “not a terror to good works, but to the evil” (Rom. 13:1, 3). To this we may add the examples of saints, some of whom held the offices of kings, as David, Josiah, and Hezekiah; others of governors, as Joseph and Daniel; others of civil magistrates among a free people, as Moses, Joshua, and the Judges. Their functions were expressly approved by the Lord. Wherefore no man can doubt that civil authority is, in the sight of God, not only sacred and lawful, but the most sacred, and by far the most honourable, of all stations in mortal life.

Those who are desirous to introduce anarchy [French, “Ceux qui voudroyent que les hommes vesquissent pesle mesle comme rats en paille;” -- Those who would have men to live pell-mell like rats among straw] object that, though anciently kings and judges presided over a rude people, yet that, in the present day, that servile mode of governing does not at all accord with the perfection which Christ brought with his gospel. Herein they betray not only their ignorance, but their devilish pride, arrogating to themselves a perfection of which not even a hundredth part is seen in them. But be they what they may, the refutation is easy. For when David says, “Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth;” “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry” (Psalm 2:10, 12), he does not order them to lay aside their authority and return to private life, but to make the power with which they are invested subject to Christ, that he may rule over all.

A social contract theorist would not say that the kingly office was unqualifiedly divine by nature. He would instead argue that the office was a human creation, endowed perhaps with an authority and majesty similar to God’s, but commanding allegiance through prudence, consent, or the laws of nature.

Hobbes passed for a rabble-rouser because he reached the conclusion “absolute monarchy” by a slippery slope (freedom leads to anarchy!) rather than by an argument from authority (for the Bible tells me so!). As we’ve just seen, the latter fallacy was the going one, and the former was Hobbes’s special gift to posterity. For Calvin, it’s argument from authority all the way.

Mock it though I have, this distinction is the very difference between a rudimentary social contractarianism and the traditionalist view of kingship that came before it. According to Calvin, magistrates get their authority from God, and not — as the Levellers would have had it — by an agreement of the people. Hobbes sided with the agreement of the people, although he did attach, shall we say, some rather stringent terms to it. This — agreement versus divine institution — is the whole of the difference between social contract theory and what came before it.

Insofar as Calvin ever considered a state of nature, he viewed it not as full of danger (like Hobbes), nor as imperfect and needing improvement (like Locke), nor even as subject to natural transformation into a governed state (like Nozick). He viewed it as profane, because it was not sufficiently subject to God’s authority. He compared it to rats in straw. (And yet don’t rats enjoy living in straw? Why should we presume that this is such a bad thing for them? Doesn’t the metaphor deconstruct itself?)

Indeed, it’s hard to find something less like a Lockean social contract than the following passage from Calvin:

If you fix your eyes not on one state merely, but look around the world, or at least direct your view to regions widely separated from each other, you will perceive that Divine Providence has not, without good cause, arranged that different countries should be governed by different forms of polity. For as only elements of unequal temperature adhere together, so in different regions a similar inequality in the form of government is best. All this, however, is said unnecessarily to those to whom the will of God is a sufficient reason. For if it has pleased him to appoint kings over kingdoms, and senates or burgomasters over free states, whatever be the form which he has appointed in the places in which we live, our duty is to obey and submit. . . .

But if we have respect to the word of God, it will lead us farther, and make us subject not only to the authority of those princes who honestly and faithfully perform their duty toward us, but all princes, by whatever means they have so become, although there is nothing they less perform than the duty of princes. For though the Lord declares that a ruler to maintain our safety is the highest gift of his beneficence, and prescribes to rulers themselves their proper sphere, he at the same time declares, that of whatever description they may be, they derive their power from none but him. Those, indeed, who rule for the public good, are true examples and specimens of his beneficence, while those who domineer unjustly and tyrannically are raised up by him to punish the people for their iniquity. Still all alike possess that sacred majesty with which he has invested lawful power.

This, we are told, is the man who inspired John Locke. I would suspect him more of inspiring Robert Filmer, the target of Locke’s seldom-read but very clever First Treatise.

(I also had a larger problem with the logic of the film: It most certainly does not follow that because much of the history of individual liberty is rooted in Christianity, all those desiring individual liberty today must be so rooted as well. This requires an additional argumentative step, one that The Birth of Freedom did not effectively take. And there are many, many implications of this stance that don’t logically shake out, including that because some P are Q, all P are Q: Because some propositions belonging to Christianity are favorable to liberty, all of Christianity is likewise. But Calvin burned books, and people, and this is surely worth looking into.

Just because Christianity got there first — kind of, and not counting Calvin — it does not follow that individual liberty can only ever succeed in a Christian society, or that some ideas originating in Christianity cannot be transplanted out of that setting and function very well elsewhere. Indeed, this sort of transplantation happens in intellectual history all of the time.

Consider chemistry. Much of the history of chemistry is rooted in the theory of the four elements, which indeed helped create chemistry as we now understand it. Yet it would be fallacious to suggest that all true chemistry must be based on the theory of the four elements, or that we risk losing chemistry itself if we reject its original framework.)

Tags: Acton Institute, Birth of Freedom, John Calvin, John Locke, social contract

Trackback URI |