A Political Companion to Walker Percy

Introduction. Walker Percy, American Political Life, and Indigenous American Thomism

INTRODUCTION Walker Percy, American Political Life, and Indigenous American Thomism Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith Why do two political scientists say that an American Catholic novelist can teach us what nobody else can about our nation’s political life? In fact, we think it’s important that Percy was an American, a Catholic, and a novelist, not to mention a physician and a philosophical essayist. Percy explains that the novel itself is a Christian medium. Who’s read a really good Darwinian novel, or an atheistic novel, or a socialist novel? For all their wisdom, the classical Greeks never managed to write any novels. The characters in the dialogues and plays aren’t quite—and aren’t meant to be—fully fleshed-out human beings. The novel depends on the Christian discovery of irreducible inwardness or personal identity. In other words, the novel depends on the searching personal investigation found, maybe for the first time, in St. Augustine’s Confessions. Even the novels of the officially atheistic Sartre, which Percy admired, shared the Christian discovery that being human is all about being stuck in a predicament not of one’s own making and about wondering and wandering in search of who you are and what you’re supposed to do. For Percy, the existentialists—Sartre and especially Heidegger—offer personal or particular corrections to the impersonality of science ancient and modern. The existentialists observe that the human being is a leftover in the world described by modern science, and the Christians agree. Percy adds that the existentialists incorrectly slight or ignore the joyful discovery that the truth we can share in common is science. Percy painfully notes that the Christians 2 Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith have more than a bit of history of dropping the ball when it comes to science , but that’s often been because they’ve made the mistake of believing that they must choose between science and what revelation teaches about the origin and destiny of each particular person. The harmonization of what we know through science and what we know through revelation is the rather distinctively Catholic project called Thomism. There’s a neglected American Catholic tradition composed of Orestes Brownson (author of The American Republic, 1865), John Courtney Murray (We Hold These Truths, 1960), and Percy that holds that a Thomistic interpretation of the greatness of our Founders’ accomplishment is the gift American Catholics can offer their country. What Percy offers that Murray and Brownson do not is philosophical depth, psychological subtlety, and the novelist’s gift for putting what he knows in action through the imaginative description of particular lives. Percy also offers, of course, the formidable literary and political resources of the Stoic/aristocratic and “Christ-haunted” American South. The Southern Agrarian criticism of the flourishing techno-republic of the industrialized North culminated in the indigenous Thomism of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. What indigenous Thomism offers America, above all, is a better foundation for its liberalism than that our nation’s most prominent political philosophers have provided us—one expressed, as G. K. Chesterton said, with “dogmatic lucidity” in our Declaration of Independence, but one rarely systematically explored. Thomism is often called moral and metaphysical realism. There is, as Percy explains, a real world out there, and we the have natural capability to discover the real truth about it. We, the beings hardwired, so to speak, for language, are open to the truth about all things. We are like the other animals in some ways, but we are given excellences and responsibilities not given to them. As the existentialists say, we can live either authentically —not diverting ourselves from what we can’t help but know—or inauthentically . We can’t help knowing the bad news that we’re born to trouble because of who we are as self-conscious, sinful beings, and there’s no merely environmental or chemical remedy for what ails us. But we also know that compensations for our misery include the love of other particular persons and joyful shared discovery. It’s not really true that each of us is absurdly locked up in him- or herself. The founders of philosophy and science—the classical Greeks—taught Introduction 3 that the human being is distinguished by the capability to wonder, and that the world, as Leo Strauss reminds us, is the home of the human mind. There is...