We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S. J. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 111 Freudian ideas and that other schools of medical psychology, be they dependent on Freud or not, are hardly mentioned. In regard to Freudian psychoanalysis, however, the perusal of these papers will certainly further understanding and critical appraisal. . Georgetown Dniverllity, Washington, D. C. RUDOLF ALLERs We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. By JoHN CoURTNEY MURRAY, S.J. Sheed and Ward. Pp. xiv, 886. $5.00. Were politics merely to treat of the morally permissible, as Vincent McNabb once declared, the dispute between the temporal and spiritual powers would go scarcely deeper than or be different in kind from accomodations between the village policeman and the parish priest. In fact, however, the indifference of politics towards morals, including religion, has rarely been a working theory, though manifestly hostility has been a frequent practice. For when the community is truly civil, that is not merely a collection of people making the same noises or enclosed, as Aristotle said, by the same wall, it will reach for ends which politics assume and which can be discussed only by asking and attempting to answer psychological and theological questions about the nature 6f man and his destiny. Some of these appear in the Report of the Commission, appointed by President Eisenhower, on National Goals. The political history of the classical world and most of the world's great cultures is not a tale of two cities. That began only with the entrance of Christianity into the Roman Empire, and even so, it was developed only in the West, in one direction by the Augustinist contrast of the civitas terrena and the Civitas Dei, in another by the Thomist distinction of functions within a single polity. Moreover when this last was so pressed that State and Church became separate legal corporations, it is slapdash to represent the differences between them as being that the State .is concerned only with what we do ·with our bodies while the Church is concerned only with what we do with our souls; and the dualism becomes all the more confused when it is put into the categories of public and private life, of penal and moral law, of natural and supernatural virtue, of the profane and the sacred, and of this world and the next. These slip into cliches which can cOnceal the State's possession of rights which engage Christian obedience as objects and not merely as occasions of virtue. The believer is left with a divided mind, the size of each half depending on the ratio of his " worldliness " to his " church-going,'' while the secularist is well 112 BOOK REVIEWS content to reckon only with the one and be good-mannered and incurious about the other. One great merit of Fr. Murray's essays is to challange this state of affairs, and less on religious grounds than from the high political position of his own country. He does that courteous and most difficult thing, he conducts a dialogue with those who differ with him on the principles where they agree, and keeps to the medium of proper aonversation within the City and under the law. In logical terms, he raises contraries rather than contradictions, for he seeks the continuance of argument, not its closure. What lies at the root of agreement is reasonable assent and unfeigned loyalty to a set of constitutional principles declared at the independance of the American Nation and augustly maintained and developed ever since. To this" proposition," as it was called by Abraham Lincoln, and justly, for it is at once a doctrine and a project, Catholics are not late adherents, whatever may be the findings of historical sociologists. For though the Natural Law of the Fathers of the Republic may have been clad with the verbiage of the Englightenment it was rooted sturdily in layers formed by the Church, namely the English Common Law and the Christianized philosophy of Greece and Rome. It is ·a strength of America to represent a very old world, older than the era of Concordats, and older than those Latin politico-ecclesiologists dominated by memories of religion either privileged by the King or dispossessed by the Assembly. The very notion of...