Dr. Robert D.

Hickson

29 December 1996
Feast of St. Thomas Becket of Canterbury:
Defender of the Liberty of the Church (Libertas Ecclesiae)

THE NATURAL LAW AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY (Libertas Religiosa):

A TEST OF PROPER UNDERSTANDING
The extent to which, if at all, the Natural Law--i.e., the natural moral law--logically
entails (requires or implies) religious liberty, and how so, will provide a decisive test of our
proper and adequate understanding of Natural Law: this long and articulate, but sometimes
equivocal, tradition of moral thought. My proposed criterion of discernment--i.e., the purported
natural right (ius naturale) to religious liberty in light of the Natural Law--will also illuminate our
proper understanding of both tolerance and the truth--Toleranz und die Wahrheit--and of the first
cardinal virtue: the virtue of prudence, that perfection of practical wisdom and judgment which
properly guides all moral action from "knowledge of reality" to the "realization of the good."
Virtuous prudence, as distinct from cowardice, sloth (acedia) or cunning (astutia), is "right
reason" applied to human moral actions (recta ratio agibilium).
What, for example, is the proper relationship between tolerance and the truth? When does
tolerance become a lax permissiveness or provocative weakness which conduces to
indifferentism and vapid nonchalance? And when does purported tolerance actually become a
provocative and subversive complicity, even a complicity with relativism, a moral relativism
sometimes concealed as "pluralism"? To what extent is the Enlightenment interpretation of
Natural Law itself generally and intrinsically a distortion and truncation of a more spacious and
adequate tradition of understanding the natural moral law, wherein the fundamental Christian
concept of "natural" always meant "by virtue of the Creation"? Hence, the latter understanding
was bound to an essentially sacred and Christian conception of the world, in sharp contrast to the
impersonal, deistic "absentee landlord" notion of god, as the "Deus Extramundanus."
However, "nature" itself, as has often been analyzed, is often an elusive and very
equivocal "norm" of judgment and conduct, and this latent ambiguity thus especially requires our
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disciplined and attentive perspicacity in discourse and argumentation. For example, is there such
a thing, as the higher speculative Masons would argue, as a "true, primordial, natural religion" to
which we must return? Or, is there, as St. Augustine asked, such a thing as an alternative "true
religion"--a vera religio? Is religion from man or from God? Most fundamentally, does religion,
finally, come from God or from elsewhere? The cult of man was once considered an idolatry or a
pantheism, and maybe a subtle kind of polytheism. However, in some modern
theologies--"process theologies"--God--or Hegel's Geist--needs man: needs man to complete
himself (or itself), a view which would have once been considered a blasphemy. But, is there a
"natural right" to such "religious liberty," in order to profess, live, and proselytize such a "process
theology" or religion as just delineated?

What are the limits to religious liberty and its

missionary activity or proselytism, for example, among the youth? Are there not to be standards
of truth and reason?
St. Thomas Aquinas articulates clearly the indispensable importance of human reason
(both ratio and intellectus) in the proper discernment of the principles and precepts of the Natural
Law. In his Summa Theologiae, for example, he says:
I t i s from t h e precepts of the natural law, as from general and
indemonstrable principles, that the human reason needs to proceed to the
more particular determination of certain matters.
These particular
determinations, devised by human reason, are called human laws,
provided the other essential conditions of law be observed. (I-II q. 91 a 3)
St. Thomas had earlier defined law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good
(bonum commune) , made by him who has care of the community, and which is publicly
promulgated" (I-II q.90 a 4). Furthermore, given that "the eternal law is the plan of government
in the Chief Governor", "all laws, insofar as they partake of right reason (recta ratio), are derived
from the eternal law"(I-II q. 93 a 3).
St. Thomas' emphasis on human reason and right reason is important for our purposes of
trying to understand the proper meaning and justification for the purported natural right (ius
naturale) of religious liberty. To the extent that a right is "a claim in justice," does anyone have a
right to do what is wrong? In the Christian, especially Roman Catholic, understanding of Natural
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Law, the question of why we have a free will (liberum arbitrium) at all has a very specific
answer. Why do we have a free will? Is it to do our own will? Or is it to discern and do God's
will? In the Christian world-view, are not God's laws acts of love? Are they not the way to
plenitude: Beatitude, which God has promised, but under certain conditions, or according to
"Manufacturer's Instructions," as it were?

Given our initial, liberal or prejudicial, view of

religious liberty, are we free to do what is not permitted? Are we finally free to do what is not
morally permitted? Are we finally free to pursue a false religion? And to do it with impunity,
without adverse consequences? Is it the case that "one religion is as good as another, but none of
them is true"?
Contemporary, and often very permissive, views of religious liberty usually posit a
natural (or other) right to "liberty of conscience." But, what do we mean by "conscience"? If there
is such a thing as a sincere, but erroneous conscience, then we must face the matter of authority,
and of religious authority, with special reference to the formation of conscience. That is to say,
on what grounds and by what authority--and by what specific religious authority--is the
conscience properly to be formed, if it is not to be negligent and otherwise subjectively culpable
(morally blameworthy), as well, and not just objectively in error? Just as modern notions of law
often consider law, no longer as a "ordinance of reason," but rather as an "ordinance of will," so,
too, with conscience. "Conscience" often enough now "drops down," as it were, into the will--or
to what is merely desired and wanted; similar to the concept of "right."

Instead of being a

reasoned "claim in justice", "right" is now often merely means what is willed and wanted or
desired.
Such "re-orientations" of concepts such as "law", "right", and "conscience" undermine
the very primacy of reason in the human person, and also the primacy of the common good,
whereby persons are also members of larger "social wholes", and intrinsically in relation to
other persons.
Tolerant and winsomely liberal men of the essentially secular Enlightenment, such as
Moses Mendelsohn in his book O! Jerusalem, have argued that religious toleration--or religious
liberty--is an inherent part of the Natural Law. But, such an orientation means "naturalizing" the
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"supernatural"--e.g., Revelation, Faith, Grace--and hence "de-naturing" it, truncating and

attenuating it to some purportedly common secular level or set of analogues, which would
promote tolerance and "what is held in common", and hence a kind of religious peace and unity.
But, what is the basis of unity? Is it not truth? Does not truth matter? Does not truth finally matter
in determining, although with true prudence, the nature and limits of "religious liberty"? The
Natural Law cannot properly be understood to promote religious pluralism, religious relativism,
religious syncretism, or promiscuous "ecumenism," under the guise or subterfuge of "religious
liberty."
At the heart of the concept and reality of religious liberty is "the meaning of freedom."
What is freedom and what is freedom for? Two essays by very different twentieth-century
authors will lead us further to consider what should be meant by religious liberty in the longer
light of the Natural Law doctrine.
In his 1918 book Mysticism and Logic, Bertrand Russell has a piercingly eloquent essay
entitled "A Free Man's Worship." This vividly poetic, prose essay is a conscious sequel to
Lucretius' hexameter Latin poem, De Rerum Natura, on the nature of reality. Bertrand Russell,
like his philosophical mentors--Lucretius, Epicurus, and Democritus--would also rid his reader of
the fear of death, and not just the craven, ignoble, and irrational fear of death. Russell essentially
argues that "a free man's worship is based upon a firm foundation of unyielding despair." He
assumes that, for a mature and truly free man, despair (which is one form of hopelessness) can be
and can remain a firm foundation. A truly free and properly reverent man, in Russell's view, has
a sustaining perception of beauty because he has a tragic conviction about human fragility and
final isolation, as part of humanity, stranded as on a tossing raft, "amidst a universe which cares
nothing for its hopes or its fears." In other words, Bertrand Russell believes that, if the Natural
Law is properly understood, a mature man's religious liberty and true freedom of worship will be
founded upon the unshakable conviction that there is nothing finally to hope for. Final hope for
fulfillment of one's being is an illusion. Despite man's desires for fulfillment and his
consciousness of acting with a purpose, there is no possibility of a final fulfillment of one's
"having", or "doing", or "being" in an existential plenitude, in a completing and elevating
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beatitude. Bertrand Russell's vision of religious liberation starts with the unflinching conviction
and conscious anticipation of final non-fulfillment. If Russell were to answer what Immanuel
Kant, among others, considered to be the fundamental question of philosophy, "Quid sperandum
est?" (What is to be hoped for?), he would reply: "Nothing, finally."
In light of the historically important Stoic (not Epicurean) contributions to the natural
moral law, what, we may further ask, is the proper understanding of the place of hope (Greek
ELPIS; Latin Spes) in the Natural Law? For, the Stoics also did not want to deal with the concept
and reality hope, especially because it is not under man's immediate self-control, being the
expectation of some possible (but not assured) attainment of a difficult good (bonum arduum) in
the future. How does the reality--or illusion--of hope fit, if at all, into the proper understanding
of the Natural Law and religious liberty?
In contrast to Bertrand Russell, the contemporary cultural critic and writer, Tom Wolfe,
the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, has written an essay entitled "The Meaning of
Freedom."

The essay was surprisingly published as the lead article in the U.S. Army War

College Journal, Parameters (March 1988), and was originally delivered as a lecture to the
Cadets at West Point in October of 1986, before the disordering "Revolutions of 1989."
Wolfe's article examines, in the light of history, four phases of American freedom. He
argues that it is in "the fourth phase of freedom" that America now forebodingly finds itself, and
that, therefore, it should be to us a matter of grave concern, especially to the U.S. military officer
corps. Wolfe writes:
But I think, above all, the 20th century [in America] will be remembered as
the era of the fourth phase of freedom, which is the phase this country is in
right now. It is the most bizarre form that freedom has ever taken, and I
think this should be of particular interest to the officer corps of the
American armed services. I think you will find this fourth phase very
frustrating. It may even bring you grief.....
The fourth phase is freedom from religion. It is not freedom of
religion; it is freedom from religion. . . . De Tocqueville said, in 1835,
that American democracy was the freest form of government in the world,
by which he also meant the most libertine; so free, in fact, that American
society would have come apart had it not been for the internal discipline of
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the American people. This internal discipline, he said, was rooted in their
profound devotion to religion. What we are now seeing is the earnest
rejection of the constraints of religion in the second half of the 20th
century; not just the rules of morality but even simple rules of conduct
and ethics....
You [in the American military] are going to find yourselves required
to be sentinels at the bacchanal. You are going to find yourself required
to stand guard at the Lucullan feast against the Huns approaching from
outside. You will have to be armed monks at the orgy.
If I use religious terminology, I use it on purpose. One of the most
famous addresses ever delivered in this century by an American was the
address on 12 May 1962, by Douglas MacArthur at West Point, in which
he enunciated the watchwords of duty, honor, and country. . . . He said that
the soldier, above all other men, is expected to practice the greatest act of
religion: sacrifice.
Sacrifice, or the consecration of suffering, will be selflessly required of the strategic
"sentinels at the bacchanal" against "the Huns approaching from outside," or, especially from "the
Huns" within. What of this inner or internal revolution which challenges each man in his mind
and spirit? As Whittaker Chambers once said in Cold Friday (1964) about Communism's
dialectical and historical materialism, and we should also still say it about the continuing Long
March of Freudian-Marxist "Critical Theory" through our Cultural Institutions:
[I]t seeks a molecular re-arrangement of the human mind. It promotes not
only a new world. It promotes a new kind of man [i.e., the "revolutionary,
democratic personality", not "the authoritarian personality"]. The physical
revolutions which it [or "the Long March through the Institutions"] once
incited and now imposes, and which largely distract our attention, are
secondary to this internal revolution which challenges each man in his
mind and spirit.
Since many dialectical varieties and syncretisms of "religious liberty" also now promote
this purportedly emancipating "internal revolution," what criteria and standards, what tests and
limits, does the Natural Law, rooted in reason--rooted in Logos--properly provide for our deeper
discernment and patient prudence? I leave you with this challenge, and with these suggestive
reflections, lest the order and mystery (ordo et mysterium) of religion itself, and the sacred,
become a servant of disorder and anarchy. Nor should religious liberty serve the subversive
"gnawers of roots" and agents of presumption and despair: the corrosion of hopelessness.
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As a concluding reflection, I also leave you with an extended quote from a friend. In his
1991 book, Myths of Modern Art (in Spanish in 1978, it was originally entitled Art and
Subversion), Alberto Boixados, the Argentine professor of literature, introduces and quotes an
important interview that the Italian professor, Augusto del Noce, gave in 1976 to a Madrid
newspaper on the topic of Gramscian Eurocommunism and other indirect variants of cultural
subversion. Introducing the words of del Noce, my venerable elderly friend says:
The conquest of power can no longer be achieved by traditional
revolutionary means. Civil society must first be conquered, and then the
state will collapse. And how will the conquest of culture come about?
"By means of an alliance with middle-class intellectuals, with radical
movements, with Catholic progressives and, most especially, with all the
trends of modern Catholic theology." [including about religious liberty?]
"In Italy," Professor del Noce continues, "all the essentials are under
control: the publishing houses, the schools, quite a few universities, the
judiciary...." The confrontation in the fight to dominate the sources of
culture is not between "the proletariat and the bourgeoisie" but between
"tradition and modernity."
A new culture and a new system of values are created precisely so that
the freedom of ideas [about religion, as well] may be redefined.
Gramsci also understood that the only hope of eliminating the Catholic
Church was to undermine her and destroy her from within. Today's neomodernist and demythofied theology was foreshadowed in Gramsci's
thoughts at the beginning of the century. Knowing that Marxism and
Catholicism are incompatible, he sought a compromise because he knew
t h a t the appeasers would end up in apostasy. (Professor Alberto
Boixados)
To what extent will appeasers of unlimited or unconditional "religious liberty" end up in
apostasy, and maybe also despair? What is to be hoped for from the Natural Law in itself, without
Grace, and without a fuller doctrine of light, and of love? Hence also our Defense of the Liberty
of the Church (Libertas Ecclesiae).
-- Finis--

1996, 2015 Robert D. Hickson