What Gerhart Niemeyer emphasized in the fullness of his life and the appreciation for tradition he developed over many years suggests that he would want us to learn especially from his way to a well-worn path.1 The image of such a path is taken from one of his eulogies of tradition.2 It is along such paths, he thought, that you should build your road. This essay is the fruit of the beginning of an inquiry into his way to that path. The question for consideration is how his Christian faith emerged in the course of a life concerned with politics and political philosophy.

To call this an “inquiry”” is not an indication that I have shifted entirely from a mode of eulogy, proximate to death, to cold scholarly inquiry. I understand it as inquiry in the sense that the most cited saint in Niemeyer’s writings, Saint Augustine, understood his Confessions as both praise and thanksgiving to God for what he has done—and also wonder and inquiry as to just how God has done it with Augustine’s life.

The Confessions can be a model only in a certain sense. There are obvious differences from the present endeavor. There is the difference between autobiography and what is at best but a few strokes toward an intellectual and spiritual biography. Augustine speaks of himself with the intimate perspective we have with our own souls and their struggles. I write of Gerhart Niemeyer without the benefit of what could be called close or intimate friendship with him or with members of his family. I had a long and reasonably close professional association with Niemeyer and came to know quite well some of the students who knew him well. In any case, Niemeyer was not regarded as having a disposition or practice of speaking readily of his personal state. This inquiry will be conducted chiefly in terms of the public record of some of his writings on law and politics, writings that over time came increasingly to engage the most fundamental human questions.

This essay represents the “”beginning”” of an inquiry not simply in the literal sense. With a nod again to the wisdom evident in the Confessions and also, I believe, evident in Niemeyer’s reticence about such matters, I realize that such an inquiry as this may never advance much beyond a beginning. Who of us, after all, may even aspire to know the how and why of God’s grace in bringing receptivity to his Word and Love? Will more interviews conducted, more sources read, take us much beyond a beginning?

Given such limitations—both of my experience and with respect to the task itself—one might ask, Why raise and pursue such a topic as this? Why an inquiry into how Christian faith came to function in one scholar’s study and practice of politics? Why not, at most, pursue what is more conventional, as in the history of ideas or the history of philosophy taught in that mode, and what is more accessible—namely, what Niemeyer came to teach in his writings about Christian faith and its relation to politics. In this approach, some objectivity and approximation of certainty can be operative. In this approach, we ask for the texts to support this or that claim, and we look to how interpretations are conducted. In fact and as already suggested, what follows in this essay is necessarily and largely in this more objective, conventional mode.

However, in Niemeyer’s writings over thirty critical years of his life, Christian faith as a topic proceeds from a state of being unmentioned to one of being at the center of his political analysis. If we join this evident feature of his writings to certain events of his life—events that would catch the attention of any reflective person, and notably of those whose lives he has touched more directly by his teaching or writing—we are naturally led to wonder how Christian faith emerged in a remarkable life of political analysis, political service, and political combat. We must interpret this faith’s apparent initial absence and then its central place in his writings. We are interested, too, in learning from this life about the possibly inherent relationship of politics, political inquiry, and faith.

The events to which I allude and which catch our attention are initially his flight from impending political oppression in his native Germany in 1933 and his turn from political anarchy and threatened oppression in his initial adopted land of Spain as civil war broke out there. Likely in these early years he had direct experience with what came to be the two major totalitarian movements of that “”terrible century,”” movements which he later came to describe as instances of spiritual disorder.3 The public life that begins, in a sense, with his seeking here in the United States a reasonable prospect of a tranquil political order ends with him an ordained Episcopal priest seeking, after initiation into the Roman Catholic tradition, ordination as a Catholic priest. Between his coming to this land in 1937 and his aspiration late in life to the Roman Catholic priesthood, he teaches political theory in a string of distinguished universities, he serves in various significant political and governmental roles in this country of his final adoption, he writes and acts in the public forum in ways we have come to call those of the public intellectual. Such activities, then, coupled with what can be noticed in the broadest of overviews of the role of Christian faith in his writings, lead us to wonder how this faith related to his political inquiry and political practice.

It is quite clear how politics and political inquiry interact for most, and so they did for Niemeyer. Political inadequacies or failures, if not disasters, give rise to distress and perplexity and the need to understand—the owl of Minerva rises from political trouble—and what comes to be understood, what genuine political science can be attained, becomes (or should become) a polestar for political practice. This is a recurrent and universal human experience, always more manifest where there is the freedom of serious political inquiry that Athens somewhat reluctantly granted Socrates.

Yet how does Christian faith, in the case of Gerhart Niemeyer a profound Christian faith, work its way into a life of politics and political analysis? Our inquiry takes on an added urgency in a time when there is considerable cultural momentum to marginalize religion in politics and professional life, to build a “”wall of separation”” that would extend so artificially into the souls of men and women, presuming to compartmentalize their deepest beliefs and their daily activities.

There is, however, a more integrated view of human interests and capacities, one that is represented in the life of Gerhart Niemeyer. His example endorses Whitehead’s common-sense formulation, with a nod to Plato, that “”we live as we think.”” In the light of Christian faith and, perhaps, an even deeper or broader human experience, that formulation of living as we think needs some amendment. First, we live as we think, at least consistently so, only with sufficient help or grace for the will. Second, there is a powerful influence on how we think from the way we live. Happily, we need not conclude that we are trapped into thinking as we live. Yet there are powerful cultural and societal influences on thought with which Niemeyer was often concerned, both as he explored the drive for closure in totalitarian societies and as he noted the sometimes stiflingly oppressive quality of the alleged “”progressive”” or “”enlightened”” opinion in the free societies that stood against totalitarianism. Also, what is Christian thought or Christian philosophy (in the Augustinian formulation of “”faith seeking understanding””) other than a thinking that is shaped by, and in certain ways directed by, a way of life. Integral to that way of life, enjoined on us by Saint Augustine and exemplified in his life, is prayer and Christian charitable action. Clearly the expectation is that the way we live will affect the way we think. Gerhart Niemeyer witnessed in his life, and with full awareness, the complexities of the relationship between thinking, believing, and living.

What follows is an overview and summary of such findings, as I now have, from the inquiry into faith and politics in Niemeyer’s life. In the broadest terms, Niemeyer developed a faith-informed understanding of politics, and accordingly, of education, from his struggle against—and endeavor to understand—the totalitarianism of Nazism and Communism and the nihilism that he found to be widespread in modern intellectual life, a nihilism destructive of any moral basis for liberal democracy. Niemeyer was, in a chronological sense, first a man of politics, indeed a passionate man of politics; then, out of distress and perplexity, he became a man of philosophy searching to understand the roots and causes of the disorder he found; and then, a man of Christian faith whose own inquiries and life came to be shaped decisively by that faith. The progression from politics to philosophy to faith was not one where the earlier stage is left behind at each point. Rather, each stage represented a new center for his life in which the earlier concerns and emphases still had a critical role. Niemeyer remained passionately concerned with politics even when he came in the light of Christian faith to have a well-informed sense of the limits of politics. Niemeyer never abandoned philosophical inquiry, but at a certain point his inquiry became clearly directed and illuminated by Christian faith; he embraced the notion of “”faith seeking understanding.””

Niemeyer’s thirty critical years were part of a lifetime that extended over ninety years. This thirty-year period can literally be book-ended from the appearance of Niemeyer’s first English-language publication and initial scholarly effort after his emigration to the United States. This is the substantial book titled Law Without Force, published initially at Princeton University Press in 1941 and very recently reissued.4 In 1971, at the other end of the thirty-year period, Niemeyer published two books, one titled Deceitful Peace,5 the other Between Nothingness and Paradise.6 From the book of 1941 to the books of 1971 and in the intervening publications, Niemeyer’s progression from political man to philosophical man to faith-centered man is evident in ways instructive in how souls passionately engaged in politics might become receptive to a larger and deeper truth.

The two books of 1971 reflect different emphases of Niemeyer’s work in the preceding years, the one his practical engagement with American foreign policy during the Cold War, the other his philosophical and historical inquiry into the ideologies disrupting twentieth-century politics. Those books of 1971, however, mark the end of his critical period because both reveal a consolidated and seemingly settled personal Christian faith operative in his outlook and analysis. This hypothesis about the significance of this time for Niemeyer is based not only on certain passages in those books but also on trustworthy reports of his state of mind and faith at the end of the 1960s. Years later, upon Niemeyer’s death, Robert Francis Smith described the Niemeyer he met upon arriving at Notre Dame for graduate study:

By 1969, when we first met, he was both a convinced Christian and a dedicated Episcopalian, whose life had been shaped by Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, the writings of C. S. Lewis and Richard Hooker, and Anglican music and liturgy. He identified with what he called “”the Episcopalian type””: joyous, charitable, learned in the faith, both Catholic and Protestant, and involving continual recommittal to Christ—in Niemeyer’s words, a matter of “”saying ‘yes’ every day, every hour, every minute.””7

Given that report by Robert Smith of Niemeyer’s own words, it is not surprising that Smith adds the observation that Niemeyer “”lived his faith with the same seriousness and enthusiasm that he brought to every sphere of life.””8 The redirection of passion in the light of a consolidated and renewed faith brings Saint Augustine to mind. In establishing the significance of Niemeyer’s state of mind and faith in 1971, note must be taken that it is about this time that he makes the decision to take diaconate orders in the Episcopal church. Ordination as deacon occurs in 1973.

As I have indicated, the 1941 book Law Without Force marks the beginning of the critical period. This book and period, however, is best approached by acknowledging that it has a pre-history; more than one-third of Niemeyer’s life is already behind him as he comes to the United States and writes this initial book. What we might know about what preceded in Niemeyer’s life would of course be relevant to his state of mind at the start of the period and to an interpretation of the book. Knowing that pre-history well depends on availability of and accessibility to papers, letters, family, and friends.

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That work is at the least the work of another day, if not another student of Niemeyer’s life. The framework for what little I know of this period can best be captured by Niemeyer’s own summary of his past when called in 1958 before a committee of the United States Congress for a consultation on his analysis of the Soviet Communist mentality.9 Niemeyer had published a book on this topic in 1956, and in March of that year a popular mass-circulation American newsmagazine had published an extensive interview with him based on the then-forthcoming book.10 At the time of his congressional testimony, he was in his third year on the Notre Dame faculty. As is often the case with witnesses before such committees, Niemeyer was asked to begin by introducing himself and briefly describing his past. The published record reveals that he responded as follows:

I was born in Germany, educated both in England and in Germany. I received a degree of doctor of laws from Kiel University.

I left Germany in 1933 on the advent of Hitler to power; went first to Spain along with my teacher and friend, Hermann Heller; found myself on vacation in Germany when the Spanish civil war broke out.

I then came to the United States where I have taught at Princeton University, from 1937 until 1944; Oglethorpe University from 1944 to 1950; in between at Yale University, later at Columbia University.

I was planning adviser in the Department of State from 1950 to 1953; research analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations from 1953 to 1955 . . . .11

What I have learned at this stage from the oral tradition among Niemeyer’s students and friends is that in his youthful university days he was an atheist and a strongly committed socialist. It apparently was his politics, coupled with the Jewishness of his teacher Heller, that drove him out of Hitler’s Germany. One account of his going to Spain indicates that, with the civil war impending, he went there specifically to aid the anti-Franco forces.

There is no settled account in the oral tradition as to how and when Niemeyer’s conversion to Christianity came about. Likely Niemeyer came to the United States with not much, if any, real attachment to religion or any specific religious affiliation. One view is that he and his wife had converted in the Anglican community upon a return to Cambridge before embarking for the United States.12 It is possible that he still harbored some hostility to institutionalized religion from the Marxist-tinged alienation, the rebellious anti-traditionalism, that likely was a part of his socialist stage. I think this, in part, because later in life he would cite with approval Eric Voegelin’s observation of the modern intellectual rebel that what he rebels against “”is precisely that which he is seeking.””13 Niemeyer’s conversion to Christianity seems to have taken place gradually beginning in the late 1930s and extending into the 1940s.

These variously informed speculations about his conversion and the state of his Christianity as he came to the United States are all consistent with his initial published writings here. In addition to Law Without Force, he published two major articles in his first American decade. In those writings there is no specific sign of a commitment to Christianity. It is treated, rather, with a certain professional distance, as a datum in a historical account and a factor in the contemporary world where political compromises must be forged with all forces. On a couple of occasions he appears to lend credibility to the modern view that the world is witnessing the demise of Christianity. There is, however, in these early English-language writings, an emphatic concern with the moral dimension of political life and political policies, an attendant concern with the impact of moral relativism and moral indecisiveness, and a comfort in writing of and even seeking to elevate the soul or spirit of man. These features make it reasonable to see a certain continuity between Niemeyer’s passionate socialist reformism and his initial academic writings. They also may well explain why Niemeyer’s socialist idealism did not slide, as it did for many, into Marxist Communism.

Law Without Force is a book about international law which appears much indebted to Niemeyer’s mentor Hermann Heller. The book is dedicated to Heller, who is cited frequently throughout and thanked and lauded directly in the Preface. This first American book appears to be the fruit of Niemeyer’s study with Heller and provides evidence of his initial academic expertise and analytical power in international relations and international law.14

Part One of Law Without Force is a history of the development of international law and how it has come to function in the international politics of the time. The moral dimension of Niemeyer’s analysis comes to light when the reader discovers the meaning of Niemeyer’s title. If one who knows of Niemeyer quite superficially, knows of him simply as the prominent intellectual among American conservatives which he came to be, were told that he once wrote a book with the title Law Without Force, such a person would likely conclude that the title must be ironical and thus reflective of a good conservative “”law and order”” argument: if you want law, back it up with sufficient force or police, in this case, international police. In this view, law “”without force”” would be considered ineffective and as a result no law. In fact, Niemeyer is arguing quite the opposite in the book. His argument is that the only effective law is one that can command widespread moral assent and is not then dependent on force. Niemeyer believes at this point that the moral consensus that gave rise over three hundred years to the system of international law that Hitler and so many in the twentieth century mocked has dissolved. Niemeyer’s book is an exploration of what he calls a “”functional theory of international law”” in the interest of finding a new kind of moral basis for the law among nations. Niemeyer is arguing that the modern world must find a convincing rational basis so as to have “”law without force.””

Early in the book, Niemeyer sets a direction by highlighting certain instances of “”lawlessness”” in international affairs and indicates that such incidents

demonstrate how far the real foundations of international law and order have been undermined. They reveal to what extent the sense for law has ceased to be an effective factor in the decisions of statesmen. They show that even the capacity for distinguishing between what is right and what is wrong has largely disappeared, and that a formal observance of legal technicalities, an empty shell without any substance in it, is all that is really left of international order.15

The old system of international law that Grotius and his followers had developed and that was now “”an empty shell”” once was, in Niemeyer’s account, held “”to be obligatory because, and in so far as, it was inspired by Christian morality. It was effectual,”” adds Niemeyer, “”inasmuch as the obligations of Christian morality were actually felt by people high and low and influenced their thoughts and actions. The present crisis in international relations,”” notes Niemeyer, “”results from the circumstance that the compelling force of its standards and principles is no longer a real experience.””16 Much later in the book Niemeyer analyzes with more historical perspective how the sense of individual responsibility under God disappeared as a common experience. “”The religious institutions,”” he writes,

lost their grip on the individual mind to the degree to which the idea of truth, reason and redemption was secularized. The period of life in the service of religious ideals was followed by a period in the service of reason, of “”scientific”” truths, of the results of human intellect.17

The secular substitute that replaced religion could not, argues Niemeyer, ever satisfactorily provide a compelling, and thus effective, sanction for morality. Near the end of the book, Niemeyer writes, “”The mere reference to morality certainly does not exercise a very strong pressure upon the will of people, unless there is also a strong belief in the ultimate sanction of an avenging God.””18 At another point, Niemeyer claims that there must be a “”belief in and the fear of an omnipotent God”” that engenders “”the conviction that there was a real power superior to that of the sovereign ruler . . . .””19

Niemeyer does not call for some kind religious revival or Christian renewal. In fact, he appears to close the door on that by observing, “”Today religion no longer holds the key to people’s wills.””20 Niemeyer looks to find a moral basis other than that which the traditional Christian-rooted sense of obligations placed on individuals. The functional theory of law does not seem to me a very satisfactory solution to what he is seeking. Though he wants to find a non-utilitarian and moral basis for international law, the nebulous direction that he holds out suggests a pragmatic appeal to calculated self-interest rather than any moral appeal.21 Thus, it appears to be a kind of utilitarianism that emphasizes the reality of man’s increasingly collective and organic community experience.

Niemeyer’s sense of the world in 1941 anticipates the widespread recognition today of the regional interdependence of nations and then the world interdependence of regions in an inevitable process of globalization. Niemeyer wants a moral basis for international law in what is already evolving among nations. He seems struggling not only for a natural moral basis for law but also for how to come to terms with the role of the individual. Though he says the “”individualistic”” morality of the past is unworkable, he expresses a concern that some of the aspirations for international law entail a “”thoroughly planned society”” that would threaten human individuality.22

Law Without Force is marked by much philosophical searching. While practically focused and concerned with what he calls the present “”debacle”” in the international order, Niemeyer has clearly moved along not only from days of student activism but also from anything like simple history and a manual-like approach to international law—if I may assume that he ever indulged in such. His political concern and inquiry is turning to political philosophy. What is the ground of right and how do we put things right?

Just as his concern with the limits of the “”individualistic”” moral approach anticipates an uneasiness throughout his later life with an aspect of both America and the American conservative movement, so his ending in this book of his thirty-fourth year suggests the prayerful Niemeyer of his elder years. The last paragraph proceeds by Niemeyer telling readers to hold back on planning “”external forms”” for the international order. He means “”organizations, institutions, regulations””; he likely means the talk of another League of Nations, talk of the United Nations. Niemeyer then writes the following last five sentences of the book:

More violence has been caused by imposing abstract intellectual blueprints on reality than by all the revolutions taken together. When the new outlook on the problem of law prevails, we shall detect by its light the solution of organizational problems as they present themselves. The laws of social reality cannot be speculated upon, they must be experienced. Therefore we conclude with the philosopher, John Macmurray: “”What we have to do is to wait and be quiet; to stop our feverish efforts to do something. The next word is not with us, but with reality.””23

Quaker-like, even Taoist, he calls on his readers to wait and be quiet. Perhaps Niemeyer’s inquiry into the inefficacy of international law has brought him to the point of confessing the seeming inefficacy of human efforts and plans.

Is there a tension between this ending and his praise for his teacher Heller in the Preface to the book? There, he spoke of Heller as one whose “”living inspired me with the example of an extraordinary man, outstanding in qualities both of soul and mind, a man to whom the rational mastery of political reality meant a profound human responsibility and thus a personal task.””24 The phrase “”rational mastery of political reality”” catches my attention, and I wonder how that aspiration suggestive of modern social science fits with quiet waiting. Perhaps the pursuit of rational mastery leads to seeing the necessity of quiet waiting, at least just now. Note that this same sentence that mentions a goal of rational mastery also sees Niemeyer distinguishing qualities of soul from those of mind and using the language of “”responsibility”” and “”personal task.”” Niemeyer is clearly already an exceptional man, no ordinary social scientist or legal historian.

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Pondering this aspect of Niemeyer’s book will leave us less surprised in discovering in a subsequent article in his first American decade that he defends the heady aspirations of modern social science while simultaneously seeking to protect a sphere of moral responsibility, a sphere of the soul, or what he calls “”faith.””25 He seeks to protect this sphere from the comprehensive explanatory thrust of the social science of the day.26

The article, “”Faith and Facts in Social Science,”” draws considerably and with much respect from Karl Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. Niemeyer’s argument seems adapted to the largely Christian audience of Theology Today where the essay appeared, but there is no evidence of Christian commitment on his part. Niemeyer in fact affirms a basic position that might be called secular democratic humanism. He praises Popper’s devotion to the rule of “”Reason”” as a commitment to “”humanitarian, liberal, and democratic ideals.””27 Writing of Popper’s “”values,”” a relativistic commodity-suggesting term that Niemeyer would later come to reject,28 Niemeyer says that Popper stands for “”the unconditional worth of the individual, of equality, freedom, and the unity of all mankind.”” At another point, Popper’s “”moral values”” are described as “”humility, brotherliness, and charity.””

Niemeyer singles out for special attention the priority Popper gives to helping those who suffer and to preventing suffering; Popper, with Niemeyer’s approval, elevates the needs of the suffering over a societal and political pursuit of overall happiness and the realization of some ideal or perfect state. In a very significant statement, Niemeyer welcomes Popper’s moral evaluation of “”philosophical systems and their premises,”” systems such as Plato’s, Hegel’s, or Marx’s, as “”a task for which our age is eminently fitted in view of the sufferings which false and immoral political ideologies have brought upon us.””29 In the liberalism that Niemeyer now embraces it is not hard to see the incipient Christian—and to see continuity in the moral core from his presumably idealistic socialism that was resistant to Marxism, continuity to the democratic and benevolent outlook affirmed here.

Niemeyer met Eric Voegelin just a couple years before this article of 1949 appeared.30 As he came to know Voegelin and his work in the subsequent ten to fifteen years, Niemeyer gained critical resources for his own philosophical inquiry, an inquiry that his essay in Theology Today shows to be already well under way. If Niemeyer was at all attached to Popper’s treatment of philosophical thinkers, that attraction would be replaced by a much deeper attachment to and appropriation of the analyses in Voegelin’s work. This is clearly evident in the books of 1971. Popper’s view of the consequences of the teachings of Hegel and Marx would not prove to be discordant with the more profound diagnosis of their thinking in Voegelin, but the instance of Plato is another matter.31 The moral clarity and firmness that Popper exemplified for Niemeyer would carry forward as desiderata in his continuing search for a defensible stand in the political disorder of this “”terrible century.”” Popper was for him an exception in the democratic liberal circles of the day, for he provided “”clear directions”” from a quarter where Niemeyer claimed “”we were accustomed to hear only inarticulate protestations.””32

Even as he affirmed liberal democratic commitments, Niemeyer was clearly restless with the way the leaders and peoples of the non-ideological West understood and defended such commitments. He was seeking a coherent and firm defense of those moral commitments in a world where their religious basis was lost. His search for defensible moral foundations for political order had, in a sense, moved from a focus on the debacle in international politics to where he had earlier located the roots of the crisis—that is, in the breakdown of individual morality because of an intellectual crisis of confidence in the tradition that was once regnant. Niemeyer seems in the Theology Today piece to be looking in more traditional directions for defensible moral foundations.

Niemeyer does not hesitate to acknowledge that Popper wants no part of “”Christian beliefs.”” Yet Niemeyer’s voice in this essay indicates that, for him, a traditional basis is not a futile direction or one that would entail a betrayal of his moral core. At the very beginning of this article, he presents the tension between social science and faith, and specifically the threat of the former to deny the realm of the latter, as a grave danger to “”our spiritual existence.””33 He praises “”St. Thomas Aquinas”” for “”assuring our civilization a new lease on life”” by his “”almost superhuman effort”” in “”re-uniting Christian faith and social science.””34

Later in the piece, Niemeyer expresses qualified praise for Richard Hooker and Edmund Burke, both of whom came to play an important and openly acknowledged role in his later thinking. The allusions to Hooker and Burke occur as Niemeyer expresses appreciation for Popper’s idea that attempting to “”know too much about the ultimate destiny of human life and human history defeats the practical rule of reason . . . .””35 Niemeyer finds Popper’s idea “”close to the Christian belief that human creativeness is an ultimate mystery the key to which is in God’s hand.”” Niemeyer immediately adds, “”In political theory, this attitude underlies conservative thought, e.g. in Hooker and Burke, where it is coupled with an apology for the existing order of things and especially for the ruling classes.”” Even as he finds some “”wisdom”” in conservative thought, Niemeyer reflects – in his last clause on “”an apology””—a distance from it, and some caricature of it. Niemeyer wants primarily to respect “”the claim of every living generation to the most rational solution of its problems.”” These are but indications that Niemeyer is looking anew to tradition, but his journey back is very much yet in progress.

A year later, in 1950, in the context of the intensifying Cold War, Niemeyer writes about freedom of speech.36 This piece represents another effort on his part to point up the shallow and self-undermining understandings and defenses of the moral and political principles of liberal democracies.37 For Niemeyer, freedom of speech exists for attaining moral truth, “”truth regarding standards of conduct,”” and it also rests on moral truth.38 In Niemeyer’s view, an early critique of what later will be called pure or mere proceduralism, the process and commitment to free speech is vitiated not only by moral relativism but also by a failure to reverence as true what results from the process. What could be said to the question “”Why free speech?”” What could be said on behalf of free speech if we never acted as if it yielded real truth worth defending? A doctrine of free speech that is allied with moral relativism is, in Niemeyer’s view, an invitation to contention and manipulation in the interest of attaining a consensus that would in fact reflect the most skillful propaganda. Thus, in his view, moral relativism prepares the vacuum into which ideological passion and dictatorship rush.

Niemeyer seeks to promote in this piece an understanding of how a morally ungrounded freedom of speech could be used by ideological movements such as Fascism and Communism to undermine liberal democracy and that freedom itself. He finds liberal democracy unprepared with a morally rooted understanding to make decisions about when to deny its enemies liberty of expression. He cautions against denials of freedom of expression that are hysterical reactions and appear as disavowals of the fundamental principles of a free regime. He seeks rather a real moral consensus as the basis for whatever limits on free expression may be necessary under certain contingencies. It appears here too, as he claimed of the international order a decade earlier, that we must wait for experience to grow and patterns to be recognized. Niemeyer writes,

When people enjoy a common awareness of what allows them to live together, and what demands common life makes, not only on actions but on dispositions, no arbitrary repression of public speech will be held necessary or indeed possible.39

The sentences that follow this statement, however, make clear that Niemeyer is no longer content with simply waiting. He seems to want even more clearly at this point and with respect to this issue what he saw earlier and admired in Popper’s liberalism, namely, moral leadership. The next sentence begins, “”In the meantime,”” and the text proceeds as follows:

a firm, official stand for what is known as right, true, and good is required if an awareness of the moral nature of political community is to return. Moral judgments of political issues should not only not be avoided, but also faced with resolution and made with clarity and determination. Above all, we must once more become confident that such judgments are possible.40

Niemeyer appears to be saying we must build by practice a moral culture, and that entails moral leadership.

Firm as his words are, he offers this injunction to renew morality with wisdom and judicious restraint. “”The entire question,”” he writes, “”of what moral standards deserve public approval and official support can be approached only in a spirit of deep humility.””41 He distinguishes humility from neutrality with its attitude “”of indifference to standards.”” Humility necessarily implies “”the objective reality of oughtness”” in the awareness that “”we are falling short of the mark.”” Humility then is “”compatible with clear decisions and judgments according to moral standards, although such decisions should always be overshadowed by the knowledge of their provisional character.”” Niemeyer ends by finding the true spirit of humility, a spirit that entails moral affirmation and “”inspires”” courage, captured in Abraham Lincoln’s injunction, in one of the low and discouraging late moments of the devastating American Civil War, to go forward “”With firmness in the right,—as God gives us to see the right.””

Other than this mention of God through Lincoln and the implication of the statement of a trust in God through our consciences, there is no turn to a religious basis for morality, no personal confession of a religious nature, nor even any other mention of God or religion. Niemeyer is focused on the moral crisis underlying liberal democratic institutions and their practices, such as freedom of speech. The simple fact of the focus suggests he does not despair of doing something about the moral vacuum. In fact, over the first decade of his writings in America he has grown ever less passive with respect to the moral disintegration that he already highlighted in 1941.

The essay on freedom of speech in 1950 announces in effect the character of Niemeyer’s major writings over the next two decades. In this essay his concern with Marxist Communism is explicit; the Soviet Union’s threat to liberal institutions is explicit. Niemeyer is turning to an effort to understand and then to explain what he calls “”the mentality”” to which this ideology gives rise. He becomes increasingly concerned with the implications for American foreign policy if the public and its leaders do not grasp the mind and methods of the rising Soviet adversary. He is, as we might expect, concerned with the moral vacuum on the democratic side that might render confused and infirm the American response to this adversary.

During the first part of these two decades he is in Washington, D.C., involved with the Council on Foreign Relations and then lecturing at the National War College and at Yale University. During those decades, he also becomes foreign policy advisor to a presidential candidate and to one of the major political parties in the United States. His books, either authored, edited, or co-edited, of these decades affirm in their titles the focus his work now took: in 1956, An Inquiry into the Soviet Mentality; in 1958, the recorded testimony of his consultation with the United States Congress, published under the title, The Irrationality of Communism; in 1962, Handbook on Communism; 1963, Communists in Coalition Governments; 1964, his first major article in The Review of Politics, titled “”Lenin and the Total Critique of Society””; 1966, Outline of Communism; and then, in 1971, Deceitful Peace.

One might ask what has become, in this period, of the searching, philosophical Niemeyer. Where has his discernment of the crisis in moral foundations led him during this time? Has the rapprochement with tradition and possibly with religion suggested in the 1949 article on “”Faith and Facts”” taken root and developed in any way? There is, during most of this time, a semi-private realm of activity and inquiry in his busy life. In the mid 1950s he begins teaching at Notre Dame, and reports from students of the period indicate that he is utilizing Voegelin’s New Science of Politics which appeared just a few years earlier. The intensity of his engagement with Voegelin’s thought is partly reflected in his writing important reviews in the late 1950s of the first three volumes of Voegelin’s unfolding magnum opus, Order and History.42 The soul restless for a better understanding of this “”terrible century,”” for more effective defenses of the moral principles of the liberal democracies, was not rendered idle or wholly distracted by the very public struggles over Cold War foreign policy. Through much of this period, Niemeyer is working slowing and painstakingly on what we might call his philosophical book Between Nothingness and Paradise, which appeared in 1971. As indicated earlier, by 1971, likely sometime in the late 1960s, Niemeyer’s Christian faith appears deeply rooted and consolidated. It becomes clearly the center of his life, including his intellectual life. It is the lens through which he approaches all problems and issues. Before noting the evidence of this state in the books of 1971, what do his publications from 1951 to this point indicate about his thinking about religion and faith?

Two kinds of references to religion and faith stand out in the writings on Communism in the 1950s. Niemeyer begins to speak of Communism not just as an ideology poised to fill a moral vacuum but quite specifically as a “”political and secular religion.””43 The idea that politics might function as religion he would later attribute to Camus.44 In another formulation he speaks of Communist ideology as a substitute for both religion and ethics.45 The analogy could be carried quite far as when Niemeyer, in the 1956 book on the Soviet mentality, draws on Whittaker Chambers’ testimony to note a kind of otherworldly passion in the people he knew to be drawn to Communism. These are “”persons who would have become martyrs had they been Christians. Here, in the modern faithless age, they have found a faith by which to live and die.””46 Niemeyer’s conceptualizing Communism this way may be owed at least in part to his assimilation during this time of Voegelin’s teaching. It is also possibly an outcome, again at least in part, of his collaboration with a Dominican priest, Joseph Bochenski, a European philosopher who served as a regular visitor to Notre Dame in this period and with whom Niemeyer began working in 1955 on analyses of Communism. The 1962 Handbook on Communism is one of the fruits of their collaboration. They co-edited this substantial collection of essays, and both contributed essays of their own.47 Bochenski’s concluding essay in the volume contained a section on “”Communism as Faith”” in which he explored in detail what kind of faith it was and argued that it could not be religious in any genuine sense. Bochenski concluded that “”Communism is, from the religious point of view, a stupendous perversion and sin.””48

However Niemeyer came to the conceptualization of Communism as a pseudo-religion, this step in his writings suggests that he might be ready to open again and in earnest the question of religion; indeed, the very concept of pseudo-religion suggests there is something that might more truly satisfy human needs and fuel the moral renewal that Niemeyer had sought for years. As the decade of the 1960s begins, an existential encounter with the question of God breaks into Niemeyer’s writings. Already in 1957 in reviewing Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation, the first volume of Order and History, Niemeyer claims that Voegelin has shifted the basis of political order “”from the ground of morals to that of ontology.””49 Consider the significance of this perception for the moral-centered Niemeyer evident thus far. Would not ontology bring the question of God front and center? Then, in 1960 in a review of a German book on dialectical materialism, Niemeyer wrote the following:

What during the last century used to be a favorite parlor game—the argument concerning the existence of God—has become the foremost existential choice of our time. It is obvious by now that on the concept of God turns the very idea of man. No longer an academic debate, the pro and con of this argument mark the division between the two worlds locked in life-and-death struggle.50

No mere academic question—and for Niemeyer, now, no mere academic forum in which he raises the issue of God. Niemeyer begins writing more regularly in National Review and showing there that he is closing in on the question of God and the implications of a full faith. In a 1961 review of Frank Meyer’s The Moulding of Communists, Niemeyer reflects on Meyer’s experience as a Communist as a “”denial of half of reality, namely the spiritual half.””51

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How Niemeyer describes that half is notable. It is not for him a half filled with certainties. Rather, he argues that what the Communist denies and rejects is “”the essential precariousness of the human situation. He is unwilling to accept the ultimate mystery of life and the risk of faith, both of which together make a rational access to life possible and meaningful.””52 A few months later in 1961, Niemeyer, this man of wide and deep learning, reviews the publication of Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. Niemeyer observes, “”As the years and Bergman films go by, faith in God emerges more and more as the continuing central concern. The modern intellect with its self-centered ‘certainties’ turns out to be the chief stumbling block . . . .””53 In the conclusion to this review essay, Niemeyer seems self-reflective. He asks, “”Is Bergman a prophet of our time?”” He answers, “”Hardly.”” Bergman is, however, “”[a] seeker for the way, more sensitive to our want of knowledge than most contemporary artists, more aware of where our lack of faith has left us, but still nothing but a seeker among seekers.”” And Niemeyer concludes, “”Whether Ingmar Bergman then will produce more haunting, probing, wonderful pictures, no one can tell. But whatever he has already created he has made in the image of all of us.””54

Niemeyer seems on his way home. To be explicitly and openly the seeker is to have already been a finder—or, should we say, receiver. In this same year of 1961, he will argue in print that no political philosophy can be adequate without theology.55 In 1964, in his first full article in The Review of Politics, Niemeyer ties the possibilities of political order to people becoming aware “”of participating in realms of being that transcend human purposes.””56 In the same year in a popular piece on the United Nations, Niemeyer will speak of “”the worship of a transcendent God”” as clearly the true center for mankind, and he will caution against deceiving substitutes.57

The 1960s is for Niemeyer a decade of consolidating and then witnessing to his Christian faith. It is not surprising, in the light of his writings, that at the end of this decade his life will show a thorough Christian witness, as the testimony of the former student cited earlier indicated. That witness breaks into the books of 1971, two very different books.

It is less overt in Deceitful Peace a book in the Cold War trajectory of his work, a book warning against a manipulated and false sense that the Cold War is over and that peace with the Soviet Union is necessary and possible. This book is not directly confessional as to the state of his Christian faith, but it indicates a substantial incorporation of Voegelin’s work and concepts in Niemeyer’s own analysis of the Soviet mentality and thus of the Cold War situation. With the benefit of Voegelin’s rich historical and philosophical studies, Niemeyer writes, it seems, with a more grounded confidence about the reality that the Communists distort with their “”second reality”” and about the totalitarian ideologies’ deceptive offer of salvation to mankind.58 Niemeyer reveals a receptivity to the power and understanding that God grants when he writes here, critically, that “”modern man considers himself the Prometheus who, independent of the gods, can make and remake the world according to his own image.””59 Niemeyer’s confidence in the true order is such that quite remarkably he dares to tell, in 1971, what did in fact come to pass with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Niemeyer writes specifically against those who say that Communism is here to stay and we had best compromise with it:

Inasmuch as we have frequently stated our conviction that Communism is here to stay we have actively discouraged change. Communism, however, is not here to stay, for it is an enterprise of a very small number of people . . . . It will one day crumble and become ineffective, and that day is mankind’s best hope to escape atomic devastation as well as destructive tyranny.60

Between Nothingness and Paradise, Niemeyer’s philosophical book, or perhaps his philosophical/theological book, provides more occasion for him to be directly confessional about the God of the Christian tradition. Writing about the eighteenth-century French thinker and writer Abbé de Mably, Niemeyer observes that this cleric’s God “”is not the God who miraculously reveals himself to man nor the God who offers man the gift of his grace, but rather the God who is seen as identified with man’s practical reason.””61 A little later in the book, writing of Turgot, Niemeyer wonders how he could eulogize Christianity “”without mentioning Jesus Christ or ‘having in remembrance his blessed passion and precious death, his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension and innumerable benefits promised to us by the same,’ as the Book of Common Prayer expresses itself on the same subject.””62 This, in an “”academic”” book. Niemeyer then upbraids Turgot for seeing the “”advantages of Christianity”” in man’s worldly progress “”rather than in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, the means of grace and the hope of glory.””63

In Between Nothingness and Paradise Niemeyer also reveals his serious engagement with Augustine, an engagement as well as an explication of Augustine that will continue in the following years. At the end of the book he wisely cautions against an abandonment of the problem of politics, the problems of concrete existence, in the light of confident faith. With the guidance of Augustine, he writes:

Even though men here are “”restless, till they find rest in God,”” concrete existence in this world is never to be regarded as trivial or merely provisional. It is pregnant with “”real possibilities”” which Augustine discovered much more imaginatively than any progressivist of the Enlightenment, but which he never was in danger of confusing with phantasmal “”possible realities.””64

So Niemeyer has found his rest with a third of his life before him, a period in which his inquiries and political efforts continue, but now clearly in the light of Christian faith. Now it is “”faith seeking understanding”” and faith illuminating all that he does. There is much to be done in explicating and appreciating his scholarship and other writing of this period. Here is found further work on Saint Augustine and political philosophy, critique of Eric Voegelin in light of Niemeyer’s Christianity, discussion of faith and reason in a way that clearly anticipates the powerful and very significant encyclical Fides et Ratio by John Paul II, and explorations of education in the light of Christian commitment. All of these and more that might fall under the topic of this essay must be left for another day.65 On such a day or another, one might also look to Niemeyer’s critics and what resources his writings provide to speak to them.

There is, however, one experience in the latter third of his life that seems important to note before concluding. This occurs, in print at least initially, shortly into the 1970s and the period just scrutinized in detail. It is Niemeyer’s encounter with and profound appreciation for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In one instance of praise, Niemeyer says that Solzhenitsyn “”sees himself as one who, by telling the truth of the camps, the truth of history, the truth of the human condition, recovers the essence of humanity.””66 On another occasion, Niemeyer asserts that Solzhenitsyn’s appearance is “”one of the great events of our time, of all time.””67 He adds, “”In his books Solzhenitsyn hardly ever mentions God or speaks of religion. He confines himself faithfully to following movements of the human soul, wherever they may lead him, and his work is above all the restoration of man’s full image. But for him the path led logically further. In 1971, Solzhenitsyn received his first communion in Russia’s Orthodox Church . . . .””68 In Solzhenitsyn’s dictum, cited by Niemeyer elsewhere, “”The only alternative is Christianity.””69 I surmise that Niemeyer’s appreciation for Solzhenitsyn was at the least enhanced by an autobiographical dimension which he found in Solzhenitsyn’s life and personal journey. Niemeyer too had come to see Christianity as the only alternative.

Walter Nicgorski
University of Notre Dame

NOTES

  1. An initial version of this essay was presented as a lecture in the Phoenix Institute at the University of Notre Dame in July 2001.
  2. Niemeyer’s actual words occur in the context of his observing that humans connect with the order of reality through tradition. He then adds, “”When villages were built, the road between them followed the Indian trail, as the Indian trail followed the deer trail. Man’s gift of language implied understanding: it enabled him to grasp the structure as well as the power in the manifestations of life around him and within him.”” “”Counter-culture?”” National Review, 14 May 1976, 508. A more developed, reflective piece, “”In Praise of Tradition,”” was published by Niemeyer in his eighty-seventh year. There he wrote with simple directness as follows: “”Tradition implies awareness of being, along with awareness of history. Tradition is not only remembrance of ancestors, but also openness to God. Tradition results in appropriate humility of individual persons, while it denies not freedom of choice. Indeed, freedom of choice presupposes awareness of tradition.”” Modern Age 38 (Spring 1994), 233.
  3. “”Terrible century”” was Niemeyer’s frequently used description of the century that his life (1907-1997) nearly spanned from end to end.
  4. Law Without Force (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941). The reissued edition (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001) includes a new introduction by Michael Henry.
  5. Deceitful Peace (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1971).
  6. Between Nothingness and Paradise (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971). This book was reissued in 1998 by Saint Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Indiana.
  7. Robert Francis Smith, “”‘Love Divine’: Remembering Gerhart Niemeyer,”” The University Bookman 37, no. 4 (Winter 1997), 13. Smith’s observations on Niemeyer’s religious state at this time have been confirmed by Bruce Fingerhut, who arrived in the same year to begin graduate studies with Niemeyer.
  8. Smith, “”‘Love Divine,'”” 14.
  9. U.S. Congress. House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Irrationality of Communism. A Consultation with Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer. Eighty-Fifth Congress, Second Session, 8 August 1958.
  10. An Inquiry Into Soviet Mentality (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956). “”Why You Can’t Trust The Soviet Mind,”” U.S. News & World Report, 16 March 1956, 102-114.
  11. The Irrationality of Communism, 5.
  12. For a fuller account of Niemeyer’s conversion in England see the Biographical Essay by Bruce Fingerhut in this symposium.
  13. Niemeyer cited Voegelin’s observation in an essay, “”Loss of Reality: Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,”” which originally appeared in Modern Age 22 (Fall 1978), 338-45. I cite the essay from the reprinted version in Gerhart Niemeyer, Aftersight and Foresight: Selected Essays (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), 26.
  14. More information on Niemeyer’s earlier writings and on his mentor Heller is found in Michael Henry’s “”Introduction to the Transaction Edition,”” Law, xi-xiv.
  15. Law, 10-11.
  16. Law, 22.
  17. Law, 178.
  18. Law, 339.
  19. Law, 341.
  20. Ibid.
  21. Henry’s interpretation of Law Without Force emphasizes this dimension of what I would call Niemeyer’s struggle in this book. “”Introduction to the Transaction Edition,”” esp. xvii and xx-xxi.
  22. Law, 200ff., vii. By “”individualistic,”” Niemeyer means the earlier mainstream tradition (see p. 50 and n. 16 above) of individual moral responsibility under God and/or a moral law in the nature of reality. Niemeyer is seeking, however, what he calls “”the basic value-experience which does inspire individuals of this age . . . .”” (201) So individuals are still very much in the picture for Niemeyer, though it seems that their “”social outlook”” and “”organizational orientation”” is to be given more role in determining the natural moral basis for the relations among nations.
  23. Law, 402.
  24. Law, viii (1941) or xvi (2001).
  25. “”Faith and Facts in Social Science,”” Theology Today 5, No. 4 (January 1949). “”Faith”” as used in this essay in inclusive of but not limited to religious faith. See especially pages 492, 495, and 498.
  26. Note that this piece appears just before publication of Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952, the lectures on which the book was based having been given in the previous year)and Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953, though the lectures on which this book is based were given in October of 1949), both of which include segments sharply critical of the explanatory imperialism and reductionism of the positivism then inspiring social science. Niemeyer in “”Faith and Facts”” is clearly wrestling deeply with the nature of moral choice and how this realm is to relate to human rationality. Notably on p. 498, he observes,

    No scientific proof can compel our mind to accept one course of action to the exclusion of all others. In making such a choice, we are dependent on realities and potentialities which we cannot measure or know fully. To acknowledge this dependence means to declare our faith. In every moral choice we cannot help risking ourselves, our intellectual pride, and even our existence, since we fix our direction by trusting in something beyond us rather than by that which we intellectually possess as our own.

    Shortly after this observation Niemeyer expresses concern over the post-seventeenth-century tendency to equate rationality in politics “”with the rational knowledge of universal laws of human nature or universal laws of history.”” He praises Karl Popper’s effort to defend a rationality in practical political life distinct from such “”laws”” and comments of Popper, “”He has opened anew the discussion of what constitutes the soundest guarantee of rationality in our common experience.””

  27. “”Faith and Facts,”” 494.
  28. For example, in “”Counter-Culture?”” op. cit.
  29. “”Faith and Facts,”” 497-98.
  30. Niemeyer mentions this meeting in his essay, “”Christian Faith, and Religion, in Eric Voegelin’s Work,”” in the collection of his essays, Within and Above Ourselves: Essays of Political Analysis (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 138.
  31. Perhaps even at the time Niemeyer did not approve of Popper’s handling of Plato. Note that twice (“”Faith and Facts,”” 492, 497) he pointedly distances himself from Popper’s specific interpretations of the philosophical thinkers in question.
  32. “”Faith and Facts,”” 494.
  33. “”Faith and Facts,”” 488.
  34. “”Faith and Facts,”” 489.
  35. “”Faith and Facts,”” 498-99.
  36. The essay, entitled “”A Reappraisal of the Doctrine of Free Speech,”” originally appeared in Thought 25 (June 1950), 251-74. Citations from it are taken from the version reprinted in Within and Above Ourselves.
  37. “”A Reappraisal,”” 279 and passim.
  38. “”A Reappraisal,”” 281ff.
  39. “”A Reappraisal,”” 299.
  40. Ibid.
  41. “”A Reappraisal,”” 300.
  42. “”The Order of History and the History of Order,”” a review of Israel and Revelation (Vol. I of Order and History) by Eric Voegelin, The Review of Politics 19 (July 1957): 403-09; “”The Depth and Height of Political Order,”” a review of The World of the Polis and Plato and Aristotle (Vols. II and III of Order and History) by Eric Voegelin, The Review of Politics 21 (July 1959), 588-96.
  43. For example, in An Inquiry into the Soviet Mentality, 3.
  44. Deceitful Peace, 74.
  45. The Irrationality of Communism, 10.
  46. An Inquiry into the Soviet Mentality, 26-27.
  47. Joseph M. Bochenski and Gerhart Niemeyer, eds., Handbook on Communism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962).
  48. “”A Critique of Communism,”” in Bochenski and Niemeyer, 590-91, 598.
  49. “”The Order of History,”” 408.
  50. “”A Philosophical Confrontation With Communism,”” a review of Die Erkenntnistheorie des dialektischen Materialismus by Josef de Vries, The Review of Politics 22 (July 1960): 440-41.
    Linking the idea of man and the idea of God in this way seems to reflect the impact of Voegelin, whose New Science of Politics Niemeyer knew well at this point. Later Niemeyer specifically quotes Voegelin’s sentence, “”The truth of man and the truth of God are inseparably one.”” “”Eric Voegelin, 1952,”” Modern Age 26 (Summer/Fall 1982), 263.
  51. “”The Bending of Human Souls,”” a review of The Moulding of Communists by Frank S. Meyer, National Review (28 January 1961), 54.
  52. Ibid.
  53. “”Bergman: Image and Meaning,”” a review of Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, National Review (22 April 1961), 258.
  54. Ibid.
  55. “”What Is Political Knowledge?”” a review of What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies by Leo Strauss and The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers by Gerhart B. Ladner, The Review of Politics 23 (January 1961), 107.
  56. “”Lenin and the Total Critique of Society,”” The Review of Politics 26 (October 1964), 500.
  57. “”The Collapsing U.N.,”” National Review (21 April 1964), 31.
  58. Deceitful Peace, 72-74.
  59. Deceitful Peace, 165.
  60. Deceitful Peace, 201.
  61. Between Nothingness and Paradise, 32.
  62. Between Nothingness and Paradise, 46.
  63. Ibid.
  64. Between Nothingness and Paradise, 220-21.
  65. This is not to imply that all these topics have gone untreated by others. For example, Niemeyer’s critique of Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity up to that time receives careful attention in James M. Rhodes, “”Voegelin and Christian Faith,”” in The Good Man In Society, John A. Gueguen, Michael Henry, and James Rhodes, eds. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989), esp. 279-80.
  66. “”The Prophetic Calling of Solzhenitsyn,”” National Review (15 March 1974), 320.
  67. “”The Eternal Meaning of Solzhenitsyn,”” National Review (19 Janu