John Carroll, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008)

 

Grant N. Havers,Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love
(Columbia, MO: University of Missiouri Press, 2009)

First impressions may indicate that John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited and Grant N. Havers’s Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love are clean different books. While Carroll is critically addressing the role of humanistic thinking in the moral self-destruction of the West, Havers is highlighting the theological foundations of the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln. Moreover, the moral direction of the two works would seem to differ. Carroll is tracing the evolution of what he takes to be a hubristic belief, namely, that man can control his fate through his own mind and through the exercise of his will. His critical survey starts with the Italian Renaissance, and its cult of the resourceful individual, and ends with the evocation of postmodernist chaos.

Havers, by contrast, is celebrating the distinctly Protestant biblical elements that he uncovers in Lincoln’s oratory, and particularly in Lincoln’s tropes about the inhumanity of slavery and about Americans as an “almost chosen people.” Carroll’s work would seem to point in a starkly antihumanistic direction, one in which, to quote Martin Luther as Carroll often does, “faith exists where there is neither light nor Reason.” It is a far gloomier tract than Havers’s celebration of Lincoln as a critic of slavery and as a champion of human freedom. Unlike Carroll, Havers is talking about the religious achievement of abolishing slavery. In making his arguments, he would seem to be covering some of the same ground as did such Lincoln devotees as Harry Jaffa, Gary Wills, and George McGovern. All these interpreters have presented Lincoln as someone who reconstructed American identity around the principle of equality.

But first impressions can be deceptive. Havers devotes more than thirty pages in his work to defining himself in terms of what he is not, namely a Straussian, who doubts the efficacy of religious ideas in shaping American political life. He depicts Leo Strauss as a scorner of biblical wisdom. And in his comments about Strauss’s disciples, “all devotees of modern natural right” who demand “the spread of American liberal democracy around the world,”[1] Havers ascribes the blame for this project to Strauss himself: “Strauss’s teachings on the irrelevance of Christianity to politics have indirectly encouraged the position among his mostly American students that the only legitimate mission of America is to spread democracy, without recognition of the historic influence of Christianity.”[2]

Nowhere in his book does Havers endorse the war policy that Lincoln pursued to force the South back into the Union—a policy that led to the abolition of slavery and ultimately to legislation making former slaves into full citizens. Havers is examining Lincoln as a rhetorician, and his exploration calls to mind the commentary of the Southern conservative Richard Weaver. To the consternation of many on the then-intellectual Right, Weaver praised Lincoln, in contrast to the advocate of expedience Edmund Burke, as someone who argued from principles. Havers laments the fact that conservatives like Irving Babbitt and Richard Weaver, who dissociated Lincoln’s legacy from a “strong presidency with imperial ambitions,” “are hardly read anymore.”[3]

Havers also emphatically does not attribute to Lincoln the natural or human rights position that Straussians and many on the Left associate with his thinking. Rather, he tries to show that Lincoln was presenting his listeners with a Protestant Christian reason to oppose slavery, one that was rooted in a biblical notion of charity. Lincoln’s stated reason for opposing slavery had nothing to do with social contract theory, eighteenth-century natural rights, or any belief that blacks could be fitted into American democratic political life. As Havers reminds us, Lincoln emphatically denied that he thought such political equality was desirable during his senatorial debates with Stephen Douglas in 1856.[4]

Nor does Havers, like the Jaffaites, believe that Lincoln was dissembling when he wished to withhold political equality from freed blacks. Opposing the enslavement of those who were created in the image of God is not the same as favoring the raising of every resident of one’s country to full citizenship. Although Lincoln thought slavery was anti-Christian, according to Havers, his religion, like that of most of his sympathetic audience, did not require him to support the Sixteenth Amendment. Liberating slaves did not mean for Lincoln an accompanying right to vote. In his tightly reasoned and well documented work, Havers makes a case that Lincoln was appealing to moral sentiments that had grown out of a shared religious culture. To some extent, it was shared by slave owners who doubted the morality of their peculiar institution as well as by opponents of slavery. Within this religious culture, which was also favorable to a constitutional republic, Lincoln stood out as an orator appealing to principle.

According to Havers, Lincoln’s brief against slavery owed little to Athens or the Enlightenment. Ancient societies were built on human bondage, and such leading figures of the Enlightenment as Hume, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were entirely indifferent to the persistence of this condition. Havers cites with some respect John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and The Reasonableness of Christianity, but he is clearly not impressed by Locke the Christian theologian. Locke in his discussion of the New Testament, Havers observes, was overly concerned with which miracles he could or could not fit into his canon of Reason. A materialist philosopher and progenitor of the Age of Reason, he did not sufficiently emphasize the kind of character the Gospels were urging on the believing Christian.

Moreover, Locke’s defense of tolerance, even when it suggested something like Christian charity, was essentially utilitarian. Locke was essentially a skeptic trying to deal with supernatural beliefs that he doubted and which were incompatible with his “egotistical psychology.”[5] In England the crusade against slavery was driven by Christians like John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, and John Wilberforce. These were the men who raised the banner against a degrading institution and, even earlier, against the slave trade, and they did so on religious grounds. Havers scolds the Straussians for trying to read into classical texts, and into selected passages from John Locke, a sufficient explanation for what was religiously inspired and specific to Christian conscience.[6]

Curiously Havers is drawn to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, because of Spinoza’s proper understanding of the Gospels as a guide to Christian charity and his perception that the health of popular government rested “on the practice of charity.”[7] While Havers rejects Spinoza’s view of charity as merely “useful” for citizenship, he also presents the philosopher as a precursor of Lincoln, in his defense of popular government predicated on Christian charity.

But nowhere does Havers universalize citizenship, even in a democracy based on the recognition of the humanity of others. He stresses the cultural and religious preconditions for participation in the kind of government that Spinoza and Lincoln had pointed toward. And he heartily agrees with Spinoza’s invectives against the ancient Jews and the Puritans of his own time, who believed that as “chosen people” they had a duty to impose their godly lives on others: “Spinoza’s preference for democracy does not invite him to support uncharitable (and murderous) revolutions against undemocratic regimes. His position on revolution is no different from that of Edmund Burke.”[8]

Havers leaves his readers with a paradox. Although the Christian message is to be addressed to everyone, the kind of society that incorporates Christian charity is specific to time and place. It can only exist in the presence of a “vital Christian foundation to sustain political stability,” and since, as Lincoln and Spinoza both knew, “the power of reason is weak,” the capacity of a republican regime to maintain itself may call for a constant reinforcement of Christian charity. Much of what Havers praises as the virtues of his Christian regime, which he finds in Lincoln’s appeals to “charity” and the “almost chosen” status of his people, are reminiscent of Plato’s appeal to sophrosune. For Plato, and later Aristotle, restraint and prudence were the preconditions for civil order.[9] But what Havers would add as a prerequisite for good government is sympathy for one’s fellow-being, based on a shared religious consciousness. In his view, however, the cultivation of charity should not lead in the direction of a universal state or to the dilution of citizenship. Presumably adding to one’s society as citizens those who are culturally dissimilar would endanger a worthwhile experiment in self-government.

Another difficulty that Havers tries to address is reconciling Lincoln’s statements about equality with his longtime insistence that freed blacks would not be able to live as equals with whites. In his debates with Douglas, Lincoln declared that the granting of full equality to all human beings was the “highest degree of moral perfection” demanded of us by God. Yet Lincoln in the same forum denied that he favored making blacks, once freed, into citizens.[10] Indeed for years Lincoln, like Henry Clay, belonged to a colonization society, the goal of which was to resettle emancipated blacks in Africa or Central America, where they would be able to set up their own nation.

George Carey on the Right and Harry Jaffa on the Left (if such a distinction may be permitted in this context) have maintained that Lincoln was never serious about resettling blacks; and both have insisted with differing value judgments that Lincoln was hiding his hand when he expressed the views of the Colonization League. Both argue that Lincoln’s real intention, from the 1850s on, was to remove as many of the then-existing inequalities in race relations as was possible. While Jaffa and the Southern conservative M. E. Bradford crossed swords for years over Lincoln’s presidency, both agreed entirely, as did Carey, according to Havers, that Lincoln was committed not only to emancipating blacks but also to putting them on the road to full citizenship.

Havers has no adequate answer to the real or apparent inconsistency in Lincoln’s stand on equality, except to equate most of Lincoln’s appeals to equality with expressions of Christian charity, while explaining his endorsement of Clay’s Colonization League as an attempt to reach a solution on the race question that would “benefit both blacks and whites.” Lincoln himself described the colonization plan as one in which neither group “will have suffered by the change,” in a eulogy given in 1852 for his fellow Whig Henry Clay.[11]

It might be easier to deal with this inconsistency in Lincoln’s notion of equality by noting two factors that the Bradford-Jaffa consensus steers away from. One, Lincoln was of more than one mind about the future of negro slaves once they were emancipated. It is hard to believe that the leader who in his first inaugural address promised to protect slavery where it already existed and to do nothing to abolish it against the will of the Southern states was already planning to turn former slaves into full citizens. On the other hand, Lincoln found the institution of slavery to be repugnant for exactly the reasons that Havers cites.

The second factor is that there is nothing wrong with the argument, save for its being uninteresting, that Lincoln was pressed by events into taking a more radical course in considering political equality for blacks than he would have preferred. His wartime cabinet and Congress included those who would identify themselves as Radical Republicans, and Lincoln required their assistance in order to prosecute the war. Clearly such figures as Edmund Stanton and Thaddeus Stevens had a more vindictive attitude toward the soon to be defeated South and a more radical view about empowering Freemen than Lincoln. Would Lincoln have tried to indulge such figures in less urgent circumstances? One would be fully justified in doubting this.

Where Havers is on firm ground is in questioning whether Lincoln was committed to fighting for democratic equality all over the world. Although Lincoln famously expressed sympathy for the Hungarian uprising of 1848–49 and for the Polish rebellion against tsarist control in 1863, he and his secretary of state William Seward backed tsarist Russia against the Polish rebels. Seward gave as the reason for this decision that Tsar Alexander II stood with the Union (as did Bismarck’s Prussia, which also took Alexander’s side against the Poles). Havers is clearly exasperated by “the reinvention of Lincoln as the premier globalist president,” a fiction that “fits well with cosmopolitan elites in America who need to justify the dissemination of democracy on a world scale, just as the trumpeting of America as a ‘propositional’ nation, which owes little of enduring value to its Protestant roots, is a convenient form of propaganda.”[12] But Havers also observes by way of balance that the “paleoconservative acceptance of Lincoln as a protoneoconservative” has helped validate neoconservative misrepresentations.[13] The Old Right’s dismissal of Lincoln as a democratic demagogue has played into the hands of its adversaries on the left.

Although the connection between Havers’s work and Carroll’s may not seem obvious at first, a link nonetheless exists. Both of these authors present religious ideas as shaping critical historical change; and the religious ideas they highlight in their works are emphatically Protestant Christian. Further, Havers offers a critical stance that becomes explicit in Carroll, namely a generally negative view of the Enlightenment and its rationalist tradition as a source of moral education and religious redemption. But while Havers disputes the emphasis on secular human rights and the implications of a global democratic foreign policy in previous interpretations of Lincoln, Carroll launches a frontal attack on the Age of Reason and its origins in the Renaissance.

An Australian sociologist with strongly Calvinist inclinations, Carroll takes no prisoners. Reviewers of his work in the U.S. and in Australia have been struck by the sheer verbal ferocity with which he goes after the hated humanists from the sixteenth century onward. As The Guardian, which is certainly no friend of Carroll’s religious inclination, has observed, his work may be “overblown, utterly misguided, and sometimes dangerous [not to mention half crazed], but important and at times brilliant. What if he’s right?”[14] While Havers would like to rebuild Western Protestant societies with the ideas and restraints that make for solidarity and charity, Carroll believes that a wrong turn occurred in the West centuries ago, one that doomed this civilization to its current social and moral disintegration.

Unlike the Catholic-leaning paleoconservatives, Carroll has come to praise Luther, Calvin, and the classical Protestant Reformation. He refuses to blame sixteenth-century Reformers for the individualism and secularism that allegedly came out of their work, several centuries after its occurence. And it would be hard to imagine Carroll coming to any agreement over religious history with those paleoconservatives who are now embracing neomedieval forms of Catholicism or Anglophone versions of Eastern Orthodoxy. Carroll would argue that such traditionalists have gone in the wrong direction. They should be on the side of the Reformation, or at the very least the Catholic Jansenists. He identifies the Church of the sixteenth century with political power, worldly luxury, a mechanistic theology, and the erosion of the Augustinian pessimism about human nature that he locates in the Protestant and Jansenist theologians of the time. This view is not sui generis. Although Carroll does not mention him, Jacques Ellul, a French Calvinist (who like Carroll, was a sociologist) made some of the same points, though with less panache.[15]

Carroll’s key text for his antihumanist position is Luther’s tract On the Enslaved Will (1525), which depicts human nature as so fallen that no sinner can depend on his will for redemption. Erasmus and others who tried to defend free will and the hierarchical, sacramental order of the Church, are shown as already poised on the slippery slope leading to rationalism and modernity. “Sola fides had been the easy half of Luther’s Reformation: he now moved into harsh terrain where against all reason, the will is nothing. Everything hinged on this. If Erasmus won, Christ was done for. The history of the next five hundred years would prove Luther right.”[16] Further:

 

The absence of free will is the crux of the Reformation. Luther’s entire work (On the Enslaved Will) centers on proving it. He is not just pitted against Ersamus (and “the argument of a reasonable man”) but also the mainstream of Christian theology. Etienne Gilson (the Thomist theologian) wrote that ‘all Christian ethics of the Middle Ages, like those of the Fathers that inspired them, have their necessary basis in the doctrine of an indestructible free will.’ [17]

Carroll not only disputes Gilson’s claim about a single, and until Luther, indisputable Christian doctrine about the freedom of the will. He also insists that Luther took the only turn, by affirming God’s immutable will, that “the I is nothing” and that reason cannot gain the sinner salvation, which would allow Christianity to survive in the face of the humanist challenge.

Carroll is creating a counternarrative to the paleo-Catholic view, which is that Protestantism accelerated social leveling and religious individualism by denying the indelible character of the clergy and by preaching the priesthood of all believers. In Carroll’s alternative picture, Catholic scholasticism opened the door to the ethical rationalism of the eighteenth century; while the Catholic repudiation of the radical antihumanist teachings of Luther and Calvin foreshadowed the view that human nature is malleable if not entirely perfectible. In the early sections of his book, the architectural pomp and individual self-glorification identified with the Renaissance (and typified by Donatello’s equestrian statue the Gattamelatta) are shown as suffusing the Church.[18] Indeed Carroll seems to depict something of the shock supposedly expressed by Luther when he encountered the Church as a worldly institution during a journey to Rome in 1510. Throughout Carroll’s book, worldliness comes under attack, together with what St. Paul condemned as kauxema, boastful pride.

A hermeneutic device in his narrative that has caused some controversy is the attempt to read religious attitudes into visual art. Although objections can be raised to Carroll’s application of this device and to the arbitrariness of some of his interpretations, there is nothing cranky about his approach to cultural history. Erwin Panofsky and Jaroslav Pelikan have fruitfully applied the same method; and so Carroll is not the first scholar to have tried it out.[19] More unsettling however is Carroll’s tendency to use artwork as an occasion for sermonizing about the evils of Renaissance humanism or the virtues of Protestant family life. In such illustrations the line between historical interpretation and didacticism is sometimes badly blurred. But this mild stricture is not meant to disparage Carroll’s real achievement, which is to stress and demonstrate the profoundly traditionalist side of classical Protestant theology. The association of the Reformation with a radical theological turn toward the left is something that Carroll effectively refutes.

Nonetheless, there are two critical questions worth posing here, one about Carroll’s book in particular, and the other about both his and Havers’s works. Neither Carroll nor Havers, in my view, may have considered sufficiently the law of unintended consequences when they try to protect their heroes from any association with later, undesirable historical developments. Although it is hard to think of anything now less fashionable than the radical Augustinianism of Luther and Calvin, it is possible to see the Enlightenment and other modern trends evolving out of Protestant culture. This would be the case in the same way that Caroll traces another unintended development, which went from the “reasonable arguments” of Luther’s “reasonable” opponent Erasmus, to ethical rationalism and from there, according to Carroll, to “the death of God.” What “starts out with free will” ends with man’s total autonomy, and so faith must exist “where the torch of human reason cannot penetrate.”[20]

But the same law of unintended consequences can be applied to the Protestant side. Was it entirely accidental that Calvinist societies more than other kinds of religious communities evolved into constitutional republics with incipient capitalist economies, or that once the Protestants got rid of clerical celibacy and the special spiritual status of the clergy, and other signs of medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy, their societies, and particularly Calvinist ones, moved in a more modern (bourgeois) direction? Pointing this out is not to deny Carroll’s presentation of the fathers of the Reformation. It is rather to notice that religious changes may take directions that were not clear to those who initiated them.

The same observation applies to Havers’s treatment of Lincoln as a misrepresented Protestant Christian opponent of slavery, who never intended to become an apostle of a global democratic American foreign policy. Although Havers distinguishes between Lincoln’s Christian charity and later statements of democratic universalism, it is possible to argue that the second was at least implicit in the first. Lincoln’s equation of equality with “moral perfection,” his view of his mission to refound the republic on a more egalitarian basis than was inherent in the original constitutional order, and his conception of America as “the last best hope of humanity,” would seem to point beyond the task of merely emancipating black slaves.

This is not to say that Lincoln would have welcomed Woodrow Wilson’s crusade for democracy or cheered the election of President Obama. But certain principles and values lead beyond themselves, and so one should not be surprised that egalitarian, universalist rhetoric drawn from the past has been used to justify projects more sweeping than what their speakers had envisaged. While Havers’s distinctions are instructive and historically accurate, they do not refute the idea that he who says “A” may be contributing to “B,” even if that was not his intention.

The second critical point, which relates specifically to Carroll, is the targeting of something called “humanism” throughout his book. Among traditional Protestants, “humanism” has the same pejorative connotation as “relativism” does among traditional Catholics, and particularly for the current pope, who has written a book attacking the “relativist” foundation of a godless society. Humanism and relativism are both concepts that are brought up in explaining why Christians have lost their moorings.

But the question that must be asked is whether the enemy Carroll locates in the present age is the same as the one that he targets in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Has “humanism” remained the same from the Christian Aristotelianism of the High Middle Ages through the Renaissance rediscovery of classical antiquity and the ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, down to Duchamp’s irreverent specimen of modern art “The Urinal”?[21] Carroll makes heavy-duty use of certain all-purpose definitions, e.g., by talking about man’s believing too much in his own mind or will and minimizing the need for divine grace. But Carroll is also discussing the products of different ages and different cultures. The fact that none of these products reflects an Augustinian worldview may not be enough to make them fit a single comprehensive definition.

While his observations about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard straying from the essential truth of Luther’s understanding of guilt and grace are quite illuminating, by the time we reach Carroll’s analysis of John Ford’s movies, his bridge back to the original argument starts to disintegrate. Carroll, moreover, makes sweeping judgments about historical events that are open to question. For example, he considers the First World War to have broken out as “a product of the ‘death of God’ crisis of meaning.” He sees the “totalitarianisms of the Right and the Left” as having “obeyed the same formula. They took the technological genius of humanism, its industrial and organizational power, and wedded it to a fundamentalist rancor. . . . The end in both cases was belief in nothing, a militarist society run by the secret police, and death camps.”[22] But the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were periods of traditional Christian belief in the West, also witnessed ghastly wars fought in the name of religion. While this catastrophe in no way discredits Luther’s or, for that matter, Carroll’s luminous religious insights, one should be careful about attributing too many conventional man-made disasters to the “loss of faith.” Unfortunately, religious societies, even those that have claimed to follow the Sermon on the Mount, have unleashed heinous conflicts.

But even with this said, it must be noted that Carroll fills his last section “Death Throes” with startling observations. In contrasting the U.S.’s struggle with Muslim Jihadists to the Cold War, he explains:

 

The West was always going to defeat communist societies, for that was a war of competing materialisms—over who could generate the most wealth—a battle fought within capitalism’s field of strength. The West’s metaphysical nerve, the nucleus of its vulnerability, was quite another matter, now exposed to the hot knife gouging into raw tissue.[23]

Carroll’s view of the confrontation of the Cold War is in retrospect far more convincing than all of the postwar conservative interpretations of it as a spiritual drama. The side that won offered a more appealing form of materialism and held more resources than the side that lost.

Today that part of Europe that was not under communist rule is suffering from social decadence, demographic decline, and the rule of politically correct censors. It may eventually have more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians. And these over-administered, spiritually empty, and sterile Europeans are the winners in the Cold War! Carroll is also correct when he describes Usama bin Laden and his followers as technocrats, whose activities “on September 11 came straight out of a Marxist textbook on power elites.” Driven by “envy at the success of the West, now led by America,” they decided to destroy the monuments to the “triumph of humanism,” which the Islamic Middle East lacked. Carroll is suggesting that the materialist West may have another opponent which, like the communist empire, is playing in its wheelhouse. But this wealthy Western world, even with its resources, cannot control the likelihood that a consumerist, nonbreeding and multiculturally indoctrinated population will contribute to its own destruction. This will happen if Muslims, and particularly dedicated believers, are allowed to occupy its heartland, and if Europeans practice an exaggerated tolerance toward their would-be conquerors while denying a hearing to the critics of what they are doing.

In summation, Havers and Carroll both offer studies that go against the grain of our current academic scholarship. They take religious, and more specifically, Christian, ideas seriously in contextualizing particular historical developments. Most interesting of all, they themselves have been strongly influenced by the Protestant Christian concepts that they explore in their books. For all of these reasons, these authors stand out as worthy of discussion.

Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College

[1]. Grant N. Havers, Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 123.

[2]. Ibid., 124.

[3]. Ibid., 178.

[4]. Ibid., 152–55.

[5]. Ibid., 39.

[6]. Ibid., 137–44.

[7]. Ibid., 40.

[8]. Ibid., 41.

[9]. Plato, Res Publica, Oxford Classical Texts, Book 4, 428–433; and Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, Oxford Classical Texts, Book 5, Section 14. See also Cicero’s discussion of temperatia as a cardinal virtue in De Officiis, Oxford Classical Texts, Liber Primus, and 27.93.

[10]. Havers, Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love, 148; and Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 373, 454.

[11]. Quoted in Havers, 152.

[12]. Ibid., 179.

[13]. Ibid.; Paul Gottfried, “The Invincible Wilsonian Matrix: Universal Rights Once Again,” Orbis (Spring 2007): 139–50; and James Kurth, “George W. Bush and the Protestant Deformation,” American Interest 1.2 (Winter 2005): 4–16.

[14]. Quoted on the back cover of John Carroll, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008).

[15]. See especially Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985).

[16]. John Carroll, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 53.

[17]. Ibid., 54.

[18]. Ibid., 13–27.

[19]. See Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconography: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Westview Press, 1972); and Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

[20]. Carroll, 53.

[21]. Ibid., 254–58.

[22]. Ibid., 252.

[23]. Ibid., 253; and 217–61 passim.