We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition

by John Courtney Murray

The 1960 publication of We Hold These Truths marked a significant event in the history of modern American thought. Since that time, Sheed & Ward has kept the book in print and has published several studies of John Courtney Murray's life and work. We are proud to present a new edition of this classic text, which features a comprehensive introduction by Peter Lawler that places Murray in the context of Catholic and American history and thought while revealing his relevance today. From the new Introduction by Peter Lawler: The Jesuit John Courtney Murray (1904-67) was, in his time, probably the best known and most widely respected American Catholic writer on the relationship between Catholic philosophy and theology and his country's political life. The highpoint of his influence was the publication of We Hold These Truths in the same year as an election of our country's first Catholic president. Those two events were celebrated by a Time cover story (December 12, 1960) on Murray's work and influence. The story's author, Protestant Douglas Auchincloss, reported that it was 'The most relentlessly intellectual cover story I've done.' His amazingly wide ranging and dense―if not altogether accurate―account of Murray's thought was crowned with a smart and pointed conclusion: 'If anyone can help U.S. Catholics and their non-Catholic countrymen toward the disagreement that precedes understanding―John Courtney Murray can.' . . . Murray's work, of course, is treated with great respect and has had considerable influence, but now it's time to begin to think of him as one of America's very few genuine political philosophers. His disarmingly lucid and accessible prose has caused his book to be widely cited and celebrated, but it still is not well understood. It is both praised and blamed for reconciling Catholic faith with the fundamental premises of American political life. It is praised by liberals for paving the way for Vatican II's embrace of the American idea of religious liberty, and it is blamed by conservatives and traditionalists for obscuring the real conflicts between Catholicism and 'Americanism.' Both the liberal praise and the conservative blame are somewhat misguided. The last thing Murray wanted to do is bring the church up-to-date with the latest currents in American thought. He wanted to show how distinctively Catholic thought could illuminate the authentic American idea of liberty. . . . We Hold These Truths at least offers the hope that Catholic natural-law thinking can bring together the religious devotion and moral concerns of the evangelicals with the devotion to reason and concern for scientific truth of the secular humanists. It offers the hope of getting Americans really arguing again, of holding again the truth that they are capable of engaging in the dialogue about the human good that is the foundation of any civil and civilized moral and political life. Peter Augustine Lawler is professor of political science at Berry College in Georgia.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Philosophy, Politics, Catholic, Christianity, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazing book - a set of reflections on being both Catholic and American from the '50s, before the Second Vatican Council. It makes clear how much changed with the Council; in the '50s, there is still a skepticism that one can be a good Catholic and a good American. Even at that time, the content of "these truths" that we hold varied pretty widely, but Fr. Murray shows that (at the time) Americans have a lot of consensus in practice, even if they questioned the theory. As I was reading it, I found myself thinking that I'm not sure we do have that much consensus in practice these days. With 60 years elapsed, the failures in theory from the '50s have become failures in practice. This was very thought-provoking, making me wonder what it would talk to recover the American consensus.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Hold These Truths, a seminal text in the American Catholic intellectual tradition, is a set of essays by John Courtney Murray, most famous for his crucial contributions to Dignitatis humanae, a key document from the Second Vatican Council that defends religious liberty. We Hold These Truths echoes some of the core themes from that document: for example, in one essay Murray defends the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment from an explicitly Catholic perspective. Yet beyond this, We Hold These Truths encapsulates Murray’s attempt to persuade American Catholics that they should, for natural law reasons, endorse what he calls the American Proposition, articulated both in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and repeatedly reinscribed by American presidents, the Supreme Court, and the body politic as part of the authentic American tradition. In other words, Murray claims that Catholics should affirm the American constitutional framework because it reflects the basic principles of natural law morality, so central to Roman Catholic doctrine, and on account of this, natural law morality is the most adequate philosophical basis for the truths constitutive of the American Proposition. On Murray’s account, natural law morality is a common morality, accessible and comprehensible to all rational humans, and thus it can provide the public philosophy Americans need to articulate, justify, and defend the values we as a people hold most dearly.

To make this case, Murray, with Thomas Aquinas, first asserts that what constitutes a civil society as differentiated from a mass or herd of people is its rational deliberative quality. This is not to say that civil society is a purely rational form of association, as Locke or Hobbes would have it; political community is not formed by an act of will, i.e. the social contract. It is to say that “the distinctive bond of the civil multitude is [the exercise of] reason” in relation to three major themes: public affairs, the affairs of the commonwealth (which concern more than state institutions narrowly conceived), and, most importantly, “the constitutional consensus whereby [a] people acquires its identity” (25-6). In other words, civil society is constituted by rational deliberation over basic questions of moral value that furnishes “an ensemble of substantive truths” about which there is widespread consensus, consensus which likewise supplies the collective identity of a political community. Such consensus, Murray writes, “is the institutional a priori of all the rationalities and technicalities of constitutional and statutory law”; it provides the principles for a people’s action in history just as it defines a people’s ends and aims (27).

Is, then, the political community of the United States a civil society understood in these terms? The most obvious impediment to such a claim is the fact of pluralism, of which Murray is more than well-aware. He identifies in American public affairs a plurality of incommensurable universes of discourse that make it near-impossible to establish a consensus around basic moral values and truths. The fact of pluralism, then, is also the problem of pluralism, and we have more than a few reasons to believe that this problem cannot be solved. Still, Murray claims that “while we cannot hope to make American society the perfect conspiracy [in the technical, non-invidious sense of a union of wills directed toward a common end] based on a unanimous consensus,” we can limit the (discursive, and sometimes physical) conflict between the United States’ constitutive communities and promote public deliberation. Were we to set aside our most vitriolic animosities, Murray insists, public discourse “would be no less sharply pluralistic, but rather more so, since the real pluralisms would be clarified out of their present confusion. And amid the pluralism a unity would be discernible—the unity of an orderly conversation” (39). Murray is therefore optimistic that, despite all evidence of incommensurable moral worldviews, there is the possibility for consensus between American citizens.

What exactly is this American consensus? Because We Hold These Truths is a collection of essays, it is important to clarify that Murray uses three, effectively synonymous terms to denote this consensus—the “American Proposition,” “public consensus,” and “public philosophy”—and Murray makes several attempts to articulate what they mean. Perhaps his most comprehensive effort comes in the fourth chapter, where he claims that the truths constitutive of the public consensus serve a three-fold function: (i) they determine the ends or aims of the nation “as a political unity organized for action in history”; (ii) they furnish normative standards in view of which citizens can evaluate the means used to achieve the nation’s ends; and (iii) they provide “a common universe of discourse” in which public affairs can be discussed and which cuts across ostensibly incommensurable moral worldviews in a pluralist society (88). Beyond this functional definition of the public consensus, Murray also offers a short summary its content, which should be quoted in full:

Since the consensus is constitutional, its focal concept is the idea of law. We hold in common a concept of the nature of law and its relationships to reason and to will, to social fact and to political purpose. We understand the complex relationship between law and freedom. We have an idea of the relation between the order of law and the order of morals. We also have an idea of the uses of force in support of law. We have criteria of good law, norms of jurisprudence that judge the necessity of law and determine the limits of its usefulness. We have an idea of justice, which is at once the basis of law and its goal. We have an ideal of social equality and of social unity and of the value of law for the achievement of both. We believe in the principle of consent, in terms of which the order of coercive law makes contact with the freedom of the public conscience. We distinguish between state and society, between the relatively narrow order of law as such and the wider order of the total public good. We understand the relation between law and social progress; we grasp the notion of law as a force for orderly change as well as for social stability. We understand the value of law as a means of educating the public conscience to higher viewpoints on matters of public morality. All these ideas, and others too, . . . form the essential contents of the consensus (88-89).

One of the “other ideas” Murray leaves out here he mentions in Chapter One, and it is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the consensus as described by Murray. “The first truth to which the American Proposition makes appeal” in the Declaration of Independence, he observes, is “the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual men” (44). He proceeds to cite speeches from John Adams and Abraham Lincoln in which both presidents affirm this basic truth, then claims that “the authentic voice of America speaks in these words.” And while he concedes that there is “dissent from this principle, uttered by American secularism,” the very fact that this is dissent “illustrates the existence of the American affirmation” (45). One is tempted here to defend Murray with reference to the character of American culture and society in his time; after all, Murray was convinced that the United States in 1960 was pluralist mostly insofar as it was comprised of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and secularists, on which picture secularism is truly a minority position. However, I think this would be to miss Murray’s point. Recall that for Murray, the public consensus is not equivalent with public opinion, and he insists that the American consensus “would remain the public consensus, even if it were held, as perhaps it is held, only by a minority.” And this is because “the validity of the consensus is radically independent of its possible status as either a majority or minority opinion,” since “we hold these truths,” as the Declaration states, because they are true and hence demand our assent (101-2). In other words, Murray interprets the Declaration to mean that we can know that the United States, and all other nations, are “under God” via the use of natural reason. As such, this publicly available truth, which requires no sectarian commitments, should form part of our consensus, and that it does is validated by the Declaration and subsequent pronouncements by presidents and the Supreme Court, each of which reinscribes our collective assent to this truth in the American tradition. From Murray’s perspective, that many, or even most contemporary Americans deny that the United States is “under God” would simply mean that we as a nation have rejected the American Proposition—and thus in a very real sense have lost our collective identity.

Murray, it should be noted, is not naive about whether the American Proposition or public consensus is popularly affirmed. “On the question as put, is there an American public philosophy?” Murray admits, “the Noes will have it,” both at the popular level of the body politic and at the more elevated level of the so-called intellectuals (92-3). Nevertheless, he insists, even if there does not presently exist a public consensus, there should be one—he attributes several of the social and political ills of his time to the fact that Americans do not collectively endorse their very own Proposition. “In other words,” Murray explains, “it is not true to say that America does not need a public philosophy, for the fundamental reason that this assertion will fail to work”—i.e. the lack of public consensus simply leads to moral confusion that imperils policy success. To whatever extent this was true in the mid-century context of relative bipartisanship, it is demonstrably true today. In view of this, “the further conclusion will be that there is today a need for a new moral act of purpose and a new act of intellectual affirmation, comparable to those which launched the American constitutional commonwealth, that will newly put us in possession of the public philosophy, the basic consensus that we need” (93).

One of the central theses of We Hold These Truths is that the theory of natural law is the only moral theory that can offer “an account of the public moral experience that is the public consensus” (110). In other words, only natural law theory can supply the common morality needed to justify the American Proposition. How does Murray justify this conclusion? His first and most central point is that American citizens—indeed, every intellectually mature human person—should be able to endorse three basic premises of natural law morality: that humans are rational, that reality is rationally ordered and hence can be known by humans, and that what we know about reality imposes moral responsibilities on humans that demand our action or abstention (111). Consequently, while natural law morality is native to the Roman Catholic tradition (with roots that stretch back to the Stoics and Aristotle), “the doctrine of natural law has no Roman Catholic presuppositions” (111). And this is because we are all reasoners: we can all readily endorse the self-evident first-principle of practical reason to seek good and avoid evil, we can all, based on our own moral experience, more or less comprehend what good and evil are in an array of human situations, and, on account of this, we can all infer a set of basic natural law principles that impose on us moral responsibilities.

Admittedly, we do not all possess the competence to reason from these basic principles to the more immediate principles and rules constitutive of the public consensus. These latter principles are, as Thomas Aquinas explains, “remote precepts of natural law,” and, because they are not self-evident, are reached by “careful inquiries.” As such, the principles and rules that make up the public consensus are deduced by the so-called “wise,” who possess the necessary competency to reflect on factual circumstances, identify the relevant moral demand that reason perceives as applicable to those circumstances, and conclude that a certain action be either commanded or forbidden in the situation under review.

For the critical role Murray carves out for the wise in the articulation of the public consensus, critics have accused Murray of elitism. No doubt, Murray is to some extent an elitist, but in a qualified sense. First, because he stresses that the public consensus exists in the public mind, but “in two forms or on two levels”: amidst the wise, it exists “in a consciously articulated and reasoned form,” and amidst the body politic, it exists “in the form of simply affirmation or accepted conviction” (118-19). In other words, even if the people do not articulate the carefully reasoned conclusions of the public consensus in applied circumstances, they nevertheless possess the natural reason required to affirm the basic truths at the heart of the consensus. And second, Murray firmly believes that anyone who protests an unjust law does so from a natural law perspective. Such a person asserts an idea of justice transcendent to the expressed will of the lawmaker, that she really knows this idea, that this idea should be realized in law and action, and that when a law fails to embody this idea, that law is both irrational and unjust. Such a person “may be no philosopher,” Murray observes; she simply knows the crucial difference between law and morality, and that the latter should be the basis for the former, even if their respective domains are not coterminous (294).

Thus far, Murray has shown that because humans are by nature rational, American citizens of all stripes can readily endorse the natural law as the basis for a common morality that cuts across the fact of pluralism. Still, two additional pieces are required to demonstrate that natural law morality is the only adequate moral theory to account for the American Proposition. The first piece is historical: Murray claims that the “law of nature” philosophical tradition that so influenced the American Founders was the flawed descendent of the medieval natural law tradition. As such, while the “law of nature” tradition advanced by theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is philosophically untenable (as nineteenth-century critics like Darwin, Marx, and Freud so aptly demonstrated), the Founders built “better than they knew”—i.e. the political principles for which they advocated, while derived from the rationalist, individualist, and nominalist “law of nature” framework, nevertheless resemble medieval Catholic (and specifically Thomist) conclusions about the human person and political society, themselves rooted in a realist natural law framework. Consequently, the Founders inscribed, if not consciously, natural law morality in the very fabric of American political life, evident in the truths espoused by the Declaration of Independence and the political system established by the Constitution. Therefore, natural law morality serves and always has served as the foundation for the public consensus, whether American citizens, politicians, or jurists knew it or not.

The second and related piece is that the political principles set forth by the natural law tradition do in fact correspond with the political principles constitutive of the American Proposition. Murray identifies four principles that stem directly from Thomas Aquinas and broadly overlap with the political theory American constitutionalism presupposes: first, “there is the supremacy of law, and of law as reason, not will.” As rational, the law is ultimately educative and therefore ordered toward the cultivation of virtue, the means by which humans attain their natural end. Second, “there is the principle that the source of political authority is in the community.” Third, “there is the principle that the authority of the ruler is limited”; the scope of the state is strictly political, and hence “the whole of human life is not absorbed in the polis.” The power of the state is limited both “from above” by the order of justice, and “from below” by human rights. Fourth, “there is the principle of the contractual nature of the relations between ruler and ruled,” which demands that citizens are “to be ruled constitutionally, in accordance with law” (298).

To these four principles, Murray identifies two more that, while still rooted in the natural law framework, were not espoused by Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, but added later. The first is the principle of subsidiarity, which posits concentric and interrelated dimensions of civil society, each with their own ends and rules. These include the family, the local community, various professions, trade unions, and minority cultural identities or ethnicities within the nation. The principle stipulates that the ends and rules proper to each subsidiary community or association should be respected, and that social and political conflicts should be addressed at the level that is most conducive to their resolution. The second post-medieval principle is that the will of the people should constitute the collective will as expressed in law and executive policy. In other words, citizens should be active co-participants in political decisions that concern them and the pursuit of the ends of the state, of which there are five: justice, freedom, security, the common welfare, and civil unity or peace (298-99). Murray notes that the Preamble to the Constitution likewise posits these as ends of the state (258).

The six principles outlined above should sound familiar, since they more or less reflect the content of the American Proposition. At the very least, they should be principles that all rational humans can reasonably endorse, irrespective of whatever faith tradition to which they ascribe or whatever other views they may hold. And in relation to Murray’s other, equally important task—to persuade American Catholics that they can and should affirm the American political system—these principles should make clear that “American democracy is compatible with Catholicism” (xiii). At a time when several prominent Catholic intellectuals in the United States are not prepared to concur with Murray, We Hold These Truths is more important than ever.

[Jennifer L]

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[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

William F. Buckley Jr. could write much better than me, so I'm going to borrow a portion of his review (which I entirely agree with):

"Fr. Murray deals in his book with many questions, political and philosophical, ranging all over the lot, touching deeply on censorship, humanism, foreign policy, and other subjects. The first section, perhaps the most striking, is addressed to the recurring question: what does America stand for? WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS, he reminds an inattentive public who, alas, if they hold these truths, do not know they do. These truths, he says, are the patrimony of America. The Founders established a republic on the presumption of a natural law the rudiments of which are intelligible to all rational men (ut in pluribus), the refinements of which our Lords Spiritual (the learned and conscientious elite) must elaborate for us. Evil times have overtaken us. The natural law, which is indestructible, exists, but we do not acknowledge it, and hence fail to elaborate a public consensus based on it. The consensus is probably still there, in the interstices of our mind, and the natural law continues to govern our soundest instincts and emotions. But during the last century we got way behind, we were dazed by the shock troops of epistemological relativism and still are...We have failed to elaborate the consensus, admit its essential place in intelligible society, lavish upon it the kind of attention needed to rebuff the assault on the very idea of America. We are left with nothing substantive to believe in.

The consensus proper to American liberal society is purely procedural. It involves no agreement on the premises and purposes of political life and legal institutions; it is solely an agreement with regard to the method of making decisions and getting things done, whatever the things may be. The substance of American society is our “democratic institutions,” conceived as purely formal categories. These institutions have no content; they are simply channels through which any kind of content may flow. In the end, the only life-or-death question for American society is that it should live or die under punctilious regard for correct democratic procedures.

That is not enough, obviously. And everyone appears to agree that is not enough, as witness the aching search for National Objectives."

The book is divided into three parts. Part One is titled "The American Proposition", and Buckley is spot on that the first portion is "perhaps the most striking." In this section Murray takes us through a brief, though very helpful and impressively done, sketch of the role of government as viewed by the ancient philosophers through the major movements leading up to the founding of America. I think any student of history (philosophical, cultural or American) will find this section particular engaging. These essays reflect, better than any other portion of the book, the great depth of Murray's thought. They are very rich and it is highly probably that a person would reap considerable fruit from revisiting them again and again.

In the second part of the book, "Four Unfinished Arguments", Murray deals with issues that anyone at all interested in modern American politics would find fascinating. Here he discusses issues facing education (especially Catholic education and its struggles with the state), censorship and the advantages/disadvantages to the American approach to law, Christianity and humanism, and what the future holds.

Part three is titled "The Uses of Doctrine." I found this portion of the book least engaging - not because of anything to do with Murray's writing or the ideas he offers, which are quite good - largely because it dealt with issues of foreign relations, the role of the military and the threats we face due to the increasingly grave threat of mass destruction that our technological advances has created (more specifically, rival powers having this potential and how to address the problem) which is something that, though I acknowledge is of grave importance, lies outside my scope of interest.

Overall, this is an excellent work and the book I've found most helpful in helping me engage the ideas of America's Founding Fathers through a Catholic lense.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the hardback published in 1960, but it appears to be similar to this paperback edition by the same publisher.

Stimulating thoughts. Worthy of serious interaction, even if one disagrees at points.

[Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic, erudite, complex, and interesting account of what America is and what its challenges are. A must-read for folks interested in church-state relations, political theology, and ethics. Even when Murray is wrong about things, he's wrong in fascinating ways. I loved this book.

[Erik]

Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 5, as one of Eight Books on Christianity and Political Thought.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously, a great book. This was the background for the treatment of religious liberty at the Second Vatican Council.