Liberalism

LIBERALISM. - A movement inspired by the principle of liberty in every field, spiritual and political, which prevailed in Europe after the French Revolution of 1789 and characterized the contemporary era up to the First World War.

That principle of liberty remained ill-defined, but it may be said that it was more commonly understood as an emancipation from the tutelage of others, an affirmation of one's own independent activity, and the exclusion of every authority not deriving from human consent. Furthermore, liberty was generally conceived as the liberty of nature, understood in the manner of Rousseau (v.), without distinguishing in true human nature personal values as supreme and such as to impose order and unity upon all the activities of man, and to constitute in man a vestige of the Divinity itself. The theoretical and practical aberrations to which liberalism gave occasion were gathered together in the so-called Syllabus (v.) and condemned by Pius IX (8 Dec. 1864).

I. PHILOSOPHICAL LIBERALISM

The attitude of philosophy that rejects any tutelage that might come to it from anything outside itself is ordinarily traced back to Descartes (v.). Even earlier, the abuse of Aristotle's authority in the scientific field had provoked a reaction, justified in itself; it then spread into every field of human thought. Reason, not content with restoring to vigor the just criteria of the scientific method, claimed for itself an absolute freedom, refusing to acknowledge any limit in the exercise of scientific and philosophical reflection, and presuming to judge everything, including revealed dogmas. The concept of philosophy as "ancilla theologiae" remained excluded from every point of view. It was no longer enough to affirm the autonomy of reason in the search for the rational foundations of the act of faith, and in the right to use its own methods to investigate, discover, discuss and conclude in the field of truth of the natural order; but it was further demanded that reason a priori deny the existence of cognitions not deriving from it, such as truths of supernatural origin. Every relation with these was therefore rejected.

All the philosophical currents of the modern age, even those most opposed to one another in other respects — sensism, rationalism, criticism, skepticism, absolute idealism, positivism, materialism, neo-idealism, problematism, etc. — agree in holding this kind of freedom as their necessary presupposition. Their point of departure is the same: the self-sufficiency of human thought as such. It is in the spirit of philosophical L. to foster a jealous awareness of this kind of sovereignty. It remains hostile to any investigation — even one carried out by reason itself and with its own methods — directed at demonstrating its dependence on a superior Mind (whence comes its power to attain truth in general), and at proving the existence of such a Mind apart from itself, as the true Absolute Subject, from which it is possible to receive communications superior to material cognitions and therefore rightly to evaluate the aids that Revelation can lend to philosophy. This is not admitted by the naturalism to which philosophical L. is bound: human thought, in order to be free, must count exclusively on itself. The consequences are well known: it either recognized itself as essentially limited and proclaimed relativism (or skepticism or problematism), that is, its state of necessity of being unable to make any act of true affirmation; or it believed itself to be the absolute Subject that determines itself in a continuous becoming, and fell into an idealistic pantheism, which excludes any individual freedom; or it believed itself to be a result of cosmic matter, and found itself included in the (likewise pantheistic) universal determinism of that matter. Noteworthy is the fact that the two extremes of modern philosophy, absolute idealism and materialism, both favor totalitarianism in social life, which in practice denies freedom of thought as an essential right of the individual — a right that philosophical L. intended to preserve as first and principal for the life of humanity. Despite these contradictory consequences, philosophical L. still subsists, as a state of mind rather than as a theory: the man who wants to be sufficient unto himself.

II. RELIGIOUS LIBERALISM

Religious liberalism has its antecedent in the "free examination" of the Scriptures proclaimed by the Protestants of the 16th century, that is, the rejection of any visible living authority in the Church: in their mind the individual could use that freedom because he was enlightened directly by Christ. When faith in this mystical light weakened, or disappeared altogether, as already happened with the Enlightenment (v.) of the 18th century, the individual was left with his freedom to judge the things of religion without any control superior to his personal use of reason. Hence the concept, condemned in no. 4 of the Syllabus, that reason is the sovereign norm by which man must judge every kind of truth. This concept, even if not openly accepted, had a wide influence in the Protestant theological schools of the 18th century and made possible the excesses in biblical criticism that occurred already in that century and then in the following one, especially in Germany, or else it favored the tendency to devalue the supernatural element of religion, especially in England. Here there arose, as a reaction, the "Oxford Movement" (v.), led by Newman (v.), who was perhaps the first to denounce that tendency under the name of religious liberalism, and who fought it, first as an Anglican and then as a Catholic.

The characteristic of this liberalism lies precisely in devaluing Grace in relation to nature, whence its sympathies for Pelagianism (v.), and in abandoning the criterion of the supremacy of revealed truth over purely rational truths, attributing to human reason in its infinite progress the right to judge divine Revelation as imperfect in itself (Syllabus, no. 5). The effects of this liberalism were most serious in the Protestant countries, where it has undermined the ancient veneration for the Bible and has made common indifferentism (v.), which leaves each man free to embrace and profess any religion that appears true to his subjective reasoning (op. cit., no. 15). This subjectivism or individualism claims to find precisely in freedom its justification, without regard for the rights of objective truth, which communicates itself, whether in the natural light or in the supernatural light. It considers religion as a purely individual fact, in which it is admitted that God may intervene, but only by adapting Himself to the dispositions of individual human subjects, each of whom thus makes a religion of his own; and all are good and true, even if contradictory among themselves. Thus there takes root, as a mental habit, the repugnance to admitting an Authority superior to individuals, and which obliges them to a uniformity of adherence, to a single and absolute truth. Hence the pronounced opposition to Catholicism, more than to the other positive religions, since in it the principle of authority is affirmed in the most definite and concrete way in the teaching Church and in its visible head, the Vicar of Christ. Religious liberalism spreads a state of mind that is an antipathy to dogmatic definitions, such as was manifested in the world of culture when the Immaculate Conception or papal infallibility was defined. It also penetrated into Catholic schools. Pius IX had to reprove in the doctrines of Hermes (v.), of Günther and of Frohschammer (v.), respectively in 1846, 1857, and 1862, the erroneous prejudice of a freedom of reason and of philosophy such as to grant these a prevalence over revealed truths themselves and over the methods by which the study of theology must be conducted, without regard for divine tradition and for the authority that preserves and guarantees that tradition. Every kind of tradition displeases religious liberalism; hence its aversion to Scholasticism, even in its most vital parts, and in its function as continuer and systematizer of the philosophia perennis, to which Christian thought links itself even in its natural progress. The devaluation of tradition in general, proper to religious liberalism, also disposed minds toward the Modernism (v.) condemned by Pius X (1907). The Catholic Church, every time it condemned these various manifestations of religious liberalism, added clarifications concerning the true concept of the freedom that belongs to human reason and to philosophy, in their proper field, and concerning their relations with Revelation, tradition and theology. It insisted especially on the function belonging to natural reason of demonstrating the motives of credibility of the fact of Revelation, on the intrinsic value of such demonstration, logically prior to the certainties of faith, and therefore on the reasonableness of accepting the authority of God revealing and of the Church as depositary of Revelation. It is this reasonableness that places a limit on the freedom exalted by philosophical and religious liberalism. The latter also had other applications, always suggested by aversion to authority. And this was in the field of the ordering of the Church, which it was claimed should be democratic. This was easy to obtain in the various Protestant confessions, of which very few maintained the concept of the episcopal hierarchy after all had denied the pope. Hence the sympathy of liberalism for Protestantism as the religion most suited to the times. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintained the principle of authority that comes from above, that is, from Christ, who transmitted it to the Apostles with Peter as head, and therefore to the bishops with the successor of Peter as head. Religious liberalism, in opposing the principle of authority that comes from above, took aim especially at the visible head of the Church, in whom every power of jurisdiction is centralized and thence is shared both with the bishops, by divine and immutable institution, and with others by ecclesiastical and changeable law. In this religious liberalism continued the work already begun in the preceding centuries by the current favored by absolute kings, of the Catholic countries, called "jurisdictionalism," and sought to make as unpopular as possible the definition of the dogma of the primacy, not only of honor but of jurisdiction, universal, belonging to the pope by divine institution. It was the concern over this unpopularity, and over the harm that could come from it to religion in difficult times, that moved a certain number of bishops, among them most eminent Dupanloup (v.) and Strossmayer (v.), to advise at the Vatican Council against a dogmatic definition of what they nonetheless held to be a Catholic truth, and which in fact they accepted once it was defined. Furthermore, religious L. generally opposed the concept of the Church as a true and perfect society, in possession of inalienable rights by virtue both of natural law itself and of the power conferred by Christ its Divine Founder, denying it any freedom of action or other rights that did not come to it by concession of the State (v. § 5 of the Syllabus, nos. 19-38). This was an application to the religious field (but an incoherent and arbitrary one) of political L. Equally incoherent was the application of the principle of "a free Church in a free State," expressed in these terms by the Catholic Montalembert (v.) but with a different meaning from that in which it was taken up by Cavour (v.) and the other liberals of the time. These understood by liberty a separation of the Church from the State, which left the State free to legislate and act while ignoring the Church, as if it did not exist, and therefore without considering whether the provisions it adopted might come into collision with her just requirements. Which is not mere separation, but in substance practical hostility, because experience shows that between two different powers that deal with the same persons some occasion of collision always arises. Whereas if each of the two takes as its norm of action the care to see that its provisions do not come into collision with those of the other, then it is no longer a question of separation, but of an understanding that may even be only tacit. If one looks at history, L. saw in the formula adopted by Cavour a justification for seeking to place the Church, as regards its juridical position, on a par with any private society existing within the borders of the State, and for legislating while ignoring the requirements of the religious conscience of Catholic citizens. This appeared explicitly in the law of civil marriage.

III. POLITICAL LIBERALISM

At the outbreak of the French Revolution, the predominant form of government in Europe was absolute government, that is, an executive power (personified in the king) that absorbed into itself the other powers as well (legislative and judicial), with unlimited authority. The ideal of this system was paternal government, in relation to which all citizens found themselves in the condition of minor children in a family. Liberty was invoked as an escape from minority, a conquest of the right to enter, through representatives, into a share of government and thus to obtain a practical "autonomy" for the whole people. This kind of liberty, insofar as it sets limits on the exercise of a purely human authority, such as that of rulers, is in itself lawful and just, and indeed becomes a true and proper right in a people that is mature for self-government and is conscious of that maturity. It is democracy, in its true sense. Political liberalism was the name given to the movement which during the 19th century brought about the transformation of the European states into democratic states; the guarantee of the new liberty recognized for all citizens was found in the practice of representative institutions (chambers of deputies). In England examples of this had already occurred in previous centuries. But English political liberties had developed not so much as a systematic affirmation as a laborious search for equilibrium between the powers of the prince and certain autonomous functions of the nobles and the cities (communes), as a partial control by the latter over the exercise of royal authority, a continually renewed attempt at practical agreement between the interests of the central power and those of the other bodies, subject to the State but necessary to it, constituting the bulk of the nation. The liberalism of the continent, by contrast, was far more theoretical, and it spoiled what was good in its program by carrying over into the political field the confusions of philosophical liberalism. It proposed the exaltation of the individual, but it soon had to realize that naturalistic individualism leads to anarchy. On the other hand, the individual absorbed into the "people," to which a sovereignty without limits is attributed, finds himself confronted with a new species of despotism, the despotism of majorities, worse than that of the historical monarchies, which at least had a check in the principles of the Christian religion they professed. The new "popular sovereignty" (conceived on the postulate of man's self-sufficiency), by contrast, recognizes nothing above or outside itself. The State, as the emanation and realization of such a sovereignty, declares itself the origin and source of all rights (Syllabus, no. 39). The liberal governments of the 19th century maneuvered in the face of the insoluble problem, whose gravity they perhaps did not perceive, of reconciling such a concept of the State with the principle of individual liberties. But this internal incoherence weakened those governments and, in the crisis of the First World War, opened the way to the so-called totalitarian governments, which exploited precisely that concept of the State, already admitted by the liberal parties.

The so-called liberal Catholics, whose leader was Montalembert, sought not to fall into these contradictions and to avoid the errors of a liberalism tainted with atheism or in any case opposed to the Church (Syllabus, nos. 39-74). They openly opposed the doctrine of "legitimism or the divine right of princes," very widespread among Catholics in France and elsewhere, based on St. Paul's saying "Omnis potestas a Deo," in the sense of a direct and perpetual investiture by God of sovereign power in the reigning families. The doctrine had been formulated and defended first by the Protestant king of England James I, the first of the Stuarts; then it spread in Catholic countries and was adopted by Bossuet (v.) himself. It found favor in circles opposed to the French Revolution, and many Catholics wrongly believed themselves bound by it in conscience. Montalembert rightly saw how harmful such a confusion would prove to the Church and strove to persuade Catholics of the necessity of a better understanding of the new times, which demanded free institutions. He drew inspiration principally from English liberalism, because of the esteem and admiration he had for the political customs of that Kingdom. He wanted a State that was not the master of rights but the defender and guarantor of the just liberties of citizens, among which the principal one was that of religion. With respect to this, he rejected the protection that absolute monarchies had lavished upon it, making themselves paid for it with the enslavement of the Church and of consciences. Therefore he wanted the State free as the Church is free (equivocal, however, and dangerous is the formula: "a free Church in a free State," because it places the Church within the State, whereas by its eminently spiritual nature it is outside and above all States). Liberal Catholics in general proposed to accept from modern times the valuing of liberty as a method of public life, with the aim at the same time of opposing the erroneous and perverse applications that the enemies of religion made of it. This seemed to other Catholics, whose leader was Luigi Veuillet (v.), a concession to the errors and misdeeds of the liberal governments of the time; and they fiercely opposed it. Perhaps the liberal Catholics did not always use sufficiently cautious language, especially regarding the doctrine of "popular sovereignty"; but the good faith of Montalembert and of many of his followers is certain. Their possible inaccuracies were avoided by the "Neo-Guelphs" in Italy, who were also favorable to political liberties, but seen in the light of medieval tradition and of Thomistic thought, which holds that the authority of governments comes from God but through the people, imposing on the use of authority and of liberty those limits that are marked out by the divine law, whether natural or positive, according to circumstances.

Later Leo XIII, with the encyclical Libertas (June 20, 1888), gave the definitive answer to the problem of the attitude of Catholics in political life. The "messages" of Pius XII are an illustration and a development of it. Political liberalism, through the crisis of the two world wars, has undergone a transformation. Even if this is not accepted by those who call themselves "historical liberals," the concept of liberty has received a new application to politics, with the exaltation of the personal values of man as superior to the State and with the control of the action of the State itself by means of a supreme court, which calls both the executive and legislative power back to respect for those values. That measure of truth and good which was implicit in the political liberalism of the last century can thus be saved, and become a force particularly necessary in our days to defend civilization from the impending threat of materialistic despotism.

Per uno studio del l. attraverso le sue fonti ed i suoi paladini, cf. B. Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle ou Collection des ouvrages publiés sur le gouvernement représentatif, Parigi 1861; C. Benso di Cavour, Discorsi, 1ª ed., Firenze 1863-77; 2ª ed., ivi 1932-41, non completa; B. Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione, 3ª ed., Bari 1939; id., Storia d'Europa nel sec. XIX, 6ª ed., ivi 1943; id., Principio, ideale, teoria, A proposito della teoria filosofica della libertà, in Il carattere della filosofia moderna, 2ª ed., ivi 1945; A. Omodeo, La cultura francese nell'età della Restaurazione, Milano 1946 (sulle dottrine liberali dell'età della Restaurazione); G. De Ruggero, Storia del l. europeo, 4ª ed., Bari 1946; C. A. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni, Torino 1948.

Giuseppe Bozzetti