Brownson Answer's J.V.H. (a Catholic) on His Incorrect Notion of Right," (1853, Brownson's Quarterly Review)

Brownson’s Review and the Idea of Right According to J.V.H.

*Brownson takes issue with his Catholic friend from New York, J.V.H.

We ought, perhaps, to apologize to our readers for introducing to them an article which appeared last July in a New York journal, commenting with some severity on what is assumed to be the metaphysics and moral theology of our Review; but we do so for the sake of the writer and the interest of the questions raised, not for the gravity of the article itself, or the importance of the medium through which it was communicated to the public.  The writer, though he signs only the initials of his name, cannot be considered as unknown.  He is one, unless we are greatly at fault, for whom we have a warm personal esteem, and who for his fine descriptive powers, lively and brilliant imagination, extensive acquaintance with society, and manly avowal of his religion when it can only endanger his literary success, deserves to stand in the first rank of American popular authors.  It is true, that the principal works which he has published are not entirely free from faults of taste and even of judgment; but we look to him for many and most valuable contributions to our popular Catholic literature.

The Catholic journals of the country have very generally criticized with great severity,- greater, in our judgment, than was deserved,- Alban, or the History of the Young Puritan; and the author seems to have felt it more deeply than he needs to have done, and to be resolved to turn upon his critics, and give them blow for blow.  In this we honor his pluck, but we doubt his judgment.  Some of these critics are too slender to he hit, some are too solid to be moved, and some are too well inured even to harder blows then he is able to strike, to feel them.  No man is ever written down, says Dr. Johnson, unless by himself, and, as a general rule, when what is written against him affects only the author’s personal taste or judgment, the wisest way is to receive it in silence, profit by whatever truth may be suggested, and leave it to time to dispose of what is unfounded or unjust.  But there is, we believe, no law, but that of prudence, which forbids and author to criticize his critics, if he chooses.  The critic is not more inviolable than the author, and sometimes deserves, even more than his author, a severe castigation.  J.V.H. seems to think this is the case with the Catholic journals for their treatment of Alban, and he appears to be resolved to administer it as effectually as in his power.

We are somewhat surprised that he should select us as the principal object of this castigation, for we have been the least severe and the most indulgent of his Catholic critics.  It is true, we could not commend Alban without some important qualifications, but our remarks on that work were intended less to censure it than to moderate the censures bestowed upon it by others.  He has not a more admiring or a warmer friend among American journalists than ourselves, one more disposed to appreciate highly his motives, his literary talent, or the value of his publications.  We cannot understand why, therefore, he should feel it necessary to begin by making an onslaught upon us.  However, we trust we can bear it with patience and equanimity, and we are sure that it will not sour our feelings towards him, or make us less ready or willing to appreciate his literary labors.

The Freeman’s Journal, and one or two Catholic newspapers, having very unnecessarily and very foolishly attempted to get up a cry against our Review, JVH thinks, he tells us, that it is a good time for him to join in and have his say, as “he has a bone to pick with” us on his “own account.”  This may be prudent, but it says not much for his generosity or nobility of sentiment.  A generous enemy would scorn to attack us when we were beset on every side by others.  But we do not complain of it, for we can excuse much to an author smarting under a sense of real or imaginary injustice, and we do not allow ourselves to judge a man’s real character by what he does or says in a moment of irritation.

JVH commences “picking a bone” with us by denying us philosophical talent of the first order, in which he is right, and by allowing us “philosophical talent of the second order,” in which he is wrong, for even that is more than we regard ourselves as entitled to.  The newspapers, it is true, have awarded us more than this, but the judgments of newspapers are far from being irreformable, and we often wonder how even they can be so extravagant as to speak of us as a man of talent and learning.  Having fixed, as he supposes, our rank as to philosophical talent, JVH proceeds to reproduce and criticize our philosophy, to point our wherein it is sound, and wherein it is unsound.

“Talent o the first order originates; talent of the second order expresses and popularizes.  Nothing in metaphysics can be more clearly and perfectly expressed than Mr. Brownson’s writings.  He says what is necessary to make himself understood, and he says no more.  Then he apprehends each idea (of his own) with almost absolute clearness.  Many men in writing are searching after the idea they would fain express.  Mr. Brownson is an experimentalist who holds it in the nippers of his logic, and describes it with leisurely accuracy.  This vivid perception is the first prerequisite of a clear style.  It is the same in artistic writing, where the power of description depends first on the power of conceiving what you would describe.  We admire Mr. Brownson, then, when he states so clearly that reason in man is equivalent to the power of perceiving necessary truths.  These truths, which, as perceived by us, are called ideas of reason, (an ancient, approved, and convenient phrase, which we see no cause for discarding,) are presupposed as the light of all our knowledge; they are the necessary air of intellectual life, without which the operations of that life could not be continued for a single instant.  They constitute reason, they are reason.  M Bonnetty maintains ‘that reason is an innate, natural faculty to know the truth’; but even this definition supposes that the idea of the true and the not-true is already in the reason.  All the clearest traditions in the world could never communicate that idea, for without it they would be unintelligible.  The same may be said, and in the like manner proved, respecting all the ideas with which the traditions of moral science are conversant,- such as the just and the unjust, the right and the wrong, the eternal and necessary and the contingent, the substance and the phenomenon, the cause and the effect.  The tradition which preserves these ideas in the world, and which is the ailment of reason, would be useless as food to the dead, unless the ideas themselves were the native powers of reason itself, its light, proceeding directly from God, its breath, inspired by him.  This is the light of all our seeing.  If the traditionalists, in their ontological zeal, go to deny this psychological truth, they either reduce man to a brute by depriving him of reason altogether, (but man is not a brute,) or else they deify his intelligence by resolving it directly into the divine.  Reason, with its definite ideas, is an attribute of the finite intelligence.  So far, Mr. Brownson is magnificent in his demonstration, though he borrows it from those whom he stigmatizes as psychologers.”

The secondary merit of clearness of expression, which is so freely awarded us, we can hardly claim; for if we understand JVH, he does not understand us, and reproduces and commends as ours, not the philosophy we have endeavored to set forth, but the very philosophy we reject, and labor especially to refute.  He represents us as holding that “reason in man,” that is, if we understand it, reason as a human faculty, “is equivalent to the power of perceiving necessary truths,” and that these truths, which may be “called ideas of reason,” “constitute reason,” in fact, “are reason” itself; that is, the power to perceive necessary truths, and the truths themselves, are one and the same, or that the faculty, or the exercise of the faculty, and its object, are identical.  Does he call this sound philosophy?  Whether he does or not, we must assure him that it is not ours.  He may well say this is borrowed from those whom we “stigmatize as psychologers,” for it is without any doubt sheer psychologism; but we have not borrowed it from them, for it is precisely what we reject, and in all our writings touching the point, since 1841, we have uniformly labored to refute. 

“M. Bonnetty maintains that ‘reason is an innate, natural faculty to know the truth’; but even this definition supposes that the idea of the true and the not-true is already in the reason.” We do not say this, and we cannot accept it, for it is not true.  It implies that there cannot be knowledge unless there is knowledge prior to all knowledge, which, if it means anything, means that all knowledge is impossible, for to have the idea of the true is to apprehend, that is, to know truth.  “All the clearest traditions in the world could never communicate that idea, for without it they would be unintelligible.”  That is, intelligibility is in the subjective reason, not in the object.  The reverse of this is what we hold.  Moreover, the idea of the true and the not-true, in the mind of JVH, is not the truth itself, but some a priori possession of the reason, which must precede all knowledge of truth, and all power to know it.  It can at best, then, be only an abstract idea, and therefore he would present us as holding, and, what is more singular still, commend us for holding, that the apprehension of the abstract precedes all knowledge of the concrete,- a doctrine which we deny indeed, but which we do not hold, for the abstract is intelligible only in the concrete.  Then, again, what does our learned and philosophical critic mean by the idea of the not-true?  The not-true is pure negation, and does he hold that negation is an idea, that is, an intelligible object, or an object which the mind can apprehend or form an idea of?  We have been in the habit of supposing that only that which is or exists is intelligible, and therefore that no negation or denial is conceivable, but by the assertion of truth.  Falsehood can be denied only by opposing to it the truth.  Hence universal skepticism or denial is absolutely impossible.  

“The same may be said, and in like manner proved, respecting all the ideas with which the traditions of moral science are conversant,- such as the just and the unjust, the right and the wrong, the eternal and necessary and the contingent, the substance and the phenomenon, the cause and the effect.  The tradition which preserves these ideas in the world…would be as useless as food to the dead, unless they were themselves the native powers of the reason itself.” The mind, then, can know only what is native to itself, only the native powers of human reason; that is to say, only its own innate ideas! This, we know, is maintained by some Transcendentalists, but we never suspected anybody would regard us as holding it, much less commend us for holding it.  But these ideas, according to JVH, are native powers of “reason in man,” that is, of reason as a faculty of the human soul, and are “necessary truths.”  Then the human reason is a necessary truth, and man is God.  Then the contingent, the phenomenon, the effect, is necessary; then creation is necessary; then there is no free creation; then no creation at all; then the universe is only a divine emanation, and pantheism must be accepted.  If this is our critic’s philosophy, it certainly is not ours.

JVH misapprehends entirely what we mean by necessary truths, if he imagines that they can be properly “called ideas of reason.”  Idea may be taken either objectively or subjectively, that is, either as simple mental apprehension, or as the intelligible object apprehended.  If we take ideas in the sense of simple mental apprehensions, it is obvious that necessary truths cannot be called ideas; if we take them objectively, as the object of the apprehensions, it is equally obvious that they cannot be called ideas of reason in man, that is, of reason as a human faculty; for that would imply that reason in us, our reason, is God, and certainly so if we say “they constitute reason; they are reason.”  JVH probably takes ideas in neither of these senses, neither as simple apprehensions or simple perceptions, nor as the intelligible object apprehended or perceived, and therefore not as ideas in any sense at all.  He makes them the “native powers” of the reason, but of reason in man, reason therefore as a subjective faculty, as does Cousin, not as reason as distinct from man, and as the object of our intellective faculty.  As they are neither the apprehension nor the object apprehended, they must be either what Descartes calls innate ideas, which are not ideas, or what Kant with more justness denominates the necessary forms of the understanding, preceding all actual knowledge as the antecedent and necessary conditions of all knowing.  But if pure forms of the understanding, they cannot be necessary truths, unless man himself is necessary, and therefore God.  Moreover, being pure forms of the understanding, they are subjective, and can have no objective value; and are neither apprehensions of something, nor something apprehended or apprehensible.  This surely is not our doctrine, nor does it come within our order of philosophical thought, and is above or below it.

JVH, in reproducing what he supposes to be our doctrine, has overlooked the distinction which we always keep in mind, between reason as subject and reason as object.  We do not think that he understands this distinction.  He says we hold “reason in man to be equivalent to the power of perceiving necessary truths.”  This is not exact.  We hold it to be that power itself.  Reason in man, or reason as a faculty of the soul, is, among other things, the power to perceive necessary truths.  This is the subjective reason, the same with the intellective faculty of man; for we do not, with some Germans, distinguish between reason as subject and the understanding.  But reason may also be taken objectively, as the object of reason as subject, that is, as the necessary truths or ideas themselves.  JVH fails to keep these two senses of reason distinct, and confounds reason as object with reason as subject, without ever attaining to real objective knowledge , and leads either, with Fichte, to the identification of God with man, or, with Hegel, to the identification of man with God,-  to the absolute Egoism of the former, or to the absolute Pantheism, or rather Nihilism, of the latter. The characteristic of ontology, under the present point of view, is to keep distinct these two senses in which the word reason is and may be used, and to assert reason as necessary idea or necessary truth, as the object really and immediately perceived or apprehended by reason as subject or intellective faculty of the soul.  This is what we always insist on, and therefore we are surprised to hear ourselves commended for holding the opposite doctrine.

Our objection to M. Bonnetty and the Transcendentalists is not, as JVH supposes, that something more is required on the part of the subject, in order to know the truth, than reason as an innate, natural faculty to know it; and it never could have entered into our head to maintain, that this faculty is not enough unless there be already in the reason the idea of the true and the not-true, or that without that idea truth is unintelligible.  The innate, natural faculty to know the truth is all that is required on the part of the subject to be able to know it, and if M. Bonnetty showed us how with his doctrine of tradition he could consistently hold reason to be such a faculty, we should have no quarrel with him.  But this is precisely what he does not show, and which we undertake to show for him.  We maintain, indeed, that without intuition of the intelligible, the idea, the necessary, there can be no knowledge; not, however, on account of any defect in the intellective faculty, but because there is nothing objective to be known.  The mind apprehends truth in its intuition or perception of the true, but without the intuition of the true it cannot know truth, for without it there is no truth, either necessary or contingent.  It is not the idea of the true in the mind that renders truth, intelligible, but the idea as object of the mind or necessary truth existing a parte rei that renders things intelligible, because without that things do not exist, and things are intelligible only in that they exist.  Things can be known only in the respect that they are, and as they are only in the necessary truth, they can be known only in intuition of that, for as they are only in that, so only in that are they intelligible.  We assert that the intuition of the true, the necessary, the idea, objectively considered, must be logically our first intuition, for an ontological reason, because without it there is and can be no object to be known, and therefore nothing intelligible; JVH asserts that the idea must be in the reason  for a psychological reason, because without it, the truth, though really existent, is unintelligible.  According to him, the intelligibility of truth is in the subjective reason; according to us, it is in the truth itself, and hence the object is known because it is intelligible, not intelligible because it is known.

The misfortune of JVH, as of all psychologers, is in his attempt to assert ideas what are neither the object apprehended, nor the mental apprehension of an object existing a parte rei.  But what is idea in this sense?  What, for instance, is the idea of the true, as distinguished from truth on the one hand, and the mental perceptions, apprehension, or intuition of truth on the other?  Three things we can understand, the object apprehended, the subject apprehending, and the apprehension; but something to be termed idea, which is distinguished from all these, passes our understanding.  Is it truth?  Then it pertains to the object apprehended.  Is it the power of apprehending truth?  Then it belongs to the subject apprehending.  Is it the mental representation of the object?  Then it is the apprehension or intuition.  Is it something else?  Then what?  Nobody can tell, for nobody can tell what nothing is.  The old scholastic doctrine of ideas as something intermediary between subject and object, neither one nor the other, yet something by means of which subject and object are brought into relation, is in the commonly received interpretation thoroughly exploded, and among all real philosophers the direct perception or intuition of the object itself by the perceiving subject is now asserted, which is only the revival of the sound part of Plato’s doctrine, of what St. Augustine held, and of what, till the abuse of Aristotle in the latter part of the Middle Ages, prepared the way for the decline of philosophy, had always been the doctrine of the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church.

“But when he proceeds to say that this intuition of necessary truths (without which reason is extinguished like a lamp) is the intuition of God himself, as the real, necessary, eternal, and immutable being, we must distinguish.  God hath no man seen at any time, and His existence is not a matter of sight, not even of rational sight, but of faith.  God is a tradition.  He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers: - this is His name unto all generations.  It is a simple and old demonstration  indeed, to reason from our perception of necessary truths to the existence of God, who is the real and necessary being; but this is only a proof, not an intuition.  In fine, if human reason be not pure Maia; if the Pantheistic doctrine that God simply becomes conscious in man, and that man consequently is God, be a heresy, and the negation of God and man alike; then both tradition is necessary, and also a reason furnished with ideas, constituted by ideas, in order to understand the teaching of tradition concerning God.  Moral science, then, has an objective, historical basis, and a subjective, rational basis too.  The shield has a gold and silver side.  The Traditionalists are right, and the Catholic Rationalists are right; and they are both wrong, too, in what they exclude, as Mr. Brownson observes; but a theory which is scarcely one step divided from Pantheism, is not the ‘solution’ of their difficulties.”

JVH concedes here that we have intuition of necessary truth, and if he does not it matters nothing, for we have heretofore sufficiently proved it.  We have, then, intuition of necessary truth.  This necessary truth is either something or nothing.  Not nothing, because it is truth, and truth is in being, not in not-being.  Universal being is universal truth, and universal not-being is universal falsehood.  Then it is something, and if something, it is either created or uncreate, for besides created and uncreate there is nothing.  Not created, because it is necessary, and whatever is created is contingent, therefore not necessary.  Then it is uncreate; then it is God, for whatever is and yet is not created is God, and can be no other.  If something, it is real; if real and uncreate, it is real and necessary being; if real and necessary being, it is eternal and immutable being.  Therefore either we have no intuition of neceeary truth, or our intuition of it is intuition of real, necessary, eternal, and immutable being, that is, of God.  The former cannot be true, therefore the latter must be conceded, and JVH would never have denied it, if he had understood that abstractions do not exist a parte rei, and that we can have intuition only of the real.

But “we must distinguish.”  As much as you please.  “God hath no man seen at any time.”  With the eye of the body or with the eye of the mind, as God, as he is in himself, conceded; with the eye of reason, as the necessary, the eternal, and the immutable, denied; for we have just proved that intuition of these is intuition of real, necessary, eternal, and immutable being, which is God, and can be no other.  No knowledge is possible without intuition of necessary truth.  Then either we know and can know nothing, or we have intuition of God,- although it is very true that we do not take note in the intuition that that of which we have intuition is God.  We know this only subsequently, by reflection operating on the representations furnished by tradition, and some, like our New York critic, have never learned of it.

“His existence is not a matter of sight, not even of rational sight, but of faith.”  Then his existence is not demonstrable, and JVH differs with St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and the great body of Catholic theologians, who all maintain that the existence of God can be demonstrated, and therefore that it is a matter of science as well as of faith, we should like to see the author of Alban undertake to prove his faith as a Catholic, or assign any motives of credibility for the Christian religion.  If the Divine existence be a matter of science, it is of course a matter of rational sight, for reason cannot demonstrate what it cannot apprehend.  “God is a tradition.”  The writer does not mean what he says.  “He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers.”  Would he assert that there was no God before Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or our fathers?  Does he mean to say there would be no God if there were no creatures, and thus maintain the doctrine, not unknown in the history of aberrations  of the human mind, that God is realized only in creating, becomes real God only in creation, and therefore self-conscious first in man,- The Hegelian doctrine, which he singularly enough half, or more than half, insinuates is our own?  We do not believe it.  But he ought to know that God, as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, is the God of the covenant, the Author of grace, God in the supernatural order, in which sense nobody pretends that his existence is other than a matter of faith.

“It is a simple and old demonstration indeed, to reason from our perception of necessary truth to the existence of God, who is real and necessary Being; but this is only a proof, not an intuition.”  The reasoning is not an intuition, but the perception of necessary truth is, and if the perception of that truth be not an intuition of God, how from it conclude that God is?  Or what is the process or value of the proof?  God can be concluded from the perception of necessary truth only on condition that it either is God or contains him as the particular in the general; for there can be nothing in the conclusion not contained in the premises.  God cannot be contained in the necessary truth perceived as the particular in the general, for that would imply that there is something more general than God, which is not admissible.  Then he is concluded only on condition that the necessary truth perceived is God, and the proof is not, strictly speaking, that God is, but that the necessary truth of which we have intuition is God.  As this is demonstrable, we say the existence of God can be demonstrated.  The argument, which is older than we know, but which usually bears the name of St. Anselm, is a good one, though not in the sense sometimes explained, and certainly not on the principles of psychologism; for its conclusiveness rests on the identity of the necessary truth perceived with God, and therefore on the fact that intuition of it is intuition of him.  It is only the ontologist who can use this argument, and hence many psychologists reject it as worthless.

The writer of the article under review intimates that the theory which we proposed as the solution of the mutual difficulties of the Traditionalists and the Catholic Rationalists is scarcely one step divided from Pantheism, and therefore is insufficient to solve them.  We do not see that this conclusion follows.  If the theory is divided at all from Pantheism, it is not Pantheism, and therefore may be true, and if true, it must be sufficient.  We apprehend that on certain points the truth runs very close to Pantheism, though of course without touching it.  It takes a nice metaphysical eye, unless specially illuminated, to distinguish the dividing line between some parts of mystic theology and Pantheism, and JVH might find himself scandalized were he to read the Christian mystics.  Pantheism is the error which lies nearest to truth, and therefore we regard it as the first error into which the Gentiles fell, on their apostasy from the patriarchal religion.  Yet because the theory may, as every true theory must, on certain points, run close to Pantheism, and our learned critic may be unable to distinguish the line of demarcation, it does not follow that, if divided from it at all, it is to be rejected.  If, however, he wishes to be understood as meaning more than he says, that the theory is not divided at all from Pantheism, we must tell him that he labors under a slight mistake, that of taking his own theory for ours, which is not Pantheism solely because he is too good a Christian or too poor a logician to push his principles to their legitimate conclusions.  Besides, the Freeman’s Journal says that the solution we suggested we borrowed from M. Bonnetty, through his friend M. Nicholas, and, though this does not happen by any means to be the fact, as we suggested in our Review before ever we heard of M. Nicholas or his books, it claims it as M. Bonnetty’s.  If JVH chooses to call it Pantheism, we must turn him over to the tender mercies of that Journal, which will hear nothing said unfavorable to that distinguished French Publicist.

But JVH does not stop with our general metaphysics; he pushes his objections even to the doctrine we maintain on Rights and Duties, or the origin and ground of Law.

“This tendency of Mr. Brownson to omnify God to the utter absorption of the creature, is yet more strikingly manifest in another part of the same article, where he reiterates his approbation of the saying of Donoso Cortes, that ‘right on human lips is a vicious expression,’ and argues at length in its defense.  The Civilta Cattolica, a learned journal conducted at Rome by members of the illustrious Society of Jesus, corrected this expression of Donoso Cortes as exaggerated, and as leading to the Pantheistic notion that man is a pure illusion.  What God communicates to man (such was their argument), that he really has, although not in the same perfect and absolute sense as it is possessed by the Creator.  Thus God is the only wise, the only good, the only fair, yet wisdom, goodness, and beauty, in an imperfect sense, are really participated by man.  And so of right.  It belongs in an absolute sense to God alone, as the Creator and Lord of the universe; but in an imperfect sense it belongs to man, as God’s gift to man.  He has bestowed tights upon us, to Whom all rights belong.  Mr. Brownson flatly denies this.  Following the Univers and Donoso Cortes, in order to combat what he calls the atheistic tendency of the age, he maintains that ‘only God has rights, and that man has only duties, and duties only to God.’  Mr. Brownson confesses that this is repugnant to ‘the ordinary forms of expression used by the great Doctors of the Church,’ who have always maintained that man hah rights; but he contends that it is not opposed to their meaning.  We contend that it is opposed to their forms of expression, and to their meaning too, to common sense, and to sound theology.”

Whether our doctrine be true or false, no objection more ridiculous can possibly be imagined against it than this, that it leads “to the Pantheistic notion that man is a pure illusion”; for it is impossible by any form of words to mark more intelligibly man’s distinction from God, or to assert his substantiality as second cause more decidedly, than to declare that he has duties, and duties to God.  An illusion can be under no obligation, and God cannot have duties to himself, or to anyone else; for we must say with St. Anselm, whom we before cited, “Deum esse omnino liberum a lege, et ideo quod vult, justum, conveniens esse; id outem injustum, et indecens non cadere in eius voluntatem, non propter legem, sed quia non pertinet ad eius libertatem.” Deus est omnino liber a lege.  If in every sense free from law, God can have no duties, for duties are imposed and defined by law only.  Then only second causes can have duties, and, as pure illusions can have no duties, second causes can have them only in that they are second causes, and substantially distinct from God the First Cause.  We were not a little surprised at the objection when brought by La Civilta Cattolica, and we replied to it, and showed very clearly, that, if there was any pantheistic tendency in the case, it was not in our doctrine, but in that which was opposed to it.

JVH states correctly, however, neither our doctrine nor that of the Civilta Cattolica.  He supposes that we maintain that right on human lips is always, in every sense, a vicious expression, and that the Civilita Cattolica maintains that man has rights, though in an imperfect sense, because God communicates them to man, and what he communicates to man, man really has.  This is true of neither, and our New York critic fails to seize the real point of the question.  We do not deny human rights in the sense of God’s direct gifts to man, nor does our Roman contemporary restrict itself to the assertion of them in that sense.  Furthermore, we do not confess that our doctrine is repugnant to the forms of expression ordinarily used by the great Doctors of the Church, but at most only that it may appear so at first sight.  All we confess is, not a real repugnance even to the forms of expression ordinarily adopted by the Doctors, but only an apparent repugnance, and even this only at first sight, disappearing on a closer view, while we maintain that it is in perfect accordance with their sense, and our critic brings forward, and, so far as we can discover, attempts to bring forward, nothing to prove the contrary.

The following passage from our article on Rights and Duties will show that we do not deny in every sense that man has rights:-

“Nevertheless, we do not object, with proper explanations, to the application ordinarily made of the terms right and natural law.  In the sense in which Donoso Cortes condemns, and his critic defends them, we cannot accept them, till otherwise instructed than at present; yet we may call right our right, in the sense that it is a real right against our neighbor, and is made payable by the Divine order to us.  Strictly speaking, the right is God’s right, not ours, and is ours only as we are its trustees, or his ministers; yet if we bear in mind that we hold it only from God, and mean by calling it ours only that it is a real right, and good in our favor against our neighbor, it is lawful as well as convenient for us to speak of our rights.  So of the law of nature.  We may speak of the law of nature, and insist on it as law, if we only bear in mind that it is law not by simple force of nature, regarded as natura naturata, but by the will of God our sovereign.  It is also necessary to use the term when we wish to distinguish between nature and grace, or between the law by conformity to which we fulfill the purposes of our natural creation and the law by which we attain to the end of our supernatural creation.  With these qualifications and explanations well understood, the terms can do no harm, are convenient, and sanctioned by a usage upon which we have as little right as disposition to innovate.  All we insist on is, that we shall always, when strictness of language is necessary, assert all right as belonging to God, and for man only duties; and in this, after all, we doubt not, our highly esteemed contemporary will fully agree with us.” – Review for October, 1852, p. 548

We should suppose that any man with plain common sense and an ordinary command of the English tongue, who had read this, might have understood that we defended the saying that “right on human lips is a vicious expression,” only in a particular, not in a universal sense, and that that particular sense is the one in which we supposed Donoso Cortes denied, and La Civilta Cattolica asserted, that man has rights.  It is only for that particular sense we are or can be refuted.  What is that particular sense?

The real subject discussed in our article was the origin and ground of natural law, or the law of nature, and our purpose was the defence of the sentence in the Letter of the lamented Donoso Cortes, to which his Italian translator took exceptions, and which occasioned the discussion, but to deny that the natural law derives its character as law, or its binding force, from nature, and to assert that it derives that character or that force solely and directly from the command or will of God, in accordance with what we supposed to be the plain sense of the Apostle in the text, Non est potestas nisi a Deo.  The question of right came up only in the sense of jus, in the sense in which right is legislative, makes the law, and imposes and defines duty.  The question of right we showed to be a question of law, because my right is law for all but myself, and imposes and defines their duty to me; and the question, therefore, whether man, strictly speaking, has rights, is simply the question whether he has in and of himself true legislative power, and can make law, that is, impose and define duties.  But this question resolves itself into a more general question, namely, whether nature, as second cause, has in any degree proper legislative authority; that is, whether what we call the law of nature derives its character or binding force as law from nature as second cause.  If it does, then man has rights, in the true and proper sense of the word, and Donoso Cortes is wrong, for then there is no sense in which it can be true to say, “Right on human lips is a vicious expression”; if it does not, then man has no proper rights, and what we called his rights are grants, trusts, or privileges.  We maintained the latter, as we had done before the Marques de Valdegamas had ever been heard of in connection with questions of this sort, or the existence of the Univers was known to us.  What we maintain is, not that man in no sense has rights, but that he has no inherent, indefeasible, natural rights, deriving their character of rights, that is, their binding force as law, from man himself, because nature or second causes have and can have in themselves no proper legislative authority.

The doctrine which La Civilta Cattolica asserted against Donoso Cortes, and which we opposed, was not, as we understood it, that God gives man rights extra naturam suam, and therefore man has rights, since whatever God gives him is really his; but that he has, though in subordination to God as Supreme Legislator, proper legislative authority, or right in the sense that it imposes and defines duty, therefore right in the sense that it makes the law, not indeed in a perfect sense, but in an imperfect or participated sense.  In like manner as man participates beauty, greatness, wisdom, power, and being, which are perfect only in God, it contended that man participates right, that is, in his nature, and therefore makes right a participated power, therefore man’s own, as his beauty, wisdom, or being, and derived from God in no sense save as God is the author of his nature, or has created him.  But as all right is legislative, this assumes for man, if not supreme legislative power, at least real legislative power in subordination to the Supreme Legislator.  Man owes his right, as the farmer in a free state owns his farm, subject merely to the right of eminent domain in the prince, and subject to the eminent right of God he may found law, or be a lawgiver.  This is what we denied.  We denied that right in the sense asserted is participable.  Right is legislative, and makes the law.  But to make the law is, as all concede, the prerogative of sovereignty; sovereignty rests on dominion; dominion rests on ownership, and all ownership on creation; and God is sole Creator.  Therefore, God is sole Legislator.  He is not merely Supreme Legislator with subordinate legislators under him, each a proper legislator within a given sphere, but sole and universal Legislator, not in the sense of eminent legislator only, as he is the eminent cause of all that is done by second causes, but in the sense of direct Legislator, so that all legality, all the binding force of law, all law as law, emanates directly from his will.  Therefore, strictly speaking, only God has rights, that is, in the sense in which right is legislative, which, we take it, is the strict and proper sense of right.  The law of nature is, we grant, true law, but it derives its character of law directly from the will of God, not from nature as second cause; and what we call our rights, whether public or private, are real rights, but they derive their character of right from the Divine will, not our own, as we before stated.

“It must be clear enough to the reader, that we do not deny our obligation to conform to the order of nature; on the contrary, we establish that obligation by establishing the obligation to obey God.  We are not bound to obey the order of nature precisely because it is created and established by God our sovereign, and because he by his law commands us to obey it.  The eternal law, as St. Augustine says, commands the natural order to be observed, and forbids it to be violated,- ordinem naturalem conservari jubens, perturbari vetans.  Whatever is necessary to the preservation of this order is of course authorized, and when we have ascertained that this or that is necessary to its preservation, we may know without further enquiry that God commands it.  All we contend for is that the reason of the obligation is not the necessity, but the Divine will.  The practical duties or offices of life as set forth in the current teaching of the schools are all affirmed, and declared obligatory, only they are referred immediately, not mediately, to the law of God for their obligatory character.  Rights and duties remain, only they are held to be rights of God and duties to God; and what are called duties to ourselves and duties to our neighbor remain real duties, only they derive their character of duties from the command of God, and are strictly duties to him, merely payable by his order respectively to ourselves and to our neighbor.” – Review for October, 1852, pp. 539, 540.

The difference between us and the school so ably represented by La Civilta Cattolica, and so feebly defended by JVH, arises most likely from the different manner in which we respectively consider law.  We consider law only in its obligatory character, and ask simply what it is that makes it law; it considers law rather in its contents, and asks what it is that makes law right (recta) or reasonable.  In this latter sense law has its seat in the Divine Reason, or Wisdom, and is undoubtedly participable, and possessed by us in an imperfect sense, as it asserts; but in this sense it is not properly law, for law is not actus rationis, but actus imperii – is a command, and command proceeds only from will.  Law considered in its obligatory character, in that is commands, or, as we say, imposes and defines duties, has its seat, not in reason, but will, which is not participable.  Man may conform to the will of God, but even God himself cannot make his will our will in a perfect or in a participated sense.  Right as predicable of the will is personal, and not communicable.  Assuming the reason of the obligation is will, it is clear that no will but the will of God is in itself sufficient to place us or any one under obligation, and therefore we say very properly that he only has rights in the strict and proper sense of the word.  His will alone is law, for we are not permitted to go behind the fact that it is his will to inquire whether it be right or reasonable; and this again is proof that the seat of law as law is the Divine will, not the Divine reason, and therefore, as will is incommunicable, that creatures can have no power to make the law except as his delegates.

Having said this much by way of presenting the real subject of the controversy and the true state of the question before our readers, we proceed to consider the proofs adduced that our doctrine is repugnant to the meaning of the great Doctors of the Church, to common sense, and to sound theology:-

“To simplify matters, the notion of right in creatures, that is, in man, which we assert, is the following, viz: That God, who is the Lord and Creator of all men, and of the universe, in whom, consequently, all rights originally are, to whom, in an absolute sense, all right appertains, has, in his sovereign bounty, by an act which cannot fail of its full effect, given men rights.  Consequently, they really possess them, in the strictest sense.  Absolute right, like absolute truth, beauty, justice, wisdom, being, belongs only to God; but as creatures, that is, men, really are, in the strictest sense of being, and are (that is, the saints) wise, true, beautiful, and just, in the strict sense, and that because God has given them rights.”

We cannot detect here any remarkable simplification of the matter.  We say, “Strictly speaking, only God has rights, and man has only duties, and duties only to God.”  Our energetic opponent says men have rights because God has given them rights.  Have we denied that God gives men rights?  What is the difference between saying, “All rights are originally in God, to whom, in an absolute sense, all right pertains,” and saying, “Strictly speaking, only God has rights”?  “In his sovereign bounty [God] has given men rights.”  Be it so.  Rights which God gives us in his bounty are not rights which man participates by his own nature, the only rights we deny to man; and such rights are not binding against God, for they are of bounty, not of justice; therefore, though favors, exceedingly great and precious favors, they are not rights in the strict sense of the word, for they derive their force of rights from the will of God who gives, not from the will of man who receives them.  “They really possess them in the strictest sense.”  As the gifts of God’s bounty, or as trusts, conceded; as the inherent and indefeasible rights of their nature, denied; for that begs the question.

JVH perhaps is not aware of the error into which he falls, when he says, “Creatures, that is, men, really are, in the strictest sense.”  Being in the strictest sense of being is absolute being, and absolute being is God, and besides him there is and can be no absolute being.  To say that men are,  in the strictest sense of being, is only saying in other words that they are God.  God alone is ens simpliciter, as say the schoolmen, and creature is only ens secundum quid.  If we wish to speak strictly, we must say creatures, that is, men, exist, not that they are, unless we add in God, for the being of creatures is in God, not in themselves, since they are only participated beings; hence the Apostle says, In ipso vivimus, et movemur, et sumus,- In him we live, and move, and are, or have our being.  God alone can, strictly speaking, say with truth, I am, and hence he gives as his name to Moses, Ego sum qui sum, I am who am.  It is no sin in our New York critic not to be a metaphysician, but he should take care to keep clear of Pantheism himself before accusing his brother of Pantheistic tendencies.

“The error is analogous to that of the Calvinists, who denied the reality of human merit, and indeed, as we shall presently show, involves it.  The creature, they argued, cannot lay the Creator under an obligation; when man has done all, he has done simply his duty; therefore he merits nothing; which, in the absolute sense, is true; but is false in fact, because God by his promise has obliged himself to reward the just man, and so by his sovereign will has made his justice meritorious.  Indeed, it is demonstrable that man possesses real, proper, strict rights in the natural order, (by the gift of God,) because he possesses them in the supernatural order.  The human being who dies in the state of grace has a right to eternal life, by virtue of the promise and covenant of God.  That they may have a right to the tree of life, says the Scripture.  What is more common among Catholic theologians than to say that, if man corresponds to the ordinary graces of God, God is bound to give him the necessary light to discern the true Church, subauditur, by his Divine promise, otherwise not, and how does that differ from saying that such a man has a right to that further illumination?  But if he who corresponds to grace given has (by God’s promise) a right to more, if he who dies a saint has a right (which is incontestable) to eternal glory, if, consequently, men may have, if all men may acquire, in  the supernatural and eternal order, rights which they may plead against God himself, (could the essential Justice extenuate, or the everlasting Veracity deny his promise, or the Immutable Goodness repent of it,) how much more may men have rights, by the same bounty, in the things of this life?”

Merit is gained in fulfilling the law, or in the performance of duty, not in the possession of rights.  If the merit acquired be said to be our right, our right to the reward, it is only in a qualified sense, for JVH himself concedes that, absolutely speaking, “the creature cannot lay the Creator under an obligation”; that, “when man has done all, he has done simply his duty, and therefore merits nothing.”  Merit, then, is not in the order of justice, but in the order of grace or bounty, and man merits only “because God by his promise has obliged himself to reward the just man, and so by his sovereign will has made his justice meritorious.”  Then it is his own promise, not man’s right, that binds God, and therefore nothing is said to prove that man has in his own nature power to impose any obligation on anyone, much less on God, his Creator, whose he is, body and soul with all its faculties, and all he can acquire by their exercise.  “the human being who dies in a state of grace has a right to eternal life, by virtue of the promise and the covenant of God.”  No doubt of it, but not therefore by virtue of his own nature.  The right is not in his nature, but in the promise and covenant of God, and it is God that binds himself, so to speak, not man who binds God.  “What is more common among Catholic theologians than to say that, if man corresponds to the ordinary graces of God, God is bound to give him the necessary light to discern the true Church, subauditur, by his Divine promise, otherwise not?”  We are not accustomed to hear Catholic theologians say this, and we do not know that the assertion is true; but if they do, it amounts to nothing, if they add that he is bound “by his promise, otherwise not”; for then, again, it is God who binds himself, and not man’s right that binds God.  “And how does this differ from saying that such a man has a right to that further illumination?”  It differs precisely as a promise of right, that is, no right in the order of justice to any grace at all, neither to the first grace nor to the augmentation of grace, for only grace can merit grace, since gratia est omnino gratis.  What JVH calls our rights are the gracious promises of God, and he is mistaken in supposing that we can plead them as our rights against him.  We can only plead them as his promises, for it is his own perfection, not our right, that binds him to keep his promise, and should he, per impossibile, not keep his promise, he would do us no injustice.  His promises to us are gratuities, made for our benefit solely, not in consideration of benefits derived or to be derived from us by him, and therefore do not fall under the ordinary law of contracts.  Therefore, though they may give us a title to eternal life, they do not confer on us a right which binds God to give it, so that he could not withhold it without doing us wrong.  Our friend in his horror of Calvinism must take care not to fall into Pelagianism, and set up a claim to heaven as his right, as something due him in justice.

Having failed to establish our strict and proper right to things of the supernatural order, the a fortiori by which JVH concludes it to things of this life, or of the natural order, falls of itself.  Men have no natural right to anything, for they had and could have no natural right to be created.  God was under no obligation to them to create them, and he is under just as little to preserve them in existence, for the act of creation and preservation is one and the same act.

We argue, in our article on Rights and Duties, that right is a power to legislate, that to legislate is the prerogative of sovereignty, that sovereignty belongs to God alone, because it rests on dominion, dominion on ownership, ownership on creation, and God alone can create; therefore God alone, strictly speaking, has right; therefore right, strictly speaking, on human lips, is a vicious expression.  JVH replies, “Mr. Brownson might as well argue that property on human lips is a vicious expression, because all property rests on ownership, and all ownership on creation.”  Undoubtedly, and we do so argue, and therefore deny to man property in the same sense in which we deny to him rights, but in no other.  Is our good friend shocked at this?  Has he yet to learn that all property is God’s, and that man is only his steward for its management?  Has man any thing which God may not rightfully take from him whenever he pleases,- anything which man may justly withhold when God immediately or by the voice of his Supreme Vicar demands it,- any thing he can hold up to God, and say, This is mine, touch it not without my consent?  If God asks my life for his service, his honor, or his glory, am I free to withhold it?  And in asking it does he ask anything which is not by every title already his to dispose as he pleases?  If my life is his, how much more what I call my goods?  JVH would perhaps not do amiss to read St. Bonaventura on this subject, and the Homilies of St. John Chrysostom.

But JVH argues that, if we have no proper right to our goods, we are not wronged when deprived of them against our will without just cause.  Are not wronged as God’s stewards, his trustees, or his beneficiaries, denied; are not wronged in any other sense, we sub-distinguish: in the sense of being deprived of a natural right, we concede it, in the sense of being deprived of a good, we deny it.  The wrong as opposed to right in the sense of law is done to God, and to us only as his trustees; as opposed to good, is done to us, for whose advantage the trust was created.  He who deprives us of them does evil to us, but does not wrong us in the sense that wrong is the violation of the law.  The evil is a wrong in that sense, or in an ethical sense, only because it is a violation of the right of God; and is therefore simply evil as against us, and a moral wrong only as against God.  So of the maiden who is robbed by violence of her honor, the innocent whose life is taken, and all other instances adduced by JVH in his magnificent declamation.  The evil is to the sufferer, the moral wrong is to God, whose property is injured, and whose law is broken.  Is our friend dissatisfied with this?  Does wrong lose its horror because it violates the rights of God instead of the rights of man?  Is an act less wrong because it is a wrong done to God, than it would be if it were done to a creature?  And should we hold our own rights dearer than the rights of God, or feel more deeply outraged at a wrong to ourselves, or to our fellow-men, than at a wrong done to our Creator, our Sovereign, our Redeemer, our Benefactor, and our Father?  We do not think so.

“Does not every prince say, ‘I will defend the rights which God gave me’?   Is it not the sentiment of free nations, ‘Our rights were given to us by God, and we will defend them to the last drop of our blood’?  We should like to believe so.  The universal sentiment to which JVH appeals against us, if rightly represented by him, is in our favor; for mark, the prince does not say, My rights are my own, and I will defend them; free nations do not say, Our rights are our own, and therefore we will defend them to the last drop of our blood.  Both refer the rights to God, as rights held from him, and it is in his name, not in their own, that they take their heroic resolution to defend them.  But surely our friend does not mean here to assert that those rights which God gives become the proper and indefeasible rights of princes and nations, for that would be to assert a doctrine which every Catholic theologian, of any authority, denies,- the doctrine of the inadmissibility of power, or the divine right of kings, as contended for by James the First of England, and refuted by Bellarmine, Cardinal Duperron, and above all by Suarez, the greatest authority on this subject.  JVH is unfortunate.  In almost every instance in which he attempts to oppose our doctrine, he falls into the precise error he seeks to establish against us, and in one or two cases in which he does not, he falls into the error of the opposite description.  Here he is trying to make us appear as the advocate of despotism, and his own doctrine, if understood in a sense opposed to ours, offers the firmest basis to despotism that it is possible to conceive.  The rights of princes and nations, according to us, are trusts from God, and are held and can be exercised only in his name and by his authority, under responsibility to him, according to the conditions which it has pleased him to establish.  Held as trusts, they are forfeited by abuse, and the power is lost, and may be transferred to other hands, as the Sovereign Pontiffs in the deposition of secular princes have always asserted; but if held as indefeasible rights, they could not be forfeited, and under no circumstances could resistance to tyranny and oppression be lawful. 

“It is the unanimous sense of mankind that the validity of rights springs from God, who gave them.”  We are glad to heat it.  But then why tell us that our doctrine is opposed to the meaning of the great Doctors of the Church, to common sense, and to sound theology?  “His perfect and absolute right as the Creator, Lord, and Sovereign Owner of all things, is the very thing which imparts validity to his grant, and makes the right he gives a real, strict, proper right, a right which it is in itself unjust to violate.”  Very well said, and it expresses our own thought almost as well as we ourselves expressed it, except the last clause, the meaning of which in this connection we do not understand.  That which gives validity to a right is that which gives it its character of right, and which gives to the correlative duty its obligation or its character of duty.  So, just avoid the confusion between rights int the sense of grants or privileges, and rights in the strict sense of the word, and this will be substantially our own doctrine.

Here we might close, but our New York critic makes a few points more which we suppose he will expect us to notice; and if we should not, some might be rash enough to conclude that we found them too hard for us.  He expresses surprise that we object to La Civilta Cattolica’s definition of right, that it leaves out the essential element of right.  It defines right to be “a moral force which one has to subdue another to his will, and which, though it may be violated by material force, whether our own or that of others, is always subsisting, living, and speaking.”  We objected to this, that it does not define this force to be one that ought, or has the right, to subdue. JVH says that, in being defined to be a moral force which survives though violated, it is defined to be “a force that ought to subdue, and has the right to subdue.”  This is not evident to us.  Moral force is contrasted by La Civilta with material force, and when so contrasted it does by no means imply that it is a force that ought, or that has the right, to subdue.  The force of reason is a moral force, but not therefore does it make or impose the law.  But we founded our objection not so much on the words of the definition as on La Civilta’s development of it; for we did not ask in what sense or senses it might be taken, but in what sense it really was taken by its author.  This was in accordance with a habit we have of always seeking to get at and speak to the exact sense of an author, instead of seeking what sense may be extracted from his words.  In his own understanding of it, the author did not include what we regard as the essential element of right, unless in developing it he did great injustice to his thought.

JVH pronounces us incredibly sophistical in our reasoning from this definition against the existence of struct human right.  If we allowed ourselves to bandy epithets with a writer whom with all his peccadilloes we love and honor, we should say the incredible sophistry is exhibited in his effort to refute our reasoning.  “This force, La Civilta Cattolica says, ‘is based on a practical truth.’  No, Mr. Brownson says, ‘for if the right were mine, it would need nothing beyond my will to establish it, but since truth is neither mine nor myself, what you call my right is only the right of the truth or of the law to prevail, and therefore is not my right.’  A gross paralogism, for so it might be shown that God has no right, since the moral force of his will to subdue ours is equally the force of truth, the truth that he is our Creator and Sovereign, and as such has a right to our obedience.”  Not unless God can say of that truth, “It is neither mine nor myself”; for if the truth is himself, or is his, dependent on his will, the right founded on it must also be his.  The writer has reproduced our objection only in a mutilated form, but has failed to perceive its point even as he has reproduced it.  The point of the objection is, not that the right is based on a practical truth, but on a practical truth independent of my will, and which is neither mine nor myself.  My right, if mine, is the right of my will to prevail.  When you base that right on a truth, you affirm it to be the right of that truth.  Then, if that truth be independent of my will, and be neither mine nor myself, you deny the right based on it to be my right.  But you cannot retort the argument, for the truth on which the right of God is founded is his truth, entirely dependent on his will; for he is perfectly free to create, or not to create, and being his, whatever is founded on it is also his.  Even the author of Alban, we should suppose, might understand this, and see that the sophistry was his, not ours. 

Our New York friend, who not obscurely hints that he possesses philosophical talent of the first order,- that talent which originates,- tells us that right is indefinable, and then proceeds to describe it.  “It is,” he says, “an idea eternal as God, necessary as his essence (in which it subsists), the mirror of his justice, the legislator of the universe.”  Right then must be God, for what subsists in the essence of God is that essence, and the essence of God is God, and an idea subsisting in God, eternal and necessary as his own being, is also God, since, as St. Thomas teaches, Idea in Deo nihil est aliud, quam essentia Dei.  But all the ideas with which the traditions of moral science are conversant, we were told some time ago, are native powers of reason, constitute reason, are reason, as reason in man, that is to say, human reason.  So human reason is not only God, but more than God!  Right, we are told, is the mirror of God’s justice.  A mirror is distinct from that which it reflects, therefore justice is distinct from God and right!  But what is justice distinct from right?  Right is eternal as God, and necessary as his essence.  Yet right is the legislator of the universe.  Therefore the legislator of the universe is a necessary, not a free legislator.  Therefore no free government of the world, no free providence, but all are subjected to stern and invincible necessity!

The writer of the article we are reviewing is, he must permit us with all respect to say, more practiced in rhetoric than in logic, and is more of a poet than a philosopher.  We do not question his talent of the first order, but he must allow us to believe that he is not much accustomed to the investigation of the higher philosophical questions, and has not paid sufficient attention to them to be able to acquit himself creditably in their discussion.  He does not appear to understand the importance to a philosopher of the categories, and of keeping different though kindred matters distinct.  He does not seem to be aware that right is used in our language I two distinct senses, and that law itself may be considered under a twofold aspect, either as it is right (recta), reasonable, fit, proper, convenient, or as it is obligatory (ius), as the command or precept of the sovereign, and he treats the question before us as if these to two aspects or senses were one and the same.  In his description of right, where he says it is an idea eternal as God and necessary as his essence, in which it subsists, he uses the word right in the sense of rectitude (rectum), and asserts that it is the eternal reason or wisdom of God.  This is an admissible sense of the word, and in this sense men participate it as they participate reason, and they would not be capable of receiving a moral law if they did not.  But when he adds that right is the legislator of the universe, he either changes the sense of the word, or else he declares reason to be legislative, and law in its essential character as law an actus intellectus.  We know very well that many ethical writers represent reason as legislative, and regard will as only executive; but this can be maintained only when the law is considered in relation to what is commanded, or the reason why the sovereign commands it, not when considered as to its obligation, or the reason why it binds the subject.  Properly speaking, reason is declarative, not legislative.  It determines the rectitude of the law, declares it to be obligatory, but does not itself render it obligatory.  The law as founded in reason alone is a simple rule or measure of right and wrong, declaring what is right (recta), proper, decent, and what is not, but not binding the will to do the one, and not to do the other.  In other words, a law of reason, actus rationis, is law for the understanding, but not law for the will; reasonable, but not obligatory.  It teaches, but does not command.  Hence, when we ask why we are bound to obey it, we are usually answered, it is reasonable that we should, it is conformable to nature to do so, it is useful, it is for our happiness, and we shall be miserable if we do not.  All verry true, but nothing binding the will, or asserting the reason of obedience.

If, to get law in an obligatory sense in which it is law for the will, we go further, and assert reason not merely as declarative, but as strictly legislative, we then lose all free legislation, for reason is necessary, not free.  By placing the obligation as well as the rectitude of the law in reason, we place it in the eternal and necessary essence of God, and then God is no longer a free legislator, for in his essence he is necessary being.  The law, then, is of necessity, and God has no freedom in governing the world.  Then there is no free providence, and God can intervene in human affairs only in accordance with stern, inflexible, and necessary laws, which he can no more change or modify, than he can his own eternal, necessary, and immutable essence.  Then no miracles are possible, no order of grace conceivable, no supernatural revelation can be made, no prayers can be answered, and Christianity is inadmissible, save as a mythical, poetical, or symbolical representation, for the vulgar, of the universal, necessary, and unchangeable laws which bind alike God, man, and nature in the encircling chain of an invincible and inexorable destiny.  Study the Hegelian philosophy in Germany, or the eclectic philosophy in France, represented by the brilliant Cousin, and the logical but despairing Jouffroy, and you may see that the doctrine that law is to be referred for its obligatory character to reason, inevitably leads.  It makes God universal fate, and renders all freedom, save freedom a coactione, impossible. Those who have not, like ourselves, pushed modern heresy, in their own eager pursuit of truth, to its last consequences, may not feel as we do the danger of that doctrine, and the importance of refuting it in its principle.  The age with its clamorous tongues demands liberty, and gets – slavery.  We, too, demand liberty, the liberty of God.  We are deafened and wearied half to death with the ceaseless babble about the rights of man, and we seek relief in a piercing cry for the rights of God.  We had wandered in darkness, stumbling from error to error, with downcast look and saddened hearts, craving freedom and finding only bondage, till one day broke in upon us a solitary ray, the first that had ever penetrated our darkened understanding, and our heart bounded with joy to behold that God is free.  Then began the revolution in our whole order of thought; then rolled back the clouds that had rolled over us; then fell the chains that had bound us, and entered into our very soul; and we found ourselves at once rejoicing in the glorious freedom and light of the Church of God.  The revelation to us of the liberty of God wrought the change; it was the first step in the process of our conversion to Catholicity, and hence we feel most deeply the importance of asserting it.  Its denial is at the bottom of all modern heresy.  But the liberty of God, the foundation and support of all real liberty, can be asserted only by referring law, in that it is obligatory, to the will of God, and regarding it not as his eternal essence, but as his creature, and therefore whatever he chooses to make it.  There is no freedom where there is no free legislator, save in being freed from all created wills, and in being subjected to the will of God alone, who is free to impose on him whatever law he in his infinite wisdom and unbounded goodness judges best.  Then we are not chained to the car of a stern and inexorable necessity, but are subjected to a free and living and loving sovereign, to whom our hearts may expand with true loyalty, to whom we can prefer our petitions and address our prayers, and who is free to hear and answer us, who is flexible to our wants, who can condescend to our weaknesses, bear our infirmities, console us in our afflictions, and rejoice with us in our joy.  Give us this sovereign, revealed to us by our holy religion,- this Sovereign Legislator who has free will, who is above all law, and whose laws are flexible to all his gracious designs, to all the dictates of his loving kindness, and we can feel that we are free in the infinite freedom of God.

We may be mistaken, but we think all modern heresy, beginning with the Protestant principle of the right of private judgment, which supposes the law is not obligatory on account of the will that commands, but on account of what it commands, down to the assertion of the absolute independence of man and denial of the authority of God by Proudhon, finds its basis in the doctrine that law derives its essential character as law from reason, and that right in the sense of jus is participable.  Hence we must believe that, to meet and refute that heresy in its principle, it is necessary to make a distinction which we find in St. Augustine,  but which we do not always find expressed in the medieval doctors, and which is seldom noticed in the little men of our times, between law regarded as to its contents, or as to the reason why God wills it, and law regarded as obligatory, or as that which binds the subject.  In the former sense, it is actus rationis, and has its seat, its origin and ground, in the eternal reason of God; in the latter, it is actus voluntatis, and has its origin and ground in the free will of God, as has the creative act itself.  It is only by means of placing obligation solely in the fact that God wills it, that we know how to carry on the war against the peculiar errors of our times.  In this we do not regard ourselves as innovating, or as departing from the truth as taught by the medieval doctors, but simply as applying that truth under the special form required to meet the errors of their times.

But to return to our New York friend.  He contends that we must have rights in the strict and proper sense of the word, because we have the notion of right.  This notion must either be derived either from rights which we possess as our own, or from error. The latter cannot be said.  Therefore we must say the former.  Therefore we have rights.  This argument, he says, must be conclusive with us, for we are an ontologist, and contend that an idea must exist outside the mind before it can exist in it.  How an argument which is based on pure psychologism must be conclusive with us because we are an ontologist, is not very clear to us.  The notion of right cannot be obtained from an error, we concede, and that it can be obtained only from the intuition of real right, we also concede; but how it follows from this that we have rights in the strict and proper sense of the term, we cannot understand.  JVH says, indeed, that “all our ideas of spiritual and heavenly things are first taken from their earthly patterns; but this is not ontology, nor do we admit it to be true.  The reverse is what we hold.  “See,” said the Lord to Moses, “that you make all things according to the pattern shown you in the mount.”  We did not before know that the spiritual and heavenly things were patterned after the earthly; we thought the earthly was patterned after the spiritual and heavenly, and that the idea exemplaris was in God, in the Divine mind, not in the creature.  Certainly we have read something like this among the Gentiles in Plato, and among Christians in St. Augustine and St Thomas.  It is psychologism, not ontology, that teaches that the order of science is the reverse of the order of reality.  We suppose that, as right is a reality, it may be known to us in the same way that other realities, without being our property, are known to us.

JVH argues that there must be human rights in the sense we deny, because God is the true Nemesis, and avenger of the wronged.  But has he forgotten that the Lord says, “Revenge is mine, and I will repay”?  But how can this be true, if the rights to be avenged are not his?  He forbids us to avenge ourselves, because revenge belongs to him, and not to us, and therefore we should conclude that the rights violated and to be avenged  were his, and not ours, for if they were ours we should have the right to avenge them.  But we have rights in the sense of trusts, created for our benefit, and we can conceive that God might with propriety be said in avenging the violation of his own rights, the benefit of which he has granted to us, both us and himself.

But the argument that is utterly to confound us our Catholic objector has reserved to the last to cap the climax.  “If, finally, ‘right on human lips be a vicious expression,’ then what becomes of the rights of the Apostolic See of which the Popes I their briefs and allocutions constantly speak?  What are the ‘Catholic rights’ of which Mr. Brownson speaks at the close of this very article?  If ‘right on human lips is a vicious expression,’ let Catholics learn henceforth not to speak of their rights, but only of their ‘duties,’ and the Sovereign Pontiffs cease to protest that the ‘rights’ of their glorious throne are violated.”  This is a grave objection, and we can only say in our defense, that we wrote as a Catholic, and very innocently took for granted that Catholic rights and the rights of the Apostolic See are, in the minds of Catholics, Divine, not human rights, the rights of God, and not the rights of man.  The Sovereign Pontiff, we have been taught, holds, exercises, defends, the rights of the Apostolic See as the successor of Peter and the Vicar of our Lord Jesus Christ, not in his own name, as his own inherent and indefeasible personal rights.  Catholic rights are the rights of the Church, and the rights of the Church are the rights of her celestial Spouse.  At least so Catholics believe.  Is not JVH a Catholic?  If he is, will he tell us by what right he assumes that the rights of the Church are human rights?  It strikes us that he has something here to settle with his confessor, and to explain to his Catholic brethren.  He must have forgotten himself, for we cannot suppose him to be ignorant that a Catholic is not at liberty to follow Ranke and Macaulay, and call the Church commissioned by Almighty God to teach and govern, in his name and by his authority, all men and nations in all things pertaining to salvation, a human institution, to speak of her rights as human rights, and conclude that man has proper rights of his own, from the fact that she as God’s Church has rights.  Her rights are God’s rights, and unless the question between us and the Civilta Cattolica be decided against us, no doubt can be thrown on them.  JVH by resorting to this last argument has damaged his own reasoning more perhaps than we have damaged it, because by it he plainly shows that he has either been blinded by passion, or has never begun to understand the subject on which he affects to speak as a master. 

But we have said enough, and more perhaps than was necessary.  However, we are not sorry the JVH’s irritation has given us an opportunity to bring this great question of Rights and Duties before our readers again, for in our judgment it is the most important question of our times.  We are not precisely ignorant of what may be adduced against us; we have seen in the Ami de la Religion a most frightful list of  sand Doctors of the Church in favor of the expression that man has rights, but we have not seen one, in that list or elsewhere, that asserts them clearly and unequivocally in the sense in which we deny them.  None of them seem to have taken up the question in the precise form that we have, and though St. Thomas would seem to be against us, inasmuch as he formally teaches that law is actus intellectus, it is clear to us that he proves it to be so only in the sense in which we concede that it is, and we can find authority enough in his writings to prove that it is also actus voluntatis.  Suarez, whom since writing thus far we have consulted for the first time on this point, in his De Legibus, the standard authority on this subject, appears to adopt and defend our view, that law in that it is obligatory is actus voluntatis.  He gives three opinions, and certainly inclines to the third, which reconciles the other two, and this third opinion is the one we have defended.  If we consider law as to its contents, or in answer to the question why the sovereign chooses to enact it, it is no doubt actus intellectus, but in that sense it is only improperly called law; if we consider it as obliging, or in answer to the question, why does it bind the subject to obedience, there is just as little doubt that it is actus voluntatis, for it certainly does not bind till the sovereign has willed it.  If it did, it would be eternally law, and no sovereign will would be requisite to constitute it law.  Its obligation would be in what it commands, not in him who commands, which no Catholic theologian, and none but an infidel or a Liberal Christian can admit.  The reason which induced some to hesitate about placing law in will, that is, to escape the doctrine, that whatever the prince or human sovereign wills is law, is obviated by our doctrine that the right to make the law is in God alone, and in human governments only by delegation or as a trust from him, and the force of the law as law is directly from him, and human governments act only in his name, and bind their subjects only in so far as they have his authority.  And as they never have his authority for any unjust acts, such acts are null and void from the beginning, and when they persist in them they abuse their trusts and forfeit their powers.  As we ascribe the law-making power solely to God, and allow it to others only as his delegates, tied up by the conditions he annexes, there is no danger in saying that the binding force of the law is derived solely from the will of the sovereign.