The Eagle's Flight. - 'On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding' - book review

National Review, April 8, 2002 by Charles R. Kesler

On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, by Michael Novak (Encounter, 250 pp., $23.95)

In his engaging new book, Michael Novak explains why Americans of the founding era thought themselves favored, and consequently tested, by God-and argues that, without such faith, the fledgling Republic would never have gotten off the ground.

The author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and other celebrated works, Novak has labored for several decades to blend democratic theory, free-market economics, and Catholic theology into a powerful new synthesis. By putting the classics back into classical economics, he has helped to revive the Whig philosophical tradition, and especially its solicitude for the cultural conditions of individual freedom. Novak's Whiggism is, to be sure, more Catholic than the original, but it commends itself to anyone who cares about the blessings of liberty.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the most famous, though by no means the first, observer to wonder why in the American Revolution the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion had been allies, while in the French Revolution they had been bitter enemies. Novak's book addresses the same issue in a new context: He is dismayed by the secularism that dominates most 20th-century interpretations of the Founding, and worries that historians and political scientists are infusing the spirit of the French Revolution into their accounts of the American. Novak seeks to rescue our past not only from the contemporary philosophes who despise or, at best, ignore religion, but also from those conservative thinkers, supposedly friendly to religion, who persist in seeing the Founding as an almost exclusively secular affair.

In fact, Novak devotes the best parts of this book to arguing with his friends-in particular, conservative Catholics and followers of Leo Strauss. He wants to show the Catholics that the U.S. fulfills Catholic principles even better than the confessional state longed for by ultra- traditionalists; and he wants to persuade the Straussians (he singles out Walter Berns, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) that America is not simply a bourgeois emanation of the Enlightenment or a philosophers' plot against religion.

In short, Novak loves this country and wants his friends to understand why it's lovable. Happily, he writes at a moment when the ranks of scholars questioning the secularist orthodoxy have swelled. In differing yet complementary ways, Ellis Sandoz, James Hutson, Harry V. Jaffa, and many others have been busy correcting the record. Novak borrows from and builds on their work. In a well-rounded treatment of the Founders' personal piety and character, he doesn't limit himself to the few (Jefferson, Franklin, Paine) famous for their heterodoxy, but considers such mainstream figures as John Witherspoon and John Dickinson as well. He cites a plethora of writings and events that exhibit how indispensable Christian zeal was to the Revolution. He even scours medieval and post-Reformation Catholic political thought in order to find dignified Christian antecedents for the doctrines of natural rights and the social contract.

Yet for all its virtues, the book leaves the reader somewhat unsatisfied. In Brideshead Revisited, some college lads return from a long night of drinking, which overcomes one of them; another explains charitably that it was neither the quantity nor the quality of the wines that was at fault. The real problem, he asserts, is that the wines were "too various." A similar problem bedevils On Two Wings: The excellence of individual parts shines through, but the whole disappoints because the parts are too various.

Novak begins by arguing that the American eagle took flight on the two wings of Enlightenment reason and "Jewish metaphysics." By the former, he means primarily the teachings of John Locke; by the latter, he means that "the language of Judaism [became] the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race." Americans saw themselves as a second Israel, fleeing corruption and tyranny for a promised land of republican liberty. Novak notes perceptively that "the idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" became a "religious lingua franca" that enabled the founding generation to bypass Christian doctrinal disputes about the meaning of the New Testament, and to unite in a moral-political covenant.

This "Hebrew metaphysics" encouraged Americans to see history as linear, "a narrative of purpose and progress" in which human beings are free, the created world is intelligible, and man is called on to "inquire, invent, and discover" in imitation of the Creator-and to redeem liberty and human dignity by suffering and daring in behalf of republican government.

Here Novak's interesting Whiggism is on full display. But questions remain. For example, Jews and Christians alike do see history as linear and purposeful; but as progressive? Novak soon retreats from this overstatement, acknowledging that history is "measured for progress (or decline) by God's standards"-that is to say, he admits that progress is not guaranteed, because man is free to obey or to disobey God's standards.