Brownson in 1863, by G. P. A. Healy

FROM The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, Volume VIII, (Thorndike Nourse, 1884):

THE great writers in defence of those principles of liberty, natural right, justice, and equity, which form the basis of true Americanism, were in the middle ages, not laymen, but churchmen and monks; men who were stanch [sic] papists, and in every contest took the side of Peter against Caesar. We do not recollect a single layman of literary renown, from Dante down to the seventeenth century, whose influence was not exerted in favor of Caesarism, that is to say, the despotism of the state. Not one of them seems to have had any knowledge of liberty in our American sense; and however loudly they may talk about it, it is always either the freedom of the nation from foreign bondage, or the emancipation of the temporal from its natural subjection to the spiritual. They are always either simply patriots or Caesarists, virtually political atheists, adopting the maxim of the Roman jurist, Quod placuit principi, legis habet vigorem. They were formed under the influence of the courts of princes, not in the schools of the church. There may have been in the cultivated lay society some talk of the privileges or liberties of classes, estates, or corporations, but none as far as we have been able to discover, except by monks and ecclesiastics, of the rights of men as simply men, much, if any, prior to our own American struggle or national independence. You will not find those rights recognized anywhere in pagan antiquity.

They are essentially a Catholic conception, and are asserted in the maxim of our theologians, denied by all so-called Evangelicals, gratia supponit naturam, grace supposes nature. The founders 0f our republic have borrowed not from pagan antiquity, nor from the lay literature of the middle ages, but from the social and civil order introduced by Catholicity, and have really done nothing but embody with consummate practical wisdom, and sagacity, those great principles which are everywhere inculcated in the pages of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmine, Suarez, and other doctors of the church, as the fundamental principles of natural justice, equity, and of all wise and just civil polity. The church regards the Christian state as a republic, instituted for the common weal, and if she crowns the monarch, it is as the president, or the chief magistrate, bound by the tenor of office to exercise his powers for the common good of the community. To her it is, indeed, a matter of indifference whether this chief magistrate is called president, king, or emperor; but by whichever name he is called, she teaches that he derives his power from God through the people, and holds it as a trust for their good, and forfeits it by gross and continued abuse. It is only your Gallican churchmen, courtiers rather than churchmen, who maintain that the prince reigns by an indefeasible personal or family right, and inculcate the Anglican doctrine of “the divine right of kings, and passive obedience,” a doctrine fit only or despots and slaves, and which provoked in its reaction the terrible revolutions, that in these last sixty or seventy years have reduced all Europe well nigh to a state of anarchy.

“The Constitution of the Church,” The Works of Orestes Brownson, Volume VIII, pp 548-549

For another view of “true Americanism,” I highly recommend this talk by Gerry Matatics, which is only available for free for another week.

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