Ellis Sandoz - Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America

This book traces the rise of republican government, and the republican spirit of consent and individual dignity, from key sources in Western Christian Protestant civilizationwith particular attention to the Bible and to the emergence of the American mind in the eighteenth century culminating in 1776 and the constitutional founding of free government. There has never been anything like America! it has been well said by one of our staunchest friends, former British prime minister Lady Margaret Thatcher. Just why and how that may be true is a theme of the present study.

Central to my account is the analysis of the religious debt of the emergent eighteenth-century American community and its elevation of the individual person and citizen as unique in the eyes of his Creator. This grounding of the notion of human dignity, and of the citizen's vocation in spiritual individualism, I have argued, along with the understanding of human capacity for self-government under Providential guidance, emerges as the core distinction of American republicanism. It is to be considered as the seminal matrix of the more familiar so-called Enlightenment features, and as integral to the founding and to the heart of Americanism itself to this day.

While it is a collection of studies in political philosophy, the thematic unity of the volume arises from the non-reductionist philosophical framework within which the questions I address are examined. A theoretical perspective unifies the book, one for which I am indebted to Eric Voegelin, who figures prominently in the pages that follow. Among other things, this specifically means that the spiritual and noetic dimensions of experience as historically ascertained are seriously attended to and given their deserved empirical weight in the analysis. My purpose is not polemical but diagnostic and therapeutic. This persuasive purpose goes to the heart of the deformations exhibited in a contemporary climate of opinion whose relentlessly reductionist orthodoxy, oppressivelybordering on fanaticism, prohibits the asking of philosophical questions and ruthlessly enforces a nihilistic occlusion against the Ground of being as threshold restrictions upon scholarly discourse. In these as in other related matters I politely decline to play the boundary game and so refuse to join the alienated in the sour misery of their own self-imposed prison of closed existence. In the present exercise of window-opening, I have followed the evidence of the sources to the best of my ability so as to make its meaning luminously explicit and true to the various contexts under consideration. Silently underlying the argument at every stage, in effect, is the Socratic invitation to look and see if this is not the casethen and still now the way to truth through the exercise of critical reason in a dispassionate assessment of pertinent experience. In Aristotle's formulation of the decisive epistemological principle of prudential science: We must examine the conclusions we have reachedby applying them to the actual facts of life: if they are in harmony with the facts we must accept them, and if they clash we must assume that they are mere words (Nicomachean Ethics 1179a2022).

Divided into nine chapters, the first half of the book addresses aspects of American thought influential in the Founding, including the neglected question of the education of the Founders for their unique endeavor, common law constitutionalism, the place of the Greek and Latin classics. The first chapter attempts a searching account of the texture of religious experience from the Great Awakening to the Declaration of Independence, paying detailed attention to the prevalent understanding of human nature (anthropology) and its political implications as powerfully theorized notably by John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards.