CHAPTER V

LIBERAL INTIMATIONS OF TRANSCENDENCE*

DAVID WALSH

The Catholic University of America

            The Christian inspiration of the liberal order has not generally been elucidated with the philosophic depth that it receives in Kant or a Hegel, but powerful intimations of the relationship are evidenced in the confrontation with the crises of the past two centuries. They are centuries of more self-conscious liberalism precisely because of the challenges that threatened to undermine liberty. The crises that periodically seem to sweep over the liberal tradition in the period up to the present derive in part from those challenges, but also from the uncertainty of a modern liberal tradition bereft of profound philosophical foundations. We have seen the results in the profusion of attempts at finding such a foundation, but there is also the less noticeable deepening of the convictions themselves. Even in the absence of a coherent un-folding, the confrontation with the destructive abyss before it has always caused a deepening of the liberal resolve and a return to the spiritual traditions that have historically sustained it. When liberalism is pinned to the wall, Nietzsche observed, it will reveal its true foundation as Christianity. The movement toward sources is exemplified by the reflections of Alexis De Tocqueville in Demo-cracy in America (2 vols.; Vintage, 1956 and 1958).

            Despite the claims of the revolutions through which he lived, Tocqueville declared "I do not clearly perceive that they are liberal" (II 333). The nineteenth century, for all its liberal reputation, was really the age in which liberalism began to comprehend the gathering storm that would politically overwhelm it in the twentieth century. Few identified the structure of that impending catastrophe with more acuity than Tocqueville. He understood it as a perversion of the very principles of liberal freedom itself in its contest with the correlative impulse toward equality. His writings call us again and again to the distinction between these intermingled but rival principles. The liberal revolution, which had begun with the demand for freedom, was in danger of selling its birthright for a mess of equality purchased at the cost of that same freedom. "They had sought to be free in order to make themselves equal; but in proportion as equality was more established by the aid of freedom, freedom itself was thereby rendered more difficult of attainment" (333). The specter of this new more dreadful, because more pervasive despotism, is powerfully depicted in Tocqueville’s re-flections on the tyranny of universal equality.

            Nothing was more desultory to his mind than the prospect of the egalitarian society because "when men are all alike they are all weak, and the supreme power of the state is naturally much stronger among democratic nations than elsewhere" (299). Equality was only possible through that shrinking of men to the status of interchangeable atoms, no one exercising any more power, influence or prestige than any other. But that also meant that they were equally poor in the resources for taking care of themselves. They might be equally powerful but they were also equally powerless.

            Unable therefore to find the means of satisfying their needs in themselves or in others they were left with no other protection than that provided by the state. The latter loomed larger in the lives of individuals who conversely had less independence over against it. It was "a new species of oppression" that menaced democratic nations, for which the old words tyranny and despotism were no longer appropriate because "it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them" (335).

            That was the core of the problem foreseen by the most prescient of the nineteenth century thinkers and acknowledged as the commonplace reality of our own century. At stake was the very humanity of these men who, in their egalitarian powerlessness, were ready to turn over the care of their lives to an all-powerful Pater Politicus. The portrait he paints is arrestingly close to the comprehensive security embrace of our own welfare state. Its force of penetration make it worth quoting in full.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provi-dent, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the de-scent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? (336)

Tocqueville well understood the insidious dimension of equality which has "predisposed men to endure [these things] and often to look on them as benefits" (337).

            They deceive themselves with the illusion that they are still governing themselves, merely because they have preserved the "outward forms of freedom." Their divergent passions are that "they want to be led, and that they wish to remain free." Instead of confronting the impossibility of their aspirations and learning to overcome them, they give way to the conceit that they are not being controlled because they have elected their controllers. Tocqueville recognized the cruel reality of this illusion because it robbed them of their most precious possession, not simply their freedom, but the growth of their humanity which only the exercise of free self-responsibility makes possible. Like the aristocrats of French so-ciety under the ancient regime, democratic man had become victim to the comforting illusion that it was possible to maintain all of the privileges of their station without shouldering any of the obligations. "Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain" (337).

            The answer, however, is not to be found in turning away from equality by attempting a restoration of some form of aristocratic privilege. Tocqueville, despite his sympathy and deep appreciation of the role of an aristocracy as a bulwark against despotism, was "persuaded that all who attempt in the ages upon which we are entering, to base freedom upon aristocratic privilege will fail" (340). His own stature as a thinker is demonstrated in this steadfast refusal to take the easy way out by indulging in respectable, but ineffectual, evocations of a vanished past. Only those who have weathered the storm can claim the victory over it. Rather than turn his back in condemnation of the spirit of the age, Tocqueville endured it, contemplated its depth and found his way through to a transformation that pointed beyond it. He is one of the great hers of the liberal canon because he suffered through its crisis to a reconciliation of its most radical disjunction between liberty and equality.

            Tocqueville’s most profound insight was that liberty and equality could not be separated. At root they came from the same source, the equal right that each human being possesses to decide how they are going to live subject to no other restraints than the law that applies to all. Once the logic of this understanding of a common human nature, highlighted by the teaching of Jesus Christ "that all members of the human race are by nature equal and alike" (17), has taken hold then it is not plausible to expect that it will be reversed. A direction has been set that renders a return to the hierarchical order of aristocracy virtually impossible. "Nothing can be imagined more contrary to nature and the secret instincts of the human heart" than this assignation of permanent authority of one group of men over the rest. "Aristocratic institutions cannot exist without laying down the inequality of men as a fundamental prin-ciple, legalizing it beforehand and introducing it into the family as well as into society; but these are things so repugnant to natural equity that they can only be extorted from men by force" (438).

            There was no alternative but to confront the abyss of ega-litarian powerlessness and find within it the forces of resistance capable of surmounting it. Deeper than the desire for equality is the desire for liberty. It was the urge to live freely that had driven the movement for the abolition of all illegitimate privilege and authority; the same impulse can be the means of resisting the descent to nothingness without liberty. We must not, Tocqueville warns, "con-found the principle of equality itself with the revolution which finally establishes that principle in the social condition and the laws of a nation" (II, 332). His whole work might be seen as one long contemplation of the nightmare of egalitarian despotism as a way of resuscitating the contrary force of liberty that is alone capable of opposing it. In that project Tocqueville was moderately successful as a warning within liberalism, but most significant for his thera-peutic expansion of the resources of the liberal order itself. He identified the existential depths from which the liberal inspiration springs through an enlargement of the soul beyond the liberal boundaries.

            The prospect of imminent self-destruction is what awakens in Tocqueville one of the most powerful evocations of liberty in the modern world. Reflecting on the drift he witnessed toward so-cialism, which he traced back to the political economists of the eighteenth century in their preference for governmental solutions, he speculates on what it is that makes men accept so lowly a condition of existence as to live under the tutelage of others. The contrast with others who cannot endure the idea of not being their own masters is striking. They have lost that transcendent spark that moves men to set aside all considerations of practicality and efficiency, even life itself, as secondary compared to the freedom to "speak, live, and breathe freely, owing obedience to no authority save God and the laws of the land" (A. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution [New York: Doubleday 1955], 169). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of that impulse, but we can know that it is that condition without which no other benefits are worth having. "It is easy to see," Tocqueville observes about those nations who have chosen a comfortable slavery, "that what is lacking in such nations is a genuine love of freedom, that lofty aspiration which (I confess) defies analysis. For it is something one must feel and logic has no part in it. It is a privilege of noble minds which God has fitted to receive it, and it inspires them with a generous fervor. But to meaner souls, untouched by the sacred flame, it may well seem incomprehensible" (169).

            The challenge was to fan the "sacred flame" to light in those souls left relatively untouched by it. A means must be found of stirring to life what a liberal order depended on but could not directly produce. The key was to be found, Tocqueville was convinced, in the very condition of equality that threatened to overwhelm liberty. In the equality of their social condition modern men and women lacked any ready-made hierarchy of responsibility. Instead of throwing off their problems onto the government or their social superiors, they must be persuaded to undertake the initiatives themselves. Their individual powerlessness must become the oc-casion for prompting the exercise of liberty in schemes of voluntary cooperation. Individually they can do nothing so that they are com-pelled to act together, but the only means of concerting their actions is through persuasion that draws them into a free con-vergence of their efforts. It is the very circumstance of their equal isolation and impotence that calls forth the necessity of a free con-junction of wills. This was the genius of the American arrangement, as Tocqueville understood it and made it the centerpiece of his own political theory. The circumstances in which they were placed and the political tradition they brought with them conspired to develop highly the "art of association," of winning the free cooperation of all in accomplishing the public good. "Thus it is by the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom that the Americans learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less formidable" (Democracy in America, II, 127).

            Such voluntary associations are not the most elegant or efficient. They lack the rationality of a centralized administration but they are a hundred times more powerful and beneficial for a society. Compared to the European experience of oscillating wildly between servitude and license, Tocqueville found in the American polity a stability that was more reliable for all its untidiness. Ultimately there is no real political power except through the volun-tary union of wills, a coercive structure renders only the appear-ance of power that dissolves once the constraint is relaxed. Even in the case of absolute governments it is always patriotism or religion that are the source of their power, not the apparatus of compulsion (I, 97). Democratic regimes, lacking even the elementary means of coercion, are from the start thrown into the need for such sentiments of cohesion. If they wish to avoid the despotic recourse then they must turn in some way to the American example of encouraging the elaboration of liberty.

            The result, Tocqueville observed, is not only a more reliable means of addressing public problems but the more invisible, although more crucial, avenue of the inner growth of the citizens in self-responsibility. "Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reci-procal influence of men upon one another" (II, 117). Through exer-cising the art of association they acquire a taste for cooperation and develop the virtues indispensable to the maintenance of the order in which they live. This explained why in America, composed of such a diversity of human types and backgrounds, with so little of a common world to bind them together, he nevertheless found a level of patriotism and commitment to the common good that was higher than any in Europe. The Americans had hit on the way of linking the individual to the community that had little to do with the satisfaction of interest. Or rather by letting the satisfaction of their interests depend on their own efforts, the American scheme encouraged the emergence of those virtues which as the highest expression of freedom direct men beyond the calculation of interest. It exem-plified Tocqueville’s observation that, in the contemporary demo-cratic setting, "the only means we still possess of interesting men in the welfare of their country is to make them partakers in the government" (I, 252).

            The self-government of the townships of New England was so natural that it "seems to come directly from the hand of God" (I, 62). But everywhere he went in America Tocqueville was struck by the self-reliant dignity of a people taking care of itself, spontaneously forming into groups or associations in order to take care of public problems that elsewhere the government might be expected to resolve. The value of permitting and encouraging people to take the initiative themselves, for all of its untidiness, was incalculable. More than any of the practical benefits that accrued, was the growth of the soul that occurred in the discovery of the value of freedom itself. The exercise of that free self-direction itself was recognized as the transcendent end of the whole order, outweighing the value of any of the particular goods obtained through the structure of cooperation. It accords perfectly with the recommendation Toc-queville gave, not to put as much store on doing great things as on making men great, "to set less value on the work and more upon the workman" (II, 347).

            He was not overly sanguine that this counsel would be followed for the concluding pages of Democracy in America are as heavy with foreboding as anything written in the past two hundred years. But he knew that the movement of liberty was inexorable. The impulse that had devolved into the demand for equality had its roots in the aspiration for liberty. For that reason it could not be reversed without endangering liberty itself. Only the transcendent force of liberty contained an antidote strong enough to counteract the poisonous effects of the resentment behind egalitarianism. By learning through experience to know the pull of the noble cord of freedom, of the gift of self in the service of others, men could discover a force within themselves stronger than envy and self-gratIfication. They would make the discovery that lies at the core of Tocqueville’s world-view, "that nothing but the love and the habit of freedom can maintain an advantageous contest with the love and the habit of physical well-being" (II, 301). Just as the movement toward equality seemed irresistible to human modification, so only the transcendent force of freedom within it seemed capable of effecting its transformation.

            Tocqueville was deeply impressed with the sense of the providential forces at work within history. Man was not simply at the mercy of his own resources. The contemplation of the vast social and political movement toward equality, the irresistible movement toward universal participation in government, the democratic revolutions, put him in mind of the inscrutable divine providence that governs the whole process. In the Introduction he recounts how the whole book "has been written under the influence of a kind of religious awe" at the prospect of the unfolding movement of history. For centuries it has been moving inexorably in the constant direction of an expansion of the liberty that guarantees equal participation in government. The progressive movement toward ever broader social quality has "the sacred character of a divine decree," any attempt to check or oppose which would be like trying "to resist the will of God" (7). Such remarks should not be dismissed as rhetorical window dressing, his French readers on his own admission were as likely to be atheists, because they represent a spirit of reverence that pervades the work as defining the ultimate horizon of understanding. They represent the faith on which his conviction of the nobility of liberty rested and the source of his confidence in the vindication of its rightness. Even in the face of the real dangers it invited, Tocqueville had a faith that made it im-possible to turn aside from liberty.

FROM DE TOCQUEVILLE TO JOHN STUART MILL

            A similar sense of the transcendent force of liberty is dis-cernible behind the writings of Tocqueville’s greatest nineteenth century reader, John Stuart Mill. Often it is buried beneath the sur-face of appeals to the utilitarian value of individual inventiveness, but it cannot be completely concealed. Only a transcendent valuation of liberty accounts for the intensity of the convictions expressed. Mill never considers that liberty might be weighed within the utilitarian calculus. Rather, it is what constitutes the measure of utility. This becomes evident in the occasional outbursts where he throws utility overboard and steps forward to declare the indefeasibility of a transcendent order of right. In searching for an explanation of what it is that makes human beings so incapable of settling for anything less than the attainment of their full moral stature, he could find no better name for it than that "sense of dignity . . . which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them" (Utilitarianism" in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray [Oxford 1991], 140). The reflections on The Subjection of Women provoked a particularly strong affirmation of freedom as "the first and strongest want of human nature" (576). He conceives it as a force with such en-nobling power that he regards it as the only effectual means of quelling the contrary impulse of domination in human nature. "The desire of power over others can only cease to be a depraving agency among mankind, when each of them individually is able to do without it; which can only be where respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an established principle" (578).

            As so often in the history of the liberal tradition, the scale of the threat confronting it galvanized some of the most powerful declarations of the indispensability of freedom that have ever been made. If the nineteenth century was the time when liberalism first came under the characteristically modern pressures, it was also the time of its most enduring self affirmations. But it was not within liberal circles that its deepest confirmation was to be found. Tocqueville and, to a lesser extent, Mill had reestablished the tran-scendent dimension of liberty within a social setting where libe-ralism was in danger of becoming the victim of its own success. As liberal principles had led to a dramatic expansion of the franchise, the prospect of democratic despotism reared its ugly head. There was no guarantee that the newly enfranchised masses would use their freedom responsibly. They might just as readily turn it over to populist demagogues or pervert it into a means of forcing their prejudices on more independent-minded minorities. How was it possible to ensure that freedom would not be abused and, if it was not possible to guide it, how could liberty be asserted as the highest value?

            These are the questions that disturbed the nineteenth cen-tury liberals and all their successors. Its presence in the back-ground casts a pall over the confident expectations of historical progress, because it suggests that the "experiment" in self govern-ment might ultimately prove stillborn and that men cannot be en-trusted with their own liberty. The problem, as they conceived it in large measure, was to develop the institutional structures to absorb the enfranchised masses without jeopardizing the order of the liberal state. Mill’s, Considerations on Representative Government, is a classic of this type of reflection on the reforms that might be introduced to preserve a liberal order when it becomes a mass democracy. His proposals were directed at moderating the two principal dangers of the poor quality of elected representatives and their propensity to engage in "class legislation" (ch. 7). The Ame-rican founders were even more prescient concerning these prob-lems and developed an impressive array of constitutional devices to moderate the majoritarian tendencies of a popularly elected government. The subsequent experience of liberal democracies has largely been one of muddling through the dangers, pragma-tically adjusting reforms in light of trial and error experiences to arrive at moderately stable constitutions. But the fundamental question has not been confronted and that failure contributes more today than ever to the confusion afflicting the liberal tradition. Is liberty worth the risk?

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

            To find an appropriately weighty response it is necessary to look beyond the usual liberal range to a thinker who is not generally included within it, but whose spiritual depth enabled him to reach a level of insight indispensable to, yet not easily accessible from, the liberal perspective. Fyodor Dostoevsky provided the most profound defense of liberty of the century in large measure because he was not tied to the boundaries of the liberal vocabulary. He was willing to acknowledge that the value of liberty needed to be defended, and not simply treated as the mute premise of all further discussion. In an age when liberty was about to come under attack he recognized that its indispensability would have to be established, however difficult that might prove to be. If that required a meditation on the value of liberty beyond the parameters of an immanentist analysis then Dostoevsky was prepared to follow it through. In this way the Russian novelist became the one to articulate the connection with transcendence that was inchoately present, but nowhere fully explicated, within the liberal tradition itself. Dostoevsky uncovers the Christian depth of the liberal impulse.

            The most celebrated locus for this reflection is, of course, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov. It is the point where Dostoevsky fully confronts the question of whether the value of human liberty outweighs all the evil and misery that appears to be its unavoidable consequence. In what does its pricelessness consist that it outweighs all of the destructiveness it makes possible? The great merit of Dostoevsky’s analysis is that he poses the question with a depth and intensity that explore its outermost limits. He does not attempt to soften its impact, because he wants to test the case for liberty in juxtaposition with the strongest case that can be made against it. The result, he knew, would be the attainment of a strength of conviction that could withstand the assault of the worst attacks that could be mounted against it. Dostoevsky, while not generally counted a liberal thinker, has earned his place in the liberal canon because at this one crucial point he contemplated and surmounted the most devastating assault on liberty.

            The Legend recounts the unannounced return of Christ to earth in sixteenth century Seville. It is the height of the Spanish Inquisition and against the background of the practice of auto-d fé, Christ reappears to disturb the peace. The old cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, has "solved" the problem of order by keeping his charges in a state of unthinking subservience. They have turned over the direction of their lives to him who alone carries the burden of the responsibility for decision; relieved of the need to think for themselves they can live out their days in endless carefree con-tentment. Proud of his achievement in establishing this perfect order, the Inquisitor pronounces their inability to obtain the means of subsistence without his tutelage. "No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their free-dom at our feet, and say to us, `Make us your slaves, but feed us’" (Brothers Karamazov [New York: Modern Library] 300).

            The greatest challenge to this somnolent utopia is the humble presence of Christ walking among the people. All can sense who he is, the Inquisitor most of all, and he orders his arrest and detention. The greatest part of the story is taken up with the conversation that takes place between them in the darkened dungeon to which the old cardinal has descended for this most intimate of meetings. He knows that Christ is the one before whom he must be judged, for it is only Christ who is the measure of the love that must govern human life. The claim to be acting in the name of humanity, to have placed the service of human beings above all other considerations, must stand in the light of Christ’s transcending love. For this reason the Inquisitor is drawn to the interrogation to test the strength of his own resolve. Only if it can stand before the divine gaze can he be assured of its indomitable self-sufficiency, of his own unqualified rightness.

            The challenge for Dostoevsky is to find a plausible means of presenting this transcendent encounter. How is it possible to represent Christ without softening or reducing his awful divine presence? It is a well-known problem of religious art, but especially in an age when the divine no longer elicits the response of awe and reactions can verge on the blase. Dostoevsky solved it in an utterly convincing manner by presenting Christ as the silent interlocutor, yet the most powerful presence in the dialogue. It remains a dialogue and we obtain a profound sense of the reality of Christ, by virtue of the depth and intensity of responses he evokes in the old cardinal. The conversation never becomes a monologue because the Inquisitor, who has come down to conduct the interrogation, is the one who feels compellingly under interrogation. It is the Inquisitor’s response to the divine judgment so implacably, yet unaccusingly, embodied in Christ.

            The Inquisitor is, moreover, up to the occasion. It is as if he has been preparing for the contest all his life. He has an answer to the judgment that he has failed humanity by asking men to settle for less than their full human stature. He knows that in convincing them to abandon their freedom that he has colluded in their descent into the subhuman. But he is confident that his motives can withstand the examination. His trump card is the condition in which the divine accession to human freedom has left us. The Inquisitor is quite prepared to countenance the immodesty of the assertion that he has "joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work" (308). They have rendered Christ superfluous and now resent the prospect of his return which can only work to disturb the work they have undertaken in His name. But it is no longer Christ’s work, for that was ineradicably flawed through the affliction of human freedom. He is prepared to defend the superiority of his judgment.

            The gift of freedom, he asserts, is only of value to those who are capable of using it wisely. What of the many for whom it is an unutterable burden, who can find no other use for it but to destroy themselves and one another? What is the value of caring for and saving only the elect? Even the elect have begun to raise their banner of freedom against God. "But with us all will be happy and will no more rebel, nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom." Of course the Inquisitor will continue to persuade them that in surrendering their freedom they are exercising and preserving it. "And shall we be right," he asks with unflappable slyness, "or shall we by lying?" It is a performance of matchless subtlety from a man who knows exactly what he is doing and has been completely in charge of every situation in his life.

They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves; others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves’ (306-307).

            There is even a touch of nobility about the role of the In-quisitor and his assistants who have sacrificed their own souls for the sake of the contented millions. "There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil" (308). The unthinking masses will live out their subhuman lives and "beyond the grave they will find nothing but death." Only the suffering elite will face the prospect of judgment, but these nobly guilty few will surely be able to hold their heads up high on that day. They will be able to "stand up and point out to Thee the thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and say: `Judge us if Thou canst and darest’" (308). The Inquisitor is among those who had been prepared to follow Christ into the desert, "I too prized the freedom with which Thou host blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Thy elect." But then he turned away and "would not serve madness." He could not accept that "billions of God’s creatures had been created as a mockery" to the freedom they will never be able to use (310). "I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble" (308).

            The sincerity of his intentions is belied only by the disturbing consideration of the alternative to the divine gift of freedom. He is perfectly correct that many, perhaps most, human beings are destined to make a cruel misuse of their freedom. But what is the alternative? Is it the embrace of the beastlike imbecility of the Inquisitor’s happy masses? Is there not something even worse about their slobbering dumbness precisely because it has been adopted so self-consciously? They seem to have sunk to a level of degradation which has removed all that makes them human. In their brute ignorance they seem to have lost all that made them worth serving in the first place. Even the Inquisitor can barely conceal the contempt he harbors for the very beings for whom he has sacrificed his soul. Having failed miserably in their efforts to rule themselves they slouch toward the one who can control them, "the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood" (306). Is the solution to the self-destructiveness of human freedom the abandonment of their humanity?

            There can be no denying the depth of the quandary in which we find ourselves. We cannot reject our freedom without losing our humanity, nor can we avoid the admission of the untold misery it has brought upon us. The flaw of the Inquisitor was his insistence that the tension must be resolved. It is the state of mind that insists that the uncertainties of the human condition be removed, that we shift from the state of struggling fidelity to our deepest intimations to the perfection in which all things have been settled. He represents the type of the dark utopian who is prepared to accept a world less than it might be, if he cannot attain the ideal that cannot be realized. What he cannot tolerate is the ambivalence of the human situation characterized by a freedom that can neither be perfected nor an-nihilated. It is an ambivalence that pervades the liberal perspective which might be identified as a fidelity to all of its tensional com-ponents. The crucial question it provokes is, what can sustain that fidelity in the face of the temptations to abandon it?

            The question is posed by the way in which Dostoevsky unfolds the self-disclosure of the Inquisitor. He articulates the con-cern that had troubled all the great nineteenth century liberals with a clarity that remains unsurpassed. If men are to enjoy an ever expanding domain of freedom how can we be sure they will exer-cise it responsibly? What is it about human beings that makes them worthy of the risk of the horrible abuse of freedom? The Inquisitor’s reflections bring that question to the point of transparency. He shows, but he does not say, that the tensional demands of the human condition can only be accepted if they are underpinned by an acceptance of the mystery of its pulls which are experienced but never fully comprehended. The relationship of its dimensions cannot be definitively penetrated from the human side.

            The assurance of their order can only be provided by the revelation of the transcendent goodness from which they have been derived. We can sense but we cannot get beyond the good in which we participate. Only the attempt to escape the condition of the pulls and counter pulls to stand in judgment over it, the impulse to dominate or resolve the whole, can ruin our attraction toward the good.

            What provokes this realization is the silent unaccusing presence of Christ. He says nothing throughout the exchange but we know him through the ever more shrill assertions of the Inquisitor who cannot be at peace so long as the unconditional acceptance of Christ is there before him. The inner contradiction of the Inquisitor’s position becomes inescapable. He has rendered men less than human out of love for them but in the process has deprived them of all that makes them lovable. The contempt in which he holds mankind is no longer disguised. Standing over against it is the inexpressible depth of divine love incarnate in Christ. The implication could not be clearer that it is that transcendent love that redeems the mystery of the relationship of human freedom and human evil. Only Christ can sustain the tension without straining against it because he alone has plumbed the depths that lie beyond the limits of our experience. His infinitely forgiving presence could not be more perfectly conveyed as the foundation of freedom than in the gaze he turns on the Inquisitor of love too deep for words.

            The turning point in the story is the outburst of Alyosha who interrupts Ivan, the rebellious author of the account, with the exclamation, "But . . . that’s absurd! Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him -- as you meant it to be" (309). Ivan who had recounted the story with the ostensible purpose of demonstrating the force of the Inquisitor’s critique of Christ, cannot follow his character all the way. He is not yet ready to embrace Christ but he cannot avoid admitting the spiritual truth of his presence. The elaborateness of the Inquisitor’s reinter-pretation of the three temptations of Christ, as three lost opportunities to bring con-tentment and peace to an admittedly truncated mankind, serves only to underline the mendacity of his position. Love of human beings, a love that reaches as far as the full acceptance of their freedom, is not possible without Christ.

            He is the one who has shown the indispensability of the free-dom that makes it possible for men to grow toward their full human stature, reaching even into their participation in divine being itself. Christ can sustain the tension between freedom and failure because he has suffered through it to the limit. The acceptance of his passion and death at the hands of men is the love that loves men even in their sin, that triumphs over all the evil they can inflict because it has overcome evil itself. Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on Calvary is the affirmation of freedom at its deepest level.

            Without God the mystery of the interrelationship of freedom and irresponsibility becomes insupportable. There is no grounding for the transcendent valuation of freedom nor any assurance of the durability of goodness in the conflict with evil. The liberal elevation of the inviolable self-direction of the person is based on a faith in its value and its vindication. It is a faith that can be intuited but not fully validated because it reaches into regions beyond our human ken. The inability of the liberal tradition and, correspondingly, of our contemporary expositors to give an account of their own con-victions is derived from this fundamental human limitation. We are participants within reality, not spectators above it. What we know can be gained only from the intimations available to us from within the participatory experience. It entails the meditative unfolding of the intuitions we already possess even before we begin the process of extrapolation toward and beyond the limits of our perspective.

            At its core the movement is sustained by faith, a sense of the goal that is inchoately present in our inquiry as the assurance of that which is sought. The Inquisitor cannot sustain that opening of the soul in tension toward what is not yet there because, as Alyosha blurts out, "he does not believe in God, that’s his secret!" At last, Ivan admits, "you have guessed it" (310). Without the love of God there is no infinite dimension to sustain the love of man. They are just contemptible finite creatures, never more than the sum of their attributes.

            The liberal faith is at its root the Christian faith that the value of a human being cannot be quantified, that by any measure that is applied the infinity of the person escapes the posited deter-minations. Freedom is that dimension of limitless openness in-tegrally connected with what makes it possible for a human being to transcend all finitude. It is what makes possible the movement toward the transcendent and for that reason must be preserved despite the tangible costs that on any finite scale of reckoning tend to outweigh it. That recognition is what has sustained liberal order from its inception. It is the animating conviction that does not need to be fully articulated in order to make possible the unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of human self direction despite the evident social and political risks. While when such acceptance has become opaque, its necessity no longer self-evident, then the need for explication is thrust upon us. A considerable part of the liberal tradition has historically been occupied with just such an effort of re-evocation.

            The faith remains Christian but the Christian sources are no longer dispositive. As a consequence much of the effort of rearti-culation has been directed toward the development of a consensus that implicitly evokes the Christian residue that remains when revelation is no longer publicly authoritative. That vibrant and creative series of re-evocations runs, we have seen, a wide gamut of formulations. Some, as in the case of Hegel, strain the limits of orthodoxy, others, as with Tocqueville, are content to stay close to the traditional religious forms. The great merit of Dostoevsky’s analysis is the clear demarcation of the breaking point. The secula-rization of the Christian faith in the transcendent value of freedom cannot survive the loss of faith in the participation in transcendent reality. By itself the liberal faith in the unconditional worth of the person, their free donation of self in love, cannot be sustained. It depends on the recognition that the person is always something more than we see before us. That which is not present must be allowed to govern that which is. Without a recognition of the human openness to the reality that is beyond all reality, the political expression in the preservation of inalienable rights becomes a hollow shell. It is a quaint historical relic to be swept aside as soon as Inquisitors with the necessary bluff and brusqueness come on the scene.

            Dostoevsky’s meditation establishes a limit beyond which the secularization of liberal politics cannot go. It is incompatible with dogmatic atheism. Once faith in transcendent reality is firmly re-jected, faith in the transcendence of human nature cannot survive. But beyond that there is a wide amplitude for liberal openness that stops short of pushing presuppositions to the limits.

            A means must be found of evoking that intermediate con-sensus on the dignity of the person which is yet surrounded by a penumbra of depths that are acknowledged but not precisely de-limited. The meditations we have followed in this chapter, cul-minating in Dostoevsky, remind us of the historic and philosophic nature of the liberal construction. It has always been anchored in transcendent appeal that by its very nature transcends any effort at its immanent determination. The problem of the incommensurable foundations of liberalism is not therefore a discovery of contem-porary deconstructionists. It is integral to its moral constitution from the start. The secret of the success of liberalism has always been its capacity to preserve that sense of connection with the depths that lie beyond articulation, by rendering their authority with suf-ficiently evocative force that the need for further explication was largely moot. Liberalism has always been a consensual symbolism that relies on unspoken recognition of a depth beyond the public definitions. All that has been possible here is to suggest some sense both of what those depths are and why they are in principle resistant to any definitive articulation.

            *This essay is excerpted from a forthcoming book on The Growth of the Liberal Soul which has been supported by grants from the Bradley and Earhart Foundations, as well as a sabbatical leave from The Catholic University of America.