The Conservative in Crisis: Notes on De Officiis

I.

Since August 1914 the world has seen much of war and revolution.  The course of events, the moral disorganization of individuals, the destruction of anticipation, and the consequent fading of optimism, all these constitute parts of the “crisis” of our time.  But surely, it is a crisis of individuals; it is the sense individuals have of the meaning of their existence, their status, their security, and the respect they may command from others.[1]

Existentialism offers a method of study of the crisis and the ideological accents of a time.  Yet, one does not have to accept the conclusions of any and all existentialists, for that, indeed, would be impossible.  Existentialism tries to see the crisis and the ways of meeting it in the individual as he watches it come toward him, perhaps to be mastered or perhaps to engulf the soul.  It imports into political observation some of the techniques of literary criticism, used ever since Aristotle to analyze the dramatic and the poetic.  What does a “social” crisis mean in any case?  Its meaning relates to individuals who compose society, and society exists only as a variation of relation between them.  Existentialism is a method first, and then come conclusions depending on the kind of existentialist philosophy.  Method, it is hoped, will pervade this essay, but the conclusions that will emerge will be in harmony with Christian existentialism, stressing, indeed, its relation to ancient moral theory.  To the Christian existentialist, the remedy for the crisis is the affirmation of the transcendental truths of life; the “truth” of politics is its meaning in general both this side of and beyond any point of separation, turning, or putting apart, that is, the krisis of the Greeks.  Or, as in medicine, it is the point at which either recovery or death is indicated for an immediate future.  But the atheistic existentialists, the other significant type, might say that beyond the affirmations of the will, the free will, or the decision as crisis, there is no truth for the individual to affirm.  What he affirms is his commitment; it can be a recognition of the “politics of death,” or the insistence on progress and the refusal to admit the existence of krisis. It has been said that a liberal has an answer for everything but death.

Now the existentialist insight into crisis is difficult for American intellectuals to appreciate.  For it would seem that American social criticism has lost a sense of the tragic grandeur and misery of man.  Emerson insisted on turning away from Europe in both institutions and space, and, indeed, from the reality of death, which in contrast any existentialist, Christian or otherwise, would understand and include in his calculations of crisis.  Tragedy seems always to catch Americans by surprise, though one thing both a European Christian and Communist could see is the reality of the tragic, as the existential, in the flow of any social system.[2]  The existentialist will see crisis as tragedy-to the persons who compose a social situation.  Crisis is a tragic encounter between the individual and an external power that impinges upon him; it is tragic because in the end it may mean the destruction, even a cataclysmic destruction, of the individual who is attempting to meet a situation.

The purpose of this essay is to search with existentialist method for the conservative intuition of crisis.  It assumes, likewise, that a Christian and Stoic existentialism can do much to explain the nature of the conservative when he faces a crisis that is personal but which involves the political order as well.  In the abstract or statistical sense, one might say that the conservative view of the crisis is one primarily of moral rather than of economic disorder.  The moral order may be cultural, but ultimately it is also providential in the sense that the capacities of human reason are divinely given.  The economic is in essence a symptom of something else.  All who have studied classical man have understood that at his intellectual best he understood moderation and restraint as the conserving, creative way of life.  He understood as well that passion may sweep through the individual, through many individuals, or a society, like a gale.  Hybrids, Ate, Nemesis and Catastrophe (the sudden turn of the plot) were no idle figures.  They were among the truths of individual and political science, just as moderation and restraint were part of the truth that one affirmed if virtue, justice, and nobility or generosity were sought.  The conservative knew the Furies and he also know the greatness of virtue; conservatism as a moral order was a commitment to moderation and rejection of hubris.

Our method of search could lead afield, from individual to individual, from specific existence to specific existence, but our choice has fallen on Marcus Tullius Cicero.  Here is variety of experience, from greatness to personal catastrophe, associated with profound changes in the order of political power.  He was a man of archaic mentality, as Toynbee might suggest.  Yet he was in flight from his political enemies; wealth was of no use, and there was no chance of the restoration of power to him.  At the end he acted as the educated classical man, having drawn on the best of Greece, whose intellectuality has been one of the consolations of gentle minds in every age since then.  One must not accuse Cicero of originality or of too great a rigor in logic and thought.  Sir Ernest Barker, whose preference for the Greek intellectual is as firm as that of Cicero, has said that “the difficulty about the Romans is that they didn’t think-at any rate originally….If I did get anything-for instance, from Cicero-I found, or suspected, that he had got it from a Greek, generally a Greek whose name began with a P, Polybius or Panaetius or Posidonius.  The only good fresh Latin stuff I could find was in the Roman lawyers, such as Gaius and Ulpian.”[3]  We may concede, however, that Cicero attained in his late and tragic moment a sense of the bios theoretikos.  It was not original with him, for it was a mature appreciation of the philosophy of the Greeks, including Aristotle, who is to some at least the father of Western conservatism.[4]  At such a moment, he attempted to blend together his perceptions of moderation and success in human and terrestrial virtue with his perception also of the ideal.  He moved with no contradiction in his mind between De Re Publica, the utopia, and De Officiis, the book of counsel.  He could not hope for the postponement of his own death, but with hope that his son might profit by his most solemn meditations, and with the hope that the restoration of Roman institutions might evade the troubling of liberty by tyranny.

No doubt we are dealing here with an ideal conservatism, and not merely with an adjustment to things as they are.  It should always be remembered that conservatism is a theory of change, often of restorative or reactionary change, and that at some times the conservative must be a revolutionary, just as much as the most inordinate, Jacobinical reformer.  But the conservative, as to any other adherent of a political view, must often protest or rebel against history.  History may teach him what should be as well as what must be in the vast and classifiable experiences of the individual.  Indeed, the sense of encounter and commitment that one must have in his own ontological effort would, it is assumed, be generally hostile to the historical situation.  The effort of the day is directed toward tomorrow.  Cicero, the Stoic and Roman conservative, became a model for the Christian conservative of subsequent times, but not for the liberal or revolutionary who lives beyond the historical situation in his utopia.

II.

Classical and Christian man has usually had a sense of engagement and encounter both in regard to himself as a single creature and in regard to the aggregate of society.  Whatever happened he had his choices to make, even if it meant as with Socrates and Cicero, to offer oneself cheerfully to the executioner.  Engagement or commitment meant his responsibility to behave as a man ought to behave in the light of a moral order.  There was a moral order-a set of norms in reasonable discourse that stood over against the realities of the world and enabled the engaged individual to judge them.  When the great crisis came there was no relativism, no pragmatism trying to solve problems it could hardly even state; rather when death-say from the axe of the tyrant-became the vast existential sign, the individual was instructed in the virtues and the duties of a man. Not even the tyrant could deny to a man his right to courage in the face of doom.  Classical and Christian man may not have had a theory of liberal progress, yet he could discourse with the dignity of man until the resolution of crisis.

By a paradoxical result, it is, indeed, the doctrine of progress that makes the problematic of our crisis all the worse for contemporary men.  For progress has been based on a series of propositions that cannot be adjusted to crisis.  The goodness of human nature-in its meaning for Godwin and Paine, for example-can know no crisis save only of the moment; the harmony of interest makes the engineering concept of life plausible, since it involves only the calculation of manageable stresses; and science easily outruns itself by assuming a universal application beyond the known facts or the empirical data.  Here, then, the liberal has no explanation for crisis, for he has gambled historically on the undeniable stream of progress.  He has substituted science for moral obligation, even though the method of science itself might not justify it.

Modern man, like classical man, faces his crisis, and in political engagement a comparison is essential between them.  In the end, it is a comparison of intellectuals over widely separated intervals of time and between remote situations.  But the problem is the existential character of man and the moral duty or lack of it that rests upon him.  The progressive man who has lost his “progress” must face the question of what his existence means: even a progressive man is driven back finally to the ontological question which came so easily and naturally to the classical man and the Christian.  He must decide what he is, and whether there is anything in him that supervenes the grimness of the day.  Conditioned reflex, a syndrome in justification of pains and pleasures, matter endowed with consciousness-all this on one side, standing over against the demand for knowledge of the soul, and the existential urge toward the Creator, and unequivocal recognition of moral duty.  Secular progress alone withers in time of crisis, while under those conditions moral duty grows, the eternal order becomes more real, and humankind stands above the contingencies of disaster.  The dignity of man is affirmed on the basis of a moral order, even though, with Virgil: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Here are tears for human things and mortal woes touch the heart].

In this contrast of ontological reaction, one senses the application of ideology.  The political program is at stake as it encroaches on the person, and the political philosophy that is being lived at the core of the individual.  Modern man, intellectual man, is one who is able to formulate a statement of “progressive pathos” in the midst of crisis.  Against him the conservative of the ancient world stands forth in his affirmation of a moral order.  It is an order that retains meaning for the person though all political expectation is gone, and one writes or speaks furiously his testament of moral stamina against the moment when the soldier who obeys the tyrant will bring him down with the sword.  Then the proscription has been effected, or administrative efficiency has been attained, yet at the same moment perhaps one of the great conservative heroes of the “resistance” has been generated.  Proscription cannot destroy the moral nature of a man, and moral duty obeyed shines brighter than the sword of the servant of a retrogressive regime.  The classical conservative could understand suffering and the greatness of its value to man.  Yet the modern man can see at times no great evil than pain: it can never be understood.

            III.

The liberal never quite formulates a powerful vision of the meaning and the character of personal existence.  Yet those of the classical world who inquired ontologically could see this as the central issue: how the individual knows his own nature, how he makes choices by the use of his reason, and how he feeds his moral energy against the rudeness of the school of life.  For the individual there is, let us say, always the tragedy at the end, if one calls to mind the peripeteia of human living-the encroachment of tragedy upon aspiration, and the extinction of human dream and hope with the triumph of death.

Epic poetry has provided us with the substance of this contrast, and it will always be alive in succeeding generations of the literate mind.  Greek myth is in a sense the poetry of personal tragedy-of man and of the gods.  But if it is the poetry of the personal, it is also the discovery of the drama of a society.  There is no aversion to fellowmen, and the association between men and the gods is varied, close, and oftentimes filial.  The poetry of personal tragedy is thus no traitor to social life, or even to republican empire, for to it both gods and men contribute their interest, their effort, and their abilities.[5]  The vision of the texture of being is in the great poetries, especially the epic contributions of the masters, though by its nature such poetry is necessarily rooted in the mythology that preceded the mature religious consciousness.  But the vision reaches its full brilliance in Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, to name but a few and to leave undiscussed the power of the Psalmist.

We must set off the lagging liberal vision of life against the classical personal tragedy as in Cicero, the philosopher in his despair and the public figure at the height of the energy of his personality.  And against both one may set the Christian contrast which leads us back to the problem of the present.

It was to the Stoics that Cicero turned for his discourse on moral duty.  At the outset of the De Officiis, he says to his son, Marcus: “…my philosophy is not very different from that of the Peripatetics (for both they and I claim to be followers of Socrates and Plato).”[6]  But the teaching of moral duty, of a practical, active, and energetic code of ethics “is the peculiar right of the Stoics, the Academicians, and Peripatetics.”  And in this work-his last one and the one he loved the most-he decided to follow chiefly the Stoics.[7]  For here there is a combination of sound philosophy and practical activity that an orator, writer, and philosopher appreciated, even as the last hours of his life came perceptibly closer.  Much of what he said came from Panaetius of Rhodes.  The order of virtue-of justice and moderation that gave meaning to the individual and to the classical republic of virtue-was an order about which an individual could do something, for he could live it and defend it.  Epictetus was to remark in his Discourses that the things outside the will are to the individual neither good nor bad; one may be confident in that which is beyond the will, but cautious, perhaps even reasonable and noble in character, toward that which is within our power.  So Cicero could face death with confidence, but might he not also have shown caution at the fear of death?

A Christian may say that the area of Stoic responsibility has been narrowed by the creation of a great zone of indifference standing outside the moral order, or the order of moral duties.  Does not mythology instruct us that Helen was able to return to her husband, Menelaus, because she had only yielded to the plans of Venus?  A greater power than she was involved, and her dereliction that caused the Trojan War did not involve her will and her moral responsibility.  Christians would say otherwise, for though the Eternal stands always and though it is not capricious as the gods of the Greeks, the individual is capricious, and he must assume his responsibility-even Helen-for his participation in the divine order. Here is the choice of a discipline that makes us free.  Virgil might see the dignity of man, the noble soul sometimes even more commendable than the wrath, the whimsy, or the lack of understanding of the gods.  But to Dante, the Christian, there was order and the eternal order was not capricious; it was not to be disturbed by man.  “Therefore, it is clear,” said Dante, “that man’s basic capacity is to have a potentiality or power for being intellectual….This intellectual power, of which I am speaking, is directed not only toward universals or species, but also by a sort of extension toward particulars….I distinguish between matters of action which are governed by political prudence, and matters of production which are governed by the arts; but all of them are extensions of theoretical intellect, which is the best function for which the Primal Goodness brought mankind into being.”[8]  Dante, again, has offered us a conception of being, of the purpose of existence, just as Cicero and the Stoics.  And as Cicero produced his treatise on moral duty as he faced the final and greatest disaster of all, so Dante may also be considered facing crisis, in part personal, but also, as with Cicero, social and political in the extreme.

However, both the Stoic and the Christian can envision the existential crisis as a process by which the individual is peeled away from associations and groups-where the liberal will refuse even to imagine him.  Both Stoic and Christian might, in modern terms, say there is a moment in political life when the interest group or the group organization in general ceases to be the heart of the political process.  At such a moment one might say the important thing is to resist the tyrant.  However, the individual must do it, each individual, as a participant in an order of moral duty.  Both Stoic and Christian might say: we must give an example, an individual example.  Yet the effort of the Stoic might be more personal, more individual, stressing the nobility of the character of the man himself.  The Christian would be, almost inevitably as a member in the order of charity and suffering, theoretically more selfless, less interested in his own nobility and moderation of character, and more in the restoration of an objective order of moral duty.[9]  He might join the Stoic in a noble indifference to wealth or honor, provided the common good of the city is served.  Both Stoic and Christian might strive for self-perfection in the performance of moral duty, and both might urge no withdrawal from service to the community.  Both, indeed, may see inspiration in the Somnium Scipionis [Dream of Scipio], where great rewards in the afterlife are given to those who served their republic.  Yet one must beware of ambition for wealth, and ambition for glory “for it robs us of liberty, and in defense of liberty a high-souled man should stake everything.”[10]  However, the Christian inevitably should find himself more humble and more devoted to service of the neighbor than the Stoic, however similar the defense of moral duty may be in both.  Of course, the foundations of moral duty are different-as in the difference between the conceptions of justice in Cicero and St. Augustine.  In the end, the Christian must struggle to narrow the zone of indifference beyond the will, which the Stoic sets up.  The Christian may well struggle in his morality to affect, more than the Stoic, the outward circumstances of life.

IV.

A vision of the purpose of life involves a philosophy of history when the vision is an effort to meet a crisis.  Crisis questions meaning, and if it is severe it denies meaning.  Stoics might assume some cyclical movement in the affairs of men, for example, in the transmutations of government.  But a Christian had to reject the cyclical explanation of crisis, just as St. Augustine, for Christ could not be reborn every few thousand years.  Plato might consider a vast cyclical conception in his legend of Atlantis, or Polybius might explain the rise and fall of civilizations in the manner of a regularized or formalized sequence of events.  Stoics like Cicero might seek some rational moral order that could explain the courses of time; history, thus, would truly become a work of reason, a theatre for the triumph of moral obligation, and the parade of noble, if somewhat futile, characters.  Finally, the foundation of Christian historicism for modern times is the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, who drew upon Hellenic and Aristotelian thought in order to prove through metaphysics the existence of God.  Yet at the same time a rational psychology could provide one with an existential insight into man.  Such a philosophy of human nature operating in time could accept the truth of Christianity as a supernatural remedy for the historical weakening of human nature through the original fall.[11]

In forceful contrast, the liberal philosophy of history is a secular theodicy.  One of the oddities of our age is the strange respectability of optimistic views, almost any optimistic views, and the affirmation of a materialistic philosophy.  At least it means the denial of a supernatural world, without which Christianity is meaningless. It has meant as well the rejection of a moral order, discovered by reason-perhaps even a Peripatetic reason-which is obligatory on men in their daily behavior.  The age of optimism began in the seventeenth century and it has lasted well into the twentieth.  It has involved a reinterpretation of the duty of the Christian, combined with the idea that science and technology have been on the march with great swiftness, and that social change or reform for the betterment of the world was possible, even the duty of the conscience.  Indeed, the secular theodicy seemed to rely on the previous affirmation of the Christian conscience and its acceptance of the “theistic theodicy.”  To the Christian the theodicy, either of this world or the next, is always a problem of the eschaton; but it is clear that, for the Christian, there is no room for the secular theodicy of the liberals.  Nor could the Stoic with his emphasis on the moral duty and perfection of the individual see the pertinence of an aggregate doctrine of social progress.

Yet even before Leibnitz the combination of ideas was clear: conscience, providence, and tranquillity in the face of events, for the world was the best possible.  Antoine Alphonse De Sarasa, S.J., proposed in the seventeenth century a theodicy-that this is the best possible of worlds.  One should accept the events of the world as the work of providence, even though things seem to be getting worse, and in the face of death one must seek spiritual consolation.  Whoever, therefore, is content with the trend of events, who has a good conscience, and who stands through faith in close union with God, is always filled with happiness, and even death is no trouble to his calm.  Lord Acton derived some of his emphasis on conscience from Sarasa, and Acton insisted that Sarasa introduced into Europe the idea of the infallible conscience.  To Acton, conscience-and its rights-was the basis of freedom.  No doubt one should consider here the rights of the good conscience, though Sarasa placed strong emphasis on the anguished conscience.  Here is a fact that might interest the existentialist mind of our time.[12]

If in the liberal scheme one leaves out the supernatural end of man, it can be said still that we can live in the world with good conscience because it is a world that is always improving.  Indeed, belief in improvement has been regarded, it would seem, as a cause itself of improvement.  The doctrine of progress, as it was finally formulated in the eighteenth century, is a secular extension of the Christian theodicy, and it gave men cause for joy.  It was joy, however, in the achievements of society rather than in the moral perfection of the individual; it was joy in the impersonal, almost glacial trend of man toward happiness.  The mortal sin for the secularist and materialist came to be a lack of faith in progress, a lack of optimism in the spirit of each man in the world, and a belief that the setback experienced by a society could be more than temporary.  Liberalism thus eventuates in minimizing the crisis because of the inevitability of progress.  Linear progression in history-as expressed by John Stuart Mill and his inspirer Auguste Comte-is fundamental.  It moves, though it may move slowly or even stop for a time, but it will march again.  Of such is the substance of history.  In it there can be no real or permanent crisis, no progress other than material, and the heroic moral achievements of the Christian and the Stoic are all but meaningless.  Such achievements are but illusion as to the significance of existence.[13]

V.

What has been written so far is but prolegomena to considering the conservative intellectual as he may face crisis.  In Cicero, as conservative in type, the crisis involved his very existence and it ended with his death by Antony’s swordsmen.  As he waited, he could see no progress in society, for there was only disintegration of the foundations of an old civil order.  But the individual makes progress: drawing heavily from Stoic analysis, Cicero composed his treatise on moral duty in the form of a letter to his son Marcus.  And the individual might make progress as order crumbled around him.  No longer, as in the Catalinian conspiracy, could his eloquence and his deeds save the state and the world of order, organization, and hierarchy it represented.  However, there are techniques to secure order and moderation in either the individual or the state.[14]  One may adhere to the doctrine of the mean and hold his convictions without rancor-whatever may be the political circumstances of the moment.

To Cicero, either as the successful public man or the proscribed fugitive, order was his existential problem.  The conservative, we might say, has his chief moral duty in his commitment to order, and the things that may be included in it.  Crisis is the atrophy of the moral sense; it is the decline of personal honor, which is then reflected in the larger theatres of political behavior.  The man who would escape from crisis accepts moral obligation, no matter what may be his personal situation.  Propriety and moderation spring from his conception of himself in a whole cosmos.[15]  Cicero could see that as the general social crisis became darker, moral duty for each individual-or at the very least for oneself-must be more clear.  Few philosophers have been as devoted to the explanation of the nature of a man through moral duty as the Stoics, and in this the Stoics had a primary interest.  Thus, in the sense of the individual, the deepening crisis brought an increasing precision in right and duty.  “Orderliness of conduct and seasonableness of occasion” were the objectives toward which Cicero turned.  If order and season are destroyed, the very possibility of virtuous action is gone.  As moderation in individuals faded, there was then the rise of the despot in Rome.[16]

Order is clearly both in the individual and the cosmos.  It is in society as well as in the parts of society.  The individual has a moral duty to preserve order-moderation or propriety, for example-in both himself and his social world.  Hence, the great stress laid by Cicero on the importance of the “social”; in part the crisis was the failure of the social.  In so far as this was true, Cicero could stress the practical qualities of Stoic ethics, for it was an ethic to be applied in everyday life.  It was, further, an ethic that insisted on political participation; it was contrary to moral duty to be drawn away from the active life by study, or to live exclusively the life of the scholar and philosopher.[17]  But it was equally immoral to be drawn completely away from study by the active life.  For the glory of virtue is activity.  In crisis, communication in society begins to fail.  Cicero could no longer speak to the state in a language the rulers could understand.  To himself, he could still speak in the language of philosophy.  In his philosophical anthropology he could not lose his own dignity, no matter how profoundly the state he tried to save was disintegrating.  He was proud of his career; he stood above the disaster of the times.  Yet in writing the De Officiis to his son he made no mention of the disaster that overshadowed him.[18]  When one struggles, as Cicero did, to validate his own existence, the conservative intellectual has realized, as eventually any conservative must, that while we may abolish virtue, we cannot destroy villainy.  The evil of the “public” sweeps back and objectively engulfs the individual.  All that is left is the rational exercise of the soul toward virtue.  This is the “science” that Cicero would teach his son, and his fellow countrymen by his writing.

The modern man of the crisis should be able to understand Cicero.  He should be able to take the De Officiis in its setting and understand better his own critical moment.  Yet there may be differences.  The modern man, like Cicero, is trying to escape from imperfection and loneliness; he inquires into the meaning of his being, and he realizes his choices are sometimes eternal in their quality.  Cicero tried to escape from the imperfections within him by greatness-even pride and vanity-in the service of the state.  He seems to have sought to bury himself in the service of society.  Service to society was part of the valid ethical system he accepted.  Though the trials and disappointments of public life were perhaps overwhelming even before the final stages of his life, he could still return to Scipio’s Dream and the thought of reward in the afterlife for those who served the respublica well.

Our modern man in his existential storm may say “I choose,” but few perhaps can say in the age of atheistic humanism “I believe.”[19]  The modern may engage himself in a political cause, such as Communism, or merely for the material improvement of the life of man, but that commitment is relative, contingent, or necessary.  He may love the gods of Greece, but believe in no gods at all.  This is not the acceptance in good faith of moral obligation as the answer to crisis.  Here, then, is the difference between the Ciceronic crisis and that of contemporary man.  Cicero could regard himself as a son of the Greek philosophical leaders of his day; he could be given a hero’s welcome in Greek cities during his exile; and he could say that he had taught the Romans the truth of individual and social life.  The modern will accept neither the call of his God for a return to the faith, nor the principle that philosophy can give him an abiding answer.  Indeed, order to the modern inquirer is a fiction; it is perhaps even simply an idea in a kind of Hegelian or Marxian sense-an idea embodied in the rationality of the particular.[20]  But order was no fiction to Cicero.  The reason perceived it and gave it system, though order was a reality outside of the individual.  It was an order of valid moral obligation, and it could, therefore, be a monitor and a judge of events.  The “order” justified the individual before history.  Communication might be timeless, even though Cicero failed with his son for a time and with the rulers of the commonwealth who had excluded him from the things he loved most.

In Cicero’s soul the external symbols of the loss of order were the destruction of the republic and the rise of tyranny.  His own suffering was but a fact correlative with the larger disorder, yet surely the disorder in his own existence was bound organically into the disorder of the political cosmos, the violation of moral duty, and the contempt of men generally for the law of nature.  “And so in Rome only the walls of her houses remain standing-and even they wait now in fear of the most unspeakable crimes-but our republic we have lost forever (remvero publicam penitus amisimus).”[21]  Thus, “kept by force of armed treason away from practical politics and from my practice at the bar, I am now leading a life of leisure.  For that reason I have left the city and, wandering the country from place to place, I am often alone.”[22]  Tyranny had come, and all men, it would seem, must make a decision that would penetrate the core of their being: either they must accept the corruption of the time, or, adhering to the tradition of the disappearing world, they may be called upon to accept death as a gentleman-as Cicero did-or to kill the tyrant if there should be an opportunity.

Finally, thus, the crisis of existence of the individual and the cosmos blend.  There is really no difference in principle between the consequences to the individual and to society, for society is individuals in relation.  There is no difference between the moral duty of the individual and the moral duty of anyone in the face of the fall of the moderate and balanced republic and the rise of corruption and tyranny.  It was a noble deed for a Roman to kill a tyrant, as it had been a noble deed for a Greek patriot.  Tyrannicide to the Romans was held to be the most noble of deeds.[23]  The darker shadow remains: even though the tyrant might be slain-and properly so-the republic would not be restored.  Hence, the disorder was too profound to be cured.  What, then, for the individual like Cicero?  He would, in Stoic fashion, affirm moral duty for himself, whatever might be the condition of the world around him.  He would declare order in his own soul, though he might travel just ahead of the executioner.

There is a difference, then, between killing the tyrant and restoring the republic, which is the order of reason and virtue.  Tension might exist at these points or poles of catastrophe.  But over against them both the individual must decide his role beyond a successful encounter with disorder in his own soul.  If one turns against the tyrant primarily, he may be committed to use the dagger on lawless rulers.  Yet a man like Cicero-left out of the conspiracy against Caesar as unstable or unreliable-was clearly less designed in his nature for the dagger than for the pen and the scroll.  In this judgment Brutus and his followers were no doubt wise, and Cicero himself could hardly disagree, however much he might regard Caesar as mad and lawless with ambition.  Yet, in turning from the stroke of the tyrannomach to writing, he also of necessity turned to the dream of restoration.  He turned to the vision of another republic in which the old one would live again in law and liberty.  It is this vision of liberty that Cicero bequeathed to many future generations; for he formulated the meaning of the republican ideal for others who resisted the tyrants of other times, such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Of Caesar he said: “Our tyrant deserved his death for having made an exception of the one thing that was the blackest crime of all….Behold, here you have a man who was ambitious to be king of the Roman people and master of the whole world; and he achieved it.  The man who maintains that such an ambition is morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression glorious.”[24]

But the dream of liberty grounded in the political moderation of the faded republic means that even in death we assert the terrestrial future.  If moral duty means anything it means this.  Caesar would destroy the historic constitution, just as Antony would in his turn.  The republic of the past was also the model for the republic of the future; as a mixed constitution, such as the Greeks had described, it was the symbol of order and law in the universe and in each particular soul which adhered to liberty.  It was the model from the political law of nature, a natural constitutional law, and a participant in the Great Chain of Being.  Had Cicero been a Christian, he might have written like Richard Hooker: “…God hath disposed all laws, each as in nature, so in degree distinct from other….Of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both Angels and men and creatures of what condition so ever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.”[25]  The individual must have the law within him as it is in the Great Regiment of the World.  He is separated from the social order in degree and kind, but the mere sense of an eternal order of justice and moderation in the state makes it possible to die for a social balance, as Cicero did.

VI.

From the desperate struggles of Roman moral and political life, the existential insight into the spirit of the conservative intellectual is clear.  It is the defense of a moral order.  When one considers the nature of the moral order that is implied, the gap between the classical and the modern is bridged.  Just as St. Thomas could bring Aristotle and Christian philosophy together, so Cicero helped to bring the Greek Stoic into association with the  Romans.  The answer to crisis is and has been the explication of a moral order; the defense, not of a tradition, but the means by which a tradition is judged.  It can never be the liberalism of disintegration, which stresses material and technical progress.  The Christian, like the Stoic, knows that moral struggle is of the essence of human life.  Though one may seek the community as an escape from personal anguish, the Christian knows, as the Stoic knew, that victory, the attainment of a complete fellowship among men terrestrially, is impossible.  A victory for the Christian is, first of all, within, just as it was to the classical man of noble aspiration.  The teachers of Cicero and those to whom Cicero was a teacher might say that the justification of a moral order is not its victory over a whole society, but its internal justification in the law of nature.[26]

Without a moral order the community is a place of boredom and despair; anomie grips the soul of the uprooted man.  Public opinion becomes an aimless force, a kind of revolt of the masses, as Ortega might say.  Without a moral order, loyalty to the community can hardly be demanded either of intellectuals or of ordinary citizens; tradition fades and treason can become a way of life, as Cicero insisted was the case in Rome as tyranny became a permanent political form.  Yet, in the boredom one may face where no “offices” or moral duties are affirmed, both classical and modern man can see no significance in loyalty to one’s own country.  Sometimes one senses that Cicero felt this to be the highest of the moral duties of men.  No one in such conditions can be an advocate of the power of the people-of the popularity of the unscrupulous and a majority rule without the moral context of a Ciceronic community.  A community-for here is no lonely crowd-as Cicero said in De Re Publica: “a commonwealth is the property of a people.  But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.”[27]

Through the centuries Cicero’s De Officiis have been read by succeeding generations, and it has a relation to modern man were he disposed to indulge in ethical and moral inquiry.  At the end of De Officiis, Cicero denounces Epicureanism and the doctrine that good and evil are pleasure and pain.  Yet, it is just here that modern man begins, and, as Cicero might say again: “Justice totters or rather, I should say, lies prostrate; so also with all those virtues which are discernible in social life and the fellowship of human society.”[28]  The widespread modern tyranny is hardly different.  The modern man often does not wish to admit that the crisis in progress has occurred at all, and if the crisis is denied it is clear that the moral issue proposed by Cicero, as he faced his personal encounter, need not be raised in our time.  The Christian, as well as the classic Stoic, may read the Offices; it is a turn toward a moral existentialism in an effort to meet the disintegration of the day.  Philosophy stands firm but the crisis is transitional, or the evolution to the new is transitional.  The moral order stands objectively outside of the mind, as the Peripatetics might insist.  Reason orders it, but reason does not create it, nor, in a Platonic sense, would it merely observe it.  Stoic and Christian-then and now-could say that education in moral virtues and in the acceptance of duty is the proper manner for human effort to meet the disintegration of liberalism.  A moral affirmation is a higher form of realism.  So Cicero at least spoke to his son.

Disintegration is no new thing in human experience, either in individuals or in social organizations.  But there will be little agreement as to why it comes.  The cause of the crisis has been a matter of high political philosophy.  Hobbes could point in the Leviathan to the internal diseases of a commonwealth as the causes that led to its destruction.  These diseases were in effect the liberties and rights of men against the sovereign.  If the sovereign lacked power, the revolutions of states, on the model of the revolutions of the stars, might rudely interpose themselves against the calm of a secured public order.  Crisis here was a result of internal, self-destructive tendencies, which Hobbes asserted were liberties and limitations on power, but which Madison in The Federalist could see as the growth of unbalanced group pressure.  Cicero saw disintegration in the disappearance of moral standards in individuals who were in public life.  Individuals, society, the republican order, and the proper administration of the law could be saved by a philosophy of moral duty.[29]

Such an analysis could never be accepted by the positivistic mind, the mind of determinism, of inevitable historical trends, of a science of society, or by those who predict dire things for America.  Marxians say time is on their side, and that their “scientific Providence” cannot fail.  Thus, there is coming to us-to America-a revolutionary crisis and the end of world capitalism.  Yet not only Marxians in or out of Russia believe this of America, but many European intellectuals who are ashamed of their bourgeois origin.[30]  The death of the Rosenbergs, our assisting in the ousting of Communists in Guatemala, our policies in the Far East, and other episodes, may be cited by European journals, such as Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, or the more moderate and Christian Esprit, to show the growing crisis of American life.  Here, then, the burden on the American conservative rests more heavily than one might think.

Our conservatives must, indeed, be somewhat like Cicero as he moved, in his last days, from place to place.  The conservative must present again the principle of moral duty, as it was presented to a failing classical society by the Stoics.  Conservatism is the defense of a moral order in its final and existential meaning.  In this we should be like Cicero, perhaps also with his indecision, and his frustrated hopes.  Plutarch described Cicero’s indecision, but in the end he faced his murderers with Stoic courage.  His enemies said he often chose expediency rather than the moral duty he so highly praised.  In the end he canceled, however, all his hesitations.  Cicero made enemies by his sarcasm and his personal jesting.  Thus he was at times like the twentieth-century liberal, for in the bitter jest one is not bothered with facts.  Cicero showed too great an intellectual vanity and too great a search for distinction.  Yet Plutarch could say: “And at Rome, when he was created consul in name, but indeed received sovereign and dictatorial authority against Cataline and his conspirators, he attested the truth of Plato’s prediction, that then the miseries of states would be at an end when, by a happy fortune, supreme power, wisdom, and justice should be united into one.”  “Finally, Cicero’s death excites our pity.”[31]

Notes

[1]Editor’s Note: Francis Graham Wilson (1901-1976) was an eminent political scientist, and a central figure in the postwar American conservative intellectual movement.  Wilson was also a correspondent of Eric Voegelin’s for the majority of his life.  Since Wilson’s death in 1976, four new or revised volumes of his scholarship have appeared as part of Transaction/Routledge’s ongoing series devoted to introducing Wilson to a new generation of scholars.  These volumes include a new edition of The Case for Conservatism (1990); Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (2001), a collection of Wilson’s published and unpublished scholarly articles; Order and Legitimacy (2004), a revised and extended version of his earlier work on Spanish political thought; and, a new edition of A Theory of Public Opinion (2013), Wilson’s seminal refutation of the behavioral ascendency in the study of politics.  This essay was discovered by Dr. H. Lee Cheek, Jr., among Wilson’s unpublished papers, and is included in Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (Transaction, 2001; republished, Routledge, 2017), pp. 129-147).

[2]L. L. Matthias, Autopsie des États-Unies, trans. from the German (Paris, 1955), pp. 130-131.

[3]Ernest Barker, “Elections in the Ancient World,” Diogenes, No. 8 (Autumn 1954), p. 10.

[4]Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952; rprt. Univ. of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 64ff.  See also Jesús F. Fueyo, “Eric Voegelin y su Reconstrucción de la Ciencia Política,” Revista de Estudiôs Políticos, No. 79 (January-February 1955), pp. 67 ff., and especially p. 116.  Truth, transcendental truth, and political science, meet on a common plane.  Historically, conservatism asserts the existence of truth, not merely of knowledge; the science of politics is a science of truth, which is in nature conservative of justice in society.

[5]Cicero, De Officiis, trans. by Walter Miller (Loeb Classical Library, 1913), I, ix, 29 [hereafter cited as De Officiis].

[6]Ibid., I, i, 2.

[7]Ibid., I, ii, 6.

[8]De Monarchia, I, iii.

[9]Cf. Ernest von Solomon, “The Silent Revolt,” Confluence, Vol. III (September 1954), pp. 298-299.  The author speaks of behavior motivated by “ethical categories” as against “bankrupt interest-groups.”

[10]De Officiis, I, xx, 66 and 68.

[11]Umberto A. Padovani, “Storicismo Teologico-Agostiniano e Storicismo Filosofico-Hegeliano,” Humanitas, Vol. IX (October-November 1954), p. 966.

[12]Antoine Alphonse De Sarasa, S. J., L’Art de se Tranquiliser dans Tous les Événements de la Vie, tiré du Latin (Strasbourg, 1752).  Sarasa lived from 1618 to 1667.

[13]On December 6, 1951, George Santayana wrote to Mercedes Escalera: “What I like most, and what most interests me now, is history, and today’s historians are excellent.  They are not smooth-talking and false like the liberals, but instead scientific and precise in the work they undertake.” (Estudios Americanos, Vol. VII [October 1954], p. 347).

[14]De Officiis, I, xxv, 88ff.

[15]Ibid., I, xxxiv, 125ff.

[16]Ibid., II, i, 2.

[17]Ibid., I, vi.

[18]Ibid., I, i.

[19]Cf. Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley (New York: New American Library, 1950).

[20]See Charles N. R. McCoy, “The Logical and the Real in Political Theory: Plato, Aristotle, and Marx,” American Political Science Review, Vol. XLVIII (December 1954), pp. 1058 ff.

[21]De Officiis, II, viii, 29.

[22]Ibid., III, ii, 1.

[23]Ibid., III, iv, 19.

[24]Ibid., III, xxi, 83.

[25]Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1592, 1594), Book One, XVI, pp. 7-8.

[26]Henry Duméry has said: “….apostleship and evangelization are not conquests, but life testimonies, preachings by attitude, examples of devotion, and not conversion techniques,” in “La Tentation de Faire du Bein [The Temptation to Do Good],” Esprit, Vol. 23 (January 1955), p. 34.

[27]De Re Publica, De Legibus, trans. C. W. Keyes (Loeb Classical Library, 1928), I, xxv, 39.

[28]De Officiis, III, xxxiii, 118.

[29]One of Cicero’s examples of moral decay would seem quaint, indeed, to the modern utilitarian or pragmatist.  He considered it a shame that states enjoying the rights of Roman citizenship should need a patron to protect their interests in the Roman capital (De Officiis, III, xviii, 74a).

[30]Charles A. Micaud, “French Intellectuals and Communism,” Social Research, Vol. XXI (Autumn 1954), p. 290.

[31]Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden (Modern Library), pp. 1071-1072.

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