22
PARTISAN REVIEW
God's handiwork. The origin of a thing may have a bearing upon
its nature. But the value of a thing cannot be inferred from its
origin. It is not putative original nature but what emerges in the
course of developing nature which is relevant to normative judg–
ment. To judge people not by their origins, for which they are
not responsible, but by their efforts, fruits, and achievements is
a sound democratic maxim.*
(2) There is little warrant for the view that the theological
dogmas of Hebraic-Christianity are the historical source of modern
democracy. Judaism contenanced slavery while Christianity never
condemned it in principle. The Church was one of the mainstays
of feudalism; until its real-estate holdings were raided by absolute
monarchs, it furnished the chief theoretical justification of the
divine right of kings. Ideologically, modern democratic theory
owes more to Stoic philosophy and Roman law than to Christian
Dogma.
Religious institutions based on supernatural dogmas tend
towards theocracy. Priesthoods have often been hereditary, and
when not tightly closed corporations, rarely subject to democratic
influences.
It
has sometimes been urged as a mitigating feature of
the hierarchical, authoritarian structure of the Church that "a
peasant might become a Pope." True, but so can an Austrian
housepainter or the son of a Georgian cobbler become a Dictator.
Does that alter the character of totalitarianism?
(3) We are
ask~d
to accept religious dogmas as true mainly
on the grounds of their effectiveness in combatting Hitlerism.
This in turn rests, as we have seen, upon the notion that Fascism
is the consequence not of economic conditions, nationalist tradi–
tion, and disastrous political policies inside Germany and out,
but of the spread of positivism, secularism, and humanism. Why
Fascism should then have arisen in such strongly religious and
metaphysical countries as Italy and Germany and not in such
scandalously heretical and positivistic countries as England and
America, is something that the neo-Thomists and their fellow–
travellers do not explain.
None of the specific proposals of social reform that issue
from religious conclaves, or even the principles sometimes offered
*For a more detailed refutation of the attempts to ground democracy upon
theological and metaphysical foundations,
cf.
"The Philosophical Presuppositions of
Democracy,"
Ethics,
April, 1942, pp. 275-296.
