Reading Josef Pieper’s The Four Cardinal Virtues, I was (pleasantly) surprised by his brief, yet suggestive, comments on patriotism. They occur in a chapter on “The Limits of Justice.”1 Pieper, good Thomist that he is, is commenting on the Angelic Doctor’s treatment of religio and pietas in connection to the cardinal virtue of justice. Justice requires giving to each what is owed; “religion” denotes the human attempt to be just toward God; but man, because he is infinitely indebted to God, can never repay in full this debt. Pieper says that this helps explain not only the “excesses of sacrificial offerings such as self-annihilation, killing, burning,” but also “the extravagance inherent in religious acts,” in man’s proper relation to God:
In certain fundamental relations, for example in man’s relation to God, the equality that properly belongs to the concept of justice, that is, equality between debt and payment, cannot be achieved. Therefore, the one who is in debt strives to pay back whatever is in his power to remit (106–107).
As Pieper tells us, pietas also “depends on something being due a person which of its very nature cannot be fully repaid” (107). This is clear enough in the child’s relation to his parents, and Pieper, as he writes, does not see the need for much throat-clearing on this topic. (Perhaps he would spend more time winding up to this point about parents if he were writing today!) But he does clear his throat quite a bit when he turns to the other manifestation of pietas discussion by St. Thomas: the (never-fully-repayable) debt one owes to his country, what we commonly call patriotism.
I was expecting some throat-clearing about patriotism. Pieper is, after all, not only a Thomist; he is also a German who lived through Nazism, a regime that has barely entered the rear-view mirror in 1955, when Pieper writes the chapter on justice.
But I was not expecting the way in which Pieper clear his throat as he broaches this topic. Here is the passage in question:
In speaking of piety, Thomas does not confine himself to the relation between parent and child; he includes man’s relation to his country as well. “Man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore, just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country” [Summa Theologiae II–II.101.1].
Here we meet with a considerable difficulty. No matter how wide the scope within which we comprise our obligations to our people—counting as goods the language with its inexhaustible treasure of wisdom; the protection afforded by law and order; the participation in whatever can be thought of as the “common good” of a people—yet it remains supremely difficult to accept the thought that it belongs to the image of full and true humanity “to show reverence to one’s country,” cultum exhibere patriae.
And as we realize, on further thought, that this difficulty cannot be overcome simply by resolution, that what is implied here goes infinitely beyond the irreverence or the ill-will or the illoyalty of the individual, we begin to measure the extent of the deterioration in the ideal image of man and man’s communal life in Western civilization (108–109).
Reading this passage, I was expecting Pieper to say that the “considerable difficulty” involved in appreciating Thomas on patriotic piety had something to do with the pall that Nazism, or some other recent ideology, or the 20th century more generally, had cast over love of one’s own country. But he does not. Instead, he notes some of the great goods we receive from our country,2 and then (employing passive, impersonal construction) says this is, for some reason, a hard pill for us to swallow.
Why, exactly—even after we have been reminded that we owe to our country (1) our native tongue and thus our access to wisdom, (2) security, and (3) the very possibility of participating in the cultural, national, political common good—is it still “supremely difficult to accept the thought that it belongs to the image of full and true humanity ‘to show reverence to one’s country’”?
For whom is this “supremely difficult”?
Is it difficult for the Christian, who might wish to conceive “the image of full and true humanity” as being abstracted from such messy, or even icky, particulars as “one’s own country”? Aren’t we supposed to slough off all those particular connections, or at least recognize our radical insufficiency, so that we can follow Christ instead? So that we can love all our brothers and sisters without preference, instead of preferring “our own country”? Sure, I’m here with these neighbors in this country now; but we’re looking forward to the new heaven and the new earth, and we might as well start breaking down those (human, all too human) barriers now!
Is it difficult for the modern, who might wish to conceive “the image of full and true humanity” as being only tenuously connected to “our own country”? Isn’t the state just a convenient construction for the sake of securing basic goods, so that each of us individually can pursue what he or she or ze perceives to be the good life? Sure, I’m dependent upon the state for security, and sure, I’m influenced by the particular culture into which I’m born. But progress toward happiness entails both introspective self-discovery (me, not “us”) and a cosmopolitan exploration of as many different cultures as possible (all y’all, not “us”) in order to sample each and maximize my self-fulfillment potential. The philosopher does this in a sophisticated way; the rabble does it in a shallow way; but this kind of use of the state, and ironic detachment from the nation, and enthusiastic sampling of each and every culture, is what we all do, and what we all should do, right?
Pieper does not tell us.
Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Leo XIII recently (is that possible?), namely, Diuturnum Illud (1881) and Immortale Dei (1885), both of which condemn modern social contract theory and in general the idea that man is not naturally political. In any case, I suspect that Pieper thinks it is “supremely difficult” for the Christian, and for the modern (who is himself deeply conditioned by Christianity), and for the modern Christian to recognize that proper love of one’s own, proper service to one’s own country, “belongs to the image of full and true humanity.”
Pieper seems to be telling us: if “political piety” seems strange, or even objectionable, to you, if you don’t grasp how “political piety” constitutes part of “the ideal image of man and man’s communal life,” then that’s a sign that you’re taking your bearings from the much-decayed state of Western civilization that we find all around us. Perhaps the terrors and tragedies of the 20th century signify a stage in that deterioration; but it would be totally insufficient to point to, say, Nazism and nationalism as the culprits and then invoke some more palatable notion of “enlightened patriotism.”
Better, surely, to take our bearings from those authors and books—and, I would suggest, to that Author and Book—for whom love of country, and duty to country, is indispensable to our “full and true humanity.”
Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966). The text collects several essays originally published separately; the chapter on justice was first published in 1955.
Pieper’s characterization of language (in the form of a native tongue) as a means to the attainment of wisdom as one of the great goods bestowed by one’s native country reminds me of Pope St. John Paul II. See, for example, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), especially his discussions of how “the concept of patria includes the values and the spiritual content that make up the culture of a given nation” (60–61) and how “every nation draws life from the works of its own culture” (83–86); as well as his comments on the “almost organic link existing between the family and the nation,” which is “founded above all on a participation in its culture,” in Gratissimam Sane (1994) §17. In each of these passages, JPII refers the reader to his June 2, 1980 address to UNESCO in Paris (English translation here).
This is excellent and vital for all of us who love God, love our country and want to work for the common good in this postmodern era. Thank you!!!!!
There is also a more negative, more of a "what's the alternative?", path, whereby one arrives at the notion that we are "stuck with" the virtue of national patriotism. With the help of Chantal Delsol and the Genesis story of Babel, and against the famous John Lennon verse, I articulated it on the old Post-modern Conservative: https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/carls-rock-songbook-no-98-imagine-no-countries-carl-eric-scott/