Lamont's argument can be reduced to several connected claims: The Vatican II religious-liberty dispute was framed by two competing theories of rights. Lamont says the progressives treated religious liberty as a natural subjective right arising from the individual's nature, while the conservatives rejected the idea of any right to practice a false religion because they identified justice with morality. Lamont thinks both sides inherited problematic conceptual assumptions. His broader "ressourcement" argument is that nominalist and Baroque-Scholastic developments distorted Thomistic understandings of freedom, conscience, faith, and authority. He calls the resulting synthesis the "Counter-Reformation system."
This work, the life work of a great scholar, 107 emerges vindicated from its defence, but it is not the only important contribution made by Villey to the question of subjective rights. In addition to this work, there is also an insight that Villey the Christian and Catholic drew from it. This is the insight that natural subjective rights are an idol; and that they are connected to another idolatry, that of the self.
We can conclude this discussion of objective and subjective
rights by briefly indicating the light it casts on the flaws of the
conflicting positions in the debate over Dignitatis humanae at the
Second Vatican Council. The progressives believed that religious
liberty was a natural subjective right flowing from the nature of
the individual human. The conservatives believed that it could not
be a right of any kind, because it would be a right to do what was
morally wrong, namely, to practice a false religion. They believed
such a right to be impossible, because they accepted the identity
of justice and morality, an identity that rules out not only a
natural subjective right to the practice of religion, but any kind of
just claim-any objective right-to any form of practice of any
false religion.
Ill. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION SYSTEM AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT RELIGION
The above discussion of moralities of conscience and subjective
rights has been an exercise in ressourcement, arguing that
nominalists and their baroque Scholastic heirs adopted gravely
mistaken views, and that these views should be rejected in favor
of the superior positions of St. Thomas. In an earlier article I
pointed out the flaws in the baroque Scholastic conceptions of
faith and theology. 106 These two arguments yield more than
philosophical and theological conclusions. In describing the
baroque Scholastic views that have been argued against, the main
outlines of a system have been delineated: a system that can be
called the Counter-Reformation system. The intellectual foundations of this system are liberty of indifference, moralities of
conscience, faith conceived of as obedience, and authority
understood as the exercise of subjective rights. The system itself
is the embodiment of these foundations in the intellectual,
spiritual, psychological, and institutional life of Catholics and the
Church. This embodiment involved holiness conceived of as the
widely accepted and practiced - a failure Rao finds mysterious - is in fact due to a large extent
to the weaknesses that result from its being framed in modern natural law terms.
106 See also Lamont, "Determining the Authority and Level of Church Teaching."
236 JOHN R. T. LAMONT
prerogative of clergy and religious; clerical, and ultimately papal,
authority conceived of in parental or even despotic terms, rather
than as analogous to a form of political leadership over citizens;
and faith conceived of, and inculcated, primarily as obedience to
orders rather than as attainment of truth. It is termed the
Counter-Reformation system, because it was during the CounterReformation that it came to shape the life of the Church and
decisively influence her strategies for dealing with the world. It
does not correspond to the Counter-Reformation itself, which had
many features that were independent of and even at odds with it.
The Counter-Reformation system was however a chief aspect of
the Counter-Reformation, that persisted after the energy and
achievements of the Counter-Reformation itself were largely
exhausted. It was the source of the evils in the Church that have
been discussed in this article and the previous one: clericalism,
authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, aversion to philosophical
thinking, and spiritual immaturity and lack of ambition on the
part of the laity.
Understanding the Counter-Reformation system is one of two
tasks that are required to answer the question asked above, the
question of why the Church has been steadily in retreat since the
Enlightenment. The other task can be carried out by developing
some insights of Villey's. The above defence of Villey's views on
objective and subjective rights is concerned with the work of his
academic career. This work, the life work of a great scholar, 107
emerges vindicated from its defence, but it is not the only
important contribution made by Villey to the question of
subjective rights. In addition to this work, there is also an insight
that Villey the Christian and Catholic drew from it. This is the
insight that natural subjective rights are an idol; and that they are
connected to another idolatry, that of the self.
108
107 On Villey's learning, see Stephane Rials, 'Presentation', in Villey, La formation de la
pensee juridique moderne, 13-16.
108 For Villey on the rights of man as idols, see e.g. Villey, Reflexions sur la philosophie et
le droit, 243, 257; on the self as an idol, see ibid., 159. Villey's view on idols is discussed in
Stephane Rials, Villey et /es idoles: Essai (Paris: PUF/Quadrige, 2000).
CONSCIENCE, FREEDOM, RIGHTS 237
This development of these insights of Villey's points out that
conscience (as understood by moralities of conscience), liberty of
indifference, and subjective rights assign to human beings
properties that belong to God alone, which is idolatry. Moralities
of conscience ascribe a real, and in practice a decisive, moral
authority to conscience as such. But moral authority belongs to
God alone. Attributing it even partially to the human conscience
is thus a form of idolatry. The same is true of liberty of
indifference. To possess liberty of indifference is to possess the
power to determine one's actions in a way that results solely from
one's own will-from one's own self. In reality this power belongs
only to God, whose actions are determined by his own goodness.
In addition, according to the notion of liberty of indifference the
fact of any action occurring at all, independently of what choice
that action involves, is at least to some extent caused only by the
agent. This means that the agent (as Robert George has
approvingly(!) noted) 109 is to that extent an uncaused cause. But
to be an uncaused cause to any extent at all is an attribute that
belongs only to the divine nature. Subjective rights add to the
notion of being an uncaused cause an entitlement to do whatever
one wants, simply because one chooses it. This extends the
idolatrous aspect of liberty of indifference. It means that one not
only can act as God does, but one can rightly act only for the sake
of one's self.
Put together, these three anthropological notions constitute in
a strict philosophical and theological sense a deification of the
self. They are the unholy trinity of what can be called the
Enlightenment religion. This religion, whose fundamental tenet
is this conception of the deified self, has provided the ultimate
motivation and the strength of the Enlightenment, and has
explained its success in converting people. This success does not
109 Robert George remarks that "whether or not one recognizes Biblical authority or
believes in a personal God, it is true that human beings possess a power traditionally ascribed
to divinity-namely, the power to be an uncaused causing" ("Natural Law and Human Rights:
A Conversation with Robert P. George," in Does Human Rights Need God? [sic], ed. Elizabeth
M. Bucar and Barbra Barnett [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005], 138).
Unsurprisingly, this
statement occurs in the course of a defense of subjective rights.
238 JOHN R. T. LAMONT
rest upon the utopian promises of progress that the various
Enlightenment movements have made-which is why the failure
of these promises, and the appalling miseries that attempts to
implement them have brought, have scarcely disillusioned people
with the Enlightenment in the least. Instead, its success rests on
the fact that the Enlightenment offers a religious goal, in the form
of an ultimate authority and good to be sought; that making the
self that goal has a powerful appeal to human nature in its fallen
state; and that the depth of sin involved in choosing this goal
produces an extreme form of bondage and spiritual blindness,
which is very hard to break.
This goal has presented itself in different guises-as communism, Nazism, or consumerism-but the fundamental concept
and its appeal remains the same. It is the driving force behind the
vulgar and base consumerism and sexual depravity that characterizes modern society. Previous non-Christian societies would
have found these practices shameful and embarrassing. This
natural human reaction is overridden, and even made use of, by
the Enlightenment religion. This religion gives these forms of
decadence a deeper meaning, the meaning of adoration of the
deified self. The natural guilt and shame they provoke are
transmuted into a proclamation of this self, which by rejecting the
moral law is declaring its total supremacy. The deep and sincere
belief in the human right to have an abortion gets its strength
from being the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment religion.
Its supporters understand that abortion is the murder of an
innocent child, although they may not publicly proclaim this fact
or even consciously admit it to themselves. It is precisely its status
as murder of the most innocent that makes abortion the triumph
of the deified self as ultimate end. (One may speculate that the
emergence of the Enlightenment religion was the end stage of a
pattern of decline that civilizations tend to follow; being focused
first on God in the Christian epoch, then on the created world in
the Renaissance, and finally on the self in the Enlightenmentwith some overlap between the stages, obviously.)
CONSCIENCE, FREEDOM, RIGHTS 239
This understanding of the Enlightenment religion explains the
steady defeat that the Church has experienced at its hands. The
anti-intellectualism of the counter-Reformation system left the
Church unable to deal with the intellectual attacks of the Enlightenment, and the spiritual weakness fostered by this system
made Catholics vulnerable to the spiritual temptations the Enlightenment offered. But the most important reason for this defeat
was that the unholy trinity of the Enlightenment religion was
taken from Catholic theologians, and the Counter-Reformation
system not only did not condemn, but actually taught, this trinity.
This fact was completely overlooked by Catholics, who usually
saw Protestantism as the original source of Enlightenment
thought-failing to realize that the Reformation was instead one
of the results of the ideas behind the Enlightenment religion, ideas
which had already been developed by nominalists. It is true that
at the same time the Church was teaching the Catholic faith that
contradicted the Enlightenment religion, and that the teaching of
the elements of the Enlightenment religion was done by
theologians rather than officially by the Church, but the theological teaching was so pervasive that its nonofficial character did
not undo its effects. Thus, in addition to the spiritual and
intellectual weakening caused by the drawbacks of the CounterReformation system that have been emphasized above, the system,
to the extent that it was inculcating belief in liberty of
indifference, the authority of conscience, and subjective rights,
was helping to train devotees of the Enlightenment. The
philosophical elements of the Counter-Reformation system, and
the accumulated victories of the Enlightenment over the Church,
were in turn key influences on the debates over religious liberty
within the Church. The content and outcome of these debates
cannot be understood without grasping the nature of these
influences, whose effects were not limited to the progressive side
in these debates.
This passage is highly relevant to the Villey–Lamont critique of subjective rights, and it sharpens the distinction we have been discussing between objective law and the modern conception of rights.
Lamont's argument can be reduced to several connected claims:
-
The Vatican II religious-liberty dispute was framed by two competing theories of rights.
Lamont says the progressives treated religious liberty as a natural subjective right arising from the individual's nature, while the conservatives rejected the idea of any right to practice a false religion because they identified justice with morality. -
Lamont thinks both sides inherited problematic conceptual assumptions.
His broader "ressourcement" argument is that nominalist and Baroque-Scholastic developments distorted Thomistic understandings of freedom, conscience, faith, and authority. He calls the resulting synthesis the "Counter-Reformation system." -
The Counter-Reformation system, in his account, made authority increasingly subjective and juridical.
Its characteristic elements include "liberty of indifference," conscience-based morality, faith understood principally as obedience, and authority understood through subjective rights. Lamont associates this with clericalism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and spiritual immaturity among the laity. -
This is where Villey's critique becomes crucial.
Lamont accepts Villey's insight that natural subjective rights become an "idol", connected with an idolatry of the self. -
Lamont's deepest objection is anthropological, not merely juridical.
He argues that conscience as an autonomous moral authority, liberty of indifference, and subjective rights all attribute to man powers that properly belong to God. Hence his striking description of these three notions as an "unholy trinity" constituting a philosophical and theological "deification of the self." -
This directly connects to your earlier concern about modern rights language.
For Lamont, a subjective right is not merely a harmless way of saying "I am entitled to X." It can imply that the individual possesses an entitlement because his own choosing supplies the decisive ground of the claim. That is why Lamont says subjective rights intensify the problem already present in liberty of indifference. - His historical thesis is especially provocative: the Church's defeat by the Enlightenment was partly facilitated by Catholic theologians themselves. Lamont argues that the Counter-Reformation system taught, though not officially as Church doctrine, ideas of liberty of indifference, autonomous conscience, and subjective rights that were later central to Enlightenment thought.
The important qualification
Lamont is not simply saying that the Catholic Church officially taught Enlightenment liberalism. He explicitly distinguishes theological teaching from official Church teaching and says that Catholic teaching of the faith simultaneously contradicted the Enlightenment religion.
That qualification is important for your Dignitatis humanae question. Lamont's framework gives you a way of criticizing both simplistic positions:
Progressive error: religious liberty is an autonomous subjective right simply because the individual possesses it.
Conservative error: because false religion is objectively wrong, there can therefore be no legitimate juridical claim whatsoever concerning religious practice.
Lamont is pointing toward a third possibility: rights must be understood objectively, in relation to justice and the good, rather than as autonomous powers generated by individual choice.
That is very close to the Villey/Lamont distinction you have been developing: the fundamental question is not "What does the individual have a subjective right to choose?" but "What is justly due to the person according to the nature of the good, the social order, and the truth?"
Conservative error: because false religion is objectively wrong, there can therefore be no legitimate juridical claim whatsoever concerning religious practice. <give examples of this idea
Yes. Lamont's formulation is deliberately strong, but the idea can be illustrated by several types of argument. The key mistake is the inference:
"False religion is objectively false → therefore the state or society can recognize no just claim concerning a person's religious practice."
Examples:
-
No juridical protection for an individual's worship:
If someone belongs to a false religion, the state could say: "Because your worship is objectively false, you have no claim against interference with your worship." Thus the fact that the religion is false would eliminate any juridical protection for the person's peaceful religious acts. -
No right to possess religious books or objects:
The state could reason that because the books or objects belong to a false religion, their possession or use has no legitimate juridical status. A Catholic could legitimately possess a Bible or rosary, while a non-Catholic could not claim comparable protection for his religious materials. -
No claim to assemble for worship:
A government could permit Catholic worship because Catholic worship is true, while denying a Protestant, Jewish, or Muslim community the ability to assemble on the ground that their worship is objectively erroneous. The underlying reasoning would be: "You cannot have a juridical claim to do something objectively religiously wrong." -
No protection against coercion in religious matters:
In its strongest form, the argument could say that if someone is embracing religious error, coercing him away from that error does not violate any genuine right, because there is no right to practice false religion in the first place. -
No juridical distinction between harmful and merely religiously erroneous conduct:
The state might treat peaceful religious practice itself as lacking legitimate protection simply because its religious content is false, rather than asking whether the particular exercise causes an injustice or violates the common good.
What Lamont is getting at
The important point is that objective wrongness and juridical wrongfulness are not necessarily identical.
For example:
"This religion is false"
does not automatically entail
"therefore the person has no just claim against the state interfering with his peaceful practice of it."
That is the space in which Lamont thinks the conservative position can go wrong.
And this is precisely why the distinction between objective right (jus) and subjective right matters. A person need not possess a modern, autonomous subjective right to religious truth in order for there to be something objectively due to him in the juridical order—for example, protection against unjust coercion or interference.
Lamont's passage says the conservatives he is criticizing rejected "any kind of just claim—any objective right—to any form of practice of any false religion."
So his criticism is not necessarily that false religion should be treated as true, nor that there is a subjective right to error. It is that the falsity of a religious belief does not by itself settle every question of justice concerning how the believer may be treated.
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