The End Of Machiavellianism Is Conditioned On An Authentic Witness To The Gospel

by Gary L. Morella

Niccolo Machiavelli is considered to be the founder of modern political philosophy. In The Prince Machiavelli seeks to overturn the principles of ancient and medieval political philosophy via an accusation of foolish idealism. His argument is that the backward ancients and medievalists studied man as he ought to be, and imagined regimes, as opposed to seeing man as he really was, and considering actual regimes. This is one of the great Machiavellian lies. He also says that the man who is not willing to practice evil will by ruined by those who are willing. Thus, man as governor must know how to do evil as the situation demands, and practice hypocrisy, appearing to be a man of honor, justice and faith to mollify the masses. Before undertaking a critique of the Machiavellian lies, some background leading to a climate favorable to a Machiavelli is in order.

Leo Strauss, a critic of modern political thought from a classical perspective, said that, whereas classic political thought saw the formation of character as the proper aim of politics, modern political thinkers in general adopted lower goals – goals which, they believed, were more likely to be attained. The common denominator of modern political thought was thus its rejection of classical political thought for what seemed to be more realistic thinking. [See Strauss, What is Political Philosophy.] Strauss also said “the fundamental modern project” was “man’s conquest of nature for the sake of the relief of man’s estate.” [See Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern.] A unifying premise for those divorcing themselves from ancient philosophy was, as Strauss put it, “According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer to be understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man’s estate; it was to be cultivated for the sake of human power; it was to enable man to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature.” [See Strauss, The City of Man.] Hence, the modern project is at odds with the ancients who considered contemplative thought to be the highest achievement of the intellect. Strauss evoked memories of Hobbes and Locke when he wrote: “Very briefly, we can say that the modern project was distinguished from the earlier view by the fact that it implied that the improvement of society depends decisively on institutions, political or economic, as distinguished from the formation of character.” [See Strauss, Political philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time.] Finally, he spoke of the “modern tradition” as having “emancipated the passions and hence ‘competition,’” and he asserted that this tradition “came into being through a conscious break with the strict moral demands made by both the Bible and classical philosophy.” [See Strauss, What is Political Philosophy.] We now consider how this break took place for Machiavelli.

To understand the climate spawning Machiavellian thought, one has to first understand the breakdown of Aristotelianism. Aristotle was a pagan, and the Moslem philosophers, through whom Aristotelian metaphysics had become known to the Western World, had introduced along with it a certain number of doctrines completely unacceptable for Christians. Averroism began with the golden age of scholasticism and professed to teach philosophy such as could be found in Aristotle irrespective of whether what was taught should happen to agree with religion or not. [See Gilson, A History of Philosophy.] The characteristic of Averroism was the insistence by an uninterrupted line of masters in medieval universities from the middle of the thirteenth century until the sixteenth century that the “authentic” teaching of Aristotle had been betrayed by the theologians in their effort to adapt it to the needs of Christian apologetics. The main consequence of this was the spreading of the conviction that philosophy as a discipline is mutually exclusive from religion and theology, i.e., there is no connection between reason and faith. Those espousing the Christian tradition began to have doubts with the result that scholasticism began to break down into its two component elements – a religious faith without philosophy, and vice-versa.

Given the break with theology, Aristotelianism was on its own, losing the privilege given it by theologians like Thomas Aquinas of being the preferred vehicle of Christian truth. It succumbed to an indifferentism being just one philosophy among the others, or worse, an aforementioned syncretism ala Averroism whereby it was made to fit the agendas of those having no patience for its metaphysical bridge to theology – so much for Aristotle’s De Anima. Thus, the men of the Renaissance, having created no new philosophy, found that the ancients offered them several other views of the world besides that of Aristotle. A little bit of everything began to be tried.

Unfortunately, the scientific problems with an Aristotelian universe exposed for all to see by Galileo ushered in a climate of questioning all propositions held by the ancients to include the metaphysical as well as the physical with the consequence that the “baby was thrown out with the bath water.” With the development of mathematics, in particular, its promotion by the likes of the Jesuit, Christopher Clavius, as to its superiority of demonstrations over dialectical disputations, the battle lines were drawn against scholastic philosophy. His criticism of Aristotelian philosophy leading scholars to their endless sterile arguments stood out in a world where startling discoveries in mathematics and science were occurring everywhere. The “disputatious” world of Aristotle, in the mind of Clavius, was crumbling with the Christian world of the scholastics feeling the reverberations. Into the trash went not only perishable physics but also perennial metaphysics. There was now a need for a philosophy fitting the science of the times and not of a man who lived four centuries before Christ. Francis Bacon in England and Rene Descartes in France were to be the new evangelists for this philosophy which, with the trashing of Christianity, would soon show very dark sides in the political thought of Machiavelli.

Jacques Maritain in The Range of Reason gets to the core of the abandonment of ancient philosophy on the part of Machiavelli.

Machiavelli belongs to that series of minds, and some of them more profound than his, which all through modern times have endeavored to unmask the human being. To have been the first in this lineage is the greatness of this narrow thinker eager to serve the Medici as well as the popular party in Florence, and disappointed on both counts. Yet, in unmasking the human being, he maimed its very flesh, and wounded its eyes. To have thoroughly rejected ethics, metaphysics and theology from the realm of political knowledge and political prudence is his very own achievement, and it is also the most violent mutilation suffered by the human practical intellect and the organism of practical wisdom.

All questions involving the morality of human life, the good for man, ultimate end and moral principles, the structure of the human act, good and evil action, character and decision, prudence and conscience, and religion and morality, are either non-existent or skewed beyond recognition in the radically pessimistic world of Niccolo Machiavelli.

Before Machiavelli, world leaders had no qualms whatsoever about doing anything to stay in power, to include every kind of evil imaginable in order to satisfy their greed and ambition. But they had pangs of conscience to the extent that they had a conscience, which shamed them into a certain amount of self-restraint from preventing the crimes that they committed as a result of their evil doings from becoming the rule. In such a manner a distinction between good and evil was rendered for the governed to make their lives livable.

After Machiavelli, all bets are off in regard to distinguishing between good and evil because the aforementioned pangs of conscience in regard to evil doings are now absent. All of a sudden world leaders have a green light to do anything that they want without fear of feeling guilty about it because Machiavelli told them that this was the new modus operandi for the modern state. What was heretofore an evil in relation to accidental and contingent things became a full-fledged right in relation to necessary things. Thus, a total disregard for good and evil is now the rule for human politics with no thought of human morality. Immorality became the very law of politics under Machiavelli’s tutelage.

Machiavelli’s world has only one axiom, one law, one primal motivation, one reason for living, “the end justifies the means.” The end, of course, relates only to man’s quest for happiness in the “here-and-now” as opposed to the “here-after” which, along with the bulk of Aristotelian thought pertaining to ethics, virtues, and perfect and imperfect happiness must, of necessity, be discarded in favor of the politics of expediency.

Radical pessimism regarding human nature is the basis of Machiavelli’s thought. He sees no redeeming qualities for man as a governor or governed. The entire premise of his radical philosophy is that man is inherently bad and, as such, must be expected to act badly, especially in politics. He reduces man to being nothing more than an animal with his politics becoming an animal farm. His Prince gives consent to the evil that he sees everywhere, in particular in his own mirror. This presents no problems for Machiavelli since vice is virtue in the covetous pursuit of power at all costs.

Maritain in The Range of Reason, Chapter Eleven, The End of Machiavellianism, describes the legacy of Machiavelli’s teachings as follows:

The practical result of Machiavelli's teachings has been, for the modern conscience, a profound split, an incurable division between politics and morality, and consequently an illusory but deadly antinomy between what people call idealism (wrongly confused with ethics) and what people call realism (wrongly confused with politics). Hence, as Mr. Max Lerner puts it, "the polar conflict between the ethical and the ruthlessly realistic."

Machiavelli’s big mistake was to see politics in a purely artistic or technical sense, totally devoid of any human concepts. His politics was a mechanistic politics of manipulation for utilitarian purposes. He ushered in the advent of spin-doctoring in the extreme for political ends, regardless of how incredible the lies pawned off as truth become in the process. Maritain saw the folly of this in The Range of Reason when he addressed what the proper priorities should be, and the consequences for not recognizing these truths.

But all this amount of art and technique is organically, vitally and intrinsically subordinated to the ethical energies which constitute politics, that is to say, art is there in no manner autonomous, art is there embodied in, and encompassed with, and lifted up by ethics, as the physico-chemical activities in our body are integrated in our living substance and superelevated by our vital energies. When these merely physicochemical activities are liberated and become autonomous, there is no longer a living organism, but a corpse. Thus, merely artistic politics, liberated from ethics, that is, from the practical knowledge of man, from the science of human acts, from truly human finalities and truly human doings, is a corpse of political wisdom and political prudence.

Maritain charges that the Machiavellian lies are two-fold: 1) The just man must be weak, and 2) the successful man must practice evil and deceit. His critique is based on an empirical or historical claim. He argues that the just man, and his extension, the just regime, can be strong. Conversely, the doers of evil prosper for relatively a short time frame in a historical context, e.g., the life of a man, but not for the extent of a regime. Maritain looks at the history of regimes, in particular, their struggles in the Twentieth Century. Both Hitler and Stalin claimed to learn from Machiavelli, and were practitioners of his art. Maritain refers to this as the artistic or technical view of politics whereby mastery is simply developing an ability to manipulate men and materials to achieve one’s goals. Rationality is nothing but a technical rationality that leads to a materialistic view of the world where the acquisition of goods is the highest goal of the state, an entity to be worshipped completely replacing God – the resulting atheism begging the following question. What has atheism done for us lately? We only have to follow Maritain’s example and look at recent history for an answer. We saw the deaths of six million Jews and twenty million Ukrainians in the concentration camps and gulags of Hitler and Stalin respectively. Today we see the killing of forty million innocents in what should be their safest place of refuge, their mothers' wombs, sanctioned by the state because America ignored the truth of the Natural Law and its Author in the Roe vs. Wade decision. To those who would argue that the holocaust ongoing in America is not indicative of atheism, a simple question is in order. Is killing babies indicative of a belief in God? You cannot say you that believe in God, while currently condoning the murdering of innocents, the latter de facto makes you an atheist. To argue otherwise is to be in denial of a fundamental first principle, something cannot “be” and “not be” at the same time in the same place.

Maritain contrasts this warped view of politics presented by Machiavelli with the moral view where politics is a matter of virtue or character as espoused by Aristotle in his Politics. It requires prudence defined in the ancient sense – a thoughtful regard for what is possible in the light of principle as conditioned by the good character of the statesman. In 1950 Maritain predicted that the great totalitarian power in the Soviet Union would collapse of its own internal rot. He called it a huge Machiavellian robot that possessed vast external power but lacked the internal power of truth and virtue. History proved him right.

We must not be deceived by Machiavellian sophistry. When the disciples of darkness tell us that justice and respect for moral values spell weakness and doom, and that strength is found only when raised to the supreme standard of political existence, our reply should be that “This is a LIE!” History has proven that evil cannot exceed in the long run with the destruction of Nazi Germany and the breakup of the former Soviet Union being prime recent examples. Strength is found where virtue is sought; moreover it reigns supreme, as the power of nations struggling for freedom can be much greater than that of nations struggling for enslavement. The Second World War was proof of that. We must never lose sight of the fact that the effort needed to overcome the Machiavellian powers is rooted in the supreme effort of the body politic to adhere to moral values and standards. Strength is illusionary if it, and not justice, becomes the highest political standard.

Maritain offers a warning in his conclusion to the problem of Machiavellianism in The Range of Reason.

Totalitarianism lives by Machiavellianism, freedom dies by it. Machiavellianism’s triumphs over mankind will only occur because all kinds of accepted iniquity, moral weakness and consent to evil, operating within a degenerating civilization, will previously have corrupted it, and prepared ready-made slaves for the lawless man.

Translation – the silence of good men who do nothing will be the death knell of civilization as we once knew it. If Machiavellianism is to be crushed, it will only be because of what remains of Christian civilization will have been able to oppose it on all fronts. It’s modern tentacles have reached into the innermost sanctums of politically correct totalitarian dictatorships masquerading as democratic governments whose governors have no problem blatantly promoting the culture-of-death in all its evil manifestations from the killing of infants in the womb, to the promotion and celebration of unnatural lifestyles in a redefinition of the traditional family, to artificially generating life in a utilitarian fashion for purposes of death for the “betterment” of mankind, to finally telling grandma and grandpa that they have a duty to die. Make no mistake about it, Niccolo Machiavelli is alive and well in the world at the turn of the new millennium. His prime sponsor, the father-of-lies, has grand plans yet for one his more famous apprentices. Whether those plans are realized or dashed is a function of the Gospel witness of Christian civilization as Maritain points out in Man in the State.

This means that the political task is essentially a task of civilization and culture, of making faith, righteousness, wisdom, and beauty ends of civilization; a task of progress in an order which is essentially human or moral, for morality is concerned with nothing else than the true human good.

Such a task cannot conceivably succeed – once the good tidings of the Gospel have been announced – without the impact of Christianity on the political life of mankind and the penetration of the Gospel inspiration in the substance of the body politic. As a result we are entitled to state that the end of the Body Politic is by nature something substantially good and ethical, implying, at least among peoples in whom Christianity has taken root, an actual – though doubtless always imperfect – materialization of the Gospel principles in terrestrial existence and social behavior.

The democratic feeling and philosophy has its deepest root in the Gospel. To try to reduce democracy to technocracy, and to expel from it the Gospel inspiration together with all faith in the supra-material, supra-mathematical, and supra-sensory realities, would be to try to deprive it of its very blood. Democracy can only live on Gospel inspiration. It is by virtue of the Gospel inspiration that democracy can overcome its direst trials and temptations. It is by virtue of the Gospel inspiration that democracy can progressively carry out its momentous task of the moral rationalization of political life.

Maritain is, of course, assuming that the Gospel witness to be given will be that of THE Gospel, not some reinvention of it, such as we’re currently observing on the part of many who would reinvent the Church and her teachings to make them comfortable with their vices - clergy and laity alike. The modern Christian finds himself in the catacombs fighting a two-front spiritual war against the secularists who would erase God completely from the world scene, and the heretics and apostates who would betray him at the drop of a hat just as Judas did to Christ. More often than not in today’s raging culture war for souls, he is left to hang out and dry by those whose sole charge it is to be his “good shepherd.” His consolation is that he, as a member of the Church Militant, is in good company with the Church Triumphant, and the Church Suffering – the Mystical Body of Christ. That knowledge in his faith gives him the hope and strength to continue to fight the good fight for Christ and His Church.