MAGNA EST VERITAS "GREAT IS TRUTH: IT PREVAILS" *JOHN T. NOONAN, Jr.* Milo Rees Robbins Professor of Law and Legal Ethics University of California Law School, Berkeley I encountered the saying I employ as a title in the Statute of Religious Liberty, America's first legislative commitment to complete religious freedom, drafted by Jefferson in 1779 and enacted by the Virginia Assembly in 1785. In its Jeffersonian form, where it operates as the statute's final and conclusive argument for religious freedom, it reads, "Truth is great, and it will prevail, if left to itself."1 Was this a conventional bromide or a piece of 18th-century Enlightenment optimism or over-optimism, with a wry American caveat "if left to itself" added? I wondered. Tracing the English expression back to its roots, I discovered they lay in revelation. "Magna est veritas, et praevalet" reads Esdras 4.4 in the Vulgate. "Truth is great, and it does prevail." The statement is less bromidic, more challenging than any Enlightenment expression could be. In what sense does truth prevail? With that question in mind I shall present to you three episodes in the history of the Catholic Church. Let me begin with testimony: Joan in her last moments had wonderful contrition and broke out into words so Catholic and devout that they moved everyone in that great throng, including the English cardinal and many other Englishmen. She asked me to stay with her at the end and humbly begged me to go to a nearby church and bring her a cross, and I held it erect before her eyes, until her passing, so she could always and ceaselessly see the cross. In the middle of the flames, she never stopped confessing and crying out in a loud voice the holy name of Jesus Christ, or imploring, most devoutly, the help of the saints. As she expired and bowed her head, she professed the name of Jesus, a sign of the faith with which she was animated, just as we read of St. Ignatius and many holy martyrs. The executioner came to me and my associate, Brother Martin Lavenu, immediately after the burning, impelled by a wonderful and terrible penitence. It was as if he despaired of receiving pardon from God after what he had done to her, who, as he said, was such a holy woman. He also affirmed that although he had several times put the wood and coals upon her entrails and heart, he could in no way consume her heart or reduce it to cinders; and at this he was amazed, as if it were an evident miracle.2 The witness is Ysambart de la Pierre, who was with Joan of Arc in her last moments in Rouen on Many 30, 1432.3 Before he helped her ar her death he had been an official signatory of two statements: one, that Joan was a lying, devil-inspired heretic; the other, that she was not only a heretic but a relapsed heretic. What was the relapse? Her English jailers would not give her her clothes. Hence she was compelled to resume the men's clothes she had been wearing and had promised to renounce. For this offense she was burned. The judgment of conviction was pronounced by the experienced bishop of the diocese, Pierre Cauchon, assisted by theologians from Paris, the leading theological faculty in the world. Joan's trial had been made possible in principle by the defense--based on Scripture--of the practice of governmental repression of heresy elaborated by St. Augustine in his treatise The Correction of Donatists; by the defense of the practice of killing relapsed heretics elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the second part of the second part of the Summa theologiae; and by the odious, paper-thin, legal fiction devised by canonists that the Church, when pronouncing the heretic relapsed, did not condemn the heretic but merely released him or her to the justice of the secular power. The verdict against Joan was quashed by Pope Calixtus III a quarter of a century after her death; she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV five centuries later. The truth did prevail in time. But in what sense did it prevail that May day in Rouen when Joan told Bishop Pierre Cauchon--"Peter Pig" as his name may be anglicized--"Bishop, I die by you"? The second episode is also French, much later in history. In 1830, in the wake of the July revolution, Felicité de Lamennais and his collaborators began the publication of a newspaper, L'Avenir--"The Future." Lamennais, a 48-year-old priest, was the leading apologist for the Church in France, the author of a formidible work attacking religious indifferentism or the theological view that all religions are equally good, and the champion of the papacy in a country where Gallicanism has at times veered toward Anglicanism. His collaborators were Charles de Montalembert and Henri-Dominique Lacordaire. The slogan of L'Avenir was "God and Liberty." In impassioned editorials, Lamennais argued for the separation of Church and State; asserted that for Catholicism support by the state was servitude and death; cited the examples of Belgium, Ireland, and Poland to show the great value that religious liberty already had for various Catholic peoples; and declared, "It is religion which alone has freed human beings. What then more natural than the alliance of religion and liberty?"4 The future of religion he saw lay in replacing the alliance of Throne and Altar with this new alliance. Today, no doubt, Lamennais' views seem unsurprising. In 1831 they meant the loss of state salaries by the bishops of France and they meant a commitment to the cause of liberty upsetting to authoritarian governments. A group of French bishops denounced Lamennais to Rome. The French and Austrian governments each represented to the Holy See the revolutionary character of L'Avenir's proposals. Gregory XVI and his curia studies Lamennais' work attentively, compared it with past doctrine, and on the Feast of Assumption 1832, issued the encyclical Mirari vos--"You surprise us." What surprised Gregory XVI, a former Camaldolese, the most was Lamennais' advocacy of freedom of conscience--a position described by the Pope as "madness." Separation of Church and State was condemned. Religious liberty was characterized as the fruit of that religious indifferentism which Lamennais had spent his adult life combatting. In the wake of Mirari vos, Lamennais left the Church, never to be reconciled. Montalembert went on to be a leader in Catholic political thought, Lacordaire became the restorer of the Dominicans in France. Neither abandoned the aspirations of L'Avenir.5 And it was in the spirit of L'Avenir that the greatest book on religion in America, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, was written in 1835, Tocqueville confessing to a friend, Eugène Stoffels: You seem to me to have understood the general ideas on which my programme rests. What most and always amazes me about my country, more especially these last few years, is to see ranged on the one side men who value morality, religion, and order, and upon the other those who love liberty and the equality of men before the law. This spectacle strikes me as the most extraordinary and deplorable ever offered to the eyes of man; for all the things thus separated are, I am certain, indissolubly united in the sight of God. They are holy things, if I may so express myself, because the greatness and the happiness of man in this world can only result from their simultaneous union. It seems to me, therefore, that one of the finest enterprises of our time would be to demonstrate that these things are not incompatible; that, on the contrary, they are bound up together in such a fashion that each of them is weakened by separation from the rest. Such is my basic idea.6 Lamennais' doctrine, in short, did not die. It fructified in his disciples and in the understanding Tocqueville gave us Americans of ourselves. The heart of Lamennais' teaching was no more consumed by the condemnation than Joan's heart was destroyed by the flames. But on that Assumption Day in 1832 when Mirari vos was issued, did truth prevail? Was not Lamennais killed spiritually as Joan was killed physically by an erroneous conception of the relation of Church and State? Did not the lie prevail in 1832 that they must be permanently united? I turn to the third episode, one that occurred in our own country less than 40 years ago. In June 1948 the Catholic Theological Society met in Chicago. The society was only three years old. It was about to elect Eugene Burke, the Paulist, its president. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive." John Courtney Murray, then 41 years old, a professor of theology at the Jesuit Seminary at Woodstock for the past 11 years, presented a 70-page paper entitled "Governmental Repression of Heresy," a subject which he accurately identified as "the neuralgic point on a contemporary controversy." He contended that it was not the duty of a good Catholic state to repress heresy even when it was practicable to do so.7 All of the modern theological textbooks were against him--the Dominican Louis Bender; the curialist Alfred Ottaviani; a variety of French, German, Italian, and Spanish Jesuits.8 In the United States the leading authority on "Catholic principles of politics," Monsignor John A. Ryan--"Right Reverend New Dealer," the liberal theological supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had published as recently as 1941 this pronouncement: "If there is only one true religion, and if its possession is the most important good in life for States as well as individuals, then the public profession, protection and promotion of this religion, and the legal prohibition of all direct assaults upon it, becomes one of the most obvious and fundamental duties of the State."9 From this principle Ryan drew the conclusion that in an ideal state heresy would be repressed. The unanimity of the theologians was no accident. They were united because they followed what Gregory XVI had taught in Mirari vos, what Pius IX, following Gregory XVI, had taught in Quanta cura, what Leo XIII in the wake of his predecessors had proclaimed in Immortale Dei. And these Popes had only brought to bear in the concrete circumstances of 19th-century Europe ideas whose pedigree could be found in St. Thomas and St. Augustine. Small wonder that the Redemptionist Francis Connell, then America's chief moral theologian, announced at Chicago after hearing Murray, "I, for one, shall continue to uphold the traditional view."10 The furthest that orthodox theologians would go in glossing the papal position was to advocate a theory, daring when first conceived, that there was a thesis and an hypothesis. The thesis was that a Catholic State had a duty to repress heresy. The hypothesis was that, in some circumstances, more harm than good might be done by a State doing its duty. In these hypothetical circumstances, religious toleration became the duty.11 In the United States, for example, it was generally agreed that the circumstances of the hypothetical held. Catholics could and should accept and extend religious freedom; but in thesis, and on principle, religious repression was the State's responsibility. Naturally, this view that in ideal circumstances the Catholics would repress the rest caused uneasiness. The unrest was skillfully played on by Protestant polemicists like Paul Blanshard. Critics of this character were guilty of being more Catholic than the Pope--of taking the authoritative texts more literally than they were taken in the Catholic Church in America; but their distrust was genuine and the doctrine they exploited had once been operative. What Murray did in defense and development of his idea was to cultivate an understanding of the difference between State and society; to critique the Church-State theory of St. Robert Bellarmine; to invoke ideas on "the indirect power" of the Church first fashioned by the 14th-century theologian Jean Quidort (Sleeping John); and to suggest that the 19th-century encyclicals be read in context as polemics against a rationalism, a naturalism, and a Latin anticlericalism very different from the philosophy behind the separation of Church and State. And he appealed as well to European history: "Political experience has taught us that the worst way to cope with dissidence is by legal suppression of it. Experience too has, I think, taught the Church that any attempt to establish or maintain religious unity by governmental coercion of dissenters does more harm than good to the Church."12 Murray was answered not by experience but by appeal to authoritative doctrine. His scholarly articles, his tentative attempts to establish historical contexts, were replied to by firm insistence on the black letter of the papal texts. His theological critics, courteous in 1948, became so aroused that their denunciations of him reached curial officials wholly sympathetic to the established view of the State's duty to support the Church and to suppress the heretics. In 1954, at the request of his Jesuit superiors, Murray stopped writing about Church and State. He was also removed from teaching at Woodstock. Murray, unlike Joan and Lamennais, was vindicated in his lifetime, although he died less than two years after his vindication. At the Second Vatican Council he played the major part in the drafting of the conciliar Declaration of Religious Liberty.13 The Declaration was bitterly opposed by the bishops committed to the principle "No change in the Church." The kind of change envisaged by the Declaration struck them as the worst kind of change--outright repudiation of past doctrine, taught by Popes, bishops, and theologians for centuries. As the schema on religious liberty was debated on the council floor, Archbishop Enrico Dante of the Roman Curia identified its teaching with that of Montalembert and Lamennais (was there in any substantial way any difference?). Morrillo Gonzalez, archbishop of Madrid, said that the document "contradicted" the Popes. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre--the debate was a turning point in his ecclesiastical career--said specifically that the draft contradicted Leo XIII.14 No one who reads their protestations can doubt that the minority could not understand how such a shift was possible in Catholic doctrine. Yet they were a minority, about one-tenth of the Council Fathers. Their only real tactic, which they executed, was to delay, and they did delay a decisive vote until the last session of the Council and the final vote until December 7, 1965, the eve of adjournment. In the end, Pope and Council overwhelmingly adopted the views of Father Murray. The Declaration of Religious Liberty--Dignitatis humanae personae, to give it its evocative title, declared: This Vatican Synod has decreed that the human person has the right to religious liberty....It further declares that the right to religious liberty is in truth founded on the very dignity of the human person such as it is known both by the revealed Word of God and by reason itself.15 Uncompromising, principled, the Declaration set forth a teaching that annihilated the old thesis-hypothesis distinction, subverted Mirari vos and its 19th-century sequelae, and read very differently from the reasoning on Church and State of St. Thomas and St. Augustine. Religious liberty was established on the basis of the human person as seen by Scripture and by human reason. Dignitatis humanae personae--fortified by the further conciliar document on Catholic-Jewish relations, Nostra Aetate--removed the reason for the democratic distrust of the Catholic commitment to religious liberty. The Council made possible complete cooperation by Christians in the cause of religious freedom for every human being. The Declaration made a modest acknowledgment of the change it effected: Although in the life of the People of God in its pilgrimmage through the vicissitudes of human history, the way of acting was sometimes less conformed to the spirit of the Gospel, and even contrary to it, yet the doctrine of the Church always remained that no one should be forced to the faith.16 This statement used the phrase "vicissitudes of human history" as though some impersonal force or circumstance could explain the doctrinal intransigence of the past. This statement referred only to an earlier way of acting, not of believing and teaching, as contrary to the Gospel. This statement's only doctrinal reference was to a doctrine that had been invoked to keep Catholics from forcing conversion on Jews and on pagans but had never been applied, as it might have been, to prevent the persecution of heretics when they were forced to the faith. The monumentality of the change was in fact admitted only by the minority that voted against it. The great declaration, for all its virtues, was wanting in candor about the mutation it effected. To most of us, I have little doubt, truth prevailed on December 7, 1965, when John Courtney Murray's views were vindicated. But did truth prevail in Chicago in 1948 when his views were doubted or in 1954 when he was effectively silenced on the subject closest to his heart? It is time now to offer an answer to my repeated question. I shall do so in the most scholastic of ways by rejecting one distinction and accepting another. To say that truth, defeated here on earth, still prevails with God is an evasion. We know that God is Truth; we want to know, Does truth prevail among us? But a distinction can be drawn between truth officially acknowledged and truth spoken, heard, and understood by those who hear it understanding it to be true. Truth in the former sense did not prevail at Rouen in May 1431 or in Rome in 1932 or in Chicago in 1948. Truth in the latter sense did prevail when Joan's heart refused to be consumed or when she told Peter Pig, "Bishop, I die by you." Who doubted her words? Who doubted her sanctity as she "professed the name of Jesus" and, bowing her head, died? Who doubted the mute testimony of her heart? Truth in the latter sense did prevail when Lamennais' ideas were lived by Lacordaire, Montalembert, and Tocqueville. Truth prevailed among Catholics who heard or read Murray in the 1940's and knew that what he said was so. Truth prevailing in the latter sense does not, cannot, mean that everyone sees it or is converted by it or acts upon it. The stubborn, the stupid, the bureaucratic, the entrenched will resist the truth. Even an Augustine or a Thomas will miss the truth occasionally: What great theologian has not written heresy? The truth prevails when it is stated and grasped by those who have ears to hear. Truth prevails even when its speakers suffer martyrdom--not, I hope, that martyrdom is essential for the truth to become clear, but that in spite of the sacrifice of the truth-teller, those who see his or her acceptance of personal defeat or death are convinced by the sincerity and fidelity and insight with which the truth-speaker has spoken. Joan's death and Murray's partial silence bore witness to the truth more telling than Lamennais' defection. In the case of Joan, in the case of Lamennais, in the case of Murray, truth was suppressed by those who believed they were acting in the name of truth, indeed in the name of God. The suppressors were, so far as can be seen, not acting out of personal spite or for personal advantage. They were acting on behalf of a great institution which they loved. They thought they were doing their duty by that intuition. What lessons can we draw from their mistake? Let me propose three. First: the danger of what I shall call the morality of vicarious responsibility. By this term I mean the morality that says when you are acting on behalf of others you are free to do what you cannot do on your own behalf. No one could doubt that no one could morally burn another human being on his own behalf, but Pierre Cauchon and the Paris theologians believed it right to burn human beings on behalf of the Church and the State. Theirs was the morality of vicarious responsibility. Acting for others, they were freed from ordinary mortal morality. They acted vicariously. The morality of vicarious responsibility may not be totally dispensable. It needs to be checked by constant reference to what is permissible for the person acting only for himself or herself. The inflation of importance, the sense of overriding mission, the possession of power that all follow upon the assumption of responsibility for others, need to be reined in by an acute awareness that no human being is dispensed from the commandments of love.17 Second: the essential role of experience in moral judgments. When St. Augustine in the fourth century opted for coercion of the Donatists, but not the death penalty, he was responding to his own experience; he had seen the good fruits of the use of limited application of force. When Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century defended the death penalty for heretics, he had not seen with his own eyes the effects of a policy of bloody repression; he extended Augustine's reasoning and accepted its expanded application by the churchmen of his day. What turned our European ancestors from persecution was to see Augustine's and Thomas' doctrine put to work again and again. The European experience was not only to burn celebrated saints like Joan, but to destroy a substantial number of anonymous innocent persons--those of whom Czeslaw Milocz writes in Bells in Winter when he speaks of: Our sister Lisabeth in the communion of saints, Of witches ducked and broken on the wheel Under the image of the cloud-enfolded Trinity Until they confess they turn into magpies at night. These evils were evidence against the confident contention that the suppression of heresy was a corollary of the Gospel. That experience of this sort was necessary for the truth about religious liberty to be proclaimed is a further qualification of the proposition "Truth prevails." There is a conundrum in the relation of experience to truth. Sheer experience proves nothing. Horror could be heaped on horror without our learning anything if we did not already possess the truth about good and evil. It is by the light of this bright truth that experience brings out the character of more limited propositions. "By their fruits you shall know them." These words of Jesus presuppose that one knows what good fruit is; but experience is essential to identify those whose ideas bear good fruit. Truth prevails, but there is development in the perception and acceptance of specific propositions. Human propositions are not invariably true; it would be absurd to maintain that truth always prevails in that sense. But as we advance developmentally we do so in the blaze of the divine illumination that enables us to evaluate experience. Third: beyond experience, the need to imitate God. "God is the measure of man," Plato tells us in The Laws. Jews and Christians, we are told by Scripture to imitate God. When Thomas Aquinas is defending the repression of heretics, he is faced with the objection that God always takes sinners back. Why should the Church not be like God? Thomas' answer is a terrible one: "In this the Church cannot imitate God."18 That answer can never be satisfactory. That answer can never be true. And God's willingness to forgive is the foundation of liberty as His being is the foundation of truth. FOOTNOTES 1Thomas Jefferson, "A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," Jefferson, Papers, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 2, 545-546. 2Ysambart de la Pierre, Deposition in Paul Doncoeur, S.J., and Y. Lanhers, La Réhabilitation de Jeanne La Pucelle. L'enquête ordonnée par Charles VII (9 1956), p. 7. The translation is mine. 3The record at the beginning of the deposition identifies Ysambart de la Pierre as an Augustinian, but from other evidence he appears to have been a Dominican. The statement of which he is a signatory is printed ibid., p. 15. 4L'Avenir, November 1, 1830, in L'Avenir, ed. Guido Veruccio (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura 1967), p. 119; ibid. August 30, 1831, pp. 644-645 (examples of Belgium, Ireland, Poland; servitude is death). 5On Lacordaire and religious liberty as he brought the Dominicans back to France, see A. Duval, "Lacordaire présente l'ordre à son pays," La vie spirituelle, January 1985, vol. 139, pp. 94-96. 6Alexis de Tocqueville to Eugène Stoffels, July 24, 1839, Tocqueville, Oeuvres et correspondance inédites (Paris, 1861), pp. 1, 432. 7John Courtney Murray, "Governmental Repression of Heresy," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America, vol. 3 (1948), p. 26. 8George Shea, "Catholic Doctrine and `The Religion of the State,'" American Ecclesiastical Review vol. 123 (1950), p. 161. 9John A. Ryan and Francis J. Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 319. 10Connell, Discussion in Proceedings, supra n. 7, p. 100. 11e.g., Joseph Pohle, "Tolerance, Religious," Catholic Encyclopedeia (New York: Encyclopedeia Press, 1913) vol. 4. 12Murray, "Governmental Repression of Heresy," pp. 87-88. 13Gerald P. Fogarty, The Vatican and the American Hierarchy, 1870-1965, Band 21 of Papste und Papstum (Stuttgart: Anton Hiesmann, 1982), chapters 14 and 15; Reinhold Sebott, Religionsfreiheit und Verhältnis von Kirche und Staat: Der Beitrag John Courtney Murray zu einer modernen Frage (Rome: Universita Gregoriana, 1977). 14Xavier Rynne, Vatican Council II (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), p. 462. 15Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis humanae personae, Declaratio de libertate religiosa, adopted December 7, 1965, Acta apostolicae sedis, pp. 57, 929. 16Ibid., n. p. 12. 17Cf. Noonan, "Making One's Own Act Another's," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 27 (1972), pp. 36-38. 18Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 11, art. 4, ad 1. ---------------------- This article was given initially as the second annual Erasmus Lecture, on January 23, 1986. The Erasmus Lecture is sponsored by The Rockford Institute Center on Religion & Society (New York), of which Rev. Richard John Neuhaus is director.