Some people still look askance at Catholic intellectuals. It doesn’t seem to matter to most British philosophers, for instance, that many of their greatest peers have been Catholics – from Anselm to Anscombe, from More to MacIntyre. They are still liable to sneer. Half a century ago Leonard Woolf tried to stop my father becoming editor of the New Statesman merely because he was a Catholic. Little has changed since.
There is one country, however, where the Catholic intelligentsia really matters: the United States. The death last month of the theologian and philosopher Michael Novak, at the age of 83, was treated as a major event on the other side of the Atlantic. Tributes poured in not only from Catholic institutions and individuals, but from Protestant and especially Jewish ones too. Why?
It isn’t just that Novak was highly respected by and influential on several presidents – though he was. This was all the more remarkable because those to whom he was especially close, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, were Republicans, despite the fact that Novak was a lifelong Democrat.
Nor was it simply the prestige enjoyed by a distinguished scholar – Novak won the Templeton Prize in 1994 – who was equally eminent as a diplomat. In the 1980s he was Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and played a major role in the latter stages of the Cold War, leading the US delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
What really mattered about Novak were his ideas – ideas that will endure for as long as American Catholicism does. He began his intellectual journey in 1964 with The Open Church, the product of his time as a correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter at the Second Vatican Council, which he attended while still studying philosophy and theology at Harvard. Novak welcomed Vatican II, but was alert to the danger that it might unleash revolution rather than reform.
His book established him as one of the best Catholic minds of his generation. Novak realised reluctantly that he had no priestly vocation. But his book is dedicated to his younger brother Dick, a priest who was tragically killed in Pakistan during riots between Hindus and Muslims.
It was followed by Belief and Unbelief: a Philosophy of Self-Knowledge. This, Novak’s most spiritual meditation, confronts the gulf between Catholics and atheists. It finds the basis of an answer in “intelligent subjectivity”: the attempt to see the human person as the interpretive key to the universe. Reading between the lines, one senses that belief did not come easily to Novak. Alongside his academic and journalistic books, he wrote several novels in which he explored the more subjective side of his experience.
Novak’s favourite author around this time was St John of the Cross; his own dark night of the soul coincided with falling in love with Karen Laub, a brilliant artist and pupil of Kokoschka, whom he met in 1962. Their marriage endured 46 years until her death in 2009.
Novak’s faith set him apart from his philosophical contemporaries. He returned to academic life at Stanford, where he flirted with the New Left, before teaching at the State University of New York and Syracuse. But he found his true vocation at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, moving easily between the academic world and that of think tanks and policymakers. There he spent three productive decades, during which he brought about a transformation in Catholic thinking about capitalism and democracy which even found an audience in the Vatican.
His best-known work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, appeared in 1982 and was dedicated to Pope John Paul II, whose encyclical Centesimus Annus reflects Novak’s bold attempt to reimagine Adam Smith for our time. Novak’s book, which is subtitled “An Inquiry into the Spiritual Wealth of Nations”, had a seismic effect on the hitherto anti-capitalist nature of Catholic thought. My own copy, which Novak gave me on my first visit to Washington in 1984, is inscribed by him “with warmest wishes and high hopes”.
His next book, Freedom with Justice: Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, continued the critique of Catholic social teaching while holding fast to the liberal tradition that he refused to relinquish to the Left. He saw my father (who had produced Modern Times, his bestselling history of the 20th century, while at the AEI) and me as fellow crusaders. I hope I lived up to his hopes.
The third volume of Novak’s capitalist trilogy, which appeared in 1993, was The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Here Novak appears as a kind of Catholic Max Weber, combining economics, intellectual history and sociology to explain what he called “the heart of the matter: creativity”.
Michael Novak sets an example to all of us, Catholics or not, who aspire to live the intellectual life. We must never forget that our duty is to unleash human creativity; our mission is to bring what he calls “moral liberty” to those who are deprived of it through no fault of their own.
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