Schall on Acton Essays

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TheActon LegacyJ ames V. Schall

Selected Writingsof LordActon,editedby J . Rufus Fears, tndianapolis: LibertyClassics.VolumeI: Essays in the His-toryof Liberty, 1985, 557 pp. VolumeII: Essays in the Study and WritingofHistory, 1985. 580 pp. Volume 111:Essays in Religion, Politics, andMorality. 1988, 716 pp. Each $15.00(paper $7.50).

LORD ACTON (1834-1902) was withoutdoubt one of the most interesting per-sonalities of the nineteenth century. Hisgrandfather had been the Prime Ministerof the Kingdom of Naples, his stepfatherthe Prime Minister of England. He waslegitimately English and legitimately Ger-man on his mothers side, with an enor-mous erudition in French, I talian, and gen-eral European culture. Everyone knowswhat Acton said about power corrupting.Hewas especially known for his loyalty tothe Catholic Church, yet famous for his op-position to the Declaration of Infallibilityof Vatican I , and perplexing to many as acorrespondent of Robert E. Lee, whosecause Acton thought was the more just.Professor J . Rufus Fears and L ibertyClassics have produced amost handsome,inexpensive, thorough collection ofActons writings. Acton is also sometimesknown for never having written a com-plete book, but he certainly made up forthis .in numerous essays and reviews,which revealed a profound learning andconstant attention to scholarship thateventually made him Regius Professor atCambridge and the founder of the famousancient histories. Would that the vastmajority of writers of actual books couldshow his extraordinary genius.Acton, because he was a Catholic, wasnot allowed, evidently, to attend Cam-bridgeas ayouth. But, such are the work-

ings of Providence, he was promptly sentto Munich to study under lgnaz Dollinger,only to discover there the world of Ger-man historiography and theology that hecould never have known half so well inEngland. We have here an account ofwhat he learned and subsequentlythought. It would be difficult to find a finercollection of any author than this seriesthat Professor Fears has brought together.What strikes one again and again aboutActon is what a good writer he was. Nodoubt he assumed that, like himself, hisreader would be able to read French, Ger-man, I talian, Spanish, Latin, or Greek withequal facility and delight. Consequently,he cited such long passages where appro-priate, yet his English was excellent,graphic, witty, memorable, flawless. Ac-ton, for instance, once did a charmingreview (these three volumes containnumerous reviews of famous and not-so-famous works, even as the reviews them-selves are classics of criticism and learn-ing) of a book of George Eliots works, col-lected by her husband. She, too, had hada German phase and knew many of thefamous German scholars, especially DavidFriedrich Strauss, whom she visited in1854. She also translated his curious Lifeof J esus into English. On this point, Actonvividly describes Strauss in this way:Theology made him sick, and fame didnot console him, for he was tired of beingcalled the author of his book. . .(Volumettt,p. 466). Acton knew irony.George Eliot even translated Feuer-bachs The Essence of Christianity, in thetranslation still readily available. Eliot hadby this time lost her early Christian up-bringing and had become quite hostile toChristianity. But Acton knew the impor-tance of Feuerbach in Eliots intellectualsaga. He thus describes The Essence of

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Chrisfianify,hat book Marx himself readwith so much enthusiasm:More than any other work it had con-tributed to the downfall of metaphysics, andit contained an ingenious theory of the riseand growth of religion, and of the relation ofthe soul to God, while denying the existenceo either [III, p. 4731.

From the subtle wit of such a passage wecan be sure that, for A cton, metaphysics,religion, soul, and God remained in place,however much Feuerbach and GeorgeEliot contributed to their presumeddownfall.Acton clearly had the advantage ofknowing the Germans and of knowingtheology, so that he could put this mostfamous English lady in context when she,too, took up the German intellectual worldto justify her agnostic views. After she hadencountered at Coventry a family of busyand strenuous freethinkers, M arianEvans seems to have quickly given up thefaith that Acton understood sowell. But

from that momentous November [1841]until her death it would appear that nomisgiving favourable to Christianity everpenetrated her mind or shook for an in-stant its settled unbelief (111, p. 463).True to his own principle of judiciousfairness and equitable treatment, Actonconcludes:If ever science or religion reigns aloneover an undivided empire, the books of

George Eliot might lose their central andunique importance, but as the emblem of ageneration distracted between the intenseneed ofbelieving and the difficulty of belief,they will live to the last syllable of recordedtime [HI, p. 4851.If Acton himself had a single vocation asan intellectual writer, surely it was thiseffort to resolve the need for belief withthe difficulty of believing in an age inwhich science and religion seemed at log-gerheads. His famous History of L ibertywas designed to show that they were not,at least not necessarily.In his correspondence with RichardSimpson in 1861, to recall something of

the prodigious range of his intellect, Actontook up the question of poverty. Sincedevotion to the poor has become almostthe essence of religion at the end of thetwentieth century, Actons observation onthis delicate topic is worth recalling:The remedy for poverty is not in thematerial resources of the rich, but in themoral resources of the poor. These, whicharelulled and deadened by money-gifts, canbe raised and strengthened only by personalinfluence, sympathy, charity. Money giftssave the poor man who gets them, but givelonger life to pauperism in the country [I l l ,p. 5741.

One could state without too much exag-geration that failure to understand Actonspoint has been the main problem with lib-eral and religious thought on poverty,especially in the Third World, throughoutthe twentieth century.Acton could be most witty, even biting.In an essay on The Hanoverian Settle-ment, Acton wrote of the new king thathewas neither a tyrant, nor a coward, nor afool; he was only unintellectual and brutallyselfish. There were ladies in his companywho received English titles, and offendedone part of the public by their morals andthe remainder by their ugliness [I, p. 1211.Somehow, on coming across such a pas-sage, one is not prepared to find Lord Ac-ton so consistently amusing.Actons account of the execution ofMaximillian, the Mexican Emperor in1867, rivals Burkes account of the deathsof Marie Antoinette and the King duringthe French Revolution.

He fell, and carried with him in his fall theindependence o the people he had come tosave. Nothing henceforth remains that canpermanently arrest the United States in theannexation of Spanish America. If they haveprudence to avoid European war, and wis-dom to compose their own dissentions, theymay grasp the most glorious inheritance theearth affords. . . .The memory of the fair-haired stranger,who devoted his lifeto the good of Mexico,

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and died for guilt which was not his own,will live in sorrow rather than in angeramong the people for whom he strove invain. A lready we may pronounce the ver-dict of history upon his sad career-hisworst crime was in accepting the treacher-ous gift of Empire, but his misfortune wasgreater than his fault. 1 think he was well-neigh the noblest of his race, and fulfilledthe promise of his words, The fameo myancestors will not degenerate in me [I, p.1971.Acton wrote these words in 1868. Heseems to have been wrong about theannexation of the Spanish possession. Onedoes wonder, however, what he had inmind by the most glorious inheritancethe earth affords.In these volumes we find the famousessays of Acton-The Study of History,The History of Freedom in Antiquity,The History of Freedom in Christianity,The Political Causes of the AmericanRevolution, Human Sacrifice, Ranke,The Vatican Council, Nationality, andThe German Schools of History. In giv-ing us these essays, Professor Fears hasrightfully preserved all the academicapparatus that Acton himself displayed.No doubt in part because of ProfessorHerbert Butterfields analysis of it in hisWhig View of Hstory, Actons inaugurallecture as Regius Professor in 1895 isperhaps his most famous work. Muchreflection remains to be done, especiallyfor those Voegelinians and Straussiansamong us, on Actons view of the natureof modernity. In his Regius lecture, Actonobserved:

The modern age did not proceed frommedieval by normal succession, with out-ward tokens of legitimate descent. Un-heralded, it found a new order o things,under a law of innovation, sapping theancient reign o continuity. In those daysColumbus subverted the notions of theworld, and reversed the conditions of pro-duction, wealth, and power; in those daysMachiavelli released governments from therestraint of law [ I I , p. 5071.

The novus ordo saeculorum and gov-ernments no longer restrained by law

are at the root of modernity in preciselythat way in which Acton sensed that thecontinuity with the past would be brokento the extent that it did not serve as asober corrective to how men could dealwith one another.Acton thought that valid modern libertyfollowed a line that went from Aristotlethrough Aquinas.As he put it in his reviewof Sir Erskine MaysDemocracy in Europe:

But the Politics, which, to the world ofliving men, is the most valuable of his[Aristotles] works, acquired no influence onantiquity, and is never quoted before thetime of Cicero. Again it disappeared formany centuries; it was unknown to theArabian commentators, and in WesternEurope it was first brought to light by St.Thomas Aquinas, at the very time when aninfusion of popular elements was modifyingfeudalism, and it helped to emancipate polit-ical philosophy from despotic theories andto confirm it in the ways of freedom [I, p.631.

It seems clear that Acton was aware ofboth the need for continuity with antiquityand the nature of the break with antiquitysignaled by an attempt to emancipate theworld into a new order by liberating thestate from any theoretic restraints.Acton. thus was not happy with whatwas occurring in the United States. He feltthat Jefferson was at theheart of the prob-lem. In The Political Causesof the Ameri-can Revolution he wrote:

J efferson, who, even at the time of theDeclaration of Independence, which was hiswork, entertained views resembling those ofRousseau and Paine, and sought the sourceof freedom in the abstract rights of man,returned from France with his mind full ofthe doctrines of equality and popular sov-ereignty. By the defeato Adams in the con-test for the presidency, he carried theseprinciples to power, and altered the natureof the American government [I, p. 2291.Acton often displays the same cautionabout abstract rights that Burke hadalready embodied.Actons two essays on the history of l i berty are, no doubt, the contribution to

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intellectual life and political ethics that hewas most proud of. He was no Mill, and hisreasons for political liberty were not basedin a kind o skepticism about truth. Actonknew that ideas formed institutions:It would be easy to point out a paragraph inSt. Augustine or a sentence of Crotius thatoutweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Par-liaments, and our cause owes more toCicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocque-ville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or theFive Codes of France. By liberty I mean theassurance that every man shall be protectedin doing what he believes his duty againstthe influence of authority and majorities,

custom and opinion [I, p. 71.Acton fought for liberty not because hewas against religion but because he wasfor it. He was not afraid to record calmlyany sordid act of a cleric or a politician,because he held, in a way, that the verypurpose of his historiography was to re-deem the evil acts of men in the very ef-fort to write accurately about them.

Moreover, Acton was willing to face thequestion of why men do not proceed tothe full truth. The vice of the classic state,he thought, was that it was both Churchand State in one (I, p. 17). As great as hisrespect for Plato and Aristotle was, Actonheld that human reason by itself could notpersist in coming to the truth, or wouldnot if it could.If you will bear in mind that Socrates, the

best o the pagans, knew of no higher cri-terion for men, of no better guide of con-duct, than the laws of each country; thatPlato, whose sublime doctrine was so nearan anticipation of Christianity that cele-brated theologians wished his works to beforbidden, lest men should be content withthem, and indifferent to any higher dogma-to whom was granted that prophetic vi-sion o the Just Man, accused, condemnedand scourged, and dying on a Cross-never-theless employed the most splendid intellectever bestowed on man to advocate the abo-lition of the family and the exposure of in-fants; that A ristotle, the ablest moralist ofantiquity, saw no harm in making raidsupon a neighboring people, for the sake ofreducing them to slavery-still more, if you

will consider that, among the moderns, menof genius equal to these have held politicaldoctrines not less criminal or absurd-it willbe apparent to you how stubborn aphalanxo error blocks the paths of truth; that purereason isas powerlessas custom to solve theproblem of free government.. . [I , p. 191.

Acton was willing to grant that the limita-tions of human ethical and political capaci-ties were real and that this was a fact ofobservation. He knew the limits of purereason.The stubborn phalanx of error that, asActon put it, blocks the path to truth wasfound in the greatest intellects of our kind.The legacy of Acton no doubt lies here inthe question we are no longer culturallyallowed to ask when we face the problemsand defeats of a free government, thefact that reason alone, however great itis, even to the sublime Plato and theable Aristotle, and those who noblyfollow them in this, is not enough. Acton,one suspects, would suggest that we havetwo alternatives: the first is to ask our-selves whether anything more thanreason is given to us; the second is torepeat the history of antiquity.These three volumes represent an intel-lectual occasion of the first order. Pro-fessor Fears and L iberty Classics could nothave chosen a body of philosophical, polit-ical, and theological reflection from thelast century more directly pertinent andchallenging to the cultural issues of thecoming century. Thus, writing para-doxically of Goldwin Smiths I r i shHstory,Acton recalled the lesson of the FrenchRevolution, now itself 200years old

The significance of that sanguinary dramalies in the fact, that a political abstractionwas powerful enough to make men thinkthemselves right in destroying masses otheir countrymen in the attempt to impose iton their country. . . .The Reign of Terrorwas nothing else than the reign of thosewho conceive that liberty and equality canco-exist [I, p. 951.The century from Acton to ourselves,more earnestly than his own century, cer-tainly did attempt, again and again, to im-

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pose this political abstraction, an imposi-tion that always resulted in another san-guinary drama.What is important to understand is thatthe lesson we have learned in the mean-time isnot Actons concerning the limits ofreason. Rather it is the lesson that, tophilosophize and to legislate, liberty andequality must co-exist. What is wrong,we are told, is not our theories, but the

structure of the world. Therefore, we seekto change the world as if it is ours toremake in our own image, itself limited tonothing but ourselves. This isthe conclud-ing sentence of The History of Freedomin Christianity: The story of the future iswritten in the past, and that which hathbeen is the same thing that shall be (I, p.53).

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Schall on Acton Essays