Real Heroes Read online

  A Hero of Liberty

  With Cicero’s death three years later under the orders of Caesar’s successor, Marc Antony, the republic died and the dictatorship of the empire commenced.

  Centuries later, in April 1713, Joseph Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy debuted in London. Depicting the ancient Roman as a hero of republican liberty, the play resonated for decades thereafter in both Britain and America. George Washington read it over and over, inspired by this self-sacrificing hero. General Washington ordered it performed for his bedraggled troops at Valley Forge during the awful winter of 1777–78. Congress had forbidden the performance, thinking the play’s sad conclusion would dispirit the troops, but Washington knew that Cato’s resistance to tyranny would inspire them. And it did.

  “Few leaders have ever put ambition so squarely in the service of principle,” write Goodman and Soni. “These were the qualities that set Cato apart from his fellows—and that made posterity take notice.”

  Putting ambition in the service of principle instead of one’s own power or wealth: now that’s a virtue to which every man and woman in public office—or any other walk of life—should aspire today.

  Lessons from Cato the Younger

  Stand on principle: Cato’s tenure in public office was marked by honesty and fealty to republican values. As his biographers noted, “Few leaders have ever put ambition so squarely in the service of principle.” Cato took his own life rather than live under the rule of a tyrant.

  Practice self-discipline: A devotee of Stoicism, Cato was supremely disciplined. As a leader, he inspired loyalty and respect by never asking those he commanded to do something he would not himself do.

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  Augustine

  Searching for Truth and Wisdom

  To write about a man known chiefly as a theologian—a bishop in the early Catholic Church, no less—might suggest at first a discourse on religious issues. Augustine of Hippo (later canonized as Saint Augustine) is unquestionably a giant of Christian thought and teaching. On matters of salvation, grace, free will, original sin, and “just war,” his brilliant observations continue to spark lively debate throughout Christendom and beyond. He could be regarded as a hero for those contributions alone, but they are largely matters for readers to explore on their own.

  Augustine was also a hero because he took charge of his troubled, wayward life and transformed it. Then, once committed to the highest standards of personal conduct and scholarly inquiry, he offered pioneering insights on liberty critical to the development of Western philosophy. One does not have to be a person of any particular faith to learn a great deal from this man.

  The Roman province of Africa produced no more consequential figure than Augustine, born in 354 in Thagaste, now called Souk Ahras, in modern-day Algeria. It was a momentous time to be alive. By the fourth century, the old Roman Republic and its liberties had been snuffed out for four hundred years, succeeded by the increasingly corrupt, tyrannical, and dysfunctional welfare-warfare state that we know as the Roman Empire. Augustine would live to see the Visigoths sack the “Eternal City” of Rome in the year 410. Twenty years later, as the Vandals laid siege to Augustine’s own city of Hippo in North Africa, he died at age seventy-five. His life was proof that even as the world you know crumbles into dust, you can still make a difference for the betterment of humanity’s future.

  “An Unjust Law Is No Law at All”

  Augustine’s youth was hedonistic and self-centered, in spite of the earnest prayers and intense counseling of his devoutly Christian mother, Monica. His father, a volatile and angry tax collector who converted to Christianity on his deathbed, died when his son was a teenager. Augustine’s voracious sexual appetite led him into numerous affairs, which he regretted in later life.

  Though a bright student with remarkable rhetorical skills, he found plenty of time to get into trouble. Years later in his magnificent autobiography, The Confessions, he recalled with analytic introspection an incident in which he and some young friends stole pears from a man’s orchard. He did not steal the fruit because he was hungry, he wrote, but purely because “it was not permitted.” Noting this as evidence of his flawed character, he explained, “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own error—not that for which I erred, but for the error itself.”

  Words of Wisdom from Augustine

  “Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues.”

  In his twenties, Augustine bought into the cult of Manichaeism, a strange concoction of Christian, Buddhist, Gnostic, astrological, and pagan elements. He also flirted with Neoplatonism, a school of philosophy drawing heavily from Plato and from one of Plato’s later followers, Plotinus. While Augustine’s mother despaired at her son’s shifting fancies, two encounters—one with a book and one with a man—ultimately fulfilled her hopes and changed his life.

  The book was Hortensius by the great Roman republican Cicero. Though the text was eventually lost to history, scholars have reconstructed its core message through citations by contemporaries and by Augustine himself. According to Robin Lane Fox’s magisterial biography, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, “Cicero defined philosophy as the ‘love of wisdom’ (philo-sophia), words which struck home to his young reader.” It ignited what Augustine termed “an incredible blaze” in his heart for truth and a disdain for pseudo-philosophers, hypocrites, and deceivers. Cicero’s emphasis on acquiring knowledge would play a key role even in Augustine’s sexual life. He concluded that the passions of the flesh were a distraction from his growing love of wisdom, though this was a transition that took a little time. Before becoming a celibate priest in his early thirties, he famously asked God, “Give me chastity . . . but not yet.”

  The other life-altering encounter was with Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, one of the greatest orators in the Roman world. Augustine credited the bishop as the decisive factor in his own conversion to Christianity. That conversion would dominate his every waking moment in the second half of his life.

  Before his fortieth birthday, it was apparent to contemporaries that, thanks to Cicero and Ambrose and, secondarily, his mother, Augustine had developed a remarkable, searching intellect combined with a deeply Christian conscience. His account of his conversion in The Confessions is a classic of Christian theology and a seminal text in the history of autobiography. It’s been described as “an outpouring of thanksgiving and penitence” and includes observations about the nature of time, causality, free will, and other central topics in philosophy. Augustine’s City of God is also highly regarded and still widely read today. He wrote the book as an encouragement to his fellow Christians in an increasingly violent world. It was a ringing defense of Christianity in the face of erroneous claims that Rome declined because it had abandoned the old pagan gods.

  Of special interest to me is that in his writings and sermons, Augustine says things that resonate with lovers of liberty.

  Augustine was more than a little skeptical of earthly political power. “The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule,” he said,

  for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but—what is worse—the slave of as many masters as he has vices.

  Augustine did not subscribe to any sort of “divine right” of rulers. Nor did he believe that legislation or decrees should pass unquestioned. “An unjust law is no law at all,” he maintained. To Augustine, government was at best a necessary evil that could only grow more evil the bigger it becomes. In this passage from The City of God, he questioned the legitimacy of government itself:

  Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself i
s made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who doest it with a great fleet art styled an emperor.”

  Writing for the blog Discourses on Liberty, Will Harvard notes, “The fact that man has dominion over other men is not a product of God’s intended world, but rather the result of sin.” Augustine argued that a rational creature made in God’s image was meant to have dominion over nature, not over fellow men. At a time when slavery was common and widely viewed as acceptable, declaring it unequivocally sinful was positively bold and refreshing. Augustine even used church funds to purchase the freedom of individual slaves. The scholar from Thagaste also railed against torture and capital punishment. And theft, in his view, was “absolute wickedness” because it violated something sacred: “the law written in our hearts.”

  Rome had its own immorality to blame for its decline and vulnerability to invasion, Augustine thundered. He argued that the old pagan gods imparted no morality to their followers in either Rome or Greece. Romans had allowed their personal and civic virtues to erode. If legionnaires failed to prevent the assaults they had once repulsed, it was because Rome was rotten at its core. Lust for power and ill-gotten gain had come to plague a people who once rose to greatness because of honesty, self-discipline, mutual respect, and responsibility. The welfare-warfare state of the late empire was a den of iniquity presided over by a nest of vipers. Why should decline come as a surprise?

  In Augustine: A Very Short Introduction, Henry Chadwick observes:

  With remarkable prescience of what was to come in the West within a generation of his death, Augustine suggested that the world would be a happier place if the great and proud empire were succeeded by a number of smaller states. The kingdom of God had as much room for Goths as for Romans.

  Augustine’s language angered imperialist patriots. He was aware that empires come and go. He did not think the Roman empire was doomed, as some contemporary pessimists were saying. Rome would collapse only if the Romans did. People cursed the times they lived in; but (in Augustine’s words) “whether times are good or bad depends on the moral quality of individual and social life, and is up to us.” Each generation, he remarked, thinks its own times uniquely awful, that morality and religion have never been more threatened. He thought it his duty to attack fatalism and to arouse people to a sense of being responsible if things went wrong. They could have a say in what happened next.

  Augustine was a man of peace. He urged Christians in particular to engage only in voluntary interactions with themselves and others unless and until a grave wrong required violence to be stopped. His was, in effect, an early defense of self-defense and of a concept now known in libertarian circles as the nonaggression principle.

  Humility

  Of all the virtues of personal character, Augustine reserved the highest praise for one that’s often overlooked in our times. “Humility,” he asserted, “is the foundation of all the other virtues; hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.”

  Until the twentieth century, most cultures held that having too high an opinion of oneself was the root of most of the world’s troubles. Misbehavior—from drug addiction to cruelty to wars—resulted from hubris or pride, a haughtiness of spirit that needed to be deterred or disciplined. The idea that you were bigger or better, or more self-righteous, or somehow immune from the rules that govern others—the absence of humility, in other words—gave you license to do unto others what you would never allow them to do unto you.

  These days, it’s a different story. Being humble rubs against what millions have been taught under the banner of “self-esteem.” Even as our schools fail to teach us elemental facts and skills, they teach us to feel good in our ignorance. We explain away bad behavior as the result of the guilty feeling bad about themselves. We manufacture excuses for them, form support groups for them, and resist making moral judgments, lest we hurt their feelings. We don’t demand repentance and self-discipline as much as we pump up their egos.

  In an extraordinary 2002 article in the New York Times, “The Trouble with Self-Esteem,” psychologist Lauren Slater concluded that “people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem, and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country’s biggest, most expensive social problems.”

  Augustine, who was quite familiar with the bloviating demagogues of the late Roman Empire, would surely agree.

  In the second half of his life, Augustine was keenly focused on truth and wisdom. He knew that a humble person is a teachable person because he’s not so puffed up that his mind is closed. A humble person reforms himself before he attempts to reform the world. A humble person treats others with respect, and that includes other people’s lives, rights, and property. A humble person takes criticism or adversity as an opportunity to grow, to build character. A humble person knows that graduation from formal schooling is not the end of learning but only a noteworthy start of what ought to be a lifelong adventure. Augustine regarded the power-seeking know-it-alls of his day the same way that the Austrian economist and Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek saw “central planners” more than fifteen centuries later: as dangerous fools armed with a “pretense of knowledge.”

  Legacy

  Augustine has deeply influenced many leading figures through the centuries: men and women such as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Soren Kierkegaard, Russell Kirk, Hannah Arendt, and a long list of popes, preachers, philosophers, and politicians.

  But even in his day, Augustine inspired appreciation from unlikely quarters. Within weeks of his death in 430, Hippo fell to the Vandals, who burned the city to the ground. They spared only two buildings: Augustine’s cathedral and his library.

  Lessons from Augustine

  Be humble and virtuous: Augustine embodied humility, which he called “the foundation of all the other virtues.” He understood that humility encourages an attitude of self-improvement, the key to bettering society. He saw Rome’s decline as the inevitable result of its moral degeneration.

  Pursue truth and wisdom: Augustine turned away from his useful hedonism partly because he read Cicero and embraced the “love of wisdom.” Inspired by truth and wisdom, he became one of the greatest thinkers and theologians of the late Roman Republic.

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  Anne Hutchinson

  The Spirit of Religious Liberty

  Opinions of Anne Hutchinson have, shall we say, covered the waterfront.

  In his masterful tome Conceived in Liberty, the twentieth-century economist and libertarian historian Murray Rothbard cast her as a staunch individualist and the greatest threat to the “despotic Puritanical theocracy of Massachusetts Bay.”

  John Winthrop, the second, sixth, ninth, and twelfth governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, thought she was a “hell-spawned agent of destructive anarchy” and “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.”

  The state of Massachusetts apparently agrees with Rothbard. A monument in the State House in Boston today calls her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” She was, in fact, the preeminent female crusader for a free society in eighteenth-century New England, for which she paid
first with banishment and ultimately with her life.

  Cast Out

  Anne Hutchinson’s story is bound intimately to the “antinomian” or “free grace” controversy involving both religion and gender. It raged in Massachusetts for the better part of two years, from 1636 to 1638. Hutchinson was an unconventional, charismatic woman who dared to challenge church doctrine as well as the role of women in even discussing such things in a male-dominated society. In Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, historian Emery John Battis wrote, “Gifted with a magnetism which is imparted to few, she had, until the hour of her fall, warm adherents far outnumbering her enemies, and it was only by dint of skillful maneuvering that the authorities were able to loosen her hold on the community.”

  Antinomianism literally means “against the law” and was a term of derision applied against Hutchinson and her “free grace” followers. While the Puritan establishment in Massachusetts argued, as good “Reformers” of the day did, that Christian understanding derived from scripture alone (“Sola Scriptura”), the antinomians placed additional emphasis on an “inner light” by which the Holy Spirit imparted wisdom and guidance to believing individuals, one at a time.

  “As I do understand it,” Hutchinson explained, “laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. He who has God’s grace in his heart cannot go astray.”

  Barely a century after Martin Luther sparked the great divide known as the Reformation, the Protestant leaders of Massachusetts saw antinomianism as dangerously heretical. Their theological forebears broke from Rome in part because they saw the teachings of priests, bishops, and popes as the words of presumptuous intermediaries—diversions by mortals from the divine word of God. When Anne Hutchinson and other antinomians spoke of this supplemental “inner light,” it seemed to the Puritan establishment that the Reformation itself was being undone. Worse still, Hutchinson accused church leaders in Massachusetts of reverting to the pre-Reformation notion of “justification by works” instead of the Martin Luther/John Calvin perspective of justification by faith alone through God’s “free grace.”