It occurs to me that we need to start some kind of contest on who can think of the most important way Tocqueville was wrong (hint: Ignoring the Declaration of Independence has been done). Meanwhile, here’s a neglected aspect of his teaching on religion (which is all good):
Christianity and the Greatness of Human Individuality
Tocqueville’s final discussion (DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, vol. 2, part 2, chapter 15) about religion in America moves away from any concern about political utility toward sustaining the sublime qualities that distinguish human individuality from all else that exists, from being absorbed into some materialistic account of the world. There, he calls the American religion their most precious inheritance from aristocratic times, and the way they have knowing the aristocratic truth, found in the philosophic doctrine of Socrates and Plato, that we are beings capable of transcending our biological limitations in the direction of immortality.
Tocqueville praises the rest commanded my American law and belief on what might be called the Puritans’ Sunday. That leisure is for beings who know their longings to be more than mere bodies can be satisfied, for reflection on who they are in light of their true destiny. Without Sunday, the Americans could easily lose themselves in the frenzy of restless diversion. They could easily, by thinking of themselves as less than they really are, become less than they are meant to be.
Christians believe, against the pretensions of the materialistic experts, they are as more than material beings, and so they’re inspired to have thoughts and perform deeds that stand the test of time. Christianity also curbs their restless materialism by giving them a view of humanly worthy leisure (which they enjoy on Sunday), by keeping them from believing that they need to be constantly diverted from the ephemeral insignificance of the isolated “I.” Tocqueville, in evaluating Christianity’s effect on the individual, divides the philosophers into pre-Socratic and Epicurean materialists and the Platonists serious about the soul’s immortality. Christianity originally emerged, he explained, as part of the soul’s rebellion against the Epicurean excesses of the Romans. And the pre-Socratic claim about the transience of everything human l was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. None of the pre-Socratics” writings were preserved in tact over time. Meanwhile, the works of Plato, attuned as they are to the true longings of the souls, remain with us as wholes.
Tocqueville pointedly says the American religion is its most precious inheritance from aristocratic times, the carrier about what’s always true about the aristocrat’s proud view of the high purposes of particular individuals. . According to Tocqueville, Christian functions for the Americans as a kind of Platonism for the people, a kind of aristocracy that includes everyone. For Nietzsche, Platonism for the people suggests that Christianity is a religion for slaves being diverted from living well now by illusions about their true home in some other world. Christianity is a diversion or opiate for the weak. For Tocqueville, the suggestion is that only if people believe that they’re more than the biological beings the scientists describes or the empty leftovers the Cartesians describe can they live well—or achieve their true greatness—in this world. As Percy puts it, only if we have some credible explanation for our experiences of homelessness can we be as home as well can be in with the good things of this world.
Christianity is the antidote to materialism, which is what Tocqueville calls the probably untrue and certainly pernicious theoretical diversion that makes the weak—displaced “I”—weaker. Materialism can’t extinguish but it can intensify the experience of the “I” as pointless leftover in a world otherwise perfectly comprehensible by impersonal theory. So materialism can have the effective of turning the subliminity of human longings—and the great thoughts and accomplishments—into nothing but dizzying, paralyzing disorientation.
No materialist can explain the hopes and longings of the being capable of experiencing himself as existing for a moment between two abysses. And Tocqueville agrees with the Socratic Christian Percy that there’s nothing more mysterious and wonderful that the particular human being, the being who knows but who can’t be fully known to himself. Tocqueville, by connecting magnanimity and humility or pride and the anxious experience of personal insignificance, comes close, in his own way, to Thomism—meaning a way of showing the aristocratic Christianity or classical Christianity or philosophic Christianity aren’t oxymorons. His Platonic or aristocratic affirmation of the truth about the soul or the sublimity of the highest forms of human thought and action isn’t meant to negate the distinctive contribution of Christianity to the whole truth about who we are. We can say that Tocqueville offers a Platonic criticism of Pascal on behalf of the thought that our true greatness includes some justifiable pride in who we are, but he also offers a Pascalian criticism of the absolutely self-sufficient pretensions of classical magnanimity and Socratic philosophy. We can see, in fact, that Tocqueville’s talking up of both the aristocratic and the egalitarian Christianity corresponds to the measured approach he takes to more pure or complete displays of aristocracy in America.
