By Michael Pakaluk
Loyalty is a republican virtue, and more than that. «The American people have distrusted the word loyalty, perhaps because they consider it the correlate of royalty», says Orestes Brownson in his great work on our country, The American Republic; «but loyalty is rather the correlate of the law».
This fact can be perceived with just a glance at the components of the word. It clearly comes from the French for law, loi. Loyalty is loi-alty. In medieval Latin it was simply legalitas. Loyalty is, in its most fundamental sense, respect for the law.
But loyalty is not simply «a» virtue, if Brownson is right. Remember that he wrote in 1865, right after the disloyal men, the «rebels», had been defeated, and after hundreds of thousands of loyal men gave their lives for their country. Let us listen to him:
Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human virtues, and it is the human element of that sublime love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfillment of the law. It contains within itself the principle of self-giving, of self-sacrifice, and it is, of all human virtues, the one that makes man most like God. There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic that a truly loyal people is not capable of, nor anything mean, vile, cruel, brutal, criminal, or detestable that should not be expected from a truly disloyal people.
Thus, what is at stake with this virtue, loyalty, is enormous.
And yet, it seems right to say that our Catholic tradition, at least in its ethical system, does not offer direct guidance on it. I say «in its system», because who can be a better teacher of the nature of loyalty than Saint Thomas More, with his martyrdom and his famous «the king’s good servant, but God’s first»?
And yet, there is no classical virtue in Saint Thomas that corresponds exactly to it, and the Catechism is almost silent on the matter. «Each man must give loyalty to the communities of which he is part» (§ 1880), says the English translation, but the Latin and French state, more simply, that he must be dedicated to those communities, which is something else.
Brownson seemed to believe that it was impossible for what we would today call «a liberal» to be loyal at all. Let us define liberal as someone who believes that we are not bound by anything to which we have not consented. The obligation of a mother to her child, then, comes from the fact that she has accepted carrying it to term. The obligation of a Christian to believe comes from his commitment to the faith as a mature adult. The obligation of a citizen to obey the law comes from the fact that, in some way, he has participated in a social contract by which he has «alienated» certain rights in favor of a government. He is loyal and respectful of the law only in the sense that he wants to be faithful to himself and to his word.
But Brownson places loyalty first among human virtues because it is a recognition of the authority of God and of his law, which flows from on high, through a government responsible for the common good of a concrete people, rooted in a concrete place. We are bound by God’s law because He is our Creator, and it is true and just, regardless of what we have agreed to. That is why the sacrifice of a soldier on the battlefield for a just cause can be so admirable and even fruitful, because it is a return to God of the gift of one’s own life.
Loyalty, understood ethically, requires personification. It is toward the motherland or the fatherland, or toward the nation in relation to the Father of the Country.
The famous homily of Saint John Paul II in Victory Square in Warsaw, before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, is a hymn to loyalty: «I wish to kneel before this tomb to venerate every seed that falls to the ground and dies, and thus bears fruit».
He then generalizes and, without saying it explicitly, turns loyalty into the animating virtue of the entire life of a citizen and patriot:
It can be the seed of a soldier’s blood shed on the battlefield, or the sacrifice of martyrdom in concentration camps or prisons. It can be the seed of daily hard work, with the sweat of one’s brow, in the fields, the workshop, the mine, the foundries, and the factories. It can be the seed of the love of parents who do not shy away from giving life to a new human being and assuming the entire task of educating him. It can be the seed of creative work in universities, higher institutes, libraries, and places where national culture is built. It can be the seed of prayer, of service to the sick, to those who suffer, to the abandoned: «all that Poland is made of».
The virtue of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, from a human point of view, was loyalty. So is a mother’s refusal to contemplate abortion. So is that of the professor who writes that academic article that may «fall to the ground», in the sense that no one reads it.
I said that the Church, in its tradition of classical ethics, does not teach directly about loyalty. But it does teach that respect for the law requires respecting the order of authority, the primacy of natural law, and the principle that «the law must rule, not a man».
Thus, Saint Thomas More was not disloyal when, respecting the order of authority, he affirmed that he was God’s servant before the king’s, nor were the Apostles when they said that they must obey God rather than men.
And Antigone was not disloyal when she obeyed natural law by burying her brother, nor would a German soldier have been disloyal to his country or to any oath by disobeying a murder order.
Likewise, the accusation of disloyalty is never pertinent regarding someone who criticizes or even resists any arbitrary exercise of authority.
About the author
Michael Pakaluk, scholar of Aristotle and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, is Professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His collection of essays, The Shock of Holiness (Ignatius Press), is now available. His book on Christian friendship, The Company We Keep, is available from Scepter Press. He contributed to Natural Law: Five Views (Zondervan, last May), and his most recent book on the Gospels was published in March with Regnery Gateway, Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel. You can follow him on Substack at Michael Pakaluk.