Michael Novak: Intellectual Godfather to a Generation of Conservatives

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National Review:

The president of the American Enterprise Institute fondly remembers the great Catholic theologian and economist.

Arthur C. Brooks

February 17, 2017

 

Next time your work is frustrating or unpleasant, reflect on these words: “Enjoying what we do is not always a feeling of enjoyment; it is sometimes the gritty resolution a man or woman shows in doing what must be done — perhaps with inner dread and yet without whimpering self-pity.” The author of this tough love is the great philosopher and policy expert Michael Novak, who died Friday at 83. Novak, a longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute until his retirement in 2010, was one of the most influential conservative scholars of the past 75 years. His work shaped an entire generation of intellectuals.

 

Novak’s own formation started with twelve years training for the Catholic priesthood. He left the seminary just a few months before ordination. But he never wavered in his Catholicism and put his priestly training to good use in a career-long apostolate for faith, family, and free enterprise.

 

Novak’s early intellectual accomplishments were in theology. His most influential work in the field was the 1965 masterpiece Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge. Reading it is a viscerally satisfying experience, as Novak challenges the bravery of believers. A belief in God “could be an empty illusion, even a crime against his own humanity,” Novak wrote. “He knows the stakes.” But the possibility of hopeless delusion is no excuse for the “I’m spiritual, but not religious” evasion we so often hear today. A person of honor must decide to believe and face the consequences if wrong. In Novak’s words, “He has no place in his heart for complacency or that sweet pseudo-religious ‘peace’ that sickens honest men.” In short: Religious belief is not for sissies.

 

Like many thinkers of his generation, Novak intellectually matriculated as a progressive but graduated to conservatism. The first reason was his observation that the Democratic party of the 1970s was softening on Communism; then over social issues such as abortion and the family; and finally over support of the American free-enterprise system. He ultimately defined himself as a neoconservative alongside AEI colleagues such as Irving Kristol. But while Kristol defined a neoconservative as a liberal who has been mugged by reality, Novak preferred the definition “a progressive with three teenage children.”

 

(Snip)

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