The first revolution was not political. It was angelic. Before any throne was overturned on earth, a created spirit of surpassing beauty looked upon the order God had established and spoke the two words that have echoed through every rebellion since: non serviam — “I will not serve.”
Lucifer did not deny that God existed. He denied that he owed God submission. He preferred his own will, his own judgment, his own glory, to the order in which he had been placed. Every revolution that has followed, in heaven and on earth, is a translation of those two words into new circumstances. This is the lens through which the American founding must be read, and it is precisely the lens that Michael Knowles, in his recent and much-celebrated defense of the American project at a CatholicVote event, declines to pick up.
Dr. E. Michael Jones, whatever one makes of his many provocations and his uneasy relationship with the fullness of Catholic tradition, performed a genuine service in tracing this genealogy in his study of the Puritan settlement of America. The Puritan was the non serviam spirit incarnated in religious form. He had rejected not only the Catholic Church but the very principle of mediated, hierarchical, sacramental authority. He would have no priest between himself and God, no bishop above him, no king he could not depose, no tradition he was bound to honor. He carried his Bible and, in time, his gun, and with them he built a society on the explicit premise that the individual conscience, illuminated directly by the Holy Spirit, needed no authority above itself. This was liberation as Lucifer understood liberation. It was the refusal to serve, dressed in the language of Scripture.
Dr. Jones is right to insist that this spirit found its supreme literary monument in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the point deserves more weight than Knowles or any Catholic apologist for America would care to give it. Milton was no neutral observer of the Puritan revolution. He was its propagandist. He served as Latin Secretary to Cromwell’s regime and wrote, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, an explicit theological defense of putting a king to death. When such a man sat down to compose his epic of rebellion, he gave the rebel the best lines. Satan’s defiance, his refusal to bend the knee, his insistence that the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell, his preference to reign in Hell rather than serve in Heaven, is non serviam rendered into the most magnificent English verse ever written in service of a lie.
Dr. Jones observes that the inspiration for seminal American figures —from Thomas Paine to Emerson and beyond — traces directly back to Satan’s speech at the opening of Milton’s Puritan epic. This is not literary trivia. Paradise Lost nearly replaced Genesis in the New England Puritan imagination; after 1740 it was quoted from the pulpit by nearly every major New England minister. The Americans did not merely inherit the regicidal politics of the Puritan revolution. They inherited its myth, its hero, and its founding gesture of refusal, recited from memory.
The Protestant roots of the American rebellion
The political fruit of this spirit ripened first not in 1776 but in 1649, and this is the connection Knowles and his fellow Catholic apologists for the American order must avoid at all costs, because to admit it is to lose the argument.
The English Civil War, and the regicide that crowned it, was the first modern enactment of non serviam against a legitimate Christian sovereign. Oliver Cromwell is the pivotal figure of the modern age, and we must rescue him from the textbook portrait of the sober Protestant statesman and name him for what he was: the first man to put a crowned and anointed king on public trial and behead him in the name of the people.
Hilaire Belloc understood this with characteristic clarity. In his biography of Cromwell, Belloc refused the Whig portrait of the Lord Protector as the architect of English liberty and presented him instead within his larger thesis that the Protestant Reformation was the central catastrophe of European history, the rupture from which the dissolution of Christendom flowed. Cromwell, in this reading, is not the heroic founder of a free people but an agent of that dissolution.
The execution of Charles I in January 1649 was the template. Everything that Paris would do to Louis XVI in 1793 was rehearsed in London a century and a half earlier. Cromwell was the arch-enemy of Catholicism, as Drogheda and the devastation of Catholic Ireland attest in blood. But he was also, and this is the point the Americanists evade, the enemy of throne and altar as such, even of the Anglican monarchy he destroyed. He demonstrated that a Christian people could be persuaded to kill its king and call the killing righteousness. It is no accident that readers have long heard, in Milton’s Satan rallying his fallen legions in the pseudo-parliamentary debate of Hell, an echo of Cromwell himself.
The line from Cromwell’s scaffold to the American Revolution is not metaphorical. It is genealogical. The Puritans who settled New England were Cromwell’s spiritual kin, many of them his literal contemporaries and sympathizers, carrying the regicidal principle and Milton’s epic across the Atlantic and planting both in colonial soil. When the American colonists raised their own non serviam against their lawful sovereign in 1776, they were not innovating. They were completing a project begun on the banks of the Thames. The ideological foundations of the American founding, popular sovereignty, the social contract, government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, the autonomous rights-bearing individual as the atom of political order, are the secular distillation of the Puritan religious revolt. The Declaration’s appeal to a Creator who endows individuals with rights, while pointedly omitting the Church, the sacraments, and any acknowledgment of Christ the King, is the non serviam in its mature constitutional form: God may be invoked as a witness, but He may not rule. Authority ascends from below, from the will of the people, never descending from above, from the throne of God through His ordained hierarchy.
The prophetic wisdom of Orestes Brownson
The Dispatch
No one saw this more clearly than the man who knew the American spirit from the inside and abandoned it. Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), the most distinguished American Catholic intellectual of the nineteenth century, had passed through nearly every species of New England religion, Presbyterian, Universalist, Unitarian, Transcendentalist, before his conversion in 1844.
In his spiritual autobiography, The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience of 1857, he reflected on the Puritan inheritance with the authority of one who had lived it, observing that however erroneous the views of the New England Puritans, they had at least retained a conception of the Church that Christ founded and the necessity of belonging to it, a conception their humanist and transcendentalist descendants had wholly cast off. Brownson watched those descendants dissolve even the Puritan remnant into pure self-reliance, and he watched his fellow Catholics rush to baptize the result. By the end of his life, he had become a ferocious critic of the Americanist accommodation.
In a private letter written in August 1870 to Father Isaac Hecker himself, the founder of the Paulists and the very figure whose name would later become synonymous with the Americanist tendency, Brownson described how “Catholics as well as others imbibe the spirit of the country, imbibe from infancy the spirit of independence, freedom from all restraint, unbounded license.” Brownson further wrote that the Church had never encountered a social and political order so hostile to her, and that the conversion of the American republic would be a far greater victory than the conversion of the Roman Empire.
The candor is telling. Brownson was not denouncing America to its enemies but warning its most optimistic Catholic champion, to his face, that the order he hoped to win for Christ was not neutral ground but a rival spirit, and that to convert it would require confronting it, not flattering it. By one of history’s bitter ironies, this fiercest critic of Americanism now lies buried in the crypt of the basilica at Notre Dame, the flagship of the very impulse he opposed.
The birth of Americanism
Brownson’s warning went unheeded, and the error he named became the foundation upon which the American Catholic establishment of the nineteenth century chose to build. This is the error that Pope Leo XIII identified and condemned in his apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae of January 22, 1899. The letter was addressed to Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, and behind Gibbons stood a whole party of prelates, Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul and Bishop John Keane among them, gathered around the memory of the same Father Hecker whom Brownson had warned a generation earlier.
What Brownson had said privately to Hecker in 1870, Pope Leo now said publicly to Hecker’s heirs: that the American spirit they wished to wed to the faith could not be accommodated without wounding the faith itself. Pope Leo named the underlying principle of these new opinions precisely: that in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age, relax some of her ancient severity, and make concessions to new opinions, not only in ways of living but even in regard to doctrines belonging to the deposit of the faith.
The specific errors Pope Leo condemned read like a catalogue of the American spirit itself. He condemned the notion that external guidance is superfluous for souls striving after perfection, on the theory that the Holy Spirit now pours richer graces directly into the faithful and guides them by His own hidden instinct without human intervention; he condemned the disparagement of religious vows as alien to the spirit of the times and hostile to human liberty; and he condemned the unwarranted preference for the natural virtues over the supernatural. Each of these is the non serviam in devotional costume. Each prefers the individual will to the order God established. Archbishop Ireland published his acceptance of the letter and then denied that anyone held the condemned doctrines at all, calling it a blessing that freed Americanists from a heresy to which they had never adhered. The Americanist party dismissed the whole affair as a “phantom heresy,” and a sympathetic historiography has repeated that dismissal ever since.
But Pope Leo was not wrong. He was early. The opinions he condemned, that each member of the Church may decide religious questions for himself, and that this capacity comes directly to each one from the Holy Spirit, have turned out to be the operative creed of the overwhelming majority of American Catholics today. The phantom proved more real than the men who denied it. What Brownson foresaw and Pope Leo formalized became the air that American Catholicism breathed throughout the twentieth century and beyond, the slow dissolution of a supernatural faith into a religion of activism, self-fulfillment, and accommodation to a liberal order founded on the refusal to serve.
This is the history Michael Knowles must keep offstage. To defend the American founding as compatible with — even friendly to — Catholic order, one must forget Lucifer, forget Milton’s seductive Satan, forget Cromwell, forget the regicide, forget the Puritan, forget Brownson’s warning to Hecker, and forget that a pope of the Church examined the American spirit directly and pronounced it dangerous to the faith. The Americanist must perform an act of forgetting at every step. The counter-revolutionary need only remember.
The two words have never changed. Non serviam was spoken in heaven, given its imperishable verse by a blind Puritan poet, repeated on the scaffold at Whitehall, proclaimed in Philadelphia, and whispered in the chanceries of Baltimore and Saint Paul. There is only one answer to it, and it is the answer the Church has always given to her Lord and King: serviam. I will serve. Everything in our crisis, and everything in the coming restoration, depends on which of those two words a civilization chooses to make its own.
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