It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, and an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of folkways into which the individual has to be initiated.     —Christopher Dawson

It is fitting at the outset to acknowledge that I am not a scholar. I have no credentials in theology, philosophy, nor other sciences. I have met, however, many scholars, in a host of disciplines, during a long association with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. What knowledge I have was acquired through conversations with those scholars, listening to their lectures, reading their books and the writings of other minds greater than my own. Whatever is good in this essay I attribute to them. The errors are my own. The best that I can say about myself is that I try to be a good generalist. Not a bad approach in responding to “Is religious faith a necessary ground for conservatives?”

Religious faith has been a part of my life since childhood. Thinking about this essay brought to mind one of my earliest encounters with the notion of God. My father was a sculptor. As a child I made frequent visits to his studio. During those visits I watched as he was either modeling in clay or carving in limestone or marble. During one of those visits he told me that while he could make an excellent likeness of an individual out of existing materials, he could not give it life. It was simply a lifeless image. “Only God can give life. Man makes and God creates. God is Almighty.” Simple—yes, but “awesome” as my grandson Marcus, who is six, about the age I was then, would say. As I recall that experience, I am reminded of my father’s gentleness and his humility while telling me this and how I, too, saw the difference between God and me. Needless to say, I believed. I had it on good authority: my father who I knew loved me. Some years later I would read in a sermon by Cardinal John Henry Newman, “this attribute of God [Almighty] is the only one mentioned in the Creed. ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty.’ . . . Why is this? It is plain why, because this attribute is the reason why we believe. Faith is the beginning of religion, and therefore the almightiness of God is made the beginning and first of His attributes.” How nice of my father to lead me to that belief. It would become the cornerstone of my intellectual and spiritual growth and my life.

I would eventually learn that man was God’s special creation. For in Genesis we read that God “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils and man became a living soul.” When I first read these words I thought back to that earlier encounter with the notion of God in my father’s studio. How different He was from us. He had no need to model man in clay nor carve him in limestone. The thought and the act were one. And in this creation is man’s true worth. He is a soul, a breath of divinity, destined for immortality. This is his primary essence. Nothing I have read and learned over the years has shaken this simple belief in the almightiness of God and man as His special creation.

Chesterton once stated that “a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.” I am a Christian, a Catholic, and the ground of my belief is in the testimony of Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and after that to the eleven. . . . After that he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. And last of all, as by one born out of due time, he was seen also by me.

These beliefs are also a part of the tradition I wish to conserve. Does it follow then that a conservative must be a Christian. No. Russell Kirk lists the first of the six canons of conservative thought as a “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” This canon is well chosen, since God is the supernatural and transcendent and thus implied in the canon. This is the ground and foundation of conservatism.

Jacques Maritain writes that, in response to the question what is man, “we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love.” Maritain held that the “prime root” of this idea of man is the concept of the soul.