Who Lives There?

By Roger Rosenblatt

After all the Bicentennial's examinations of what the Constitution is, take one last look to discover who lives there. Someone lives there. The Constitution's inventors could not have produced so durable a document without a vision of the person to whom the laws and stipulations were directed. Before the season dissipates, look at the words one more time. Read them not as rules of the game but as the interior ruminations of a character, a hero, who in some strange conflicted combination of exultation and self-restraint has, for 200 years, found a way to live a life. What character? What life?

The house he occupies is as strange as he is, at once balanced and perilous, like a house of cards. The basic text of the Constitution is the main building, a symmetrical 18th century structure grounded in the Enlightenment principles of reason, optimism, order and a wariness of emotion and passion. The Constitution's architects, all fundamentally British Enlightenment minds, sought to build a home that Americans could live in without toppling it by placing their impulses above their rationality. To these men, who grew up on Swift, Hume, Locke and Pope, stability and moderation were not only practical measures but signs of morality.

Ben Franklin, when he wrote of striving for moral perfection in the Autobiography, said that he originally set his ambitions in the light of an already God-perfected world. "Whatever is, is right," he quoted John Dryden; Pope used precisely the same line in "An Essay on Man." Washington, whose presence hovered over the Constitutional Convention like a muse, also advocated moderation: "We ((Americans)) are apt to run from one extreme to another," he wrote John Jay in 1786. As for Madison, the Constitution's principal and most elegant-minded architect, his views were straight Enlightenment dogma. "Why has government been instituted at all?" he asked. "Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint." Again: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary" -- a judgment of angels as much as people.

The collective wisdom behind all such statements envisions human nature as existing in and requiring for its survival the most delicate array of balances between religion and science, reason and emotion, democracy and aristocracy, the individual and the group, self-interest and general welfare; that is, all the balances that found their way into the Constitution's basic text. On the whole, that original, unamended text is a model Enlightenment tract, carefully checking and balancing as if in imitation of the moderate universe in which 18th century Europe trusted. One of the framers, John Dickinson, even saw the proposed relationship between the states and the Federal Government as an analogue to Newtonian physics; and why not? Whatever is, is right. If the "man" Pope considered in his "Essay" needed a body of laws, the American Constitution would do just fine.

The trouble with that original body of laws, as Henry May concluded in his study The Enlightenment in America, was that it reflected "all the virtues of the Moderate Enlightenment, and also one of its faults: the belief that everything can be settled by compromise." In other words, the basic Constitution was too balanced, and thus logically flawed: What moderate compromises are available when a nation seeks to retain the institution of slavery? The answer to the Constitution's excessive symmetry was the Bill of Rights, which did not overturn the basic document but represented a risky extension into the realms of individual freedom that many of the framers thought dangerous. So here was the Enlightenment house with an ell attached, and a riddle: yes, the main structure was perfect, and, yes, it needed continuous work.

What sort of person would live in such a house? An 18th century person, in fact, but one whose mind spanned the entire century, adding the late 18th century expansiveness of Blake and Wordsworth to the wary constraints of Pope. The century that began in the Age of Reason ended in the Age of Romanticism, and the Constitution accommodated that severe transition. If the basic text is an Enlightenment document, the Bill of Rights is a homage to Romantic thought, challenging not so much the specifics of the basic Constitution as its earnest sense of permanence. Amendments did not promise answers to sentimental wishes, but they did build in rooms for restlessness. Amendments promised more, and "more" is a Romantic idea. The person who lived in the Constitution was born in the last century that equally prized both modesty and fantasy, and he shuttled naturally between the poles.

After 200 years he has changed dramatically, from an 18th century Englishman to a modern African, Asian, Hispanic. But in terms of basic human nature, he remains as he was when the country began. In two centuries his equilibrium has been tested constantly in a history that includes a secession of half the country, Prohibition, a civil rights movement, burgeoning Fundamentalism and a thousand exigencies that the Constitution's framers could not possibly have foreseen. Yet, amazingly, they could foresee this character at the center of their work: the basic Enlightenment man with a capacity for explosions and a touch of dreams. Much like themselves, he was capable of sitting still as a stone and of changing utterly.

That he has survived these 200 years seems due largely to the Constitution's roominess, which has given him space to shift the furniture without destroying the house. The beauty of the Constitution is that it offers its resident a perpetual challenge to find his own equilibrium within the structure. Miraculously, to date he has managed to do that, as if he were conscious of the fact that the Constitution reflects his nature, mirroring his competing tendencies to squat adamantly and lurch suddenly. In a way, he continually rediscovers himself in that house, a brand-new American for every decade of problems.

Yet if the Constitution allows this character to create himself, he also creates the Constitution, for he existed before it was conceived, and it was built to suit his mind. Astonishing that that mind has endured, given its obvious weaknesses and failings. Perhaps its endurance has something to do with the fact that it runs on a fundamentally generous impulse, that it is the mind of a country that saw itself from the start as an institution of welcome, seeking doggedly to make good on a promise to provide a free, just home. That generous impulse is equally stabilizing and liberating, like the document that promotes it.

Who lives in the Constitution? Look again. You know that face.