By Felix de St. Vincent and Brett Favras
Here, Felix de St. Vincent and Brett Favras argue that—contrary the recent claim that Alasdair MacIntyre is “anti-integralist”—MacIntyre’s thought, if not itself integralist, at least points in that direction. Provocative as always, they offer an excellent exposition of MacIntyre’s own thought and respond to certain, perhaps simplistic, readings of his works.
Regardless of where MacIntyre himself is ultimately placed, MacIntyre’s thought has undeniable value for integralist thinkers for two chief reasons. First, although the relation of church and state is historically the defining feature of integralism, no less defining is integralism’s insistence on the primacy of the common good. Today, indeed, the few thinkers who accept any notion of the common good tend to view it as something instrumental and private. Not so Alasdair MacIntyre. Second, MacIntyre correctly rejects the confusion of nature and grace that was so prominent in 20th century Theology. A correct understanding of this distinction is, as Pater Edmund has argued, vital to a proper account of an integralist dyarchy.
To these two may be added a third reason his thought is a useful admonition (or perhaps corrective in some cases) for integralists: MacIntyre warns that we must be careful not to replace one leviathan with another. MacIntyre’s sees that justice exists in multiple coordinate but separate spheres, each with its own proper end. An integralist state that subsumed family and subsidiarity would not be a just order but yet another tyranny. ——The Editors.
The philosophical work of Alasdair MacIntyre is a touchstone for post-liberal political theory, especially in the English-speaking world, and especially for Christians. Most prominently, his work inspires the Benedict Option movement, although he has repudiated this development. There has been less of a concerted effort to link MacIntyre to the revival of Catholic integralism. Nevertheless, some affinities are obvious: MacIntyre is a Thomist, a critic of the liberal separation of politics from concern with a shared conception of human ends.[1]
MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism seems to open the door to integralism. In brief, integralists are those who would restore the traditional Church-state relationship, one which subordinates the temporal power to the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church about the ends of human life. MacIntyre does not endorse integralism, but, despite his criticism of some historic Catholic regimes that might be called ‘integralist,’ there is no reason to conclude that he is—as Caleb Bernacchio has recently claimed—“anti-integralist.”[2]
While the theological basis of integralism in the magisterium of the Catholic Church is well-established, placing MacIntyre and integralism in conversation is an opportunity to reflect upon whether or not there is a “secular account” of integralism. As a philosopher, MacIntyre is committed to offering a “secular” account of ethics and politics that is silent on questions of “revealed theology.” That is, he is committed to an account of what it is to be and to act as a rational being that addresses itself to all of his fellow rational beings, whether they share his faith or not. On the other hand, Catholic integralism is a political theology. We learn of the authority of the Church and the Pauline teaching in Romans 13 that God ordains the temporal power though revelation.
Integralism is the authoritative interpretation of Romans 13, taught by the popes since Gelasius I in the fifth century, and perhaps brought to its greatest clarity by Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century. Integralism requires one to believe the apostolic teaching that there are “two powers,” that the Church is the Church, and that while the state is a ‘juridically perfect’ society, it too must be shaped according to apostolic teaching. Revelation has political content. It is limited—the Church offers no model of the best regime—and qualified by prudential considerations: one is not automatically exonerated from all duties to temporal powers that deny the rights of the Church and disdain her authority. Despite these limitations and qualifications, integralism is the apostolic teaching about the proper relationship between the Church and the temporal power. The relevant political debate is whether it is prudent to ‘integrate’ the temporal power with the authority of the Church in a given set of political circumstances. A secular account of integralism, however, might help convince Catholics that our time is such a time.
There may be valid reasons for Christians not to actively advance claims of the Church in political life. For prudential reasons, Catholics might accept a temporal power that does not recognize the authority of Church teaching about human beings’ final ends. Unfortunately the exception has become the rule in modern regimes: Catholic immigrants to the secular governments in the United States of America, French citizens ‘rallying’ to the anti-Catholic Third Republic, or perhaps in the future, welcoming a preferable Islamic government as in Michel Houllebecq’s novel Submission.
Even though integralism is part of revealed theology, however, this fact alone does not make a “secular account” of its virtues to non-Christians impossible. Importantly, integralism is not reducible to a politics of altar and throne in which superstition supports arbitrary theocratic power. Non-Catholic Christians are not bound to accept integralism as an aspect of apostolic teaching, as Catholics are. But beyond any private theological reasons they may have, non-Catholics also may have prudential reasons to accept an integralist temporal power, just as Catholics may have prudential reasons to accept a non-integralist temporal power.
We shall focus briefly upon the prudential reasons that would be part of a “secular account” of an integralist regime. Could a Jew or a Muslim, for instance, ever be persuaded of the political content of the Magisterium in isolation? Quite possibly, when an integralist temporal power is preferable to certain alternatives. No Christian temporal power can compel baptism. A regime organized according to Thomistic principles would be a furthermore limited government: human law is ordered to temporal peace and tranquility, and coercion limited to external acts that disturb this peace (ST I-II q.98 a.1), though the law may also consider the internal dispositions that lead to these acts.
The final end of temporal peace is desired, of course, not only by Christians, but by all reasonable people of goodwill. Why would non-Catholics, however, ever prefer an integralist regime to a purely secular account of peace? Here, MacIntyre’s criticism of the evaluative neutrality of the modern state—which resembles many criticisms of “liberal neutrality”—might be useful. If one rejects the notion that liberal regimes can manage to be neutral with respect to the good, we might imagine that many confessional minorities even in historically liberal regimes were persuaded that they should accept Christian rule, just as many Christian and Jewish were persuaded to accept Ottoman rule.
It is characteristic of political regimes to elevate some final end for their citizens; this historical aspect of Aristotle’s Greek polis persists into modernity, for good or for ill. MacIntyre and many others deny that it is possible for the state to be evaluatively neutral. Unavoidably, contemporary political regimes erect some kind of ideal, or at least a vague and incoherent package of irreconcilable ideals. Modern examples of such ‘political ideals’ are the worker who sacrifices to build a better world for her children, or the parents who maintain the purity of the race, or the self-sacrifice of the citizen-soldier that dies for our freedom, or all of the above. In the soviet, the ‘ethno-state,’ and the republican death-cult these politically sanctioned final ends are obvious, but traces of them persist in liberal regimes as well.
Part of our contemporary political crisis stems from a dread of human obsolescence. The “overpopulated” technological society has increasingly devalued the need for human labor, for sexual reproduction, and for battlefield sacrifice. Glorifying God, our true common good and final end, may become the only one left to us. Integralism comes not from nostalgia for the late nineteenth century, or bitterness about being routed in the culture wars of the late twentieth century—as Ross Douthat sometimes claims[3]—but dread and foreboding about the century to come. This may be why integralism has become somewhat popular among younger Catholics, who have few if any living memories of the Cold War or the culture wars of the 1990s.
Against a liberal order that elevates a shifting and incongruous set of values despite itself—from gentle worldliness to republican soldier-sacrifice, from enterprising business acumen to public-sphere “activism” for the marginalized—MacIntyre proposes local moral discourses that can share a vocabulary, and integralists propose the teachings of the Catholic Church. Although Catholic, MacIntyre’s solution is wholly secular. This does not mean, however, that no secularist case can be made for the integralist proposal, or that MacIntyreans must be opposed to it in principle.
Routed conservative Boomer culture warriors come to MacIntyre for different reasons, we have suggested, than (mostly) younger integralists do. It is the former, older conservatives, who seek out MacIntyre, and misappropriate him out of nostalgia and bitterness. These critics of liberalism now enjoining us to build up post-liberal local communities claim MacIntyre as a spiritual father. The closing lines of After Virtue inspire the vision of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option.” Catholic conservatives like Patrick Deneen, also fed-up with the dominant liberal “anti-culture,” are taking up this strategic position as well.[4] But MacIntyre, for his part, blushes at the reports that he has sired some self-described “conservative” progeny.[5] Underneath the glib impasse, however, lay two antithetical conceptions of “tradition.” There is MacIntyre’s sense of a tradition that makes rational inquiry possible, and it is counterpoised to Burke’s sense of a tradition as custom, ‘prejudice,’ and sentiment that is, in turn, counterpoised to rationalism.
While emphatic objections to Burkean traditionalism separate MacIntyre from the ‘BenOppers,’ a restrained philosophical silence separates him from integralism. When he reaches the water’s edge, MacIntyre seldom wades into theological debates. His early understanding of Christianity, he confesses, was naïvely Barthian.[6] Cyril O’Regan points out that the MacIntyrean project launched by After Virtue (1981) is austerely secular.[7] Amidst the detritus of a failed moral Enlightenment project, there is no living Church to recover, only the shattered pieces of attenuated Aristotelian ethics with, as we shall discuss, an important Thomistic modification. It is not clear, for instance, how MacIntyre views the relationship between liturgy and other social practices. In general, MacIntyre constricts his competence to the mundane. He frequently notes, however, the possibility of a common good and the reality of radical evil beyond our philosophical understanding.
On the other hand, MacIntyre is notable as a moral philosopher who insists that happy and fulfilled human lives need to presuppose a final end above all finite and particular ends. MacIntyre’s recent Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity (2016)[8] reveals why this Thomistic modification to Aristotle is necessary, and even poignant:
What Aristotle excludes, but Aquinas does not, is the possibility that there are situations in which defeat in achieving particular finite goals, no matter how great, is not a mark of failure. Consider the common enough case of someone who has treated some finite and particular good as if its achievement were not just a very great good, but her or his final end. They care about the well-being of their child or a spouse of friend, or they aspire to some extraordinary athletic or intellectual feat in such a way and to such an extent that, were that child, spouse, or friend to die or were they to fail to attain their athletic or intellectual goal, their life, so they believe, would no longer have a point or purpose. They might as well be dead and there would be, they take it, no good reason for them not to commit suicide. It is Aquinas’s contention that this is never true of anyone and that rational agents find themselves committed to believing that it is not true of themselves, insofar as they are reflectively aware of the directedness of their lives toward an end that cannot be identified with any finite and particular end” (2016, 230).
For Aquinas there is no life that is no longer worth living. Thomists presuppose that there is always some further good or desire beyond particular and finite goods. And they argue that there is a final end, God, that secures the dignity and worth of each and every human life. MacIntyre stops here, with emphatic abruptness: “here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins” (2016, 315).
A philosopher rather than a theologian, MacIntyre stops short of publicly asking how we come to know we have a final end beyond all finite and particular goods. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990),[9] he is disposed polemically against those Thomists who start from epistemological questions, who locate in Thomas a response to post-Cartesian philosophers, and who thus “doomed Thomism to the fate of all philosophies which give priority to epistemological questions: the infinite multiplication of disagreement” (1990, 75). Thomism has a kind of original sin, according to MacIntyre. The revival of Thomism by the Leonine encyclical Aeterni Patris is initially by the hand of Joseph Kleutgen, S.J. (1811-1883), who bequeathed the epistemological red herring. MacIntyre is content to “begin in the middle”—as Stanley Hauerwas puts it[10]—not the Cartesians’ radical method, ‘Where can I begin if I am to truly know what is true?’ but rather, ‘What do we have at our disposal and is it enough for our society?’ Unlike the Cartesian, MacIntyre argues that human thought must be embedded in a tradition as a condition of discovering the truth.[11]
Serious theological questions attend to how we know our final ends, earthly and resurrected, and the relations between them. This “nature-grace debate” between “two-tiered Thomists” and the ‘nouvelle theologie,’ and how it relates to integralism requires further exploration—not least because the term integralism is used in widely divergent ways.[12]
We have argued that MacIntyre wants to bracket these theological debates, and especially to push past what he calls the “unfortunate generation” of moral theologians in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.[13] But Caleb Bernacchio argues otherwise. Bernacchio offers the one reference to grace in Dependent Rational Animals (1999) as evidence that MacIntyre’s critique of two-tiered Thomism shines through: MacIntyre proposes that divine grace can appear as a secular virtue in Aquinas.[14] (This is of course true—Aquinas makes a strong claim that grace is necessary to wish for or do anything good in ST I-II q. 109 a.2.) Bernacchio calls this, bewilderingly, the “Rahnerian” MacIntyre. But MacIntyre’s lonely theologumenon here is incomplete. Elsewhere MacIntyre admits the opposite: the saint’s infused virtues of divine grace can also appear as “unbalanced extremism.”[15] Perhaps then we have the anti-Rahnerian MacIntyre also. At any rate, it is far from clear how MacIntyre’s recognition that divine grace can be manifested in secular virtue entails a rejection of integralism.
Setting aside the question of secular virtue, a stronger case for an anti-integralist reading of MacIntyre might come from his skepticism of the modern state. Training his sights indiscriminately upon Lutheran princes, the Anglican settlement, Reformed political covenants, and Catholic alliances of throne-and-altar, MacIntyre criticizes the “corrupting integration of church and state” (2016, 137)—as Bernacchio points out, he even fetes the well-known bloody fantasy attributed to Diderot about the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest.[16] Routinely throughout his career, MacIntyre has resisted communitarian proposals that the nation-state become the bearer of final ends; the arch-critic of liberalism even prefers the notionally “neutral” liberal state over a communitarian nation-state with a collectively political doctrine of human ends.[17]
While MacIntyre very much wants moral communities in which we can find some account of our ultimate final end, both the scale and the proper concerns of contemporary political life mean that the modern nation-state cannot simulate such a moral community. And it ought not try, he thinks. MacIntyre’s essay “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict” (1999) is one of the clearer examples of his claim that the state both cannot and should not be the promoter and arbiter of any common good:
The state must not be allowed to impose any one particular conception of the human good or identify some one such conception with its own interests and causes. It must afford tolerance to a diversity of standpoints. But liberals generally have arrived at these conclusions because they believe either that the state ought to be neutral between different rival conceptions of the good or that states ought actively to promote the liberty and autonomy of individuals in making their own choices. I have argued by contrast first that the contemporary state is not and cannot be evaluatively neutral, and secondly that it is just because of the ways in which the state is not evaluatively neutral that it cannot generally be trusted to promote any worthwhile set of values, including those of autonomy and liberty.[18]
Here and elsewhere,[19] MacIntyre is making empirical and historical claims rather than philosophical ones.
While his arguments against “tradition” as custom, prejudice, and sentiment distinguish him sharply from neo-Burkeans like Deneen and Dreher, as a matter of practical politics, MacIntyre’s suspicion of the state also inclines him to political solutions at the level of local communities. MacIntyre’s suspicion of the modern state echoes Aristotle’s suspicion in Politics 3 that political communities are based on some certain partial sense of justice that is said to be justice writ large, as well as Aristotle’s statement in Ethics 9 that a city with 100,000 citizens would be far too large to secure some friendly agreement about their common project, the virtues that contribute to this communal project, and what each is owed commensurate to their contributions.
Integralism does not address these questions of the proper scale, type, and scope of temporal powers.[20] Paul VI was tempted to envision the UN as a temporal reflection of the Church;[21] Leo XIII certainly envisioned an authoritative role for the Church in large, modern nation-states; Pius VII signed a concordat with his foe Napoleon, and a nascent empire that would soon briefly span a swath of Western Europe; Alexander VI’s bulls of donation in the 1490s sanctioned the global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. But integralism was not born of early modernity, European power, and a globalized world, only applied to it. Before the rise of the ‘new monarchs,’ and the states and empires of modernity, medieval societies like thirteenth-century France were organized along an “integral vision” of social reality “before Church and state.”[22] Integralism is a kind of background conception of the political order, seemingly natural to Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition. The roots of integralism reach back to fifth-century Christian Rome, and ultimately into apostolic teaching.
Integralists are well aware of “corrupting integrations” of Church and state. Sometimes Christians do not remonstrate forcefully enough with the temporal power, and cede it too much ground to disastrous effects. The failed ralliement experiment of late nineteenth-century France—a topic well covered by The Josias—is one such case, ending as it did with the lamentable Law of 1905.[23] Other times, of course, the Church can provide apparent legitimacy to tyrannical regimes, which presents grave scandal to Christians.
It is important to distinguish integralism, however, from the kinds of statist communitarianism that MacIntyre is criticizing. Ultimately the Church and not the temporal power is the bearer of moral truths, the authoritative teacher about how human beings can live together in temporal peace, and of course about how to find eternal beatitude with their Creator. The Church may detect that this or that temporal power is unfit to teach moral truths, and wisely refuse to license the temporal power its coercive powers over the baptized.[24]
Although integralists do not propose elevating the state (or any other temporal power) to the position of the ultimate arbiter and teacher of human beings’ moral perfection, along the lines of ancient poleis or twentieth-century totalitarian movements, they do propose “identifying” the authoritative teaching of the apostles with the “interests and causes of states.” It is not clear why MacIntyre thinks this is tantamount to denying “tolerance” to diverse standpoints, if indeed a secular account of an integralist regime can be made to those who do not accept what was revealed to St. Paul and the sacred tradition of the Church, and later expounded upon by the popes. But perhaps, in the last analysis, this does not amount to evidence of MacIntyre’s anti-integralism. Integralists like Thomas Aquinas nevertheless argue that the civitas has a proper competence and sphere of its own, and that its competence has certain limits knowable to natural reason. The ends of the temporal power, in securing temporal peace, are distinguished from the ends of the Church. They belong to the lower, and not the higher, of the “two tiers.”
MacIntyre’s work is valuable to give a secular account of why we need to reflect upon our final ends if we are to enjoy a good, shared political life together. Though claimed as an inspiration by many, MacIntyre proposes no programmatic solutions for a post-liberal politics. Therefore he is a non-integralist, but not an anti-integralist. Nevertheless, MacIntyre can be helpful as integralists think about giving a secular accounting for their politics.
[1] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. “Integralism in Three Sentences,” The Josias, October 17, 2016. https://thejosias.com/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/
[2] Caleb Bernacchio, “The Anti-Integralist Alasdair MacIntyre,” Church Life Journal, May 8, 2018. http://churchlife.nd.edu/2018/05/08/the-anti-integralist-alasdair-macintyre/
[3] Ross Douthat, “Among the Post-Liberals,” The New York Times. October 9, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/among-the-post-liberals.html
[4] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 64-67 and 191.
[5] Rod Dreher, “MacIntyre Is Ben Op and Doesn’t Know It,” The American Conservative. April 27, 2017.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre’ Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, eds., Paul Blackledge and Neil Douglas Davidson, (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 412.
[7] Cyril O’Regan, “The ‘Gift’ of Modernity,” Church Life Journal, March 20, 2018.
[8] Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[9] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990).
[10] Stanley Hauerwas, “The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre,” First Things (October 2007). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/the-virtues-of-alasdair-macintyre
[11] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Relativism, Dogmatism, and Alasdair MacIntyre,” Sancrucensis. February 7, 2013. https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/relativism-dogmatism-and-alasdair-macintyre/
[12] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Critique of Integralism,” The Josias. February 27, 2018. https://thejosias.com/2018/02/27/hans-urs-von-balthasars-critique-of-integralism/
[13] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Postscript: There Is Only One Sadness… Not to Be Saints,” Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, eds. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington: CUA Press, 2010), 366.
[14] Caleb Bernacchio, “MacIntyre’s Philosophy of Mercy’s Clandestine Work in a Secular World” Church Life Journal, q. v. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 124. http://churchlife.nd.edu/2018/02/13/macintyre-on-grace-working-in-the-secular-world-through-the-works-of-mercy/
[15] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Postscript: There Is Only One Sadness… Not to Be Saints,” Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, eds. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington: CUA Press, 2010), 369.
[16] Bernacchio, “The Anti-Integralist Alasdair MacIntyre,” quoting Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (137).
[17] See for instance his rejection of Philip Pettit’s republicanism: Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. Susan Mendus and John Horton (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
[18] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” The Politics of Toleration: Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 143.
[19] MacIntyre can sound very pessimistic indeed: “…those who make the conquest of state power their aim are always in the end conquered by it and, in becoming the instruments of the state, themselves become in time the instruments of one of the several versions of modern capitalism.” Alasdair MacIntyre, Preface, Marxism and Christianity, (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), xv.
[20] See, e.g., Leo XII, Diturnum illud, sec. 7 “There is no question here respecting forms of government, for there is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.” [Concerning the question of scale, cf. the references in the following footnote.–The Editors]
[21] Paul VI, “Address of the Holy Father Paul VI to the United Nations Organization,” 4 October 1965 https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651004_united-nations.html; q. v. “World Government is Required By Natural Law,” The Josias https://thejosias.com/2015/06/24/world-government-is-required-by-natural-law/
[22] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “An Integralist Manifesto,” a review of Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State (Emmaus, 2017). First Things (October 2017). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/10/an-integralist-manifesto
[23] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Catholic Action and Ralliement,” The Josias. February 13, 2016. https://thejosias.com/2016/02/13/catholic-action-and-ralliement/, Felix de St. Vincent, “Four Catholic Political Postures: Lessons of Leo XIII and Ralliement,” The Josias. July 31, 2017. https://thejosias.com/2017/07/31/four-catholic-political-postures-lessons-from-leo-xiii-and-ralliement/ , Adrian Vermuele, “Ralliement: Two Distinctions,” The Josias. March 16, 2018. https://thejosias.com/2018/03/16/ralliement-two-distinctions/
[24] Thomas Pink, “Conscience and Coercion: Vatican II’s Teaching on Religious Freedom Changed Policy, Not Doctrine,” First Things (August 2012). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/08/conscience-and-coercion