Posted on by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Is Integralism Conservative?

1 Introduction

Integralism is a name that was given to the traditional political principles of Catholic Christendom at a time when those principles were coming under sustained attack by modern revolutions. Integralism is therefore traditional in the sense of belonging to a tradition. But is it traditionalist in the sense of giving importance to tradition as a measure of political and moral life? In other words: Is Integralism conservative? Does it have respect for long-established customs, and the wisdom embodied in long experience? Or is it rather a radical, puritanical doctrine that would completely remake societies on the basis of abstract, absolutist principles?

In the Catholic parts of Europe after the French Revolution, for the whole of the “long 19th century” integralism simply was conservatism. A conservative was a defender of throne and altar—that is, an integralist.[i] But now that the principles of the French Revolution have been established in Europe for so long, can one still call integralism conservative?

I will argue that integralism has aspects of both radicalism and conservatism. There is certainly in integralism an intransigent adherence to moral absolutes, which gives it an element of radicalism. But integralism has always also given an important place to tradition as a principle. We integralists respect the experiences of history, long-established custom, and local political variation. I want to manifest this briefly by summarizing the fundamentals of integralism as a teleological doctrine, and show how tradition is one important integralist principle among others. 

2 Integralism and Teleology

Integralism is based on a thoroughly teleological understanding of reality. It is based on an understanding of reality as most deeply explained by final causes, by goals or purposes that nature aims to reach or realize. Natures are not simple facticity, they are potentials being actualized. They are goal-directed. This understanding of reality was given an influential formulation by Aristotle. His view was profoundly consonant with that of the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. Hence, it is not surprising that in the Middle Ages this view was developed and extended among Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thinkers of various schools.

Applied to moral and political life, this teleological worldview has a tripartite pattern, which Alasdair MacIntyre summarizes as: 

  1. human nature as it happens to be, 
  2. human nature as it could be if it realized its telos, 
  3. moral training and instruction as a means to move from 1 to 2.[ii]

There is according to this scheme a basic contrast between two states of man. In the first state, man as he happens to be for the most part, morally untutored, and marked by disharmony between the higher and lower parts of his soul. He is, as Aristotle puts it, “in bondage.”[iii] Man in this state is frustrated and miserable because he is unable to attain the good towards which his nature inclines. In the second state, man has realized his potential, there is harmony between the different powers of his soul, the passions and emotions are docile to reason, and he is able to act excellently with ease. Man in the second state is courageous, self-controlled, foresightful, generous, wise, and happy. He is constantly enjoying the goods toward which his nature strives.

Since man is a political animal, moreover, he can only have this second state as part of a virtuous community. The human good is a common good. Far from being a hindrance to his actualization, the human community is necessary to that actualization.[iv] Man can only properly possess his good if he sees it as the good of a greater whole, a good toward which he is ordered, and for which it is noble to give his life.[v]

The transition from the first state to the second takes place above all by habituation. This habituation is brought about in various ways. It is brought about by education, in which parents, teachers, and rulers give authoritative guidance; by the praise that is given to noble actions and the blame that is accorded to base ones; by the rewards and punishments that counteract the impulses of disordered passion; by the fitting representation of good and evil in music, poetry, and other arts; by philosophical instruction, which aids insight into the true good; and so on. All of these modes depend on the intrinsic attraction and draw of the good itself. Their role is to make it easier for the intrinsic power of the good to operate on souls. 

A particularly important role is played here by political rulers, since they order all of the other modes. As Aristotle puts it, “since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man.”[vi]

3 Nature, Grace, and the Two Powers

The Aristotelian teleological scheme is deepened by Christianity. The doctrine of original sin intensifies the contrast between the state of man as he happens to be and man as he could be. Through original sin man has lost the original harmony of his nature and it has become difficult for him to know and do the good. God first helped man through the Old Law, which instructed him in the good. But the Law was not sufficient to save fallen man. Therefore, God sent His own Son into the world to atone for original sin, heal human nature, and allow human beings a share in His divine life. It is by grace that Christ gives us a participation in His life. Grace not only heals fallen nature, it also elevates it, giving us an end higher than that to which we are ordered by nature. Grace thus founds a new community, the Church, whose common good is a supernatural good, greater than any natural fulfillment.

Grace does not replace nature, but it does subordinate natural ends to a higher end. Hence, we have a hierarchy of ends and a hierarchy of rulers. We have the natural end of human life (virtuous activity and wisdom in friendship), to which we are directed by natural (political) rulers, but we also have the supernatural end of human life (participation in God’s own activity), and we are directed to this by the rulers whom God has placed over His Church by sacramental grace, the successors of the Apostles.

From this follows the doctrine of the two powers or the two swords, which was taught already by Pope St Gelasius I in late antiquity, and which was further developed by the popes of the Middle Ages. In its details, this doctrine was highly contested, but in its basic principles it was accepted throughout Catholic Christendom. In the De Regno, St Thomas gives a summary of the basic principles which would have been broadly acceptable, and which it is worth quoting at length:

Through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God. … Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God. If this end could be attained by the power of human nature, then the duty of a king would have to include the direction of men to it. … Now the higher the end to which a government is ordained, the loftier that government is. Indeed, we always find that the one to whom it pertains to achieve the final end commands those who execute the things that are ordained to that end. For example, the captain, whose business it is to regulate navigation, tells the shipbuilder what kind of ship he must construct to be suitable for navigation. … But because a man does not attain his end, which is the possession of God, by human power but by divine, … therefore the task of leading him to that last end does not pertain to human but to divine government. Consequently, government of this kind pertains to that king who is not only a man, but also God, namely, our Lord Jesus Christ. … Hence a royal priesthood is derived from Him, and what is more, all those who believe in Christ, in so far as they are His members, are called kings and priests. Thus, in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from earthly things, the ministry of this kingdom has been entrusted not to earthly kings but to priests, and most of all to the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff. To him all the kings of the Christian People are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. For those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end, and be directed by his rule.[vii]

It is this teleological doctrine of the two powers which is today the most controversial element of integralism. But in premodern Christendom, this basic doctrine was not controversial. Controversies arose with regard to the exact scope of each of the two powers and the cases in which they could interfere with each other. But the basic teleological order of the two powers was not in doubt. I have quoted St Thomas’s teaching on this, but the teaching was by no means peculiar to the Thomistic School. As Timothy Gerard Aloysius Wilson has shown, all of the schools of the first and of the second scholasticism shared this doctrine; we find it not only among the Thomists, but also among Scotists, and later among Molinists, Suarezians, and so on. 

Even Dante, in the De Monarchia, with its vehement defense of the distinction of imperial from papal power, concludes by conceding the point:

But the truth of this final question must not be restricted to mean that the Roman Prince shall not be subject in some degree to the Roman Pontiff, for felicity that is mortal is ordered in a measure after felicity that is immortal. Wherefore let Caesar honor Peter as a first-born son should honor his father, so that, refulgent with the light of paternal grace, he may illumine with greater radiance the earthly sphere over which he has been set by Him who alone is Ruler of all things spiritual and temporal.[viii]

In the 19th century, this teaching was vehemently defended by the integralist as an important consequence of a properly teleological understanding of nature and grace. The defense of the doctrine of the two swords was a defense of the primacy of the spiritual, the finality of the spiritual end, and of the social Kingship of Christ. As Father Félix Sardá y Salvany, one of the leading thinkers of 19thcentury integralism, put it:

[The] Integralism [the liberals] abhor and continuously revile is the integralism of the social rights of Christ-God, the Integralism of his divine sovereignty over States as much as over individuals. … [The] Integralism of the social laws of God and His holy Church is what we may call the fundamental Integralism.[ix]

And in the Manifesto of Burgos, the founding document of the first political movement to be explicitly called “integralist,” the principle is explained as follows:

As the body to the soul, so must the state be united and subordinated to the Church, the lesser luminary to the greater, the temporal sword to the spiritual sword, according to the terms and conditions that the Church of God lays down, and are established in our traditional laws.[x]

Note that the Manifesto of Burgos makes appeal to the “traditional laws” of Catholic Spain when it comes to the application of the principle. What role does integralism give to such traditional laws?

4 Teleology and Tradition

To readers of Hegelian philosophy, the notion of teleology might suggest the notion of social progress. But it is not difficult to see that the teleological scheme that I have sketched is in fact antithetical to modern progressivism. Every human being begins from square one with human nature in its untutored state, wounded by original sin, with reason out of harmony with the passions. Every human being must be rectified and perfected by the acquisition of good habits, both natural and supernatural. This rectification takes place by means of habituation, which is in effect the conforming of the individual to a traditional way of life, handed down from the excellent men of the past. Excellence is not achieved by innovation, but rather by conformity to the best models. The perfect man, Jesus Christ Himself, is the unsurpassable model, and the great saints of the early Church are the best mirror of His perfection. The ardor of the early days has waned, and so the expectation is of a tendency toward decline, which has to be resisted by constant striving to recover the excellence of the past. The human telos is fixed and determined, as are the means of approaching it. 

A good society is therefore a traditional society in which new generations are taught to imitate their elders and aspire to the excellence of their ancestors. A good society is also a hierarchical society, in which the necessary superiority of rulers is seen as beneficial to subjects, who are led thereby to their true happiness. The harmonious and hierarchical order of the parts of society reflects the harmonious and hierarchal order of the parts of the soul.

Progressivism, by contrast, in both of its main forms, is based on a rejection of the teleological scheme. One form of progressivism, which we can see in the tradition of Hobbes and of classical political economy, sees human beings as essentially selfish, slaves of restless passions, with no true telos, and no common good that could unite them to others. Social progress is achieved by setting up social mechanisms by which the self-interest of each furthers the general interest of all. Social progress is cumulative and linear, because it does not depend on the moral formation of the individual, but on the unintended consequences of non-moral actions.

Another form of progressivism, which can be seen in the tradition of Rousseau, sees human passion and feeling as basically good and generous, but corrupted by the artificial constraints of society. Progress is achieved, therefore, by eliminating social constraints on authentic feeling. This is the ideology that we see, for example, in the sexual revolution. Social progress is seen as cumulative and linear, because it depends not on the difficult struggle for virtue that has to be repeated in each human life, but rather on the abolition of repressive taboos which prevent the unimpeded expression of passion.

Integralism is implacably opposed to both forms of progressivism. Human happiness is achieved not by economic or social liberalism, but rather by conservatism. That is, to use Yoram Hazony’s description of conservatism, by propagating “beneficial ideas, behaviors, and institutions across generations.”[xi]

5 Two Objections

To clarify in what sense integralism can be conservative, I want to consider two (nearly) opposite objections which have recently been brought against integralism. The first objection is based on the work of the philosopher Robert Spaemann, which sees integralism as in a sense too conservative, based on a reduction of questions of truth to questions of the utility for the conservation of social order. I will argue that integralism is not, in fact, conservative in that sense. The second objection comes out of the tradition of Edmund Burke. It sees integralism as too rationalistic and abstract, a radical, puritanical doctrine, that would completely remake societies on the basis of abstract, absolutist principles. I will argue that integralism can in fact be more conservative than this objection supposes.

5.1 The Spaemannian Objection

The philosopher Robert Spaemann argued that Louis de Bonald and other Catholic reactionaries in their attempt to refute the Revolution and defend tradition, actually reinterpreted the tradition in modern terms. Their reactionary mode of thinking, he argues, “converts ontological truths into social functions, thus paving the way both for the reduction of truth to ideology and for truth to function as ideology.”[xii] This error of Bonald’s was, Spaemann suggests, compounded in later authoritarian thinkers such as Charles Maurras.[xiii] Writers such as Michael Hanby, D.C. Schindler, and Reuben Slife have recently suggested that this Spaemannian critique of reactionary thought can be applied to integralism.

Now, Spaemann’s argument does contain an important insight. There were errors in the reactionary thought of thinkers such as de Bonald and de Maistre, which led to even worse errors in thinkers such as Charles Maurras and Carl Schmitt. They were indeed too marked by Hobbesian and Romantic ideas and did not think metaphysically and teleologically enough. Nevertheless, a careful reader ought to be able to distinguish their thought from that of Catholic integralists, even when the latter at times made common cause with them. For example, the great integralist theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange saw Maurras as an ally in the anti-liberal struggle prior to the condemnation of Maurras’s movement by the Holy See. In his introduction to St Thomas’s On Kingship, Garrigou even makes use of Maurras’s slogan politique d’abord (‘politics first’). Now, for Maurras that slogan was certainly an expression of sociological reductionism: social utility is the ultimate measure of truth. But this is not at all the way Garrigou, as a good Thomist, uses the slogan:

We note, furthermore, that the imperium or command, which directs the execution of the means chosen beforehand, proceeds in the reverse of the order of deliberation. In place of descending from the consideration of the end to be attained to that of the subordinated means last of all, command begins by applying this infirm means and raising it afterwards little by little to the superior means capable of obtaining the end pursued: Finis est primum in intentione et ultimum in executione. From this point of view one understands that in the order of execution, but not in the order of intention, one could say: politique d’abord. [In order that] social life may be possible, the city or country must be habitable, and the agitators must be expelled or brought to reason.[xiv]

In other words, Garrigou-Lagrange saw in Maurras’s movement a useful counter to the “agitators” who were destroying France, but he by no means succumbed to Maurras’s reductionism.

I would make the same point about the use that I and other contemporary integralists have occasionally made of the writings of Schmitt. I see some helpful insights in Schmitt’s critique of liberalism and in his early work on political representation (Roman Catholicism and Political Form), but I have no use whatever for the Hobbesian decisionism and sociological reductionism seemingly implied by Schmitt’s Political Theology.[xv]

Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Æterni patris, which called for Catholic philosophy to be based on St Thomas was, I believe, partly inspired by the insight that the reactionary philosophy in vogue among many 19th century Catholics was too modern, too reductionist, and not realist and teleological enough. To be healthy, Catholic philosophy ought to turn to the most solid of the medieval scholastics. I fully agree with Pope Leo in this, as did the great integralists of the last century, men such as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Louis Billot, Raphael Cardinal Merry del Val, Henri Grenier, Charles De Koninck, Louis Lachance, and Marcel de Corte.

5.2 The Burkean Objection

The second objection to integralism is in some ways the opposite of the first. It holds not that integralism is not metaphysical enough, but rather that it is too metaphysical, too abstract, too rationalistic. I once had a small exchange with the late Sir Roger Scruton in the pages of First Things in which Scruton raised just such an objection. I had argued that Scruton was too wary of a paternalistic understanding of politics, and Scruton responded as follows:

As for Fr. Waldstein’s theological vision of the good of government, I can only respond as Burke responded to the Reason advocated by the French Revolutionaries. He wrote: ‘We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.’

Advocates of natural law in the Catholic tradition have often told us that the good is discoverable to reason, and that we have only to consult it. But they tend to be as reluctant as Waldstein to define who is doing the consulting, and how. Burke’s view, that there is a kind of reason that emerges through civil association, and which is both conserved in our traditions and irretrievably dispersed by the attempt to make it explicit, offers, to my mind, a better model of the place of reason in government. On Burke’s view, rational solutions emerge from below, by an invisible hand, and are not imposed from above by those who claim to have privileged knowledge of the natural law. (The same point is made in other terms by Hayek, in his defense of the common law.) One can agree with Kant’s warning against paternal government without thinking that ‘any submission to an authority other than the self is tyrannical.’ As I understand it, the art of living in society is precisely the art of submitting to authority—but doing so willingly, and in the little platoons that we ourselves create.[xvi]

Certainly, as an integralist I think that there are absolutely fixed moral truths that can be known both through reason and through revelation, and that the Catholic Church is the authoritative teacher about such truths. In that sense, I am not a conservative, that is, I am not a defeatist. No matter how long-established a certain moral error is in a society, no matter how universally it is accepted, I believe that it ought to be rooted out. Thus, for example, I do not think that we should ever give up the struggle against so-called “gay marriage,” no matter how long that practice has been established.

Nevertheless, I do think that there is a lot of truth to what Scruton was saying. There is a danger to seeing morality as a simple matter of rationalist deduction, as the Revolutionaries saw it, and of the impulse to simply overturn social order in accordance with such deduction. As I indicated above, morality is largely a matter of habituation, not deduction, and this demands a whole system of social traditions to be effectively carried on from one generation to the next. To the extent that there are still social traditions that are in accord with truth, they ought to be conserved. 

Moreover, most political questions are not a matter of moral absolutes. When it comes to the form of government, for example, I hold with Pope Leo XIII that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (as well as mixtures of the three) can all be just, as long as they pursue the true human good. On such questions I think we should indeed conserve the traditions of particular places and peoples. Even in the application of moral absolutes, we should be gentle and cautious. St Benedict of Nursia issues a warning to a zealous abbot that is equally applicable to politicians:

He must hate faults but love the brothers. When he must punish them, he should use prudence and avoid extremes; otherwise, by rubbing too hard to remove the rust, he may break the vessel.[xvii]

This, I believe, is how the restoration of a good society should take place, cautiously, lovingly, with reverence for the good that already exists, and nostalgia for the good that has passed away.

This paper is based on a talk which I gave at the Working-group on Conservatism in Europe (WoCE) Hosted by The European Conservative, Vienna, Austria, September 6th, 2023. My thanks to Mario Fantini for the invitation, and to all the participants for their helpful discussion.

[i] For the origins of the term “integralist” see the editor’s introductory note to Félix Sardá y Salvany, “Integralists?” trans. HHG, The Josias (2022), thejosias.com/2022/03/02/felix-sarda-y-salvany-on-the-word-integralists (accessed September 8th, 2023).

[ii] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 53.

[iii] Metaphysics, Bk. I, ch. 2, 982b30.

[iv] Cf. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 229.

[v] See: Edmund Waldstein, “The Primacy of the Common Good,” The Josias (2023) thejosias.com/2023/06/19/the-primacy-of-the-common-good (accessed September 4th, 2023).

[vi] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I, ch. 2, 1094b5.

[vii] De Regno, I.15.

[viii] De Monarchia, III.XVI.9.

[ix] Sardá, “Integralists?”

[x] “Como el cuerpo al alma ha de estar unido y subordinado el Estado á la Iglesia, el luminar menor al mayor, la espada temporal a la espiritual, en los términos y condiciones que la Iglesia de Dios señala, como lo establecen nuestras leyes tradicionales.” [Manifestación hecha en Burgos por la prensa tradicionalista el mes de julio de 1888 (Madrid: Gabriel López, 1903), 20].

[xi] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (London: Forum, 2022), xvi.

[xii] Michael Hanby, “Are We Postliberal Yet?” New Polity 3.3, 11-27, at 16, footnote 16.

[xiii] Robert Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration: Studien über L.G.A. de Bonald (München: Kösel, 1959), 181-191. This book was based on Spaemann’s dissertation, written under the direction of Joachim Ritter in Münster. Ritter was a liberal conservative, who wanted to move German conservatives away from nostalgia for past political forms, and towards support for the Christian Democratic principles of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is easy to see how a critique of Bonald’s intransigent support of the Ancien Régime fits into Ritter’s project.

[xiv] Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, On Royal Government, trans. Andrew Strain, www.academia.edu/8384944/Translation_of_Garrigou_Lagranges_On_Royal_Government (accessed September 4th, 2023), 9.

[xv] Schmitt is notoriously difficult to pin down, and it is not clear to what extent he actually holds the decisionism that he describes.

[xvi] “Letters,” First Things (October 2014).

[xvii] Regula Benedicti, 64:11-13.