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Christianity, ‘Cristendom,’ and Conversion

By Ben Reinhard

Reports of the death of Christendom are, it seems, somewhat exaggerated. Indeed, and contrary to all expectation, Christendom seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts in the second quarter of this century: as a term, at least, if not yet as a social and cultural reality. Even this conceptual renaissance, however, seems significant. Only a decade ago, Christendom was a decidedly fringe concept: few knew even the proper pronunciation of the word; fewer still had any interest in discussing its relevance for life in the modern world. Something strange has happened, however, in the past five years. First, in 2020, came Msgr. James Shea’s justly acclaimed From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, arguing that Christians must adopt new evangelistic paradigms in a post-Christendom world. Perhaps prematurely: no sooner had Msgr. Shea announced the end of the age of Christendom than a new, young, and largely online generation rediscovered it. Today, Christendom is apparently everywhere. It is discussed, of course, in books and journals and blogs, engaging the intellects of writers like Paul Kingsnorth, Sebastian Morello, Michael Warren Davis, and Joshua Charles. In some quarters, the concept has escaped from page and screen into the real world; post-liberal Catholics now occupy positions of power from county councils to Washington, D.C. Intellectually engaged Christians no longer ask what Christendom is but whether it can be revived – or, perhaps, if it should be. 

For all that Christendom has become a much-discussed topic in recent years, consensus on these most important questions has proved elusive. From all appearances, the gulf between those who come to praise Christendom and those who hope to bury it is only increasing. These heightened contradictions can be seen with special clarity in the case of Christendom College, a small and fiercely Catholic liberal arts college in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. As the educational offspring of Triumph magazine and Brent Bozell’s Christian Commonwealth Institute, the college has been dedicated to the restoration of Christian society since its founding in 1977. Today, the college is thriving, with its magnificent new chapel towering over commuters on I-66 and its dorms filled to capacity as it prepares to celebrate 50 years of “restoring all things in Christ”: a win, it would seem, for the renewal crowd. But the college’s success has drawn the negative attention of the critical camp; most notably, of Mark Massa, S.J., of Boston College. In his Oxford University Press-published monograph Catholic Fundamentalism in America, Massa mocks the college and its leaders for “Dreaming of Christendom in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” accusing them of sectarianism, fundamentalism, and parochialism – and much worse besides. This squabble in Catholic higher education is, alas, merely a concrete representative of the larger conversation. The same debate is repeated, with minimal variation, everywhere the idea is discussed today.

It is unlikely that a broad consensus will emerge any time soon. As those attuned to these discussions know, these disagreements reflect deeply-rooted differences in ecclesiology, anthropology, ethics, and politics. It may nonetheless be possible to take a first step towards clarity by recognizing that linguistics also plays its role in the ongoing confusion; at least part of the problem is semantic. However modern commentators may feel about the eclipse of Christendom – whether they view it as lamentable or desirable, inevitable or reversible – they tend to agree on one thing: they all ascribe to the twentieth-century understanding of the term. Though different writers may offer slightly different formulations, the great majority would agree that the word ‘Christendom’ refers to some form of Christian civilization or culture. As the historian Warren Carroll has it, Christendom is “a Christian society, shaped by Christian principles and truth to the fullest extent man’s fallen nature permits, a society that publicly acknowledges Christ as King.” 

Allowing for Carroll’s favorable spin, this is a wholly acceptable common-use definition. But while Carroll accurately captures how the term has been used in the twentieth- and twenty-first century, his definition does not do justice to the full historical richness of the term. This is to be regretted, as the word Christendom has an illustrious history. It is almost as old as written English itself, and occupies an important place in England’s legal and ecclesiastical history. Massa suggests that this history may illuminate our contemporary discussions. On his account,

“Cristendom” is an Anglo-Saxon term thought to have been invented in the ninth century by a scribe (possibly in the court of King Alfred the Great) translating Paulus Orosius’s History of the Pagans, written in the early fifth century. That busy scribe was seeking a term (non-existent before his efforts) to express the idea of a universal culture in which Christ (and Christ’s Church) held direct sway over every human creature.1

But while Massa is right that is helpful to go back to the Old English roots of the term, he is wrong in almost everything else he says. Orosius did not write a history of the pagans, but against them; the Anglo-Saxon translator was not a mere hassled copyist, but (as scholars have shown) an educated, creative, and humane scholar; though cristendom is attested first in his work, the translator almost certainly did not invent the word (as England had been thoroughly Christianized two centuries before he wrote, it is unlikely that so basic a term had not already entered the lexicon). It is enough to make one wonder what else Massa’s Oxford editor had on his plate when this passage crossed his desk. Even Homer may sometimes nod, but here he seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel.

These errors are mere trifles, however, compared with Massa’s central howler. The translator of the Orosius did not use cristendom “to express the idea of a universal culture in which Christ (and Christ’s Church) held direct sway over every human creature.” In the first place, it is doubtful whether he would have possessed a concept of a universal monoculture and more doubtful still that would have approved it. Had he read his Bede – and he almost certainly had – he would have known that cristendom could and did flourish in diverse national cultures. More seriously still, this is not at all how the translator uses the term cristendom. While the term occurs in various contexts through the Old English Orosius, it most frequently translates Latin terms like tempora Christiana or Christiana religio, occasionally it refers to an individual’s privately held faith (as when a persecutor attempts to make a man abandon his cristendom). For these reasons, Malcolm Godden, the most recent translator of the Orosius into modern English renders cristendom, consistently and simply, as Christianity.

Those familiar with Old English will immediately recognize that this is, in fact, the correct translation. For the rest, a brief and simple digression into Old English morphology is in order. The word cristendom was formed by affixing the adjective cristen (a loan from the Latin Christianus) with the suffix -dom, which is used in Old English to create an abstract noun of state. Nouns so created are on occasion simple calques of pre-existing Latin nouns ending in -tas. Some of these terms are alive and well in modern English (freodom, ‘freedom’ = libertas); some are obsolete (haligdom, *‘holydom’ = sanctitas). Cristendom is of course exactly this sort of word, it represents precisely the Latin Christianitas. 

This can be seen with perfect clarity in other early Anglo-Saxon witnesses to the term, especially in the works of the great 11th-century Benedictine, lawmaker, and statesman Archbishop Wulfstan. Wulfstan had a special fondness for translating pre-existing Latin texts into Old English. Happily for our purposes, this leaves little doubt as to the precise meaning of his words. As we might expect, his homily Be cristendome is a translation of an original Latin homily De christianitate. If the titles alone were not sufficient to establish meaning, the content of the homily would. Wulfstan begins with a direct appeal to the audience: they must know how to give an account of their cristendom. What follows is a simple instruction on the fundamentals of Christian faith and practice, Creed and Decalogue. No Christian empire here, only basic catechesis.

In its original historical use, then, cristendom means Christianity, no more and no less. However then did the term come to mean, not Christianity simpliciter, but a social order that many modern Christians view with suspicion and even hostility? The answer is found in the Anglo-Saxon age, and indeed in the pages of the first writers to use the word, especially Wulfstan. The Archbishop and his fellow clergy were well aware of the extraverted character of their religion, its evangelistic and social demands, and they knew all too well that their own salvation hinged on their faithfulness to this mission. And so they thundered and excommunicated and coaxed and pleaded, they advised kings and drafted laws and washed the feet of the poor. Above all, they exhorted all men, whatever their state, to do their duty to their cristendom. Laymen were encouraged to hold and keep (healdan) their cristendom and to pursue it in their daily lives, bishops and priests to build it up (aræran) by every means at their disposal. Most telling of all, however, was the king’s duty to simultaneously extend and enlarge (miclian and mærsian) the kingdom and cristendom together. In this statement, cristendom has become conceptually linked with a political unit. Elsewhere, the pairing is made explicit. Kingdom and cristendom, Wulfstan tells us, rise and fall together. In this way the term cristendom thus begins to expand to include geographical and cultural notions as well. When cristendom is directly opposed to hæþendom (both “heathenism” and “the lands where heathenism is practiced”), the semantic expansion is complete. Thus the modern, secondary sense of the word Christendom was born.

Here we see a curious phenomenon. The writers who brought cristendom into English as the word for “Christian religion” are the same ones who extended it to a Christian social-political order, an order they themselves were active in constructing (Patrick Wormald, last generation’s greatest historian of early English law and politics, credits Wulfstan with creating and preserving the English polity that still exists today). If this blending of theology, sociology, and politics is puzzling to us as moderns, it is only because we have attempted to divide what the medievals saw as a unity. In his classic Prayer as a Political Problem, Cardinal Daniélou observed that the Church has “a duty to work at the task of making civilization such that the Christian way of life shall be open to the poor,” that is, the masses. The Anglo-Saxons would have agreed with him.

The semantic shift of cristendom came not because those who used it sought to justify a Christian world-state, nor because they were too muddle-headed to distinguish what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, but because they discovered (or sensed) a real relationship between the two meanings of the word. Seeking Christianity, they found Christendom. And if linguistic history is any guide, the Anglo-Saxons were not the only people to have this experience. Such ambiguity is not restricted to the English term cristendom. Thus, when Christianity entered the English language in the high Middle Ages (a loan from Anglo-Norman French) it was used in exactly the same way – as a term for both the Christian religion and the region of the world that practices it – and was used so well into modernity. Variations of Christianity continue to be used this way in modern European languages.

So persistent is this linguistic blending of Christianity and Christendom that we may almost suspect that it is relevant, not merely as a curious fact of historical Christianity, but as a revelation of a fundamental truth of the religion, that Cardinal Daniélou was right when he wrote that “there can be no radical division between civilization and what belongs to the interior being of man.” On the contrary, there is a real and essential connection between Christianity and Christendom, one so powerful that neither thought nor language can keep them neatly separate.

Returning at last to our contemporary Christendom debates, where does this foray into millennium-old linguistics and ecclesiastical history leave us? It seems clear to me that this invites a change in thinking for both the “renewal” and “critique” parties; for now, however, I would be content with a change in definition. To whit, wherever Christian religion is truly practiced, and to the extent that it is practiced, there is Christendom: in any civilization, state, family, or soul. Clarity on this point is essential for successful navigation of the challenges of our age – or any age. To those who live, as most of my readers surely do, in the post-Christian West, it reveals how much work we have to do. True Christianity is not a religion of pure contemplation, tending towards quietism, it is a lively, fighting, and even crusading faith, one that makes demands on the temporal order. Purely private religion, individual perfection, the naked public square – these are not acceptable options for the serious Christian, and never have been. The Church is called, as the philosopher and critic Sebastian Morello so correctly points out, to make disciples of all nations. Though our record in the past century has been admittedly abysmal in this regard, this is no reason to abandon the call.

But this is only one side of the coin. If a robust understanding of Christendom places heavy demands on those living in a secular age, its demands on a structurally Christian society is even greater. It bears repeating: wherever Christian religion is truly practiced, and to the extent that it is practiced, there is Christendom. From the one to whom much is given, much is required. To the publicly Christian society, family, or individual, Christendom is therefore the call to continual conversion, to become more deeply and perfectly what we profess to be. Only thus can we avoid the charges of hypocrisy and pharisaism so often levelled at Christian societies, and only thus can we save our souls. A broad and vague cultural Christianity (as in 1950s America) is not enough to make a society truly part of Christendom, nor is public observance of the liturgical year (as in modern Austria). We reflect that thirteenth-century Europe is, to some modern commentators, the Christian society par excellence. And yet, if Dante is any guide, the nine circles of hell were richly supplied with that century’s sons and daughters.

This is how things must be in a fallen world. As Daniélou pointed out 60 years ago, no merely earthly social order, however perfect, can be fully identified with Christianity as such. The one is by definition natural and temporal, the other is the “divine irruption” of supernatural grace. But it is essential to the Gospel that this irruption happened, and continues to happen, in history, through the Incarnation and the life of the Church. In the course of this history, many Christendoms have been created. Some of these (the Middle East and North Africa in the eighth century, Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth) have ceased to be. Some may yet be restored. The essential mission of the Church in the world, however, remains the same.

This realization should govern the way we proceed. We may, as Msgr. Shea urged, cease to rely on institutional structures and adopt more humble, practical, and flexible evangelistic strategies. I would go so far as to argue that this is among most urgent pastoral concerns of our day. We cannot, however, talk about moving from Christendom to apostolic mission. Considered correctly, these are merely two aspects of the same thing, the attempt to fulfill the Great Commission, even unto the end of the age. 

Ben Reinhard is professor of English and faculty associate of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he also serves as the director of the Humanities and Catholic Culture Program. He writes and teaches on the Inklings, medieval legend, and the thought of Christopher Dawson. His most recent book, The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination, was published in 2025 by Emmaus Road Publishing. He lives in Steubenville, Ohio with his wife and five children.

  1. Mark Massa, S.J., Catholic Fundamentalism in America, 126. ↩︎
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Happiness as the Principle of Ethics, Law, and Rights

An earlier version of this paper was read at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Law, Department for Roman Law, Budapest, February 21st, 2025. Thanks to Professor Nadja El Beheiri, Chair of the Department of Roman Law, for the invitation.

Introduction

Happiness ought to be the last end and first principle of ethics, law, and rights. By happiness, I mean here the reality pointed to by Aristotle with the term eudaimonia. I will largely be relying on Aristotle, and on his greatest medieval interpreter and developer, Thomas Aquinas, to establish my thesis. But my aim is not primarily to establish what those thinkers thought, but rather to understand the reality about which they were thinking. Nevertheless, I will attend to the ways in which the reality grasped by Aristotle in the concept eudaimonia is different from that often referred to in modern times by such words as “happiness.” I will begin (1) by looking at the Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia, paying particular attention to two features of it that contrast it with the way that happiness is often conceived of in modern discourse: (1.1) Happiness is an objective state of a human being, and (1.2) happiness is a common good. Next (2), I will consider how happiness is the principle of law (2.1) and rights (2.2). 

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Divisio Textus of Leo XIII’s Libertas Praestantissimum

Proemium (§§1-2): The purpose of the encyclical is to refute the charge that the Church is against human liberty, by showing the true nature of liberty, and by distinguishing what is good from what is bad in so-called “modern liberties.”

Tractatus (§§3-46):

I. The nature of liberty (§§3-6): the distinction between natural and moral liberty.

  1. Natural liberty (§§3-5): Natural liberty is free will, rooted in the spiritual power of reason (§3). The Catholic Church has always defended natural liberty against fatalism (§4). Natural liberty is the faculty of choosing among means to the final end. It chooses everything under the aspect of good and is dependent on the intellect’s recognition of the good (§5).
  2. Moral liberty (§6): Just as reason can err about the truth, the will can err about the good, choosing something contrary to right reason. Moral liberty is the freedom from such error. Sin is slavery, because it means acting against right reason, which is our nature. The sinner cannot therefore act without impediment in the way natural to him. Moral liberty is granted by training “in justice and virtue,” because this enables us to act easily in accordance with right reason.

II. Helps to attaining moral liberty (§§ 7-13): We need light and strength to attain moral liberty. 

  1. Law is the first help to moral liberty. Law teaches what is in accordance with right reason and trains us to live in accordance with it by reward and punishment (§7).
    • Natural law is our reason commanding us to do right and avoid evil. It has the force of law because it interprets the eternal law of God for us (§8).
      • God’s grace strengthens us inwardly so that we can obey the law (§8).
    • Civil law helps the political community to be morally free, directing it to the true common good. Some of its precepts are direct applications of the natural law, others are more remote applications. The liberty of human society consists in all being led by the injunctions of civil law to conform more easily to eternal law (§§9-11).
  2. The Church aids us in attaining moral liberty by her teaching and influence (§12). Moreover, her witness to the higher authority of God is an effectual barrier against the tyranny of the state (§13).

III. What is bad and what is good in so called “Modern liberties” (§§14-46):

  1. The doctrine of [hard] Liberalism (§15): Hard Liberalism teaches the supremacy of human reason. Human reason determines what is good and evil, without reference to God’s eternal law. The state is seen as deriving its authority from the people rather than God. The results of liberalism (§16) are that the true distinction between good and evil is lost, disordered passion runs riot, religion is despised, and socialists and anarchists are encouraged to revolution.
  2. The doctrine of [soft] Liberalism (§17): Soft liberals hold that human reason is not absolutely supreme. Man is bound by God’s eternal law, but only insofar as it is promulgated to his reason as natural law. Even softer liberals (§18) hold that while individuals are bound by revealed law, politics can only be guided by natural law. Hence they teach the fatal theory of Separation of Church and State.
  3. The various “modern liberties” promoted by liberalism (§§19-46):
    • Liberty of Worship (§§19-22) for individuals as for states is contrary to the virtue of religion and harmful to the true liberty of rulers and subjects.
    • Liberty of speech and of the press (§23) and liberty of teaching (§§24-29) are dangerous, because they are indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood and are contrary to the public duty of defending both natural and revealed truth.
    • Liberty of conscience (§§30-42) is good if understood as liberty to obey God, but bad if understood as liberty to obey or not obey him as they will. The liberals, while pretending to support liberty of conscience, actually persecute the Church, which they see as a barrier to the omnipotence of the liberal state. The Church, mindful of human weakness, does allow the state to tolerate certain evils for the sake of averting worse evils or preserving some good, but this does not concede that man has a right to do evil.
    • Political liberty (§§43-46) is good if it means lawful change of government to remove unjust oppression. The Church does not oppose democratic government or independence from foreign powers.

Exhortation, prayer, and blessing (§47): Pope Leo hopes that the bishops will help him spread the teaching of this encyclical, and prays to God that he will give his light to men, so that they will understand his wisdom. He ends with the Apostolic benediction.

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Book Review: Invisible Doctrine

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (New York: Crown, 2024).

From the advent of the Nixon Coalition of 1968 to the Trump election of 2016, the Republican Party had three key planks in its platform. The first is strong military defense spending, coupled with the claim of being the party of the “patriot” or the “real American.” The second is a social conservativism with policies largely in line with Catholic and Evangelical morality. The last plank is what has been called fiscal conservativism by its friends and neoliberalism by its enemies. In their recent book, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, Guardian columnist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison take aim at this third plank of the contemporary American Republican Party.

Monbiot’s and Hutchison’s premise is that neoliberalism is the dominant Weltanschauung of the 21st century. And while everyone (or nearly everyone) frames their own personal worldview in neoliberal terms, it is, as the title of their book suggests, an invisible power. According to Monbiot and Hutchison, those on the right who call Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or any other progressive figure a communist or Marxist are only fooling themselves, for Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are neoliberals. Those who, in turn, call Donald Trump, George W. Bush, or Steve Bannon fascists or Nazis are, in the view of Monbiot and Hutchison, also fooling themselves, for Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Steve Bannon are neoliberals as well. Neoliberalism, according to the authors, is today economics simply considered. 

Neoliberalism has, in the authors’ view, eroded politics by replacing citizens with consumers. It has granted increasing liberty to the 1% to exploit the 99%, whose free speech and right to organize are curtailed by neoliberal legislators. It is further responsible for the sense of isolation and the rise of mental illness and suicide among Westerners, for neoliberalism allegedly teaches a philosophy of individualism and cutthroat, Hobbesian competition. 

Monbiot’s and Hutchison’s history of neoliberalism has a number of parallels to that of Naomi Klein’s 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. These authors’ twist is, however, to locate capitalism’s origins in the Portuguese colonization of Madeira. When the Portuguese arrived at the island of Madeira in the 1420s, it was largely uninhabited. As a result, the Portuguese were free to strip the island of its resources (namely lumber) and to utilize the land for farming and livestock. Monbiot and Hutchison see these events as the birth of a pure capitalism in which the previous social ties and moral structure of feudalism were abandoned for an entirely deracinated economic system. This rather reactionary argument is carried through the book to demonstrate that capitalism and neoliberalism have a fundamentally destructive and exploitative character. They feed off resources until exhaustion, alienating and exploiting workers, who are themselves mere resources or tools for the capitalist system. 

Like others before them, Monbiot and Hutchison see John Locke as one of the most important early theorists of capitalism. Locke argued that the world was originally a blank slate and that ownership is achieved through one’s labor on land. This, according to the authors, creates a vision of the world (and even the universe) as merely “standing reserve” or raw material for exploitation and use. No longer are human communities based on ethnic, cultural, and religious ties. No longer are peoples rooted in the land and part of a living history. Now, it is every man or woman for him- or herself in the great race to make money from the exploitation of labor and land. 

One of the book’s strong points is its criticism of certain left-wing movements. Invisible Doctrine takes to task the notion that individual recycling has a profound benefit for the environment. The authors note that the 1970 “Keep America Beautiful” recycling campaign was “pure Astroturf” and was funded largely by corporations that wanted to shift the blame for pollution to consumers. Monbiot and Hutchison further note the irony that the reusable grocery bags meant to reduce plastic consumption are themselves enormous drains on the environment. The authors also, like their conservative rivals, call out left-wing billionaires who chide common people for their waste but themselves consume enormous amounts of energy, making special note of Bill Gates’s travel carbon footprint. 

Like a host of other recent progressive books, Invisible Doctrine proposes saving humanity and the world by rewiring the human person. While neoliberalism (and many on the right) see humans as naturally competitive and aggressive, Invisible Doctrine proposes a renewed vision of humans as naturally social, cooperative, and empathetic. Monbiot and Hutchison also believe that getting a certain number of people to reject neoliberalism will have a viral effect and that people can be converted to the authors’ vision of an internationalist, eco-friendly socialism. 

There are a number of points in the book with which readers of a variety of political stripes would disagree. Monbiot and Hutchison have a special animus against Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and other populist politicians. Whatever legitimate criticisms the authors have of these populists, it is difficult to label them as neoliberals without qualification. In fact, Donald Trump is widely opposed by neoliberals in the Republican Party, and the “never-Trump” movement is largely a movement of neoliberals. Moreover, while Monbiot and Hutchison are right to argue against blaming migrants as the root cause of problems in the West, they, like many progressives, gloss over the importance of ethnic community and culture. The authors’ vision of a global village itself sounds a lot like a communitarian version of the deracinated individualism of neoliberalism. Nonetheless, Invisible Doctrine provides a trenchant critique of the excesses of certain types of capitalism and is worth a read.  

There is a popular scenario that, prior to the stock market/housing crash of 2008 and the more recent calls for populist economics, was common in conservative (especially academic) discourse. In this scenario, a progressive professor or writer flies to a major city on a commercial jet, is picked up at the airport by an (often luxury) automobile, is driven to a (luxury) hotel or conference center that is heated and cooled with tremendous expenditure of energy. After consuming food that was flown in from all over of the world and drinking water and coffee that themselves were transported via a complex logistical process, the aforementioned progressive professor denounces capitalism, (post-) modernity, carbon use, plastics, (neo-) colonialism, and the growing divide between rich and poor around the world. In the back of the conference room, a few neoliberal business professors chuckle to themselves at the irony. 

But the chuckling neoliberal professors are a bit unfair. Margaret Thatcher is still right, “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. Liberal capitalism (increasingly, a neo-feudal technocracy) is the only game in town. In fact, as Mark Fisher and Slavoj Zizek have noted, it is difficult to imagine anything but capitalism in the 21st century; it is easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Barring an apocalyptic catastrophe, the rise of some global fascist or communist military dictatorship, or a literal act of God, neoliberalism will continue to run its course until exhaustion. 

Jesse Russell is an assistant professor of English at Georgia Southwestern State University. He is a senior writer with Voegelin View and writes for a number of publications including The European Conservative, Catholic World Report, and The New Criterion.

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Samuel Johnson: Integralist?

By Michael J. Ortiz 

I. 

Though his star has somewhat dimmed in the fogs of contemporary ideology, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a literary colossus during his lifetime and well into the twentieth-century. Born in the midlands of England, by the 1760s Johnson was already widely celebrated as “Dictionary Johnson,” the man who nearly single-handedly wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. His career as a writer was impressive, its rise from obscurity powered by the success of his dictionary alongside poems that caught the attention of London’s literati. Over the years he would write more poems, prefaces, hundreds of essays (many of deep moral import), pamphlets, and short biographies, in addition to editing the works of Shakespeare. His dictionary in 1762 inspired a young King George III to award Johnson a life-long pension for his labors in furtherance of their country’s literature.

Johnson’s work represents a high-water mark in literary history for its classical genius, with roots deep in Western antiquity. His father was a bookseller, and though Johnson only spent thirteen months at Pembroke College, Oxford, he was already well-read in the classics before he skipped his first college lecture. 

On May 17, 1763, a twenty-three-year-old James Boswell met Johnson for the first time in a London bookshop owned by Thomas Davies, a sometime actor. Boswell was the son of a Scottish Laird of Auchinleck. His father was a successful lawyer and a member of the Supreme Civil Court of Scotland, a practical man who wanted his son to settle down into a life in the law and then tend the family estate that encompassed nearly twenty square miles. Boswell was everything his father wasn’t: mercurial, witty, a drinker, a social climber, an impressionist of considerable skill, in short, the life of the party with a particular gift for bringing people out of themselves. This latter talent—alongside an ability to write up a scene or a character with fluency and imagination—made him perfectly suited to author the first great biography in English literature, The Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791.

For the past year, I have been teaching Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson to high school juniors and seniors. It’s been an invigorating experience. Most of my students have dug into the 1006 pages of the biography with admirable resolution. Their essays in class have been uniformly very good to excellent. But in class discussions, Johnson’s pre-modern views have come to the fore, and challenged my students with the inapposite,  contradictory pressure they put on their assumptions about the function and nature of government. They took Johnson the lexicographer, essayist, poet, critic, biographer, and editor pretty much in stride. They hadn’t a clue about what to do with Johnson the integralist. Except disagree. 

Johnson is often portrayed as a fire-brand of a Tory, but in actuality he was nuanced in his political philosophy. He agreed with the Whigs on slavery, for instance, once offering the toast: “Here’s to the next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies,” but disagreed with them on virtually everything else. No friend of the United States, which he derided almost as often as he did the Scots, Johnson’s animus against the Whigs had its origins in what he believed must be the heart of all government: the moral good which can provide order in society.

II.

To take one scene from the Life: on Friday, May 7, 1773, in house number 22 in the Poultry (a street inhabited by poultry sellers by Cheapside, the marketplace), Boswell and Johnson dined with the bookselling Dilly brothers, Edward and Charles. Other guests included old friends Oliver Goldsmith and Bennet Langton, as well as the Reverend Dr. Mayo (“a dissenting minister” according to Boswell), and the Reverend Augustus Toplady and Boswell’s friend, Reverend Mr. Temple. The discussion is artfully set. Johnson and his company have been talking about the migration of birds, and the necessity of close observation to ascertain their patterns. Johnson rails against romanticizing the natives of Tahiti. Boswell then introduces the subject of “toleration,” a policy that regulated the civic place of those outside the Anglican Communion, the official religion of the British government. 

Johnson opens with a position from which he will—as usual—maintain his ground: “Every society has a right to preserve publick peace and order, and therefore has a good right to prohibit the propagation of opinions which have a dangerous tendency.” Mayo asserts “liberty of conscience in religion.” Johnson counters: “Every man has a right to liberty of conscience, and with that the magistrate cannot interfere. People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking; nay, with liberty of preaching. Every man has a physical right to think as he pleases; for it cannot be discovered how he thinks. He has not a moral right, for he ought to inform himself, and think justly. But, Sir, no member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.” Mayo tries to corner Johnson, saying we cannot discover truth if that truth is forbidden in the court of opinion by the magistrate. Johnson replies that “martyrdom…is the only method by which religious truth can be established.” Boswell brings up a certain Mr. Elwal, a dissenting Baptist, who Johnson implies was mentally unstable and should have been put in the stocks: “A man who preaches in the stocks will always have hearers enough.” Boswell says, “But Elwal thought himself in the right.” Johnson doesn’t back down: “We are not providing for mad people.” Johnson then meets another objection: Mayo says it’s unreasonable that he shouldn’t be allowed to teach his children what he believes is the truth. Johnson asks, should you be allowed to teach them “the community of goods,” which in this sense means teaching children that thievery is a good thing? Or, Johnson asks, if you teach them “the notion of the Adamites, and they should run naked into the streets, would not the magistrate have a right to flog ‘em into their doublets?”

This is a particularly dense passage, albeit leavened by Johnson’s wit as is so often the case. He shows his pre-modern colors right out of the gate: “peace and order” are not found in some neutral space rendered possible by agnostic principles of metaphysics. Johnson, no surprise, is careful with his words. The state has a “good right” to “prohibit the propagation of opinions” which might endanger that peace and order. Somewhat surprisingly, Johnson’s thought tracks with that of Pope Leo XIII, who a little more than a century later would issue Libertas, an encyclical that explores the contours of freedom amid the various types of human community, particularly civil society or what Leo calls “the State.” Johnson makes a distinction uncannily similar to Leo XIII when he distinguishes between a “physical right” and  “moral right.” Leo XIII uses “natural freedom” and “moral freedom” (Libertas, 3) to make the same distinction: the first is the “fountainhead” from which our power to choose comes; the second is the will choosing the good “enlightened by the knowledge possessed by the intellect” (Libertas, 5). Johnson, like Leo XIII, posits a pre-modern vision of freedom that is substantive, not merely procedural, that sees human freedom as a condition of ethical activity, not its primary goal or terminus. 

Saying we can choose to do something, for Johnson, simply sets up the possibility of good human action, due to our ability to see what is present before us, hence the guiding function of intellect whence this power flows. Following this, both men see “right” as a “moral power” (Libertas, 23). Towards the end of their discussion, Johnson makes further distinctions, all at variance with liberalism’s view of civil authority: “If I think it right to steal Mr. Dilly’s plate, I am a bad man; but he can say nothing to me. If I make an open declaration that I think so, he will keep me out of his house. If I put forth my hand, I shall be sent to Newgate. This is the gradation of thinking, preaching, and acting: if a man thinks erroneously, he may keep his thoughts to himself, and nobody will trouble him; if he preaches erroneous doctrine, society may expel him; if he acts in consequence of it, the law takes place, and he is hanged.” 

Not only does this accord with Thomistic teaching on the reach of human law which forbids “chiefly those [acts] that are to the hurt of others” (ST, I-II.96.2), but it also shows similar nuances acknowledged by Leo XIII concerning “opinion” which “God leaves to man’s free discussion” (Libertas, 23). Johnson knew that the Anglican church of his day could not compel baptism as it must be accepted by a free act of faith. This also obtains when the state is acting according to unique privileges the Church can delegate to it. But once that relationship exists, there are sanctions the state can impose to encourage or discourage certain behavior. Likewise, Johnson thought the state should in large measure act paternalistically towards its citizens (“who are the children of the State”, Boswell, 768). Johnson, moreover, never saw political order of this kind inhibiting personal initiative or creativity. He could be forceful in his jostling with others over ideas about all kinds of things. He welcomed what Jane Austen referred to as “the compliment of rational opposition.” Boswell’s biography is itself a testimony to Johnson’s roving, tireless intellect engaging others about everything under the sun. 

For the realities he most cherished as sacred and essential to a harmonious existence in the bustling world, Johnson was anything but a proceduralist. What he thought the government shouldn’t tolerate, neither did he. When Boswell tells us that “a gentleman present” asked Johnson, as there didn’t seem a “material difference” between toleration of “opinions which lead to action” and “opinions merely speculative,” would the magistrate be allowed to tolerate “those who preach against the doctrine of the Trinity?” Johnson’s reaction is so strong it obscures the fact that he does make such a distinction. Boswell shows us Johnson shutting the man down, saying, “’I wonder, Sir, how a gentleman of your piety can introduce this subject in a mixed company.” Shortly after this, the same unnamed gentleman asks if it be “politick” to tolerate such cases. Johnson replies: “Sir, we have been talking of right: this is another question. I think it is NOT politick to tolerate in such a case.” Similarly, in a predominantly Catholic state, prudence could allow minority sects to worship according to their traditions “for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil” (Libertas, 36), without, however, having the right to espouse their convictions publicly and cause Catholics to defect. 

Johnson and Leo XIII have no problem with the government using force in correcting “the excesses of unbridled intellect.” Should not the state primarily exist for protecting the weak from such injuries that would wound public order itself? Both men would say yes, for both men are part of a pre-modern tradition that sees ideas circulated in public as capable of hurting others, though not physically. The reduction of “public order” to the sphere of physical actions would have struck them as culpably naïve. Johnson could see the complexities of human society. He loved life in London, with its rambunctious population of well over half a million, its seemingly endless variety a major part of its charm. He believed order—particularly political order—was not life-crushing, but life-enhancing.

Johnson’s recognition of the variability of social life comes out with notable eloquence in a passage from his last major work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781). Johnson gives us a biographical overview and critique of around fifty poets. In his “Life of Milton” (never one of his favorites, due to Milton’s republican, anti-royalist positions) he nevertheless was objective in lauding Milton’s extraordinary poetic gifts. When we come to Johnson’s take on Milton’s defense of free speech, we can see Johnson grappling with all the nearly interminable problems of human society’s cultivation of forces which can both further and frustrate its essential end of human flourishing:

The danger of such unbounded liberty and the danger of bounding it have produced a problem in the science of Government, which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects, there can be no settlement; if every murmurer at government may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every skeptick in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion. The remedy against these evils is to punish the authours; for it is yet allowed that every society may punish, though not prevent, the publication of opinions, which that society shall think pernicious: but this punishment, though it may crush the authour, promotes the book; and it seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

Couched as it is in some of the grand generalizations of Johnson’s time, the passage upon careful reading shows a real subtlety. For its terms, to bind or unbind, that is, to allow or prohibit, a publication never quite fix the issue firmly in place. And, I suspect, that is just what Johnson intended. He knew there were no easy answers, though there were certainly wrong ones. Punishment seems entirely too late, as the thief allowed in the unguarded home works his mischief despite later penal consequences. Pope Gregory XVI in 1832 put forth a similar line of thought, asking, when condemning the “right” to free speech: who would allow poison to be in easy reach of everyone simply because an antidote is available “and those who use it…be snatched from death again and again?” (Mirari Vos, 15)

III.

Studies of Johnson’s politics in the context of his era can be Byzantine in their complexity. Political parties were less a locus of loyalty than individuals such as William Pitt the Elder or Lord Bute. Johnson actually rebuked Edmund Burke, a good friend and a member of Johnson’s Literary Club, for being a liar in saying he would vote in parliament with his party the Whigs. Nevertheless, following Anthony Quinton’s “The Politics of Imperfection” (London, 1978), we can put Johnson in a line of religious conservatives including “Hooker, Clarendon…Burke, Coleridge, and Newman” as opposed to the “secular” conservatives “Halifax, Bolingbroke, Hume, Disraeli, and Oakeshott.” Two things we can say with certainty: Johnson was a devout Anglican who had no qualms about his government enforcing Christian standards of behavior in public life in critical points very much in line with papal teaching over the centuries; he also seems to show an almost Augustinian distrust of human faculties acting individually or corporately without the healing balm and illuminating effects of supernatural grace. Spurning the ultimate sources of order, he saw in his own long life, leads eventually to chaos. 

Of course, Johnson was not a systematic thinker in the contemporary sense of the word. He is representative, however, of an eighteenth-century Anglicanism that found many points of similarity with Catholicism. As historian James Sack has shown, after 1789 Burke and many other Anglicans made common cause with Catholics against the incendiary and destabilizing ideas of revolutionaries. After 1801, and ironically coincident with the rise of the Oxford Movement, rabid anti-Catholicism gradually became more wedded to the English political right. Johnson—with Burke and Pitt, among others—labored under no such animus. Johnson thought there were some doubtful historical developments in Catholicism (purgatory, for example) but he did not allow Boswell’s objections to “Romanism” to spin their falsifying web of misrepresentations before his vigorous mind. 

Johnson saw humanity in its fallen state with great clarity. He can be considered a fellow traveler with integralism precisely because he thought the mad, interminable mixtures of human error did not incapacitate political institutions from acknowledging—and acting by virtue of—the highest sources of their authority. In point of fact, according to Johnson all political authority in the end implicitly invokes some form of the absolute: 

There may be limited royalty, there may be limited consulship; but there can be no limited government. There must, in every society, be some power or other, from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures, extends or contracts privileges, exempts itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity (Taxation No Tyranny, 1775).

Such authority is in the nature of the case, but far from necessarily, restrictive of human goods or ends, temporal or spiritual. Johnson considered the highest goal of human earthly happiness something greater than political activism, the endless agitation of the utopians. As he wrote in one of a Rambler essay on November 10, 1750: “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.” Johnson isn’t denying some lives have wider consequence and duties for the public welfare. His political theory at once constrains politics (with a hint of subsidiary, perhaps) and frees it to serve ends proper to the highest destinies of the human person which an agnostic public square can never do.  

Though he would likely instead call it “whiggery” (as in “the first whig…was the devil”), Johnson would surely accept Kenneth Craycraft’s definition of liberalism: 

The basic moral anthropology that animates the whole political spectrum in the United States, from the far left of the Democratic Party to the far right of the Republican Party. This anthropology is characterized by at least two elements: (1) radical personal autonomy and (2) an absolute commitment to individualism, characterized by the language of “individual rights” as the basic moral foundation (or, indeed, for some the only measure of moral action (Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America, 2024). 

To Johnson, whiggery was a faction because it accepts as the basis of government the freedom of the individual from all constraint except his or her own will, due to a putative unknowability of the good. This principle is a centrifugal one, which by first destroying the interior order of virtue, abolishes the exterior order of peace.

Michael J. Ortiz teaches at The Heights School, in Potomac, Maryland. He is the author of Swan Town: The Secret Journal of Susanna Shakespeare (HarperCollins, 2006), and Like the First Morning: The Morning Offering as Daily Renewal (Ave Maria, 2015) in addition to essays and poems in various venues, including The Wall Street Journal. 

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The So-Called “New Natural Law Theory”

A Spanish version of this paper appears in: Miguel Ayuso Torres (ed.), ¿El derecho natural contra el derecho natural? Historia y balance de un problema (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2024).

Introduction

The so-called “New Natural Law Theory” is a name applied to a certain attempt at recovering natural law theory in a form that would make it impervious to objections taken from Hume’s “is-ought problem.” The attempt was begun by Germain Grisez in 1965, and carried on by Grisez himself, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, Robert P. George, and others.1 The theory began as a new interpretation of St Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on natural law, but it quickly diverged from St Thomas’s teaching on many particular conclusions. The name “New Natural Law Theory” seems to have been used first by critics of the theory.2 The theory has been influential in jurisprudence, political philosophy, moral theology, and the interpretation of Catholic Social Teaching. While it has had some influence among non-Catholics,3 its primary influence has been among Catholics.

The New Natural Law Theory has been found useful as a way of defending what I will call “neo-conservative” Catholicism. By the term “neo-conservative” I mean to signify writers who, in the decades following Vatican II, were concerned, on the one hand, with defending the objectivity of moral norms and the truth of the Church’s moral teachings on matters such as abortion, euthanasia, and contraception; but who, on the other hand, interpreted Vatican II as allowing for a rapprochement between the Church and classical liberalism on such matters as usury, free market economics, social contract democracy, the primacy of individual rights, the separation of Church and state, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and (in short) most of the ideas that had been condemned by the 19th-century Popes as “liberal errors.”4 Thus, a theory whose theoretical concern was in part reinterpreting the natural law in response to the moral epistemology of the Enlightenment ended in endorsing many of the particular political and juridical conclusions that originally stemmed from Enlightenment thought.

In this paper I offer a critique of the New Natural Law Theory from the perspective of the traditional Thomist understanding of natural law, and more fundamentally of the good to which natural law is directed. I will argue that New Natural Law Theory exaggerates the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. This exaggeration leads its proponents to a fundamental misunderstanding of the good. Counter-intuitively, their exaggeration of the distinction between speculative and practical truth leads them to have an overly abstract understanding of the good; they neglect the implications of Aristotle’s insight that while the truth is found primarily in the mind, the good is found primarily in things.5 They consider the good according to the mode of existence that it has in the mind. As a consequence of this, the proponents of the New Natural Law Theory misunderstand the way in which the good is most properly said to be universal or common. They tend to understand the universality of the good as a universality in predication (one name said of many things), rather than a universality of causation (one elevated cause of many effects below it).6 They thereby misunderstand the way in which natural law is related to the good. They understand the first precept of the law, on which all the precepts of natural law are founded—“good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided”7—to refer to the universal predicate “good,” a name abstracted from particular goods and said of particular goods, rather than as referring the actual common good of all things, in which all other goods participate, and to which all goods are directed. The proponents of the New Natural Law Theory therefore deny that there is a hierarchy among the goods to which we are inclined by nature. This leads them to the astonishing opinion that God is not the complete end of human life. The denial of the hierarchy of goods also leads them to deny the primacy of the common good of a complete society (societas perfecta) over the private goods of individuals. They therefore also misunderstand the relation of the common good to individual rights. Instead of rights flowing from the common good by means of law (which is always directed to the common good), the proponents of the theory see rights as the foundation of law, and the common good as an instrumental good that secures rights to individuals. The proponents of the New Natural Law Theory therefore accept modern liberal errors on such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.

In Part I of this paper, I will give an outline of the New Natural Law Theory and show how the conclusions just mentioned follow from its principles. In Part II, I will explain the traditional Thomistic understanding of the good and the natural law and show how it grounds the rejection of liberal errors by the 19th-century popes.

Part I: Goodness, Law, and Right in the New Natural Law Theory

In 1965 Germain Grisez published an article that came to be seen as the beginning of the New Natural Law Theory. The article offered a new interpretation of Summa theologiæ Ia-IIae, q.94, a.2, in which St Thomas treats the question of whether the natural law contains only one precept or many. It will be useful to summarize St Thomas’s text before turning to Grisez’s interpretation.

St Thomas points to an analogy between speculative and practical reason. Just as speculative reason moves from self-evident, naturally known principles to conclusions, so practical reason moves from self-evident, naturally known principles to its conclusions. Reason first apprehends being, and from this first apprehension, the first principle of speculative reason is derived: the principle of contradiction. This principle is based on the understanding of the opposition of being and non-being. What is is and cannot not be. Or, in other words, the same cannot be affirmed and denied of the same thing at the same time. All other self-evident principles of speculative reasoning are based on this first principle and would be meaningless without it. For example, it is self-evident that a whole is greater than any one of its parts. But this proposition would be meaningless if the same could be affirmed and denied of the same, for then the whole could be both greater and not greater than one of its parts.

In practical reasoning, i.e. reasoning directed to action, St Thomas argues the first thing apprehended is the good, that which all seek after, because “every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good.” From this the first principle of practical reasoning follows: “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” All other self-evident principles of practical reason, St Thomas argues, are based on this first principle and would be meaningless without it.

Nevertheless, St Thomas goes on to argue there are many precepts of the natural law, because man is inclined (slanted) by nature to many different kinds of goods that perfect or complete him. Human reason apprehends such goods as ends on account of the first principle that the good is to be done and pursued. Nevertheless, the goodness of those ends is self-evident and naturally known through the natural inclinations in man. Thomas shows how various levels of nature in man result in various kinds of inclinations. The first level is what man has in common with all beings. As a being, a substance, man is inclined like all substances to conserve his being, to keep on existing. And because the being of living things is life, natural law commands man to preserve his life. The second level has more particularly to do with man’s being as an animal, a sensitive being. In accordance with this level man is inclined to sexual intercourse and the rearing of young, and such things. The third level has to do with man’s specific nature as a rational being. According to this third level, man is inclined to specifically rational goods, and thus he is bound by natural law to shun ignorance and falsehood and, moreover, to avoid offenses contrary to rational sociability.

In his interpretation, Germain Grisez reads St Thomas as making a rigid distinction between speculative and practical reason. He takes Thomas here as having anticipated the famous “is-ought” problem raised by Hume:

The theory of law is permanently in danger of falling into the illusion that practical knowledge is merely theoretical knowledge plus force of will. […] [P]ractical reason really does not know in the same way that theoretical reason knows. For practical reason, to know is to prescribe. This is why I insisted so strongly that the first practical principle is not a theoretical truth. Once its real character as a precept is seen, there is less temptation to bolster the practical principle with will, and so to transform it into an imperative, in order to make it relevant to practice. Indeed, the addition of will to theoretical knowledge cannot make it practical. This point is precisely what Hume saw when he denied the possibility of deriving ought from is.8

Although practical reason does not know in the same way as speculative reason, nevertheless it still does know abstractly. This is seen in how Grisez understands the notion of “good” in the first precept of the law. At first, Grisez seems to indicate that “good” refers to the last end, the ultimate final cause: “The good of which practical reason prescribes the pursuit and performance…is the last end, for practical reason cannot direct the possible actions which are its objects without directing them to an end.”9 But it soon becomes clear that Grisez does not think the first precept orders reason to any actual good in things, rather “good” in the precept is merely a universal predicate, one name said of many particular goods. The good of the first precept is indeterminate. For Grisez the first precept does not actually prescribe any actions, but rather makes human actions possible by “determining that action will be for an end.”10 “Good” in the first principle does mean the actual final cause of human action, but rather signifies abstractly anything that man might choose as his final cause:

The will necessarily tends to a single ultimate end, but it does not necessarily tend to any definite good as an ultimate end. We may say that the will naturally desires happiness, but this is simply to say that man cannot but desire the attainment of that good, whatever it may be, for which he is acting as an ultimate end. The desire for happiness is simply the first principle of practical reason directing human action from within the will informed by reason. Because the specific last end is not determined for him by nature, man is able to make the basic commitment which orients his entire life.11

For Grisez there is therefore a “gap” between the first precept of law and the subsequent precepts of the natural law. Each of the subsequent precepts is in a sense a “first” precept; each of them is a self-evident ordering to some kind of good to which man is inclined. There is therefore no order between the other self-evident precepts of the natural law. They cannot be ordered by their proximity or distance from the true final end, because the first precept, at work in them, is not about the true final end. Rather, any of the goods of the other precepts, or any synthesis of them, can be taken by man as his final end. This is why proponents of the New Natural Law came to call such goods “basic goods.”12

One of the most startling consequences of the New Natural Law Theory’s denial of a hierarchy of ends is Germain Grisez’s thesis that God is not enough to satisfy the human heart. In a 2005 lecture entitled “The Restless Heart Blunder,” Grisez argued that St Augustine’s famous dictum that our hearts are restless until they rest in God was a blunder, because friendship with God is only one good among others. Therefore, he argues, the true end of human life is not God, but the Kingdom of God, which includes all human goods: “Strictly speaking, God is not the ultimate end toward which we should direct our lives. That end is God’s kingdom, which will be a wonderful communion of divine persons, human persons, and other created persons. Every member of the kingdom will be richly fulfilled in respect to all human goods, including friendship with God.”13 This opinion is so offensive to pious ears that it scarcely needs refutation. I will, however, show why it is wrong in Part II. I believe this to be the most pernicious error of the New Natural Law Theory.

The denial of the hierarchy of goods leads proponents of the New Natural Law Theory to deny the primacy of the political common good, the common good of the complete human community, over the goods of parts of the community as parts. Although their position is qualified in various ways, proponents of the New Natural Law Theory tend to see the “specifically political common good” as being “limited and in a sense instrumental.”14 The role of the state is to provide the necessary conditions for persons and smaller communities to seek their basic goods. The state, according to them, is therefore not ordered to the fullness of human virtue, but only towards such social virtues as are necessary for maintaining public order: “As the public good, the elements of the specifically political common good are not all-round virtue but goods (and virtues) which are intrinsically inter­personal, other-directed…, person to person…: justice and peace.”15

In this instrumental understanding of the political common good, proponents of the New Natural Law are closer to the political philosophers of the Enlightenment and their 19th-century liberal heirs, than they are to the Socratic tradition of political philosophy as it was developed by Plato, Aristotle, and the great thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is thus not surprising that proponents of the New Natural Law Theory tend to agree with the Enlightenment philosophers and the 19th-century liberals on the vital importance of rights such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc. 

To his credit, John Finnis points out that there was a “watershed” in the understanding of the concept of right or jus between the time of St Thomas Aquinas and that of Francisco Suárez. St Thomas had seen the primary meaning of right as being “the just thing itself,” meaning “acts, objects, and states of affairs, considered as subject-matters of relationships of justice.”16 Finnis implies that the distribution of such rights is related to the common good. To make his point more explicit: the duty that someone else has to render to you, what is your due by justice, is measured by law, which is an ordinance for the common good. Three centuries later, Finnis notes, in the work of Suárez, the primary meaning of jus comes to be a moral power that a person has over what belongs to him or is due to him.17 Finnis, however, disagrees with theorists such as Michel Villey that this watershed represents a bad development that needs to be corrected. According to Finnis, “there is no cause to take sides as between the older and the newer usages.”18 In a postscript to the second edition of Natural Law and Natural Rights, Finnis goes even further, arguing that the “watershed” between Thomas and Suárez, “must be regarded as much more a matter of appearance and idiom than of conceptual, let alone political or philosophical, substance.”19 The main reason for this is Finnis’s instrumental understanding of the common good. Since the common good is ultimately for the sake of the enabling the enjoyment of basic goods, “right” in St Thomas’s sense is ultimately for “right” in Suárez’s sense:

[W]hen we come to explain the requirements of justice, which we do by referring to the needs of the common good at its various levels, then we find that there is reason for treating the concept of duty, obligation, or requirement as having a more strategic explanatory role than the concept of rights. The concept of rights is not on that account of less importance or dignity: for the common good is precisely the good of the individuals whose benefit, from fulfilment of duty by others, is their right because required in justice of those others.20

Ultimately, therefore, Finnis can affirm the modern use of rights language as “a supple and potentially precise instrument for sorting out and expressing the demands of justice.”21 Finnis certainly disagrees with some contemporary claims about rights, such as the claim of a right to abortion or homosexual marriage,22 but he agrees with others. Particularly, he defends the right to free practice of religion. He reads Vatican II’s Declaration Dignitatis humanæ as having defended that right on the basis of an instrumental understanding of the common good.23 I would argue that his reading of Dignitatis humanæ is, in fact, incorrect, and that his error of interpretation flows from the error in his principles.24

In Making Men Moral, Robert P. George disagrees with the radical liberal claim that politics should not be concerned with morality, yet he uses the New Natural Law theory to defend the rights that had been defended by classical liberals: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.25 The list reads almost like a list of liberties condemned by the 19th-century popes.

Part II: Contrasting the New Natural Law Theory with the Old

Contrary to Grisez’s claims, St Thomas did not hold the main theses of the New Natural Law Theory. An understanding of his “old” natural law theory will, therefore, show the conclusions of the new to be erroneous.

For St Thomas the distinction between speculative and practical reason is not as rigid as for Grisez. Practical reason is distinguished from speculative reason from something that is accidental to reason as power—namely that practical reason orders what is known to action, whereas speculative reason orders it to contemplation. But, St Thomas argues, “to a thing apprehended by the intellect, it is accidental whether it be directed to operation or not.”26 In other words, to know for the practical intellect is not radically different than for the speculative intellect. 

Nevertheless, since the good is in things, the practical intellect ought to consider goods according to the existence they have in reality, rather than merely according to their abstract existence in the mind. Hence the first precept of the law, “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided” refers not to a universal name, said of many goods, but existing only abstractly in the mind; rather it refers to a good common in its causality—the final end attracting all things by its actual goodness. 

Hence, in discussing the essence of law in general St Thomas argues that law is always ordered to a good which is universal in causality. Thomas argues that law is always ordered to “the common good.” He raises an objection: “Law directs man in his actions. But human actions are concerned with particular matters. Therefore the law is directed to some particular good.”27 In response, Thomas writes: “Actions are indeed concerned with particular matters: but those particular matters are referable to the common good, not as to a common genus or species, but as to a common final cause, according as the common good is said to be the common end.”28 In other words, in any kind of law, particular actions are commanded because they are directed toward that common good which is their final cause. Therefore, in the first precept of law, “the good” refers to the most common good to which all other goods, and all actions, are directed. Insofar as it refers to other goods to be done, it is referring to those other goods as actually ordered to the highest good and last end.

But what is the last end and highest good?29 It is God Himself, the unbounded ocean of actuality, perfection, and goodness. The good is what all things desire insofar as they desire their perfection. But since every created perfection is from God as its agent, exemplar, and final cause, it is a participation in God’s perfection. To participate is to take part in something without removing a part from it. My reflection in a mirror partakes of my form, without depriving me of any part of my form. God does not have parts, but creatures share in Him in an incomplete, that is, a partial way. Therefore, creatures are ordered to their Creator the way parts are ordered to a whole. The perfection that each creature desires consists in an ever-greater likeness to the Creator. But that means that the perfection that they desire only ever exists in a secondary way in themselves. It exists fully only in God. Therefore, St Thomas teaches, creatures naturally love God more than themselves:

In natural things, everything which, as such, naturally belongs to another, is principally, and more strongly inclined to that other to which it belongs, than towards itself…. For we observe that the part naturally exposes itself in order to safeguard the whole; as, for instance, the hand is without deliberation exposed to the blow for the whole body’s safety. And since reason copies nature, we find the same inclination among the social virtues; for it behooves the virtuous citizen to expose himself to the danger of death for the public weal of the state…. Consequently, since God is the universal good, and under this good both man and angel and all creatures are comprised, because every creature in regard to its entire being naturally belongs to God, it follows that from natural love angel and man alike love God before themselves and with a greater love. Otherwise, if either of them loved self more than God, it would follow that natural love would be perverse, and that it would not be perfected but destroyed by charity.30

As all the great mystics of the Catholic tradition have known, therefore, God and God alone fully satisfies the desires of the human heart. Contrary to Grisez’s impious thesis, the one who has God and all created goods does not have more than the one who has God alone.

As James Berquist has shown, however, it does not follow that one could simply restate the first precept of the law as “God is to be pursued and what leads to Him is to be done.”31 This is because what is first naturally known to us is rather indistinct and confused. We know there is some final end of desire, but we do not yet know explicitly that it is God. Hence St Thomas writes:

To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him. This, however, is not to know absolutely [simpliciter] that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching; for many there are who imagine that man’s perfect good which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.32

A human being first apprehends the natural law when he attains the age of reason. St Thomas describes the first deliberation that takes place at the age of reason as the discernment of the true end to which man must order himself. If he fails to order himself to his end, he commits a mortal sin.33 As James Berquist has shown, the one who fails to order himself to his end does not see the good as a common good, to which he must order himself, but rather as a private good which he wishes to order to himself.34

From this primacy of God as the universal common good follows a hierarchy of all other goods, which are good because they are like God and because they in some way (either indirectly or directly) help us to approach God. The highest good of the human moral life is the common good of the complete human society, the political community. The intrinsic common good of the polity is peace, the tranquility of order that results from justice and prudent governance. This peace is a thing of beauty, in which the splendid virtues of citizens are brought into a harmonious unity, like a symphony of human life which imitates the beauty of Heaven. As Socrates puts it, “no city can be happy which is not designed by artists who imitate the heavenly pattern.”35 The extrinsic common good of the city is happiness. As Aristotle teaches, a city is founded for living well, that is acting according to moral virtue.36 Human happiness is found in doing the human activity (ergon) virtuously. And this is ordered to God both by making human beings more like God, and by preparing them for the contemplation of God. This virtuous activity is a truly common good when it is shared in political friendship.37 All other human goods are directed to this common good. This does not mean that the political community can simply destroy lesser human goods; on the contrary, the lesser goods are necessary for the primary good, which depends upon them.38

Given the primacy of the common good, Finnis is wrong to see the watershed between the older understanding of “right” as found in St Thomas and the modern theory of “rights” as a matter of appearance rather than substance.39 On the contrary, on the older understanding, since the common good is understood as true human happiness, rights are distributed with a view to that true happiness, to the fostering of the virtuous activity in which it consists. But on the newer understanding, the common good is degraded to an instrument for serving rights understood as something merely personal. As the Laval School Thomist Henri Grenier put it:

If objective right is understood as right in the strict sense, it follows that subjective right, i.e., right as a power, is measured by the just thing, according to conformity to law. Moreover, since law is an ordinance for the common good, it follows that the whole juridical order is directed to the common good. But, if subjective right is understood as right in the primary, strict, and formal meaning of the term, it follows that the juridical order consists in a certain autonomy, independence, and liberty. For subjective right is not measured by the just thing, but the just thing is measured by the inviolable faculty, which is a certain liberty. Therefore, according to moderns, the juridical order is directed to liberty rather than to the common good. This gives rise to errors among moderns, who speak of liberty of speech, liberty of worship, economic liberty,— economic liberalism,— without any consideration of their relation to the common good.40

As Charles De Koninck argues, this reversal has “execrable practical consequences.”41 For, when each orders the common good to his own private good, every member of society is a little tyrant.42

The papal condemnations of the demands of 19th-century liberals for freedom of speech, worship, etc. can be understood in this light. The popes recognized that the freedom being demanded was a tyrannical freedom, contrary to the fostering of true virtue and the common good. Thus, Pope Leo XIII in examining liberal demands for religious liberty teaches that such a liberty, understood as “the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none” is contrary to the virtue of religion, whereby we render to God what is His due. He then goes on to discuss the relation of this supposed right to the common good of the state. It is worth quoting him at length:

This kind of liberty, if considered in relation to the State, clearly implies that there is no reason why the State should offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recognition of Him; that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if they profess the Catholic faith. But, to justify this, it must needs be taken as true that the State has no duties toward God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity, both of which assertions are manifestly false. For it cannot be doubted but that, by the will of God, men are united in civil society; whether its component parts be considered; or its form, which implies authority; or the object of its existence; or the abundance of the vast services which it renders to man. God it is who has made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature, and beyond his attainment if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engravers upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must preserve and protect, if they would provide— as they should do— with prudence and usefulness for the good of the community. For public authority exists for the welfare of those whom it governs; and, although its proximate end is to lead men to the prosperity found in this life, yet, in so doing, it ought not to diminish, but rather to increase, man’s capability of attaining to the supreme good in which his everlasting happiness consists: which never can be attained if religion be disregarded.43

This argument is based on the contrast that Pope Leo XIII sets up between true liberty, ordered to the true good, and false (liberal) liberty, which is ordered indifferently to whatever human beings take to be their end. Thus, liberty of speech, of publishing, etc. are condemned in similar terms. True liberty is essentially ordered to God, who is the last end and first principle of all human moral acts. As Leo XIII teaches in the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, the true understanding of human morality is thoroughly theocentric:

The idea of morality signifies, above all, an order of dependence in regard to truth which is the light of the mind; in regard to good which is the object of the will; and without truth and good there is no morality worthy of the name. And what is the principal and essential truth, that from which all truth is derived? It is God. What, therefore, is the supreme good from which all other good proceeds? God. Finally, who is the creator and guardian of our reason, our will, our whole being, as well as the end of our life? God; always God.44

The errors of the New Natural Law Theory remove God from the center of human moral, juridical, and political life. The acceptance of those errors therefore leads to a hollowing out of morality, and a secularization of jurisprudence and politics. Ultimately, it represents a capitulation to the modern enemies of the Church, who have set up a secular anti-culture in the place of the noble customs of Christendom. It is therefore imperative that those errors be resisted.

  1. For an overview see: Patrick Lee, “The New Natural Law Theory,” in Tom Angier (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 73-91. ↩︎
  2. See: Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 5. ↩︎
  3. See, for example: Anver M. Emon, Matthew Levering, and David Novak, Natural Law: A Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Trialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), which shows how the movement has been influential on certain Jewish and Muslim thinkers. ↩︎
  4. See, for example: Gregory XVI, Mirari vos (1832); Pius IX, Quanta cura (1864); Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimum (1888). My own view is that the teaching of Vatican II is in continuity with that of the popes of the “Pian” age. See: “Religious Liberty in the Light of Tradition,” in: Waldstein (ed.), Integralism and the Common Good: Collected Essays from The Josias, vol. 2, The Two Powers (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2022). ↩︎
  5. See: Aristotle, Metaphysics, VI.4 1027b; St Thomas Aquinas, In Metaph. VI, lect. 4, 1240. ↩︎
  6. See: James Berquist, “Uncommon Confusion: The New Natural Law Theory’s Confusion of Predication and Causality Destroys the Natural Order,” The Josias, February 13th, 2023. I am very much indebted to Berquist’s insights for my reading of the NNL. ↩︎
  7. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIae, q.94, a.2, c; translation Laurence Shapcote, op, edited and revised by The Aquinas Institute, available online at aquinas.cc. ↩︎
  8. Germain Grisez, “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa theologiae, 1-2, Question 94, Article 2,” in Natural Law Forum 10 (1965), 168-201, at 193-194. ↩︎
  9. Ibid., 182. ↩︎
  10. Ibid., 199. ↩︎
  11. ↩︎
  12. Patrick Lee, “The New Natural Law Theory,” 73; cf. Steven A. Long, “Fundamental Errors of the New Natural Law Theory” in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (2013) 105-131. ↩︎
  13. Germain Grisez, “The Restless Heart Blunder,” 2005 Aquinas Lecture, Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. ↩︎
  14. John Finnis, “Public Good: The Specifically Political Common Good in Aquinas,” in Robert P. George (ed.), Natural Law and Moral Inquiry: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Politics in the Thought of Germain Grisez (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 174–209, at 187. ↩︎
  15. Ibid., 179. ↩︎
  16. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 206. ↩︎
  17. Ibid., 207. ↩︎
  18. Ibid., 210. ↩︎
  19. Ibid., 465. ↩︎
  20. ↩︎
  21. Ibid., 210. ↩︎
  22. See: John Finnis, “Is Natural Law Theory Compatible with Limited Government?” in Robert P. George (ed.), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality: Contemporary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1-26. ↩︎
  23. Ibid., 6-7. ↩︎
  24. Cf. the exchange between Thomas Pink and Finnis on the interpretation of Dignitatis humanæ in: John Keown and Robert P. George (eds), Reason, Morality, and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩︎
  25. Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ch. 7. ↩︎
  26. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, Ia, q. 79, a. 11, cf. Long, “Fundamental Errors of the New Natural Law Theory,” 107-108. ↩︎
  27. Ibid., Ia-IIae, q. 90, a.2, arg. 2. ↩︎
  28. Ibid., Ia-IIae, q. 90, a.2, ad 2. ↩︎
  29. The following paragraph is based, in part, on my paper: “Common Good Eudemonism,” Divinitas 62.1 (2019), 425-439. ↩︎
  30. ↩︎
  31. Berquist, “Uncommon Confusion.” ↩︎
  32. ↩︎
  33. Ibid., Ia-IIae, q. 89, a. 6. ↩︎
  34. Berquist, “Uncommon Confusion.” ↩︎
  35. Plato, Republic, 500. ↩︎
  36. Aristotle, Politics, I.2 1252b 27. ↩︎
  37. See: Jacques de Monléon, Personne et Société (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) 142-145; Gregory Froelich, “Friendship and the Common Good,” The Aquinas Review 12 (2005) 37-58. ↩︎
  38. See: Charles De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists, in: The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, ed. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). ↩︎
  39. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 465; cf. Part I of the present essay. ↩︎
  40. ↩︎
  41. De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, 108. ↩︎
  42. Ibid., 80. ↩︎
  43. ↩︎
  44. ↩︎
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Some Answers from the Integralists

Matthew B. Crawford has posted some questions for integralists at his Substack Newsletter. His main question seems to be this: Are integralists content with the bureaucratic form of government that has developed in modern states? Or do they want to abolish the modern state? If the former, Crawford is worried that such a form of governance cannot actually help people to become virtuous:

Would this not reproduce the vacant pseudo-citizenship we are permitted under the nudgers’ system of social cybernetics, which treats the human being as inert material to be molded by a new class of Conditioners? However much it is to be guided by Christian ends, the worry is that under this kind of politics, our thumotic capacity for overcoming obstacles, working in concert with our erotic attraction to some ideal, is left moribund and atrophying, just as it is under technocratic progressivism.

It seems to me that Crawford is confusing two questions better kept distinct. The first question is what the relation of spiritual and temporal power ought to be, given the superiority of the former. This is what integralism is about. The second question is about the size and organization of modern political life, and whether that needs to be fundamentally changed to help people develop the virtues. This is a separate, though certainly very important, question.

I would like to elucidate the distinction between the two questions by a comparison of political society to domestic society (the family or household). A domestic society ought, if possible, to be a Catholic household. This means that it sees the duties of religion, the duties of honoring and thanking God, as binding not only its individual members as individuals, but also the whole family as a society. The family ought to give corporate thanks to God. It ought also to recognize and obey the Apostolic Authority of the Church. If, for example, the bishop orders his subjects to fast on a certain day, the family ought to recognize the command of a superior authority and obey it. Obviously, there can be adverse circumstances that render such a Catholic family life impossible. If one of the spouses apostatizes, then the other can worship God as an individual, but not as part of Catholic domestic society. The domestic society in that case is religiously pluralistic, not Catholic, which is an objectively undesirable state of affairs. Such a state of affairs is analogous to that which obtains in political societies which are majority non-Christian, and (since the Reformation) in many nominally Christian ones as well.

The basic truth taught by integralism is that it is better (if possible) for a political society to be a Catholic polity, just as it is better (if possible) for a domestic society to be a Catholic family. Being a Catholic society is what we ought to desire and strive for. Not being a Catholic society is regrettably unavoidable in some circumstances, but one ought to hope for this to be changed by everyone finding their way to the fullness of Catholic truth. Just as the Catholic wife of a non-Catholic husband hopes that her husband will become Catholic, so the Catholic members of a religiously disunified political society hope that their fellow subjects will become Catholics.

Now, obviously, a domestic society can order its common life in many secondary ways that are very important for how effectively it can live a Catholic life. There is, for example, the question of whether the household lives by subsistence farming, or by cash-crops, or by cottage industry, or by the parents working outside the home in the modern capitalist economy. Or the question of whether the children are homeschooled or sent to public or private school, etc. All of these questions are very important to the life of the family, and how they are decided will certainly affect the ability of the family to raise virtuous children. But these questions cannot be collapsed into the question of whether the domestic society is Catholic. The Catholic Church acknowledges that there can be many different ways of ordering a family’s life with respect to the production of goods, the education of the children, etc. Some of these ways might be so undesirable that they should be avoided whenever possible. But in many cases families will be constrained by circumstances. 

It is similar in a political society. There are many ways in which a political society can be organized—from an ancient city, to an ancient empire, to a medieval kingdom, to a medieval Italian city republic, to a modern nation-state, etc. All of these forms of organization have their advantages and disadvantages. How a political society organizes itself will certainly affect the extent to which it can foster virtue in its members. Such organization is a very important matter for the common good, and The Josias has long been interested in such questions. But those questions are not the same as the question of integralism. The Catholic Church recognizes that different forms of organization are possible, and can be legitimate, as long as they are ordered to the common good. We can certainly argue over which form of rule is best for human beings, and which forms are relatively undesirable, but we shouldn’t confuse that question with the question of whether it is desirable for political societies to be Catholic.

But perhaps Crawford would respond that the modern “state” is not a political society in the relevant sense at all. Some have argued (Alasdair MacIntyre springs to mind), that “political society” cannot be univocally said of premodern societies, devoted to the cultivation of virtue, and modern bureaucratic ones in which virtue has supposedly been replaced by social-scientific management. If such arguments are right, then it is an error to consider the modern state as a κοινωνία τέλειος or societas perfecta—a stable union of a plurality of persons in pursuit of the complete common good of human life, arising necessarily from the teleology of human nature. On their view, the modern state would not be like a modern family, founded on the natural union of the sexes, but rather it would be like a pseudo-family founded on homosexual perversion or some other vice contrary to nature. On their view, none of the properties of a true political society could be found in the modern state, any more than the properties of the family are found in an unnatural sexual union. On their view therefore, our aim should not be to improve the modern state, to make it more Catholic and more conducive to virtue, but rather to abolish it. Just as the proper approach to a homosexual relation is not to try to improve it, but rather to dissolve it.

While I acknowledge the strength of the objection just sketched, I think that the conclusion goes too far. It seems to me that it is truer to think of modern states as sick, disordered political communities, that nevertheless do arise from the teleology of man’s political nature, than as complete perversions of that teleology. I think, therefore, that our aim should indeed be to heal, correct, and transform modern states. There are two reasons that lead me to this conclusion. The first is from experience. Anyone who knows good public servants and good politicians knows that their political nature is deeply engaged in their activity, in which they try to serve the societies in which they live. I think, for example, of a young Ukrainian, the nephew of a friend of mine, who cheerfully lost his eyes in defending his country against foreign invasion. He was convinced that the state that he defended, for all its faults, was worth defending, a society that to some degree seeks the common good of its members. Or I think of an Austrian provincial judge of my acquaintance, a just and prudent man, who excels in trying to find just solutions to disputes within the legal framework of the Austrian state. Or I think of two pro-life MPs of my acquaintance, one a Slovak, one an Austrian, both of whom are deeply engaged in the patient labor of correcting unjust laws and better securing the protection of the vulnerable, within the possibilities that the circumstances of their societies allow. Their effectiveness is partly derived from the evident love that they both have for the states that they serve. If they dismissed those states a priori as illegitimate bands of robbers, they would not be able to work within them. This then is the first reason why I think it is truer to say that modern states are faulty political societies, than not political societies at all: the experience of those involved in serving those states in virtuous ways.

The second reason is from the teaching authority of the Church. Modern Catholic Social Teaching has never proceeded from the premise that modern states are simply anti-societies, to which none of the traditional teaching on political authority applies. Rather, those who hold the teaching office in the Church have consistently seen modern states as natural law institutions, flowing from man’s political nature, capable therefore of issuing binding laws and commands. The focus, therefore, has always been on correcting such states, not on destroying them. Pope Leo XIII, for example, in the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, argues that civil power of various kinds derives its authority from God, and that acceptance of an actually-constituted civil authority—even that of the Third French Republic, so offensive to French Catholics devoted to the ancien régime—is obligatory for Catholics. The efforts of French Catholics should not be to abolish the established civil power, but rather to transform it from within, making its legislation more just and equitable, and bringing it into greater harmony with the authority of the Church.

And here integralism is indeed relevant to the question of the transformation of the modern state. For the most foundational disease afflicting modern states is their refusal to give God His due, by rendering Him corporate thanks, and recognizing the authority of His Church. In this they resemble the pagan empires, which, as St Augustine argues, were not true res publicae, the common goods of peoples joined together by a common sense for what is right (jus), since they did not render God His due (jus), but rather rendered the worship due to Him to false idols. While Augustine perhaps goes to far in claiming that the pagan empires were not res publicae at all, he is certainly right that they were deeply defective societies. And modern “secular” states are caught in a similar trap. Their supposed “neutrality” is really a refusal to give God His due, which inevitably results in false idols being given His place, such as the liberal idols of freedom and equality. Integralism would therefore heal the foundational disease of the sick political societies of our time. The healing ought not to end there, however. Everything else that is wrong with them, that impedes them from fostering true virtue, ought to be healed as well.

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‘Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit’ and ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’: Science and Creation

William E. Carroll 

Is there a fundamental incompatibility between the first principle of the natural sciences that it is not possible to get something from nothing and a primary religious belief that God creates all that is “out of nothing”? Claims that we must choose between the two suffer from a misunderstanding of both. Thomas Aquinas provides a solution to the apparent contradiction between the two.

Continue reading “‘Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit’ and ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’: Science and Creation”
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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 given at the Working-group on Conservatism in Europe (WoCE) Hosted by The European Conservative, Vienna, Austria, September 6th, 2023. 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: HHG, “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.

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Changes to Our Editorial Staff

At the end of this week, our editor Urban Hannon will enter the seminary of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, with a view to eventual ordination to the sacred priesthood. While this is great news in itself, it brings with it the sad consequence that we must lose him from our editorial staff.

Our current senior editor, Fr. Jon Tveit, will take the reins as editor.

We thank Mr. Hannon for his work at The Josias this year. Please join us in praying for him, for his seminary preparation, and for his ordination one day to the priesthood of our Lord, if it be His holy will.

Prayer for the Priests and Seminarians of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, and for vocations to the same.

V. Remember, O Lord, Thy congregation.
R. Which Thou hast possessed from the beginning.

Let us pray.
O Lord Jesus, born to give testimony to the Truth, Thou who lovest unto the end those whom Thou hast chosen, kindly hear our prayers for our pastors. Thou who knowest all things, knowest that they love Thee and can do all things in Thee who strengthenest them.
Sanctify them in Truth. Pour into them, we beseech Thee, the Spirit whom Thou didst give to Thy apostles, who would make them, in all things, like unto Thee. Receive the homage of love which they offer up to Thee, who hast graciously received the threefold confession of Peter.

And so that a pure oblation may everywhere be offered without ceasing unto the Most Holy Trinity, graciously enrich their number and keep them in Thy love, who art one with the Father and the Holy Ghost, to whom be glory and honour forever. Amen.