The Corruption of the Papal Court and the Roots of Modern Liberalism

by Ludwig von Pastor


Ludwig von Pastor’s History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages is a great gem of recent Catholic scholarship.  Spanning forty volumes and five centuries, Pastor’s history traces the Papacy from the Babylonian Captivity at Avignon, through the Conciliarist crises of the mid 15th century, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and beyond, up to the outbreak of the French Revolution.  For his work, Pastor was given free use of the Vatican Secret Archives, and was commended by both Leo XIII and Pius XI.

The excerpt below is taken from the first volume of the series, which discusses the Avignon Popes and the Great Schism.  Our readers will find it interesting for the light it throws on the relationship between the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, the corruption of the Papal Court at Avignon, and the emergence of a school of political and religious thought identical in essence to the liberalism which still plagues the Church today.


Financial Difficulties at Avignon

The financial difficulties from which the Popes had suffered in the thirteenth century became much more serious after they had taken up their abode on French soil. On the one hand, the income they had drawn from Italy failed; and on the other, the tributary powers became much more irregular in the fulfillment of their obligations, because they feared that the greater part of the subsidies they paid would fall into the hands of France.

The Papal financiers adopted most questionable means of covering deficits. From the time of John XXII. especially, the hurtful system of Annates, Reservations, and Expectancies, came into play, and a multitude of abuses were its consequence. Alvaro Pelayo, the most devoted, perhaps even over-zealous, defender of the Papal power in the fourteenth century, justly considers the employment of this system, liable to excite the cupidity of the clergy, as one of the wounds which then afflicted the Church. His testimony is all the more worthy of consideration, because, as an official of many years’ standing in the Court, he describes the state of things at Avignon from his own most intimate knowledge. In his celebrated book, On the Lamentation of the Church, he says : “Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the Papal Court, I found brokers and clergy, engaged in weighing and reckoning the money which lay in heaps before them.”

This system of taxation and its consequent abuses soon aroused passionate resentment. Dante, “consumed with zeal for the House of God,” expressed, in burning words, his deep indignation against the cupidity and nepotism of the Popes, always, however, carefully distinguishing between Pope and Papacy, person and office.

Conflict between the Empire and the Church

It was not long, however, before an opposition arose which made no such distinctions, and attacked not only the abuses which had crept in, but the Ecclesiastical authority Itself. The Avignon system of finance, which contributed more than has been generally supposed to the undermining of the Papal authority, greatly facilitated the attacks of this party.

From what has been said it will be clearly seen that the long-continued sojourn of the Popes in France, occasioned as it was by the confusion of Italian affairs, was an important turning-point in the history of the Papacy and of the Church. The course of development which had been going on for many centuries, was thereby almost abruptly interrupted, and a completely new state of things substituted for it. No one who has any idea of the nature and the necessity of historical continuity, can fail to perceive the danger of this transference of the centre of ecclesiastical unity to southern France. The Papal power and the general interests of the Church, which at that time required quiet progress and in many ways thorough reform, must inevitably in the long run be severely shaken.

To make matters worse, the conflict between the Empire and the Church now broke out with unexpected violence. The most prominent antagonists of the Papacy, both ecclesiastical and political, gathered around Louis of Bavaria, offering him their assistance against John XXII. At the head of the ecclesiastical opposition appeared the popular and influential order of the Friars Minor [the Franciscans], who at this very moment were at daggers drawn with the Pope.

The Friars Minor and John XXII.

The special occasion of this quarrel was a difference between them and him, regarding the meaning of evangelical poverty; and the great popularity of the Order made their hostility all the more formidable. The Minorites, who were irritated to the utmost against the Pope, succeeded in gaining great influence over Louis of Bavaria, an influence which is clearly traceable in the appeal published by him in 1324, at Sachenhausen, near Frankfort.

In this remarkable document, amongst the many serious charges brought against “John XXII., who calls himself Pope,” is that of heresy, and it is asserted that he exalts himself against the evangelical doctrines of perfect poverty, and thus against Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the company of the Apostles, who all approved it by their lives. After a passionate dogmatic exposition of the poverty of Christ and a shower of reproaches, comes the appeal to the Council, to a future legitimate Pope, to Holy Mother Church, to the Apostolic See, and to everyone in general to whom an appeal could be made.

This document, in which political and religious questions were mingled together, was sedulously disseminated in Germany and Italy. It must have greatly embittered the whole contest. A religious conflict was now added to the political one. Louis, a simple soldier, was unable to measure its consequences and powerless to control its progress. It grew more and more passionate and violent. The Minorites no longer confined themselves to the province of theology, in which the conflict between them and the Pope had at first arisen, but also took part in the political question. Led on by their theological antagonism, they proceeded to build up a political system resting on theories which threatened to disturb all existing ideas of law, and to shake the position of the Papacy to its verv foundations.

Subversive Doctrines of Occam, Marsiglio, and Jean de Jandun

The special importance of the action of the Minorites consists in the assertion and maintenance of these principles, which indeed did not at once come prominently forward, for the writings of the Englishman, William Occam, in which they are chiefly propounded, collectively date from a period subsequent to the Diet of Rhense. There can, however, be no doubt that the views which Occam afterwards expressed in his principal work, the Dialogus, had already at an earlier period exercised great influence.

According to the theory of Occam, who was deeply imbued with the political ideas of the ancients, the Emperor has a right to depose the Pope should he fall into heresy. Both General Councils and Popes may err, Holy Scripture and the beliefs held by the Church at all times and in all places, can alone be taken as the unalterable rule of Faith and Morals. The Primacy and Hierarchical Institutions in general are not necessary or essential to the subsistence of the Church; and the forms of the ecclesiastical, as of the political, constitution ought to vary with the varying needs of the time.

With the Minorites two other men soon came to the front, who may be considered as the spokesmen of the definite political opposition to the Papacy. It was probably in the summer of the year 1326 that the Professors of the University of Paris, Marsiglio of Padua and Jean de Jandun, made their appearance at the Royal Court of Nuremberg. The “Defender of Peace” (Defensor Pacis), the celebrated joint work of these two most important literary antagonists of the Popes of their day, is of so remarkable a character that we must not omit to give a further account of its subversive propositions. This work, which is full of violent invectives against John XXII., “the great dragon and the old serpent,” asserts the unconditional sovereignty of the people. The legislative power which is exercised through their elected representatives, belongs to them, also the appointment of the executive through their delegates. The ruler is merely the instrument of the legislature. He is subject to the law, from which no individual is exempt. If the ruler exceeds his authority, the people are justified in depriving him of his power, and deposing him. The jurisdiction of the civil power extends even to the determination of the number of men to be employed in every trade or profession. Individual liberty has no more place in Marsiglio’s state than it had in Sparta.

Still more radical, if possible, are the views regarding the doctrine and government of the Church put forth in this work. The sole foundation of faith and of the Church is Holy Scripture, which does not derive its authority from, her, but, on the contrary, confers on her that which she possesses. The only true interpretation of Scripture is not that of the Church, but that of the most intelligent people, so that the University of Paris may very well be superior to the Court of Rome. Questions concerning faith are to be decided, not by the Pope, but by a General Council.

This General Council is supreme over the whole Church, and is to be summoned by the State. It is to be composed not only of the clergy, but also of laymen elected by the people. As regards their office, all priests are equal; according to Divine right, no one of them is higher than another. The whole question of Church government is one of expediency, not of the faith necessary to salvation. The Primacy of the Pope is not founded on Scripture, nor on Divine right. His authority therefore can only, according to Marsiglio, be derived from a General Council and from the legislature of the State; and for the election of a Pope the authority of the Council requires confirmation from the State.

The office of the Pope is, with the College appointed for him by the Council or by the State, to signify to the State authority the necessity of summoning a Council, to preside at the Council, to draw up its decisions, to impart them to the different Churches, and to provide for their execution. The Pope represents the executive power, while the legislative power in its widest extent appertains to the Council. But a far higher and more influential position belongs to the Emperor in Marsiglio’s Church; the convocation and direction of the Council is his affair; he can punish priests and bishops, and even the Pope.

Ecclesiastics are subject to the temporal tribunals for transgressions of the law, the Pope himself is not exempt from penal justice, far less can he be permitted to judge his ecclesiastics, for this is the concern of the State. The property of the Church enjoys no immunity from taxation; the number of ecclesiastics in a country is to be limited by the pleasure of the State; the patronage of all benefices belongs to the State, and may be exercised either by Princes, or by the majority of the members of the parish to which an ecclesiastic is to be appointed. The parish has not only the right of election and appointment, but also the control of the official duties of the priest, and the ultimate power of dismissal. Exclusion from the Christian community, in so far as temporal and worldly interests are connected with it, requires its consent.

Like Calvin in later days, Marsiglio regards all the judicial and legislative power of the Church as inherent in the people, and delegated by them to the clergy. The community and the State are everything; the Church is put completely in the back-ground ; she has no legislature, no judicial power, and no property.

The goods of the Church belong to the individuals who have devoted them to ecclesiastical uses, and then to the State. The State is to decide regarding sale and purchase, and to consider whether these goods are sufficient to provide for the needs of the clergy and of the poor. The State has also power, should it be necessary for the public good, to deprive the Church of her superfluities and limit her to what is necessary, and the State has the right to effect this secularization, notwithstanding the opposition of the Priests.

But never, Marsiglio teaches, is power over temporal goods to be conceded to the Roman Bishop, because experience has shown that he uses it in a manner dangerous to the public peace Like Valla and Macchiavelli, in later times, Marsiglio assumes the air of an Italian patriot, when he attributes all the troubles of Italy to the Popes. This is a palpable sophistry, for that reproach was in no way applicable to Marsiglio’s days. Italy was then under the sway of her most distinguished monarch, King Robert of Anjou, whom the Popes had protected to the best of their power, and Louis of Bavaria’s expedition to Rome was certainly neither their wish nor their work. On the contrary, at a later period, Pope John XXII. issued a Bull with the object of separating Italy from Germany, and thereby destroying the influence of the ” Ultramontanes,” or non-Italians in Italy.

In face of these outrageous attacks and this blank denial of the Divine institution of the Primacy and the Hierarchy, there were never wanting brave champions of the Apostolic See and of the doctrine of the Church. Most of them, unfortunately, were led by excess of zeal to formulate absurd and preposterous propositions. Agostino Trionfo, an Italian, and Alvaro Pelayo, a Spaniard, have, in this matter, gained a melancholy renown. As one extreme leads to another, in their opposition to the Caesaro-papacy of Marsiglio, they exalted the Pope into a kind of demigod, with absolute authority over the whole world. Evidently, exaggerations of this kind were not calculated to counteract the attacks of political skepticism in regard to the authority of the Holy See.

Envenomed Struggle between Church and State

The theory put forward in the Defensor Pacis, regarding the omnipotence of the State and the consequent annihilation of all individual and ecclesiastical liberty, far surpassed all preceding attacks on the position and constitution of the Church in audacity, novelty, and acrimony. Practically this doctrine, which was copied from the ancients, meant the overthrow of all existing institutions and the separation of Church and State. Many passages of the work go far beyond the subsequent utterances of Wyclif and Huss, or even those of Luther and Calvin, whose forerunner Marsiglio may be considered. The great French Revolution was a partial realization of his schemes, and, in these days, a powerful party is working for the accomplishment of the rest. Huss has been styled “the Precursor” of the Revolution, but the author of the Defensor Pacis might yet more justly claim the title.

Louis of Bavaria accepted the dedication of the book which brought these doctrines before the world and promulgated political principles of so questionable a character, but a still greater triumph was in store for Marsiglio. In union with the anti-papal Minorites and the Italian Ghibellines, he succeeded in inducing Louis to go to Rome and to engage in the Revolutionary proceedings of the year 1328. The collation of the Imperial Crown by the Roman people, their deposition of the Pope and election of an anti-Pope in the person of the Minorite, Pietro da Corvara, were the practical results of the teaching of the Defensor Pacis.

Some of the Emperors of the House of Hohenstaufen had been men of stronger characters than Louis was, yet none had ever gone to such extremes. He appealed to doctrines whose application to ecclesiastical matters was equivalent to revolution, and whose re-action on the sphere of politics after their triumph over the Church would have been rapid and incalculable. For a century and a half the Church had been free from schism; by his action he let loose this terrible evil upon her. His culpable rashness gave a revolutionary and democratic turn to the struggle between the Empire and the Papacy. He repudiated all the canonical decisions regarding the Supremacy of the Pope which the Emperors of the House of Hapsburg had accepted, degraded the Empire to a mere Investiture from the Capitol, and despoiled the Crown of Charles the Great, in the eyes of all who believed in the ancient imperial hierarchy, of the last ray of its majesty. It is strange that under Louis the Roman Empire should actually have been thus desecrated and degraded, so soon after Dante’s idealization had crowned it with a halo of glory.

It is impossible in the present retrospect to describe all the vicissitudes of Church and State during the struggle which was so disastrous to both. Envenomed by the dependence of the Popes on France, the exasperation on both sides was intense. The ecclesiastical power was implacable, lost to all sense of moderation, dignity, or charity. The secular power, cowardly but defiant, shrank from no extreme, sought the aid of the lowest demagogues, and by its vacillations frustrated each favourable chance that arose. The long and obstinate warfare, so little honourable to either party, could have no result save the equal humiliation of both and the complete ruin of social order in Church and State. John XXII., restless and active to the last, died at a great age on the 4th December, 1334.

War in the Hobbesian State – Sovereignty’s Justification and Limit

by Jeffrey Bond


If we wish to investigate the heart of Thomas Hobbes’ political teaching in the Leviathan, there is no better place to look than Hobbes’ conception of war.  After all, although Hobbes denies that there is any summum bonum, a greatest good toward which all our pursuits and actions are hierarchically ordered by nature (p. 70),[1] he does posit a greatest evil, namely, the war of all against all which characterizes the state of nature (p. 231).[2]  Thus Hobbes justifies the need for an absolute sovereign because the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life in the state of nature is the one thing above all else to be avoided:  “And though of so unlimited a Power, men may fancy many evill consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbor, are much worse” (pp. 144-145).  For Hobbes, the peace established by the political art is not, as it was for the ancients and the medievals, the end toward which men are directed by nature which is necessary for the fulfillment and perfection of their being; rather, peace is to be sought because it is the absence of war,[3] which absence allows men to pursue their relentless quest for gratification of one desire after another (p. 70).

Continue reading “War in the Hobbesian State – Sovereignty’s Justification and Limit”

On the Utility and Necessity of Prohibiting Harmful Books

St. Alphonsus Liguori


To protect the faithful from pernicious ideas, Pope Paul IV established the Index of Prohibited Books, which remained in use as a safeguard for the protection of public morals from 1559 A.D. until the reorganization of the Holy Office under Bl. Pope Paul VI in 1966 A.D. The Index came under attack during the time of St. Alphonsus Liguori, and he chose to include a treatise defending it in an Appendix to the first book of his great Theologia Moralis. St. Alphonsus was named a Doctor of the Church by Bl. Pope Pius IX in 1871 A.D. 

Alphonsus’s magisterial moral manual, which was praised by Pope Benedict XIV as being “of great profit for the salvation of souls”, has never yet been translated into English. Here we are pleased to present a translation of one chapter of Alphonsus’s Treatise on the Just Prohibition and Destruction of Dangerous Books, for the first time in English. The original text can be found here. —The Editors


 

Continue reading “On the Utility and Necessity of Prohibiting Harmful Books”

The Lake Garda Statement: On the Ecclesial and Civilizational Crisis

The 23rd Summer Symposium of The Roman Forum in Gardone, Italy, issued the following statement. We are pleased to publish it here on The Josias, as we share both its analysis of the current crisis, and its conviction that the our response must lie in an integral proclamation of the Catholic Faith, and a vigorous promotion of the Social Kingship of Christ.


Preamble

Among the Catholic faithful the conviction grows that the ongoing crisis in the Church and the drastic moral decline of our civilization have entered a critical new phase which represents a turning point in the history of the world. Continue reading “The Lake Garda Statement: On the Ecclesial and Civilizational Crisis”

Logos and Leviathan: Leonine Perspectives on Democracy

Must the political order be derived from a cosmic model (or, at any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or are there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity, through the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least a myth, powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these questions is no, we must ask then: Can a community exist without the sacred component, by the mere power of rational decisions and intellectual discourse?

            –Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred

INTRODUCTION

In the ancient world, legitimate political forms ranged across a wide spectrum in which “rule of the people” was only one of many political forms conducive to the common good—and a very unfavorable one at that. But today, “democracy has become almost a synonym for legitimate government, for the rule of law.”[1] Pundits declaim that democracy ensures freedom and fair government, while a new colonialism seeks to spread “democratic values” to every corner of the world. If we are clued in to the reductive tendencies of modern thought, we should be wary of such absolute claims. In fact, with a little digging, we discover that the democratic ideology of modernity is built upon a novel philosophy and cosmology. Early moderns like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau sought to replace the worldview of Christian religion with their own, and in the process created new philosophies and myths that still legitimize modern political forms. A democracy bedizened with the false hopes of Enlightenment scripture becomes a Leviathan irreconcilable with church teachings; if it is disengaged from this unfruitful union, however, and defended under the aegis of Catholic Logos theology, it may be the political form most well adapted for securing the common good of modern nations.

We will first explain the nature of government according to the classical and Catholic understanding. Then, we will trace the discarding of this image in the early modern period. Finally, we will suggest how democracy might be disengaged from its current anti-Logos framework and put to good use in a Catholic political order.

I. THE DISCARDED IMAGE: A Logos-Oriented Politics

A. The Classical Cosmos

Edmund Waldstein succinctly explains the classical understanding of law, that discarded image of the cosmos upon which the Catholic Church has largely built its social teaching. Classical Greek thought, as found in Plato and Aristotle, presupposes that there is an “objective good that is knowable by human reason.”[2] Today the term “objective good” seems to denote a rather vague notion of reason, but it was rather more colorful for the Greeks. In broad terms, it meant nothing less than the total harmonious order of the universe. They saw the “cosmos” as a marvelous hierarchy of things each tending towards the perfection of a unique principle called nature. Nature is the essence of a thing, its ordering principle, the plan or purpose of its birth, unfolding, and consummation. Nature uses its powers to perfect itself in fruitful interaction with other natures. A horse, for example, is born from its mother, grows to maturity by eating grass, propagates its species, and dies: it has fulfilled its nature in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

Man too has a nature struggling to work itself out, and it is a rational nature. Man’s unique identity consists in his ability to know his own objective good and also comprehend something of the order of the cosmos. But there is a problem:

The problem is that there are different powers in the human soul; there are the senses (touch, taste and so one) and then there is reason. The senses know a limited kind of goodness, and from this kind of knowledge come certain passions such as hunger and thirst and lust. Only reason knows the complete good, wherein happiness really lies, and understands it as good.[3]

In other words, there are competing powers within man, and it is reason’s job to order those powers to man’s true good: man must be educated. Reason must “train the human soul…to help produce a harmony among its different parts….This harmony is called virtue.”[4]

But Greek virtue was not “moral” in the Kantian sense, a self-actualizing quest for self-mastery. Rather, it presupposed a real participation in the order of the cosmos, an order that not only gives man a static model from which to work out his own perfection. Plato’s world of forms did serve that exemplary function, but in a much more religious sense, the forms were the real source of perfective power. There was a “givenness” about Greek virtue, a sense of being drawn up into a mysterious cosmic dance. As Waldstein explains:

The order of the whole universe is what Charles De Koninck calls “the good of the universe” and “God’s manifestation outside Himself.” Man as the micro-cosmos can reflect this order in his own person through virtue. This is why virtue can be identified with happiness—because virtue is a participation in that order which is the greatest image of the divine beauty and goodness.[5]

Seen in this light, communion among men is a crucial part of this great order. Since personal virtue is not really individual, but a participation in a cosmic pageant, a virtuous community shows an even greater participation in the cosmic order. This is how Aristotle argues the point:

Even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states.[6]

St. Thomas Aquinas took up the insights of Plato and Aristotle, and fashioned a Christian notion of the common good. He argued that:

order is what God principally intends in creation: every individual creature reflects some aspect of God’s glory, but it is the order, the harmony, the beauty of their unity, that most perfectly reflects the creator.[7]

Something in the sum total of perfected beings is also god-like. Waldstein continues:

It is good for man to realize the order of the universe in his own soul but it is more godlike for him to realize it in the state…the community of men reflects God more than an individual man, just as the universe reflects Him more perfectly than any one creature.[8]

We are finally ready to discuss the role of law. Since the goal of community is to manifest the divine order, law has the principal function of “producing this unity of order, both in the individual soul, and more especially in the community.”[9] In other words, all law aims at the perfection of man’s nature within the context of a community. It is illegitimate otherwise: “legitimacy on this view does not depend on the ‘consent of the governed’ given through democratic rituals, but rather it depends on the objective good.”[10]

B. Authority in the Catholic State According to Leo XIII

The discussion must inevitably pass to practical matters, to the forms of government in which this harmonious order can be instantiated. Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclicals provide a coherent Catholic teaching about the nature and forms of political authority, its relation to religious authority, as well as the proper relationship of the citizen to this authority.

It is first to be remarked that Leo is not opposed to any benign form of government in principle:

Catholics, like all other citizens, are free to prefer one form of government to another precisely because no one of these social forms is, in itself, opposed to the principles of sound reason nor to the maxims of Christian doctrine.[11]

In fact, Leo is largely indifferent to the form or the means by which authority is constituted, so long as the source of authority be rightly conceived:

There is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.[12]

Leo immediately goes on to explain this right conception of authority:

But, as regards political power, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God, for it finds this clearly testified in the sacred Scriptures and in the monuments of antiquity; besides, no other doctrine can be conceived which is more agreeable to reason or more in accord with the safety of both princes and peoples.[13]

The pope does not go on to suggest some sort of divine right of political leadership; rather, he makes a metaphysical argument about the nature of political authority: Man cannot find perfection except in society; thus society is part of nature and willed by God. But every association of man needs a ruling authority, or else there will be mere anarchy. No man has in himself the authority to constrain the will of others; that power resides only in God. Thus, all political power comes from heaven, and “it is necessary that those who exercise it should do it as having received it from God.”[14] In other words, society is one of the instruments God has ordained for the perfection of man’s nature; over and above individual reason, God constitutes social authority as a necessary means for man’s perfection. Authority, in this view, most emphatically does not arise from the will of the people, even if they are the efficient cause of its peculiar shape. Rather, it is from God and for Him.

From this metaphysical principle, it follows that the social organism must acknowledge its source by offering public worship to the true God:

For men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings.[15]

In fact, Leo calls it a “public crime to act as though there were no God”; it is “one of [government’s] chief duties to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws.”[16]

Any wholly natural and metaphysically consistent society, therefore, must acknowledge its dependence on God and explicitly enforce the laws of the Church. To do otherwise is to undermine the very nature of human society. In fact, Leo argues that unless the state acknowledges God, its authority will lack any sure stability.[17] The doctrine of social contract is bound to lead to contempt for authority and an incessant revolutionary spirit. On the contrary, the Catholic doctrine will cause citizens to love and obey their rulers, and rulers to love and serve their citizens.

To summarize traditional Catholic teaching on the nature of political authority: society is the normal means ordained by God for the perfection of men’s souls, and its right ordering puts it in consonance with the rest of the cosmic order. Thus, authority takes its legitimacy from its place in this divine plan. Legitimate authority acknowledges this dependence on God, and orders the state according to the laws of the true religion.

II. LEVIATHAN: Liberty and Authority in Modern Political Thought

What we have described is the Logos-oriented politics of the classical and Catholic tradition. Government is the art of moving men and communities toward their final end in God, who has instituted governments for this very purpose. For government to work, laws must be drawn in accordance with the objective good, citizens must respect legitimate authority, and the true religion must be enshrined.

Now we must consider modern political philosophy. Modernity prides itself on being objective, practical and this-worldly, but as we examine its roots in the early modern period, we will find that it too rests on hidden, theocratic foundations. Its cosmology is, of course, not so rich as the antique, but it nevertheless exists as an a priori, mythological backdrop to modern political thought. The modern predilection for democracy must be understood as the necessary corollary of an erroneous cosmology that divinizes man.

Continuing trends of late medieval nominalism and humanism, the early moderns developed a novel conception of human freedom that, as Waldstein argues, was “disengaged from the good.” This development had several aspects. The first was philosophical. Late medieval nominalists scorned the delicate synthesis by which Thomas and the ancients had knitted nature to the divine, and offered a radically simplified cosmic image: Essences became disconnected from ends, the symphonic cosmos a mundane world of individual objects moved by the arbitrary will of God. Humanism ushered in the next stage when, poring over rediscovered treasures of pagan literature, they imbibed the classical sensibility to the glories of human accomplishment. They began to exalt what they perceived to be the infinite indeterminacy of the human will, its capacity to achieve nearly anything.[18]

But if humanism retained some affinity with the old virtue tradition, early moderns who followed the Reformation radicalized the concept of freedom, stripping from it any connection to the good. In the emerging view, man’s dignity consists above all in being unimpeded. Freedom is no longer what is accomplished, but the condition of accomplishment: a radical autonomy, the absence of any restraint on the will.

Another aspect was political. As post-reformation nations were raked with internecine religious conflict, it became convenient to argue

that the objective good for man is too hard to know, too difficult to agree about, that in order to avoid the bloodshed of religious wars, it is necessary to limit politics to the care of a bare minimum of peace necessary to allow for the non-violent coexistence of persons with different views of what the true good is.[19]

This is the thrust of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. [20] Whatever theoretical consensus remained to Europeans concerning some common objective good was destroyed in this final political development. From then on, politics decided not to concern itself with religion or any sort of claims about the objective good. Or so it thought. As Michael Hanby has argued in a recent article for First Things, the liberal state makes an implicit metaphysical claim: by denying God any role in the polity, it posits “that a thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent.”[21] In this denial, modernity effects the apotheosis of man in a new mythology.

This apotheosis has a long history, including those steps discussed above, but took a great leap in the Scientific Revolution. Encouraged by pioneers like Francis Bacon and Galileo, early modern thinkers discarded Aristotelian conceptions of the universe for more empirical methods. Most importantly, they redefined motion, the concept underlying all classical cosmology. In classical physics, motion was a interior, teleological phenomenon directing natures toward their final ends; in modern physics, motion becomes a mere external happening, the blind action of material forces whirling objects around per inane quietum. This divorce from final causes leads to a new way of seeing and relating to the natural world. If the old world functioned organically, as a sort of garden of natures growing in participatory being towards fruition in God, the new world is a machine, a collection of empirical objects jostled here and there in space according to fixed laws of nature.[22] Man is no exception. His natural activity, deprived of a final end in God, becomes the autonomous working of his own nature. Thus, man “attains his end,” or in the new metaphor “functions most efficiently,” when he enjoys that power most characteristic to him, the law of reason.

On this basis of mechanistic physics, early moderns built an edifice of mechanistic politics. Throwing out the organic metaphors, early moderns conceived the state in terms of a vast mechanism of forces checked and balanced against one another. For example, Hobbes’s systematic political treatise Leviathan takes as its theoretical foundation a mechanistic epistemology. In his account, man is not even really free, but like a floundering ship, is carried this way and that by his passions, which are in turn merely determined responses to external stimuli. Like atoms in the void, men bump into each other constantly in a state of incessant war. The only way to peace is for an absolute sovereign to be invested with all power of coercion. Hobbes’ sovereign stands like a lid on a kettle, tasked with keeping the effervescent passions of his people from boiling over into civil war.

Locke’s views are more pertinent to the discussion of democracy. Like Hobbes, he begins by considering a state of nature. Before society, however, man is also in a state of war, (though endowed with a more respectable rational faculty than Hobbes allows). Society is joined not for moral improvement, but for physical protection against predatory raids, and a guarantee of more economic prosperity than was attainable in the state of nature. Locke’s ethos is that of a very reasonable gentleman, and he often seems to invoke some sort of natural law; but he too ultimately deploys mechanist metaphors to explain the working of his system. Explaining the necessity of majority rule, he quite bluntly appeals to the physical principle of inertia according to which the greater force must always yield to the lesser.[23] Locke’s state too is an engine, and human beings its cogs. And like an engine in a factory, its end is only the production of material prosperity.[24]

If Locke and Hobbes gave to modern political thought its theoretical matter, Rousseau composed modernity’s mythological form. Surprisingly, underlying the new rationalist philosophy about man’s nature, there stands a veritable myth: the state of nature. This myth, in its various forms, underlies and legitimizes the political project of each of these thinkers.[25]

According to Rousseau, men were born into a paradisical state of absolute self-sufficiency and contentment. Far from needing the help of other men, he wandered through warm forests eating plentiful food, hardly meeting other men. He was entirely sustained in a tranquil, dispassionate state by what Rousseau calls pity. This pity prevented him from harming other creatures or his fellow man. Only later, by a series of witless concessions of freedom, did mankind form families, cities, and states. Each step towards civilization further enslaved mankind.

But this makes of man a God, casting him in the form of entirely self-sufficient and undetermined rational agent. As James Kalb observes:

To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot know anything about God, but only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world. In short, you will say that we are God.[26]

In Pierre Manent’s analysis, this is the dark myth lurking behind the progress of the democratic spirit: yearning for the pseudo-divine state of our ancestors.

What would sum up in the same or a like way our society and its extraordinary or paradoxical character of dis-society? It would be the notion of the state of nature . . . . How can we be interested in the individual in the state of nature as Rousseau describes, eating acorns and quenching his thirst at the first stream? The animal nonetheless interests us since ultimately this individual is each one of us: he is what we want to be. To put it in a nutshell, the state of nature is defined as a state of independence, liberty, and equality. We want to live independent, free, and equal. In this sense, the state of nature forms our horizon.[27]

By seeking the ordering principle of society in the beginning, rather than in the end, the state of nature hypothesis inverts the traditional political order. For classical politics, it was not so much where man came from, or how he existed in an indeterminate past, but how he ought to be, and what he could be that mattered. Politics concerned itself about perfecting man’s nature by bringing it to some end. Under the new mythology of autonomous mechanism, man springs forth fully formed from the womb of nature, in need of nothing but safety and fuel to keep his machine going. Since man is born perfect, but unfortunately enslaved in society, modern politics strives to attain as much as possible for its citizens this original Edenic state of total autonomy. As a colleague put it, “Democracy is just the story of people trying to get as far away from each other as possible.”

In light of this analysis, it is clear that modernity, for all its vaunted idealism and its supposed autonomy from history or tradition, is built on hidden theocratic foundations; it merely proposes a new mythology in place of an old one. In Thaddeus Kozinski’s words:

It is not that modern liberal democracy has successfully desacralized politics, but rather has changed the locus of sacralization from cosmic order, divine law, and the Church, to the human person, the sacred freedom of individuals to choose their own sacred allegiances.[28]

Catholics believe a story: the story about man’s original justice and original sin. The first moderns too believe a story: a new narrative of original justice, this time without original sin. In fact, the sin, in many cases, is precisely the entrance into society. Society itself becomes man’s original sin, the act that separates man from a mythical primeval state of innocence and integrity. For Catholics, man can be saved from his enslavement to sin, but only in the next life, and only if he follows the rule of divine and natural law. Modern politics too has a salvation narrative, but it is this-worldly: man can find “salvation” in the free satisfaction of all his (non-predatory) desires in the democratic state. Modern politics tries to guarantee its citizens as large a share of Original Autonomy as circumstances allow, with the ultimate goal of freeing men as entirely as possible.

In this new mythological account, democracy becomes an indispensible tool for the modern religion. All other forms of government in some way deprive individuals of autonomy, by privileging one class over another, or cleaving to accidental historical arrangements. This is why the first moderns worked hard to eradicate all obstacles to the ascent of democratic forms of government. In the French Revolution, for example, the monarchy, aristocracy, guilds, monasteries, in short all the traditional threads of the fabric of society were rent to make way for the novus ordo.

But the paradox of modern liberty is that man is not deified: he feels himself subsumed into a Leviathan. Since his own autonomous choice is his only claim to self-worth, he is faced with a paradox: either consent to association and lose autonomy, or refuse to consent to anything. As Manent argues:

The dilemma of modern liberty—the dilemma of modern liberty as experienced by the modern individual—could then be roughly formulated in the following way: Either I enter into a community, association, membership, and I transform myself into a part of a whole and lose my liberty, or I do not enter . . . and I do not exercise my freedom. In brief, this is the dilemma of modern liberty: either I am not free, or I am not free.[29]

Man in modern democracy feels himself swallowed in the unrestrained motion of a majority devoid of a rational end. Government looms as the ambivalent referee of an orgy of blind desires, over a nation “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”[30]

III. TAMING LEVIATHAN: Logos-oriented Democracy

If subsumed into such an anti-Logos modern religion, democracy cannot be reconciled in any way with the Catholic religion. Nevertheless, once these hidden religious foundations are exposed and repudiated, a Catholic is free to weigh democracy as one legitimate form among many others. The encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII clearly teach the conditions in which democracy is a possible form of government for the modern world.

Leo expressly affirms that democracy is a legitimate form of government: “Again, it is not of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of government, if only the Catholic doctrine be maintained as to the origin and exercise of power.”[31] Under what conditions, then, would democracy be advantageous? I would argue that democracy is a form uniquely suited to the modern world, as long as it is not pure, and avoids the typical attitudes contrary to Catholic teaching. Leo suggests as much here:

Neither is it blameworthy in itself, in any manner, for the people to have a share, greater or less, in the government: for at certain times, and under certain laws, such participation may not only be of benefit to the citizens, but may even be of obligation.[32]

To see how this might be so, we must turn to Tocqueville. In the introduction to his Democracy in America, Tocqueville argues convincingly that the tendency toward democracy is “the most continuous, the oldest, and the most permanent fact known in history.”[33] As civilization increases prosperity,

all processes discovered, all needs that arise, all desires that demand satisfaction bring progress toward universal leveling . . . . When one runs through the pages of our history, one finds so to speak no great events in seven hundred years that have not turned to the profit of equality.[34]

In light of this “providential fact,”[35] the duty of those who direct modern society is “to instruct democracy,”[36] not to oppose it. Unfortunately, because traditional society resisted democratic tendencies, democracy erupted by revolution,[37] rather than after careful circumspection. I agree with this account, and believe that his trenchant comparison of aristocratic and democratic societies sheds light on several advantages of a democratic polity.

First, democratic society “will be less brilliant, less glorious, less strong, perhaps; but the majority of its citizens will enjoy a more prosperous lot.”[38] Democracy does not have the glorious potential of aristocracy, but it does improve the lot of the common man.

Second, democracy can enliven the individual citizen by giving him political obligations. In his description of American townships, Tocqueville marvels at the energy of townsmen working for the common good together[39] while remarking that the citizens of aristocratic countries often feels like a colonist in his own land, “indifferent to the destiny of the place that he inhabits.”[40]

Nevertheless, while bringing democracy into a Catholic state, several dangers must be avoided. Tocqueville envisions a future society that:

regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to it without trouble; in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine and the love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment.[41]

These observations point to the first difficulty in implementing democracy: the tendency it has to erode respect for authority. Frequent elections, for example, make people think authority does in fact reside in the general will, and does not make for stability and permanence in the legislative body. But this obstacle is not insurmountable, if it is balanced by a strong affirmation of the nature of authority: if the democratic state is ruled by a strong constitution that affirms authority’s origin in God, if it submits itself to the laws of his Church, provides for God’s public worship, and establishes the natural law as the foundation of all law.[42] Oaths of office must include similar elements. Under such a system of laws, there need be no difficulty in assigning a large share of self-government to the people. Instructed by their laws and the virtuous examples of their leaders, they will seek to build up the kingdom of God by the exercise of their rights. Also, reverence that in aristocracy is attributed to the aristocrat and his family can be transferred to the offices and assemblies themselves. A House or an Executive authority, through a solid history of illustrious leaders, can still command the sort of reverence proper for a God-given authority.

Another difficulty endemic to democracy, even if it establishes respect for its ruling political authority, is the maintenance of the authority of tradition. Care must be taken that the whims of the people do not destroy the religious and cultural foundations of society. There is a democracy of the dead, whose will must be taken into account in elections. Monuments of culture, traditional practices and lore, must not be allowed to be neglected. Of course, there are democratic ways to protect these things: guilds, cultural societies, churches, all can work to maintain tradition as democracy is implemented. In answer to Molnar’s open question, we must affirm with Leo XIII that no society can remain robust without traditional religious foundations.

CONCLUSION

We have shown how democracy, as it exists within the ideological framework given to it by early modern thinkers, cannot be reconciled with Catholic principles. The classical and Catholic worldview holds that no social fabric can be woven without respecting the divine origin of authority and public profession of the true religion. Disengaged from a mechanistic mythology, democracy can be seen in its true light, as a form offering many benefits not found in more aristocratic regimes. Nevertheless, it is prone to self-will, improvidence, and contempt for authority, which must be combated with strong legal and cultural supports to tradition and religion. In the final analysis, the Leonine perspective on democracy can save modern man from the Leviathan, and help him return to the Logos.


NOTES

[1] Edmund Waldstein, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” Lecture at the Bratislavske Hanusove Dni, Pistori Palace, Bratislava, 25th April, 2014, 1.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Ibid., 3.

[4] Ibid., 3.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Nichomachean Ethics 1094b, emphasis added.

[7] Waldstein, 4.

[8] Ibid., 4.

[9] Ibid., 5.

[10] Ibid., 5.

[11] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Au Milieu des Sollicitudes (1892), 14.

[12] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Diuturnum Illud (1881), 7.

[13] Ibid., 8

[14] Ibid., 11.

[15] Ibid., 6.

[16] Leo XII, Immortale Dei (1885), 6.

[17] See, for example, Immortale Dei, 32: “A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated.”

[18] Concerning humanism, it is important to note that it began as a deeply Catholic movement. Its unofficial manifesto, Mirandola’s De Hominis Dignitate could seem an idolization of human will. But for Pico, man’s perfection is still deeply connected with God and grace.

[19] Waldstein, 7-8.

[20] For more on Locke, see “Lock’s Doctrine of Toleration: A Contract with Nothingness” on this site.

[21] Michael Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity,” on First Things, Feb. 2015. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity

[22] It is also ripe for exploitation. Man is no longer the steward of the nature-garden, but a reaper whose powers give him unrestricted domination over the other machines.

[23] E.g., “For when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. For that which acts any being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it begin necessary to that which is one body to more one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body…” (John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, ed. Tom Crawford [New York: Dover Publications, 2002], 44.)

[24] Of course he gives lip service to the natural and divine laws, but just as he invokes these laws he limits them explicitly to practical measures ensuring preservation.

[25] There is no difficulty in the myth coming to light after its philosophical and political expressions. Some orthodox Biblical scholars explain the composition of the Genesis myth by later Hebrew prophets as a process of self-reflection projected back in history: “Because the human author was contemplating an object designed to reflect creation, and because he had a supernatural gift of insight into this object, he was able to offer an account of creation based on his reflections about Israel’s history—he gazed into Israel’s institutions and history and there saw mankind’s beginnings.”(Jeremy Holmes, Genesis 1-11 and Science, in SCI 402 Reading Packet, 84) We imagine Rousseau did the same for modernity.

[26] James Kalb, quoted in Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013), 229.

[27] Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics?: A Defense of the Nation State (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2006), 137.

[28] Private manuscript

[29] Manent, 119.

[30] From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

[31] Libertas Praestantissimum, 44

[32] Immortale Dei, 36.

[33] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.

[34] Ibid., 5.

[35] Ibid., 6.

[36] “To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.” (7)

[37] “Democracy has therefore been abandoned to its savage instincts; it has grown up like those children who, deprived of paternal care, rear themselves in the streets of our towns and know only society’s vices and miseries.” (7)

[38] Ibid., 9.

[39] “The inhabitant applies himself to each of the interests of his country as to his very own. He is glorified in the glory of the nation; in the success that it obtains he believes he recognizes his own work, and he is uplifted by it; he rejoices in the general prosperity from which he profits (90).”

[40] Ibid., 91.

[41] Ibid., 9.

[42] As in the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, so rudely violated of late.

World Government is Required by Natural Law


In Laudato Si’ ¶175, Pope Francis cites Pope Benedict’s argument that the global challenges facing the contemporary world require ‘true world political authority.’ Certain soi-disant conservatives have again objected to this teaching. But, as Pope Francis himself points out, it is ‘in continuity with the social teaching of the Church.’ The perennial teaching of the Church here adopts a theme of ancient political philosophy. While classical Attic philosophy held that man was naturally political, that is, that his communal life was limited to a community of the size of the ancient Greek polis, this view was challenged very early on by the view that the commonality and universality of reason implies that there can be a single human community, an empire. Plutarch summarizes this view in the first oration On the Fortune of Alexander, in which he argues that Alexander was right to differ with his teacher Aristotle on this matter:

[Alexander] did not, as Aristotle advised him, rule the Grecians like a moderate prince and insult over the barbarians like an absolute tyrant; nor did he take particular care of the first as his friends and domestics, and scorn the latter as mere brutes and vegetables; which would have filled his empire with fugitive incendiaries and perfidious tumults. But believing himself sent from Heaven as the common moderator and arbiter of all nations, and subduing those by force whom he could not associate to himself by fair offers, he labored thus, that he might bring all regions, far and near, under the same dominion. And then, as in a festival goblet, mixing lives, manners, customs, wedlock, all together, he ordained that every one should take the whole habitable world for his country, of which his camp and army should be the chief metropolis and garrison; that his friends and kindred should be the good and virtuous, and that the vicious only should be accounted foreigners.

Plutarch’s view of empire was not yet subsidiary enough. It was left to the great Roman poet Virgil to give an image of an empire that would operate on the principle of subsidiarity, respecting the legitimate spheres of local governments and local customs, binding each place will to the universal through piety toward the local. It was this Virgilian ideal of empire that was taken up and Christianized in the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire— an ideal given masterful theoretical exposition in Dante’s De Monarchia. And it was to the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire that Catholic Social Teaching has consistently appealed.

Pope Francis is thus quite right to appeal to the continuity of Catholic Social Teaching on this point. One element of the traditional teaching that he omits to mention, however, is that such a supranational authority would have to be subordinated to the Catholic Church to avoid setting itself up as an idol. As Alan Fimister argues in his important book on Catholic Social Teaching and the European Union:

Secular utopian federalism and Catholic solidarism differ markedly, in that the former seeks the replacement of the sovereign nation state with a new sovereign federal entity whereas the latter seeks to build a supranational edifice whose final justification is supernatural upon the essentially natural foundations of enduring nation states. (Robert Schuman: Neo Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe, p. 256).

The basic point that Pope Benedict and Pope Francis make is, however, entirely sound. The following sections from Henri Grenier’s manual of Thomistic Moral Philosophy show how clearly it follows from the nature of the common good. — The Editors


  1. Statement of the question

1° International society is defined: a society which comprises all States, and directs them to their common good, i.e., to the common good of all mankind.

International society neither absorbs nor abolishes States, but leaves them their independence and autonomy in their own order.

International society, as directing all States to the common good of mankind, must possess true authority, superior to the authority of any individual States.

The subject of this authority must be determined by man, just as the organization and constitution of international society must be determined by him.

2° All who deny the specific unity of the human race conceive international society as unlawful and impossible.

Moreover, all who consider the State as the source of all rights, in doing so, deny that international society has its foundation in nature.

Again, all who conceive a perfect society as absolutely autonomous and independent hold that the State cannot be subject to the authority of an international society.

But we have already learned that a perfect society is a society which pursues a perfect good, i.e., the fulness of happiness in life.

Hence we teach that international society is founded in nature, and is directed to the good of all civil societies, i.e., of all States or nations.

  1. Statement of the thesis

Thesis: International society is founded in nature, and is directed to the good of all nations.

First part: International society is founded in nature.— International society is founded in nature if all States are naturally united by mutual moral and juridical bonds, and must tend to the common good of all mankind. But all States are naturally united by mutual moral and juridical bonds, and must tend to the common good of all mankind. Therefore.[1]

Major.— In this case, we have all the requisites of an international society: a) the pursuit of a specific common good, i.e., the common good of all mankind; b) the juridical union of all States for the pursuit of the common good of the whole human race.

Minor.a) All States are united by mutual moral and juridical bonds.— This is so because, as we have already proved, international law exists.

b) All States must tend to the common good of all mankind. Mankind, i.e., the human race, has unity of origin, unity of nature, and unity of territory or habitation, which is the whole world. Hence all men, all groups or communities of men, and all States must tend to the common good of all mankind.

Second part: International society is directed to the common good of all nations, i.e., of all States.— 1° International society leaves each State its autonomy in its own order, and directs the common good of each State to a more perfect common good, which is the common good of all nations.

2° International society fosters peace and harmony among nations, because the enforcement of international law belongs to a superior authority, just as the enforcement of laws governing the relations between individual persons is reserved to the political authority. Hence States can, without recourse to war, settle their quarrels according to the principles of justice.


[1] « A disposition, in fact, of the divinely-sanctioned natural order divides the human race into social groups, nations or States, which are mutually independent in organization and in the direction of their internal life, But for all that, the human race is bound together by reciprocal ties, moral and juridical, into a great commonwealth directed to the good of all nations and ruled by special laws which protect its unity and promote its prosperity.» (Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, n. 65).

The Dignity of Politics and the End of the Polity

by Henri Grenier


We have published several extracts from Henri Grenier’s Manual of Thomistic moral philosophy on The Josias. We find Grenier’s manual notable for its rich understanding of the common good. Grenier’s understanding of the common good allowed him, as an early reviewer noted, to return to Aristotle’s division of practical science into ethics (or monastics), domestics (or economics), and politics, with politics given pride of place. Many other modern Thomists, affected by liberal-reductionist accounts of the common good, saw the final end of man as being a matter of individual ethics, and reduced politics to a subdivision of the special ethics. But Grenier recovered Aristotle’s insight that the end of man and of the polity are the same (Ethics I,2), that is, that the end of man is a common good. It follows from this that in the natural order politics is the preeminent moral science. The following sections are taken from the General Introduction, where Grenier defends Aristotle’s division of practical philosophy, and the preeminent role it gives to politics; and from the section on the causes of civil society, where he argues that the end of civil society is happiness. — The Editors


821. Division of Moral Philosophy

1° Moral Philosophy, as a practical science, is specified by its end, which is the principle of human acts and the formal object quo of moral science, i.e., of the science of human operations.

2° Man is a social animal, and, in the natural order, is a part, i.e., a member, of two societies: domestic society and civil or political society.

3° Society is a whole of which man is a part. Continue reading “The Dignity of Politics and the End of the Polity”

The End of the Family and the End of Civil Society

by Charles De Koninck


In 1943 the Belgian born dean of the department of philosophy at the University of Laval in Quebec, Charles De Koninck (1906-1965), published his controversial book On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists, in which he argued that the private good of persons is subordinate to their common good. De Koninck is at pains to show that his position is not totalitarian, nevertheless, many of his critics remained unconvinced. One of the objections that he anticipates, but which was nevertheless repeated by his critics, was that the free man is causa sui (for his own sake), and that therefore it would be repugnant to his dignity to be ordered to the good of the community. De Koninck responds as follows: Continue reading “The End of the Family and the End of Civil Society”

The Illegitimate State as Chastisement

by Gregory de Rivière-Blanche

 The following essay rounds out our series on the question of political legitimacy, taking up the question from a somewhat different angle, with the guidance of St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas. —The Editors

The Josias’s ongoing symposium regarding legitimacy has raised several interesting questions about the legitimacy of modern states. One point that has come up repeatedly in the various contributions is whether a Catholic ought to obey an illegitimate government.[1] In discussing this question, Daniel Lendman has assumed that the illegitimate state is necessarily at variance with the divine will.[2] For our part, we shall show that, to the contrary, the illegitimate state may be an expression of the divine will as a chastisement sent by God to a sinful people. We suggest, therefore, that the Catholic should consider this point when examining his relationship to an illegitimate government. Continue reading “The Illegitimate State as Chastisement”

On the Relation of the Individual Person and the Family to Civil Society

by Henri Grenier


In the second half of the 20th century a shift took place in much Catholic social and political thought. Catholic social teaching in the ‘Pian Age’ had called for an integrally Christian society, a restoration of a pre-modern ideal of political community, which saw in political community the ‘likeness and symbol as it were of the Divine Majesty’ (Sapientiae Christianae, 9), a likeness which was itself to be subject to the social kingship of Christ. But then the focus shifted toward the duty of the political power to respect the inalienable dignity of individual persons. As Russell Hittinger has pointed out, the idea of seeing the likeness of God in political authority was practically abandoned, and instead much emphasis was put on the likeness of God in the individual person. In our view this shift was highly imprudent, and its effects have been mostly pernicious. It has led to an exaggerated value being put on individual freedom of conscience, and in many cases to a policy of appeasement toward liberal ideology. The promoters of this new approach to social questions thought that it would aid in the re-evangelization of culture, but most of the evidence suggests that they were wrong. As Christian Roy has argued, a ‘Weberian paradox of the heterogeneity of the spiritual intentions and social effects of religious reform movements’ took place, in which ‘progressive Christian personalism’ ‘unwittingly helped usher in’ a ‘drift towards hedonistic secular individualism.’

This ‘personalist’ shift, as we can call it, is often attributed to Vatican II (or even Centesimus Annus), but it began earlier as a response to the horrors of World War II. Jacques Maritain was a key figure in the early phase of the shift. Having been in favor of authoritarian restorationism early on he came to support a form of modified democratic liberalism. He wanted to find a third way between totalitarianism and individualistic liberalism. He thought he could find it by distinguishing between man as an individual, who is a part of the polity and ordered to it, and man as a person, who transcends political community through his direct relation to God.

Some Thomists saw danger in Maritain’s position. They argued that far from finding a third way between totalitarianism and individualism such a position really adopted their common error of seeing the common good as being opposed to the proper good of individuals. Personalism was thus really reducible to individualism. Moreover, taken to its logical conclusions, the position would yield an absurd and blasphemous notion of human dignity. The most famous of these Thomist critiques was Charles De Koninck’s masterful treatise On the Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists. De Koninck did not explicitly refer to Maritain, but his work was generally taken to be directed against Maritain and Maritain’s followers.

The text that we offer below is from another philosopher working in Quebec, Henri Grenier (Thomistic Philosophy, Vol 3: Moral Philosophy, pp. 363-373), and it offers a critique of personalism remarkably similar to De Koninck’s. It is likely that Grenier influenced De Koninck, since the substance of Grenier’s remark appeared already in a 1938 edition of his manual, that is, one published several years before De Koninck’s book. Like De Koninck, Grenier never gives the names of the ‘personalists,’ but it is even clearer in Grenier’s case than in De Koninck’s that Maritain is the target. Grenier’s summary of the personalist distinction between person and individual in 1091:3° is almost a quotation from Maritain. — The Editors


  1. Statement of the question.

1° The problem of the relations which unite individual persons and families to civil society is of utmost importance, for today there are many theories which do not recognize the natural rights of the individual person and of the family, and which regard the State as omnipotent and as possessing all rights over persons and families.

2° The problem has three aspects, which may be stated as follows:

First, admitting that civil society has a proper end which is a good, we may ask: have the individual person and the family, both of which live in society, proper ends distinct from the end of civil society?

Secondly, if they have proper ends, are these ends directed to the end of civil society, or vice versa?

Thirdly, if the ends of the individual person and of the famliy are directed to the end of civil society, is it their absolutely ultimate end?

3° In the thesis, first, we state that the individual person and the family have, according to the ordinance of nature, their own proper ends, distinct from the end of civil society. Moreover, since the order, i.e., the ordinance, of nature is the ordinance of God Himself, the author of nature, civil society may not disavow them, nor place any obstacle in the way of their attainment.

Secondly, we state the proper ends of the individual person and of the family are directed to the end of civil society, not vice versa. Moreover, since this order or relation of ends obtains in society, it is directly concerned with external acts by which men work for the common good, although indirectly it can be concerned with internal acts, in as much as the latter can regulate external acts.

Thirdly, we assert that the end of civil society is not the absolutely ultimate end to which the ends of the individual person and of the family are directed.

  1. Opinions.— There are various opinions on the relations of the individual person and the family to civil society.

1° All who conceive civil society as an organism, in the strict sense of the term, i.e., as an entity possessing absolute unity, not merely unity of order, do not admit that the individual person and the family have proper ends which are distinct from the end of civil society. For a part of a whole which is an absolute unit, v.g., a hand, which is a part of man, has no operation which is not the operation of the whole, and therefore has no end which is not the end of the whole.

Such was the teaching of Plato, who conceived society as a superior man.

The same conclusion is reached by the Caesarists, with Machiavelli, who proclaim the omnipotence of the State; by the Democrats, with Rousseau, who conceive the general will as the source of all rights, even of private rights; by the Pantheists, with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; and by the Socialists, with Bebel, Wagner, and others.

2° All Pantheists and Naturalists hold that the end of civil society is man’s absolutely ultimate end.

According to the exponents of these opinions, individual men are dependent on the State for everything, because all their rights are derived solely from the concessions of the State.

A summary of these errors is found in the thirty-ninth sentence of the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX: Reipublicae status, utpote omnium jurium origo et fons, jure quodam pollet nullis circumscripto limitibus.

3° Today, some Catholics teach that it is not as a person, i.e., as formally an individual substance of a rational nature, but as an individual, i.e., as multiplied in the same species, that man is subordinate to the end of civil society; for man, they say, is subordinate to the end of civil society, because he is related to civil society as the part to the whole ; but man is not a part of a whole, v.g., of the human species, because of his personality, but because of his individuation by which he is multiplied in the same species.

But this opinion appears untenable, because society is essentially a union of persons, i.e., of intelligible beings. If this were not so, a union of individual horses, or cows, or bears, etc., would be a society.

 

  1. Statement of the thesis.
    THESIS.
    — THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON AND THE FAMILY IN CIVIL SOCIETY HAVE, ACCORDING TO THE ORDINANCE OF NATURE, THEIR OWN PROPER ENDS; AND THESE ENDS ARE DIRECTED TO THE END OF CIVIL SOCIETY, BUT NOT UNDER THE ASPECT OF THE ABSOLUTELY ULTIMATE END.

First part.The individual person and the family have according to the ordinance of nature, their own proper ends.— The parts of a whole which have operations distinct from the operations of the whole have, according to the ordinance of nature, ends which are not the ends of the whole, i.e., have their own proper ends. But the individual person and the family are in civil society as the parts of a whole, and have operations which are not the operations of the whole. Therefore the individual and the family in civil society have, according to the ordinance of nature, their own proper ends.

Major.— Operation is an end in itself, or tends to a proper end. Therefore, when operations are distinct, ends also are distinct.

Minor.— The parts of a whole which has only unity of order have operations which are not the operations of the whole; v.g., a soldier in an army has operations which are not the operations of the whole army.[1] But civil society, of which the individual person and the family are parts, is a whole which has only unity of order: society is a stable union of a plurality of persons in pursuit of a common good. Therefore.

Second part.The proper ends of the individual person and of the family are directed to the end of civil society.— The individual person and the family are to civil society as the parts to the whole: the individual person and the family are the natural parts from which the whole which is civil society results. But the ends of the parts are directed to the end of the whole. Therefore the proper ends of the individual and of the family are directed to the end of civil society.

The major is evident, for civil society is composed of individual persons and of families.

The minor also is evident: the good of the part, as a part, is necessarily directed the good of the whole.[2]

Third part.The proper ends of the individual person and of the family are not directed to the end of civil society under the aspect of the absolutely ultimate end.— The end of civil society is the temporal happiness of this life. But the temporal happiness of this life is not man’s absolutely ultimate end. Therefore the end of civil society is not the absolutely ultimate end of the individual person and of the family, i.e., the proper ends of the individual person and of the family are not directed to the end of civil society under the aspect of the absolutely ultimate end.

The major is evident from what has been already said.

Minor.— Man’s absolutely ultimate end is the beatific vision, for which man is supernaturally elevated in accordance with the positive ordinance of God.[3]

 

  1. Scholia.

1° The civil authority, or the State, as it is called, has no right to refuse recognition to the proper ends determined by nature for the individual person and for the family, nor has it any right to limit them. On the contrary, the civil authority is in duty bound to aid the individual person and the family in the attainment of their proper ends, for these ends, as directed to the common good of society, lead to that temporal happiness which is the end of civil society.

2° The virtue by which the good of the individual person and of the family is directed to the end of civil society is legal justice.

In virtue of legal justice, citizens are mutually dependent on one another in regard to their end. Moderns call this mutual dependence solidarism, which, according to them, is divided into human political, family, and class solidarism.

In dealing with this division, two things must be kept in mind: first, up to the present, humanity is not constituted as a society; secondly, solidarism is not applied univocally to the different kinds of society.

Solidarism, in the strict sense, is found only in civil society, for civil society is the only society whose end is a good which, in the order of nature, is a perfect human good; and therefore only in it is realized, in the strict sense, legal justice by which man is wholly directed to the common good.

In other particular societies, there obtains between the members and the whole a relation only similar to the relation of legal justice, because the good which they pursue is not a perfect good, but rather an imperfect good. Therefore it is only by analogy that solidarism is found in them.

3° Although individual man is destined for civil society, society is for man, and not vice versa,[4] because its proper and immediate end is the temporal happiness of this life, which is the good of man. The temporal happiness of this life is directly the common good of the whole multitude, although, as a consequence, it becomes the good of individual men who appropriate it to themselves.

4° Society, under its formal aspect as a union, may be called the means by which man attains the temporal happiness of this life.[5] Society, however, considered as the union of all the members of the multitude for the pursuit of the common good, is not the means, but the cause by which individual man can attain the temporal happiness of this life: for the united members of the whole multitude are the cause of that happiness which individual men later appropriate to themselves.

5° According to Pius XI,[6] the following are the principal goods or rights with which God, the author of nature, has endowed individual man living in society: the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to whatever is necessary for life; the right to pursue his ultimate end in the manner determined for him by God; the rights of association and of the private ownership and use of property.

The proper ends of the family are the procreation and education of offspring, the mutual aid of the spouses, and the allaying of concupiscence. Hence the family, in accordance with the ordinance of nature, has the right to all things necessary for the attainment of these ends, as are the indissolubility and unity of marriage, its own authority and power of determining the means to attain its ends, without violation, however, of its subordination to civil society.

 

  1. Personalism.

1° Personalism is the teaching of those who, in order to safeguard the dignity of the human person, hold that the end of man, as a person, is superior to the end of civil society. Hence personalism denies that the proper ends of individual man are, as we have shown, directed to the end of civil society.

2° All Catholic philosophers hold that the supernatural end of the human person is not subordinate to the end of civil society. The problem with which we are concerned at present is the relation between the ends of the individual person and the end of civil society, in the natural order only.

3° Personalism holds that man may be considered either as an individual or as a person.

Man, considered as an individual, is, according to personalism, a part of civil society, and is related to it as the part to the whole.

But man, considered as a person, is superior to civil society, and is not related to it as the part to the whole. Therefore the ends of the individual man, in as much as the individual man is a person, i.e., has the dignity of a person, are not subordinate to the end of civil society.

Hence personalism may be defined: the doctrine of those who hold that the ends of the individual man, in as much as the individual man has the dignity of a person, are not subordinate, in the natural order, to the end of civil society, but vice versa.

4° In refutation of personalism, we may make the following observations.

a) The distinction which the personalists make between the individual and the person is of no value in the present question.

For the individual, considered as distinct from nature, can mean only one of two things: either a singular nature without subsistence; or a subsisting supposit in general,[7] not a supposit subsisting in a rational nature.

If the individual signifies a singular nature without subsistence, it is wrong to say that man, as an individual, is a part of civil society. For society is a stable union of men in the order of operation, and, moreover, operations are proper to the supposit, i.e., to the subsisting being, not to nature without subsistence.

If the individual means a supposit in general, it is again wrong to say that man, as an individual, is a part of civil society, for otherwise, as we have already pointed out, a union of irrational animals would be a society. The individual man is formally a part of civil society in as much as he is endowed with an intellect, i.e., as he is a person.

b) The end of civil society is the greatest of all human goods. Hence the subordination of the individual person to civil society, as the part to the whole, is not at variance with the dignity of the human person, but is a subordination of the human person to the human person’s greatest natural good, i.e., to the temporal happiness of this life.

c) Personalism is a form of individualism, because it makes the common good subordinate to the good of the individual person.

  1. Difficulties offered by personalism.

1° Man is related to civil society as the part to the whole. But man is not a part of a whole as a person, but as an individual: for the principle by which man is multiplied in the same species is not personality, but the principle of individuation. Therefore man is not a part of civil society as a person, but as an individual, i.e., it in as an individual that man is subordinate to society. (So teach the Personalists.)

Major.— As the part to the whole in the order of being, I deny; in the order of operation, I concede.

Minor.— It is not as a person, but as an individual, that man is a part of a whole in the order of being, I concede; in that order of operation which constitutes society, I deny.

Society, as we have seen, is not a union of a plurality in the order of being, but in the order of operation, for society is a union of men for the pursuit of a common good; and, since operation is proper to the supposit, it is formally as a person that man is a part of society, and therefore it is as a person, not as an individual, than man is subordinate to the end of society.

The principle of individuation, i.e., first matter signed by quantity, is the principle by which man is multiplied in a whole, that is to say, in the same species, in the order of being.

2° If the person is immediately destined for God, man as a person is not destined for society. But man is immediately destined for God.[8] Therefore man as a person is not destined for society. (So claim the Personalists).

Major.— If the person is immediately destined for God, in as much as he, as living in society, does not attain God, I concede; in as much as the person is not destined for another creature, as the irrational animal is destined for man, I deny.

Minor.— In as much as he, as living in society, does not attain God, I deny; in as much as he is not destined for another creature, as the irrational animal is destined for man, I concede.

3° If as a person man were destined for ciyil society, all that he is and all that he possesses would be destined for civil society. But all that man is and all that he possesses are not destined for civil society.[9] Therefore man, as a person, is not destined for civil society.

Major.— All that man is and all he possesses would be destined for society if the end of civil society were the absolutely ultimate end of human acts, I concede; if the end of civil society is ultimate only in its own order, in as much as it is the greatest of all human goods, I deny.

Minor.— Because the end of civil society is not the absolutely ultimate end of human acts, I concede; because man, as an individual person, is not destined for civil society, as the part to the whole, I deny.

The absolutely ultimate end of human acts is a divine good, i.e., the beatific vision; and the end of civil society, which is temporal happiness, is the ultimate end of human acts only in the order of human goods. Hence the end of civil society itself must be destined for a divine good. Hence all that man is and all that he possesses are not destined for civil society, but for a higher good.

4° That which has substantial unity is superior to that which has only accidental unity. But the individual person has substantial unity, whereas civil society has only accidental unity, i.e., unity of order. Therefore the individual person is superior to civil society, and is not related to it as the part to the whole.

Major.— As a being, I concede; as a good, I deny.

Minor.— The private good of the individual person is superior to the common good, I deny; is inferior, I concede.

Goodness and being, though identical in reality, are logically distinct, i.e., distinct by a distinction of reason; and, moreover, absolute being in not absolute goodness, whereas absolute, goodness is relative being (n. 533). Therefore the common good of persons united in society is greater than the private good of the individual person.


NOTES

[1] In Ethic. l. I, l. 1, n. 5

[2] I-II, q. 109, a. 3, c.

[3] Cf. In Politic., l. VII, 1. 2.

[4] Divini Redemptoris, n. 29.

[5] Ibidem.

[6] Ibid, n. 28.

[7] Et dico superfluum non solum respectu sui ipsius, quod est supra id quod est necessarium individuo, sed etiam respectu aliorum quorum cura ei incumbit; respectu quorum dicitur necessarium personae, secundum quod persona dignitatem importat.— II-II, q. 32, a. 5, c.

[8] Sola autem natura rationalis creata habet immediatum ordinem ad Deum; quia caetera creaturae non attingunt ad aliquid universale, sed solum ad aliquid particulare, participantes divinam bonitatem vel in essendo tantum, sicut inanimata, vel etiam in vivendo et cognoscendo singularia, sicut plantae et animalia. Natura autem rationalis, inquantum cognoscit universalem boni et entis rationem, habet immediatum ordinem ad universale essendi principium.— II-II, q. 2, a. 3.

[9] I-II, q. 21, a. 4, ad 3.