Category: Articles

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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”

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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).

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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”

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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”

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The Lawfulness and Social Character of Private Ownership

by Henri Grenier

The Québécois priest, theologian, and philosopher, Henri Grenier (1899-1980), was the author of a popular Cursus Philosophiae that was translated into both French and English. He was a major Thomistic opponent of personalism, and is thought to have been an influence on the great Laval School Thomist, Charles De Koninck. The following passages are taken from Thomistic Philosophy, Vol 3: Moral Philosophy, trans. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan’s University, 1949). A scan of the complete text of this volume can be found here.

I

LAWFULNESS OF PRIVATE OWNERSHIP

  1. Statement of the question.

1° We know that man has perfect dominion over external things, i.e., over things which are inferior to him, in as much as they are destined for man’s use. Such being the finality of external things, we may now ask: may the individual man and the family possess external things? This is the question of private ownership. Continue reading “The Lawfulness and Social Character of Private Ownership”

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On the Subject of Civil Authority, and On Resistance of Tyranny

by Henri Grenier

The Québécois priest, theologian, and philosopher, Henri Grenier (1899-1980), was the author of a popular Cursus Philosophiae that was translated into both French and English. He was a major Thomistic opponent of personalism, and is thought to have been an influence on the great Laval School Thomist, Charles De Koninck. The following passages are taken from Thomistic Philosophy, Vol 3: Moral Philosophy, trans. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan’s University, 1949). A scan of the relevant pages (including sections omitted below) can be found here. The overall context is a discussion of the causes of civil (or political) society. Grenier’s reflections on the ‘subject’ of civil authority, and on resisting tyrants are highly relevant to the problem of legitimacy discussed by Daniel Lendman, Felix de St. Vincent, and E. M. Milco. — The Editors

Subject Of Civil Authority

1116. Statement of the question

1° The question of the subject of civil authority is entirely distinct from the question of the origin of civil society. The former question is concerned with the material cause of civil society, and the latter with its efficient cause. Continue reading “On the Subject of Civil Authority, and On Resistance of Tyranny”

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‘In Dread of Modernity’: Republican Liberty and the Common Good in the American Tradition

by Felix de St. Vincent

The revolutions of the 18th century appealed to ancient as well as to modern authorities. As I have argued elsewhere, the American Revolution appealed to ancient republican notions of the rule of law and the advantages of a mixed regime, and to medieval English conceptions of cosmic order being embodied in the ancient laws which had held since ‘time out of mind.’ But, as Charles Taylor argues, these ancient conceptions were to a large extent ‘colonized‘ and taken over by modern, Enlightenment ones which took over much of the form of the more ancient ideas, but without the substance of cosmic order and the primacy of the common good: « The American Revolution is in a sense the watershed. It was undertaken in a backward-looking spirit, in the sense that the colonists were fighting for their established rights as Englishmen. Moreover they were fighting under their established colonial legislatures, associated in a Congress. But out of the whole process emerges the crucial fiction of “we, the people”, into whose mouth the declaration of the new constitution is placed. »[1] Several articles here on The Josias have examined the defects of liberal, Enlightenment political philosophy. But perhaps it would be possible for Americans to revive the ancient republican element in their founding, and thus find a form of politics that would be at once autochthonously American and truly ordered to the common good. This is the position argued in Felix de St. Vincent’s first essay for The Josias. We are pleased to publish it for its lucid exploration of the transmission of the ancient republican tradition in England and America, and its eminently practical suggestions for political action today. I myself disagree with a number of Felix de St. Vincent’s points including his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas on sovereignty, his account of the relative importance of ancient republican and modern liberal ideals in the American founding, and the ideal relative weight of the different elements in a mixed constitution for promoting the common good (he thinks the republican form per se preferable to the monarchical). But I agree with on the most important principles, especially the primacy of the common good, and am very pleased to be able to present his thought provoking essay to the public. — Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Are American democracy and Catholicism compatible? Are liberal democracy and Catholicism compatible? The first question was asked by John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960).[2] More recently, Patrick Deneen proposed that the debate was about liberal democracy, slightly reframing the debate between Murray’s compatibilism and its “radical Catholic” critics.[3] Insofar as this debate is about Catholic teaching, the two questions appear the same. Continue reading “‘In Dread of Modernity’: Republican Liberty and the Common Good in the American Tradition”

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Locke’s Doctrine of Toleration: A Contract with Nothingness

by Jeffrey Bond

Today we present the first installment of an essay on John Locke’s doctrine of toleration.  Though we have already published an extended analysis of Locke’s famous Letter on Toleration, the topic merits further analysis, especially given the centrality of this doctrine to American politics today. This series will focus less on the particulars of the Letter and more on Locke’s doctrine at large and our proper attitude toward it as Catholics.  An earlier version of this essay appeared in A Letter from the Romans, the Newsletter of the Roman Forum and the Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute, February, 1999, No. 4.  — The Editors  

PART I

By all accounts, John Locke was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment.  Although he was indebted to the writings of both Machiavelli and Hobbes—a debt he never acknowledged—nonetheless it is generally recognized that Locke’s two most influential writings, the Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, established him as the principal founder of modern liberal society.  Certainly no student of American politics would deny the significance of Locke’s impact on the Founding Fathers, for they often cited him as an authority to justify their political prescriptions.  More broadly, it is fair to state that most modern men, whether religious or not, accept Locke’s fundamental principle concerning the proper relationship between politics and religion, namely, separation of church and state.  In fact, Locke’s doctrine of toleration, as set forth in A Letter Concerning Toleration, is the most universally accepted political-theological dogma in the West today, yet this dogma is not the benevolent and salvific solution to the problem of religious pluralism that modern men suppose it to be.

Locke begins A Letter Concerning Toleration[1] with an astonishing claim:

Since you are pleased to inquire what are my thoughts about the mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of religion, I must needs answer you freely, that I esteem that toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true church (p. 167).

In immediate support of his opening claim, Locke says that all men boast of the orthodoxy of their own faith, “for everyone is orthodox to himself.”  According to Locke, all such claims to orthodoxy are far from being marks of the true church; they are “much rather marks of men striving for power and empire over one another, than of the church of Christ” (p. 167).

Here, then, at the very beginning of the Letter, Locke reveals the core of his enterprise.  While cynically dismissing all claims of orthodoxy as quest for power over others, Locke himself establishes the new measure of orthodoxy for Christians, namely, his doctrine of toleration.  He is careful to wrap his bold new doctrine in the mantle of Christian humility by immediately affirming that if a man “be destitute of charity, meekness, and good-will in general towards all mankind, even to those that are not Christians, he is certainly yet short of being a true Christian himself” (p. 167).  But Locke’s identification of his doctrine of toleration with the supernatural virtue of Christian charity cannot hide the clearly self-contradictory nature of his attempt to erect a new orthodoxy on the assertion that every claim to orthodoxy is simply the expression of a man’s thirst for power and dominion.  Now, if we are to make sense of Locke’s project, we either must assume that he could not see this contradiction—which is highly unlikely given his evident intelligence—or we must assume that he was not troubled by it, a position about which we will have more to say as we attempt to unpack his teaching.  This much we can now say:  if Locke is right, that all claims to orthodoxy are disguised attempts to dominate others, then his own orthodoxy is fundamentally an attempt to dominate even while preaching the Christian virtue of charity, and his writings are nothing less than the new holy scriptures for all who profess his new creed.

In order to appreciate fully the radical nature of Locke’s doctrine of toleration, it is important to have clear in our minds the orthodox Catholic doctrine that he is attempting to replace with his own new orthodoxy.  Such clarity is not easily achieved in our times because Locke and his followers, especially our own Founding Fathers, have so successfully established the orthodoxy of toleration.  Indeed, it is rare to find anyone who can formulate a rational argument against toleration, to say nothing of actually accepting that argument as true, and yet Locke’s doctrine was not readily accepted in his lifetime.  Nonetheless, the intellectual habits of the contemporary mind, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, are such that any challenge to this supposedly self-evident doctrine appears idiotic, if not perverse.  But at the risk of appearing both perverse and idiotic, let us reconsider the orthodox Catholic position.

Far from viewing the charge of intolerance as a reproach, the Catholic Church has always preached dogmatic intolerance because it follows from the very nature of the Catholic Faith.  After all, dogmatic intolerance is an essential prerogative of truth, and it is a universal and necessary consequence of the very existence of the Catholic religion, which alone is true and binding upon all men.  The Church, by the very fact that she is certain of possessing religious truth in its entirety, must in principle condemn all error in matters of faith and morals.  Thus, to reproach the Church with dogmatic intolerance is to reproach her for being, and for believing herself to be, necessarily true.  Obviously it belongs to truth by its very nature to exclude all that is contrary to it, and consequently not only is true religion intolerant, but so also is all true science.  A teacher of mathematics, for example, cannot pretend, nor should he, that the Pythagorean theorem is no truer than the claim that it is false.  Once one has grasped the Pythagorean theorem as true, his mind must close to the contrary view.  Indeed, he becomes doctrinally intolerant toward any and all contrary opinions on this matter, for the possession of truth makes him necessarily intolerant of what is false.

Now, at the same time that the Church is justly intolerant of all false teachings and of all vice, she makes a fundamental distinction between dogmatic toleration and practical toleration.  Dogmatic toleration, which the Church has always condemned, amounts to religious indifferentism because it refuses in principle to acknowledge any religion as exclusively true.  Practical toleration, on the other hand, is perfectly consistent with dogmatic intolerance, for although the Church condemns all errors in principle, she nevertheless recognizes that there are circumstances where errors may be licitly tolerated for grave reasons.  As the repository of all truth concerning faith and morals, the Catholic Church, in imitation of her divine Founder, discerns the need to tolerate human ignorance and weakness in certain circumstances for one of two reasons:  either to avoid a greater evil, or to attain or preserve a greater good.  Toleration in this sense belongs to the supernatural virtue of charity, which perfects the natural virtue of prudence.  Prudence, with one hand, as it were, firmly grasping the universal and unchanging truths known through natural reason, and with the other hand grasping the particulars of the here and now, judges it necessary at times to tolerate something evil.  While steadfastly refusing to grant such an evil the right to exist, prudence, especially when guided and perfected by charity, properly discerns the particular circumstances in which truth and goodness are better served by permitting error or vice to continue for a time.

To return for a moment to our example of the Pythagorean theorem, a good teacher of mathematics will understand how a student may not initially grasp its proof.  Certainly a prudent teacher will be patient with well-intentioned students who are struggling to learn.  Having perhaps struggled himself when he first learned the Pythagorean theorem, the teacher would be foolish indeed to expect all his students to grasp it immediately and surely.  In other words, the teacher would be tolerant of his students’ initial mistakes, and he would patiently guide and correct them.  In doing so, the teacher would be practicing what we have identified as practical toleration, for he would be allowing something evil—in this case, ignorance—to exist for a time in the hope that some good would come from it, namely, genuine knowledge of the theorem.  Under no circumstances, however, would a true teacher embrace dogmatic toleration; that is, he would never declare to his students that they have a right to be wrong about the Pythagorean theorem, which would be equivalent to saying that there is no objective truth concerning the relationship between the sides of right triangles.  Indeed, even if every student in his class failed to see the truth of the Pythagorean theorem, the teacher would nevertheless insist that it is true, though he might wonder about his skill as a teacher.  Similarly, in moral matters, it is a father’s duty to correct his child if his child does something wrong.  In certain circumstances, however, it may be imprudent for a father to make such a correction.  And we can see this same distinction operating even on the level of bodily health.  Although in principle food is essential to human life, the same food that is ordinarily productive of good health may, under certain circumstances, be poisonous for an unhealthy man.

The point of these analogies should be clear enough:  it is one thing to be tolerant of a falsehood or error as a practical matter; it is quite another to insist that falsehood is in principle as “true” as truth.  And certainly that brings us to the heart of the matter.  What sense does it make to say that the true position is that every position is equally true to itself?  Such a claim, which is the first premise of dogmatic toleration, makes practical toleration meaningless.  If we grant that no position is any truer than any other, then why should we be tolerant of those with whom we disagree?  Why would it be any more wrong to assault, imprison or even kill those with whom we disagree rather than put up with them?  On what basis could one defend toleration itself?  What would make tolerance superior to intolerance?  If we truly believe that no one position is better than any other, it would make just as much sense to preach intolerance.  Paradoxically, only those who recognize that the truth is dogmatically intolerant can exercise practical toleration in more than an accidental way.  Indeed, a teacher who knows the truth can exercise charity and patience in a meaningful way towards his students precisely because he knows there is truth; but a teacher who denied the very possibility of truth would have no reason, other than an arbitrary one, for exercising charity toward those with whom he disagreed.

By analogy, it is only the Catholic Church, which openly proclaims herself to be the one true Church established by God, that can exercise practical toleration in religious matters in other than an accidental way.  In other words, practical toleration belongs intrinsically to the Catholic Church because, in her dogmatic intolerance, she is the measure of all religious truth.  All other churches can at best practice toleration in an accidental manner; that is, the individuals that comprise those churches may or may not be tolerant of others based upon their individual dispositions and characters, for if they reject the very possibility of absolute truth in religion, they have no real reason to choose tolerance over intolerance either in the practical or dogmatic realm.

It may be argued, of course, that religious truths are less easily grasped than mathematical ones, and thus the analogy to the Pythagorean theorem is inappropriate.  There is some truth to this objection insofar as the truth of certain fundamental mathematical principles is self-evident to anyone who is capable of reasoning, whereas grace and faith are required for someone to grasp the truths taught by the Catholic Church.  But this merely suggests the need for greater charity in teaching the truths of the Faith since the teacher cannot simply present them and expect them to be grasped.  Moreover, the analogy holds insofar as one understand the very nature of truth, mathematical or religious.  If one grants that the Catholic Church is the one true Church which cannot teach error in matters of faith and morals, or if someone at least grants that such a church could in principle exist, then it follows that dogmatic toleration cannot be true since it is based upon the self-contradictory premise that there is no objective truth.  Surely someone cannot logically insist on the truth of dogmatic toleration, because dogmatic toleration rests on the assumption that there is no truth.  And yet this is Locke’s position, for he begins by asserting that toleration is the chief characteristic mark of the true church.  Locke, as we shall see, is careful to blur the distinction between practical and dogmatic toleration; and the fact that so few are aware of this fundamental distinction is a sign of how successful his enterprise has been, for almost all who call themselves Christian, including most Catholics, devoutly profess their faith in this one supreme dogma of Locke’s universal orthodox church.

(Continued in Part II…)

NOTES

[1] All quotations from Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration are from Sherman, C., ed.  John Locke’s Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration (D. Appleton-Century, 1937).

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A Critique of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (Part III)

by Derek Remus

The following is the third and final part of a critique of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration in the light of Catholic doctrine on the relation between Church and state. Part I was an exposition of Locke’s position. Part II summarized Catholic teaching on Church and state. It a slightly revised version of Derek Remus’s thesis at Thomas Aquinas College.
– The Editors

 III. The Godless State

It is now time to return to the Letter Concerning Toleration. In light of what we have said in the preceding section, let us reexamine Locke’s arguments for the thesis that the state has no care for souls and the Church has no interest in politics.

Continue reading “A Critique of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (Part III)”

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A Critique of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (Part II)

by Derek Remus

The following is the second part of a critique of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration in the light of Catholic doctrine on the relation between Church and state. Part I was an exposition of Locke’s position. It a slightly revised version of Derek Remus’s thesis at Thomas Aquinas College.
– The Editors

II. The Truth about Church and State

So much for our analysis of Locke’s position. Now we shall turn to the way things really are. It is worth pointing out that our starting-point will be very different from that of Locke. As we have seen, Locke’s doctrine concerning Church and State relations is rooted in his belief in the centrality of civil rights. The protection of civil rights is the object of the state’s jurisdiction, and the basis for religious toleration is that the practice of religion is not a threat to civil rights; in fact, the practice of religion turns out to be a civil right itself. As we shall see, Catholic doctrine concerning Church and State relations, on the other hand, is rooted in the primacy of the common good. Consequently, our defense of this doctrine will consist of the following parts: 1) an account of the nature of the common good in general and of the axiom that the common good is preferable to the private good; 2) an account of the end of the state or the political common good; 3) an account of the relation of religion to the political common good apart from revelation; 4) an account of the end of the Church established by Christ or the common good of eternal beatitude; 5) an account of how the political common good and the common good of eternal beatitude are related to each other.

Continue reading “A Critique of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (Part II)”