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Book Review: Invisible Doctrine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLVI: Memento mori

In this month of November, dedicated to the holy souls in Purgatory, our hosts, Amanda and Fr. Jon Tveit, are joined by Fr. Michael Barone, for a conversation about death, the importance of the funeral rite, cremation, and how today’s culture seeks to keep distant our own mortality. Fr. Barone serves as a Cemetery Chaplain in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey.

Bibliography:

Header Image: Henryk Pillati, Funeral of the Five Victims of the Manifestation of 1861 in Warsaw (1865)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLV: Catholic Land Movement

Our Editor, Fr. Jon Tveit, is joined on the podcast by Michael Thomas—the motivating force behind the new Catholic Land Movement—for a conversation about the Catholic Land Movement’s inspiration, purpose, and how puts that into practice.

You may follow Michael Thomas on (the website formerly known as) Twitter, @MichaelTG09.

Bibliography

Header Image: Eastman Johnson, Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket (1876)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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The Social Kingship of Christ and the Catholic State

By Fr. Louis-Marie de Blignières

Translator’s note: Every year at Pentecost, several thousand pilgrims walk the sixty miles from Paris to Chartres over two and a half days on the Our Lady of Christendom pilgrimage. These pilgrims are motivated by their love for the traditional Mass, which is celebrated in solemn pontifical form in the cathedral at the end of the journey. That Mass was the inspiration for and expression of an integrally Catholic society, one suffused with the faith and ruled by Christ the King. The Chartres pèlerins believe that such a society is possible again. 

The following article is from the livret du pèlerin, the official booklet given to the pilgrims, which contains various prayers, songs, and instructive pieces on what an integral Christian life entails. This translation from the French appears with the permission of the author.

Is the right to religious liberty affirmed by the declaration Dignitatis humanae of Vatican II opposed to the social kingdom of Christ over human societies? Some theologians and even bishops say so, and a good number of the faithful and of pastors seem not to have clear ideas on the subject.

Religious Liberty at Vatican II

The text of the declaration itself, like the explanations of the subsequent Magisterium, is opposed to this hermeneutic of rupture. In paragraph 1 of Dignitatis humanae, it is said that the doctrine put forward “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” The relator of the document, Bp. De Smedt, during the presentation of the final schema, had himself specified that it dealt with “the duties of the public power toward the true religion.”1

The Catechism of the Catholic Church and Religious Liberty

The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats religious liberty in a section titled “The social duty of religion and the right to religious freedom.”2 Here it specifies that “the duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially.” It asks Christians to “infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in which they live.” It affirms “the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies.” The Catechism explicitly refers to the great encyclicals Quanta cura of Pius IX, Immortale Dei of Leo XIII, and Quas primas of Pius XI. It specifies that the right to religious liberty “is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error;” in referring to Pius IX, that it “can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a ‘public order’ conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner;” and finally, that its limits must be determined “according to the requirements of the common good.”

The Teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI

The encyclical Veritatis splendor of John Paul II addresses in paragraph 34 the relativist interpretations of Dignitatis humanae that, unfortunately, have largely prevailed. A great traditionalist controversialist was able to write that “this corrected interpretation, by contrast with the so-called ‘spirit of the council’” is “explicitly placed in the perspective and the context of Gregory XVI (Mirari vos), Pius IX (Quanta cura) and Leo XIII (Libertas). The fifty-eight passages of Vatican II, those that are cited and interpreted by the encyclical, no longer cause any dubium.”3

Benedict XVI, in paragraph 55 of the encyclical Caritas in veritate affirms: “Religious freedom does not mean religious indifferentism, nor does it imply that all religions are equal. Discernment is needed regarding the contribution of cultures and religions, especially on the part of those who wield political power, if the social community is to be built up in a spirit of respect for the common good. Such discernment has to be based on the criterion of charity and truth.”

The Social Kingship of Christ: The Temporal Influence of the Incarnation

Faith and reason could expect that the Incarnation of the Son of God would have consequences even in the social order. It is impossible to see how a Catholic could dismiss this temporal influence of the central mystery of Christianity. Men have a social dimension that cannot escape the influence of Christ. Dignitatis humanae tells us that “among the things that concern the good of the Church and indeed the welfare of society here on earth…this certainly is preeminent, namely, that the Church should enjoy that full measure of freedom which her care for the salvation of men requires.”4 Elsewhere, the council and the Catechism ask us to “seek recognition of Sundays and the Church’s holy days as legal holidays”5 and to work so that “public authority should regard it as a sacred duty to recognize, protect and promote their authentic nature, to shield public morality and to favor the prosperity of home life.”6

Is to act in this way not to work for the realization of Christendom? If this work is preceded and accompanied, as it should be, by evangelization, does it not approach—as far as political prudence permits—a “Catholic nation?”

The true notion of religious liberty, affirmed by Dignitatis humanae and specified by the Magisterium after the council, is in no way opposed to the social kingship of Christ.

The Social Kingship of Christ and the Catholic State

Furthermore, we ought not to limit the notion of Christendom exclusively to the form of “the Catholic State.” The historical realization of Christendom clearly presupposes a society in which Catholics are the great majority. We should add also that, if the divine law requires the principle of a social and communal recognition of the true religion, it does not require a particular expression of this recognition (for example in written constitutions or concordats). In a society that does not enjoy a unity of belief in the Catholic faith, the divine law requires that Christians (and men of good will) strive that civil society honor the natural law and that it give to the Church the ability to preach the supernatural order, with all the indirect benefits that that involves.

This does not, therefore, imply a “nostalgia for a Catholic State,” but it does imply that one cannot be satisfied with a “neutral, passive and unengaged” State, for the State could not be neutral as regards the natural law nor indifferent as regards the religious dimension of the men who live in the polity of which it has charge. John Paul II reminded European parliamentarians of the necessity and the benefit of “the acceptance of principles and norms of behaviour which human reason attains or which flow from the authority of the Word of God, which man, individually or collectively, cannot bend to his pleasure or to the fancy of fashion or changing interests.”7 Twenty years later, Benedict XVI affirmed: “Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent.”8

Christ the King and Evangelization

There is nothing here that inhibits evangelization. On the contrary, this effort of the prudent Christianization of structures is an important form of Christian charity. “Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development.”9

Fr. Louis-Marie de Blignières is the founder of the Fraternity of St. Vincent Ferrer in France.

  1. Acta Synodalia IV, VI, 719.  ↩︎
  2. CCC 2104-2109. ↩︎
  3. Jean Madiran, Itinéraires, December 1993. ↩︎
  4. Dignitatis humanae, 13. ↩︎
  5. CCC 2188. ↩︎
  6. Gaudium et spes, 52. ↩︎
  7. Speech to the European Parliament, October 11, 1988, §7. ↩︎
  8. Caritas in veritate, 56. ↩︎
  9. John Paul II, Mass of Inauguration, October 22, 1978, §5. ↩︎
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Samuel Johnson: Integralist?

By Michael J. Ortiz 

I. 

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLIV: St. Thomas More

For the feast of Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher, Fr. Jon Tveit and Amanda are joined on the podcast by James Monti, author and historian, for a conversation on the life and example of St. Thomas More.

Bibliography

Header Image: A follower of Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1600s)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLIII: St. John Henry Newman on the Blessed Virgin Mary

St John Henry Newman

As May—the month of Our Lady—comes to a close, Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp Magazine, joins Amanda and Fr. Jon Tveit for a conversation on St. John Henry Newman and Our Blessed Mother.

Bibliography

Header Image: Sir John Everett Millais, John Henry Newman (1881)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLII: The Virtue of Religion

Urban Hannon returns to the podcast to join Fr. Jon Tveit and Amanda for a conversation about the virtue of religion—what it is theologically, and what it demands practically of us and our society.

Bibliography

Header Image: Jules Breton, The Blessing of the wheat in Artois (1857)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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Bishop Barron and D.C. Schindler on ‘Integralism’

Last week, Bishop Robert Barron interviewed D.C. Schindler and integralism was among their topics of conversation. Their discussion of our approach to Catholic political philosophy was revealing in two important ways.

First of all, their interview revealed how much these two formidable thinkers have misunderstood the very terms of the debate. Bishop Barron introduced the topic by noting some might think Schindler “sounds like an integralist,” like someone who “just wants to create one great theocratic society.” These two things are not the same; integralism does not imply theocracy, or the rule of secular society by clerics. While the Vatican City State exists as a theocracy, as did the Papal States when they existed, the hope of the integralist is not to extend such rule throughout the world. In 2024 it should be clearer than it is to some that theocracy is not the only illiberal option for structuring society. Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State, for instance, helps to expand our vision to see that a strict separation of Church and State on the one hand and theocracy on the other are not our only options. The France of Saint Louis which it depicts is an integralist society, not a theocratic one.

Dr. Schindler tries to find a via media between liberalism and integralism. With the integralist, he recognizes that the Church has an authority and a voice in politics and in the structuring of secular society, which liberalism denies. He admits overlap with integralist thinking but finds in it a fundamental problem. Schindler’s version of integralism is one in which the secular society provides “partial human goods,” to be supplemented by the Church’s provision of supernatural goods. He rejects this because as he sees it, spiritual goods are essentially human goods. They are not superadded to the goods which secular society aims to provide. 

At the heart of Schindler’s objection seems to be his view of the interaction between nature and grace, a view he shares with Henri de Lubac and other 20th-century theologians. Dr. Schindler believes that we humans have even on the natural level a desire for the supernatural, a desire for what only grace provides. This subsumes the realm of the natural into that of the supernatural, and so for Schindler it does not make sense when the integralist distinguishes these two realms in terms of different ends. For him, there is only one end of human life, which is our union with God in glory. 

The integralist follows the teaching of Pope Leo XIII on the natural and supernatural societies in Immortale Dei. As the document makes clear, both the society of the Church and the society of the State are given us by God Himself, both are necessary. Leo also teaches that both of these societies are perfect, that is to say, each of them possesses its proper end together with all the means necessary to reach that end. One cannot be subsumed by the other. The Holy Father wrote of the Church: 

This society is made up of men, just as civil society is, and yet is supernatural and spiritual, on account of the end for which it was founded, and of the means by which it aims at attaining that end. Hence, it is distinguished and differs from civil society, and, what is of highest moment, it is a society chartered as of right divine, perfect in its nature and in its title, to possess in itself and by itself, through the will and loving kindness of its Founder, all needful provision for its maintenance and action. And just as the end at which the Church aims is by far the noblest of ends, so is its authority the most exalted of all authority, nor can it be looked upon as inferior to the civil power, or in any manner dependent upon it.1 

Each of these societies, Church and State, has its proper end and all the means necessary to achieve it, the supernatural society of the Church having a supernatural end, the natural society of the State a natural one. For this reason, neither society can be seen to be ordered to merely a partial human good or any set thereof. Each is ordered to human happiness, which is the complete human good. But there exists a twofold end of happiness for man, who exists as it were in two realms, natural and supernatural, to which these societies correspond. 

While our supernatural end is our ultimate end, toward which our temporal end must therefore be ordered, the two cannot be collapsed into one another:

The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things. Each in its kind is supreme, each has fixed limits within which it is contained, limits which are defined by the nature and special object of the province of each, so that there is, we may say, an orbit traced out within which the action of each is brought into play by its own native right.2

The State “has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life,” the Church “the everlasting joys of heaven.”3 This “is the Christian organization of civil society…confirmed by natural reason itself.”4 There ought to exist between these two societies not identity, but harmony:

The Church no less than the State itself is a society perfect in its own nature and its own right, and that those who exercise sovereignty ought not so to act as to compel the Church to become subservient or subject to them, or to hamper her liberty in the management of her own affairs, or to despoil her in any way of the other privileges conferred upon her by Jesus Christ. In matters, however, of mixed jurisdiction, it is in the highest degree consonant to nature, as also to the designs of God, that so far from one of the powers separating itself from the other, or still less coming into conflict with it, complete harmony, such as is suited to the end for which each power exists, should be preserved between them.5

This harmony brings the two necessary societies into quite close cooperation with one another, so close in fact that Leo XIII speaks of their relationship as that of the soul to the body. Not in such a way that one is subsumed by the other, but that both are fully active in their own realms.

Rather than by inventing sets of human goods, we have always defined integralism in terms of the ends of human life and the perfect societies which are necessary in achieving those ends. We have had such a clear definition of integralism for many years in the Three Sentences:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

This subordination is not one of domination (and therefore theocracy). It is one of cooperation. It is one in which ideally the membership of a secular society and the membership of the Church in that society are coextensive. In such a circumstance, as we see in St. Louis’s France, while the civil leaders have their requisite autonomy, they are nonetheless subject to the munera docendi, regendi, and sanctificandi exercised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The relationship is not one in which the clergy dictate to the civil leaders, but one in which the clergy help to inform them, as the soul in-forms the body. 

Dr. Schindler wants the Church to “allow the integrity of the political sphere” rather than dictating to it. The Church, he says, has no place in making laws for the society of the State, but helps to inform what law ought to be in the secular realm. We do not disagree in the least. The relationship of the ecclesiastical to the secular does not have to be one of power and domination, which again brings us into theocratic territory. Yet the Magisterium and the Code of Canon Law are often quite clear in indicating what the civil law must provide, without dictating it.6 They elaborate the requirements of justice and the rights of Christians, and what the State must legislate in order not to run afoul of such requirements.

Integralism is political Catholicism, it is the faith lived out in the world. Our definition of integralism is purposely broad. As long as one gets right the relationship of the two ends of these two necessary societies, one is an integralist, which is to say, one has the only possible Catholic position.7 But below this level of general principle, integralism may work itself out in practice in an infinite number of ways, because of the infinite variety of practical circumstances. 

There is no science of the infinite.8 It has always been our aim to define the principles, and to let Catholics figure out the practical applications of those principles, much as the Church always does in her social teaching. We may differ on our conclusions at the practical level, but two Catholics in good faith and in good conscience can always differ about such prudential matters. To my mind, if you accept the Three Sentences, you have a place beneath the integralist umbrella. 

It is a wonderful thing that we have many Catholics working to bring about a post-liberal society, an integrally Catholic one. But the theory of any one integralist cannot be equated with integralism as a whole, any more than a particular economic theory espoused by a Catholic could be equated with Catholic economics. 

Second of all, the interview between Bishop Barron and D.C. Schindler reveals the enduring importance of integralism. As His Excellency himself put it, Catholic integralism is “a rising movement today.” That to so many Catholics, liberal and illiberal alike, integralism continues to be such a bête noire, and that so many need to justify their own positions in contraposition to ours (or some imagined version of it), shows that integralism remains a touchstone in this conversation. We thank His Excellency and Dr. Schindler for giving us a place at their table, but ask that they let us speak for ourselves.

  1. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 10. ↩︎
  2. Ibid., 13. ↩︎
  3. Ibid., 14. ↩︎
  4. Ibid., 16. ↩︎
  5. Ibid., 35. ↩︎
  6. Take, for example, c. 793 §2 on the State’s duty to help parents provide a true, integrally Catholic education for their children: “Parentibus ius est etiam iis fruendi auxiliis a societate civili praestandis, quibus in catholica educatione filiorum procuranda indigeant.” ↩︎
  7. Cf. John Joy, “The Teaching of Quanta cura is Definitive: A Reply to Robert T. Miller.” ↩︎
  8. Cf. Boethius, De arithmetica, Book I, ch. 1. ↩︎
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Some Answers from the Integralists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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