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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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Josias Podcast Episode XLI: Education

Fr. Jon Tveit and Amanda are joined by Deacon Harrison Garlick and Chris Ruckdeschel for a discussion on education, avoiding the pitfalls of the “Great Books,” and recovering the classical liberal arts.

Bibliography

Header Image: Francesco Pesellino, Seven Liberal Arts (c. 1450)

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.

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

William E. Carroll 

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

Continue reading “‘Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit’ and ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’: Science and Creation”

TRACT IV or The Tome of Pope Gelasius on the Bond of Anathema

By Pope St. Gelasius I

Translator’s preface: Pope St. Gelasius I (r. 492-496) will be known to Josias readers as the author of the famous letter Famuli vestrae pietatis, more commonly known by its famous phrase Duo sunt. It is the paradigmatic statement of “Gelasian dyarchy.”

Pope Gelasius here addresses the case of Peter III “The Hoarse,” patriarch of Alexandria (477-489), a Monophysite and hence an opponent of the Council of Chalcedon (451). He had been excommunicated by Pope Felix III in 484 for accepting the heretical Henoticon, or reunion formula, of the Emperor Zeno. This episode, called the Acacian Schism after the Monophysite patriarch Acacius of Constantinople who held communion with Peter the Hoarse, is described more fully in our preface to Famuli vestrae pietatis

In this Tome, meanwhile, Pope Gelasius insists that that imperial authorities have no power to absolve Peter from his excommunication, which is reserved to the Apostolic See. This occasions a more general discussion of the distinction between ecclesiastical and temporal authority.

Continue reading “TRACT IV or The Tome of Pope Gelasius on the Bond of Anathema”

Is Integralism Conservative?

1 Introduction

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

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

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

2 Integralism and Teleology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Nature, Grace, and the Two Powers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 Teleology and Tradition

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

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

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

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

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

5 Two Objections

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

5.1 The Spaemannian Objection

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.2 The Burkean Objection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[vii] De Regno, I.15.

[viii] De Monarchia, III.XVI.9.

[ix] Sardá, “Integralists?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[xvii] Regula Benedicti, 64:11-13.