–The Editors
By John G. Brungardt
The purpose of this post is to recall the contours of the debate about Catholic integralism that have taken place in the “Internet Republic of Letters” over the past several years. The post is part genealogy, part introductory survey, and part reflection on the warp and woof of a discussion that is now intertwined with others in the public square. I do not aim to break new ground, but I do hope to provide a reflective tour for newcomers or recollection to familiars of the debate’s high and low points. Learn or take from it what you will.
Why consider “Catholic integralism” at all? One reason is to clarify the difference between understanding the principles of political philosophy and Catholic social teaching versus a discussion of practical statecraft and “soulcraft,” the realm of particular actions and practical decisions. The question of integralism framed solely on the terms of the latter’s demands easily results in conclusions such as Rod Dreher’s, that “integralism is a dead end,” or George Weigel’s, that integralism is a “game intellectuals play,” or, worse, the verdict that it is “an internet aesthetic of mostly young men alienated from the public life and consumed with the libido dominandi.” Integralism’s proponents have also been accused of the opposite mistake, namely, of speculative errors concerning the difference between power and authority, or of lacking a speculative vision altogether, or, some wonder, misrepresenting Catholic social doctrine. Consequently, achieving some measure of clarity about the proper register of the question—is it speculative, practical, pragmatic, rhetorical?—and the corresponding answer is desirable.
Another, deeper reason is that, since the question of Catholic integralism concerns properly understanding first principles (nature and grace, faith and reason, the hierarchy of common goods) and acting with regard to those principles in concrete affairs that must take into account not just days or years but decades and centuries, it makes no little difference what the true answer is, even if that answer must come with many parts and qualifications. For human life must be ordered by that eternal truth in which the vicissitudes of human history participate. The task of the examined life is that each one in each generation know the measure of that standard, insofar as he or she can know it. To do so, we must begin dialectically, by seeing the questions and the arguments clearly.
So, what ought we to think of the question of Catholic integralism? Does it propose a deep truth or a dangerous falsehood?
Some Basics
First, what is integralism? The now most-referenced definition is the “Three Sentences” definition from The Josias, which one finds referred to numerous times in the essays listed below:
Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding 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.
The key to understanding “the two powers” in this definition is to understand what “spiritual” means in the definition. In “A clarification on integralism,” the philosopher Edward Feser notes that the question ought not to be whether one is for or against integralism, but for or against what sort of integralism. The natural law mean standard, Feser argues (and it is bound to sound like an extreme to many), is that “a generic theism should be affirmed by the state and that government policy should be consistent with the principles of natural law.” However,
the debate over Catholic integralism has to do with whether specifically Catholic doctrines, which concern our supernatural end and are matters of revealed theology, should have an influence on public policy. The state should favor theism, but must it favor the Church?
Immediately, one sees why the integralism question is, by the vast majority of people, taken to be too irrelevant, if not too dangerous, a topic to take seriously. Haven’t the issues of “Church and State” been decided by the modern political synthesis of the post-Enlightenment? Didn’t Vatican II decisively condemn 19th-century notions of religious liberty?
To explain the “sort” of integralism one is asking about, Feser proposes three options: soft, moderate, or hard integralism. Hard integralism maintains that “it is always best for the Church to try to implement integralism as far as she can,” while soft integralism holds that “though in theory the state may and ideally should favor the Church, in practice this is extremely unlikely ever to work out very well.” Naturally, moderate integralism
falls in between these extremes. Whereas the soft integralist thinks it is never or almost never a good idea to try practically to implement integralism, and the hard integralist thinks it is always or almost always a good idea to do so, the moderate integralist thinks that there is no “one size fits all” solution and that we have to go case by case. In some historical and cultural contexts, getting the state to favor the Church might be the best policy, in others it might be a very bad policy, and in yet others it might not be clear what the best approach is. We shouldn’t assume a priori that any of these answers is the right one, but should treat the question as prudential and highly contingent on circumstances.
Nor does one have far to look to find an example of a moderate integralist of no small stature. In The State in Catholic Thought (1945; reviewed here by Leo Strauss), Heinrich Rommen writes:
A union between Church and state, or better a cooperation in concord and unity of both, would mean mutual respect for the independence of each in suo ordine. … It needs no proof that such a union is possible as a practical policy only where the people of the state are in great majority Catholics. Yet under this condition the union is actually no problem at all, but simply a truism. Therefore it would be wrong to say that such a union between state and Church is a necessity or should always take place. The condemned thesis 55 of the Syllabus of 1864 (the Church should be separated from the state, and the state from the Church) does not imply this. The true thesis would demand that the circumstances be considered. St. Robert Bellarmine expressly states that state and Church may live in union or in separation, because fundamentally each can exist without the other. (pp. 595–96)
Still, for the contemporary reader, this simply reinforces the previous concerns about theoretical and political relics. It also clearly raises profound metaphysical questions about assumptions Rommen is making. Isn’t it long past the time when such ideas, or such discussion, were practical, let alone thought to be true or relevant? Don’t proposals like Rommen’s involve, somewhere in the footnotes, writs of Inquisition and coercion of religious belief?
Kevin Vallier says that the knee-jerk reaction argument against integralism usually goes something like that:
If integralism is true, religious coercion is not wrong.
But religious coercion is wrong.
Therefore, integralism is false.
However, Vallier adds:
I don’t think integralism can be so easily dismissed. The reason is that integralism has a certain elegance and simplicity and even obviousness. It tells us that states should help people achieve their ultimate good. Besides feasibility worries, why wouldn’t this be the best thing for the state to do? Are non-integralists really asking the state to do less than the best? Doesn’t that just sound crazy when we state it openly?
And indeed, many non-integralists defend the current model of the now centuries-old, minimalist, secular, and in principle non-confessional status of liberal political order. In the academic jargon, “the public good” is a “thin” one, not a “thick” one. Thus, the question becomes manifold: one of the good, the political good, and the ideal political regime simply speaking versus the best one achievable practically speaking (Politics, 1288b37). So Vallier concludes, “What anti-integralists need is a satisfying explanation as to why integralism is axiologically false. The anti-integralists need to explain why integralism has the wrong conceptions of value, reasons, and practical rationality.”
Some Origins
To gain only some of the historical sensibility required to appreciate how far back into the formation of modernity and the disintegration of Catholic Europe this question takes one, read this essay at First Things on the 1782 Decree on the Dissolution of Religious Orders in Austria. That is, the deep background to the question of Catholic integralism in the face of modern nation-state democracies began with earnest during the long 19th century, when the issue of the compatibility of the Catholic faith and (then) modern liberalism was raised.
For instance, a positive answer to the compatibility question was put forward in L’Avenir by Montalembert, Lamennais, and Lacordaire. This led to a wide-ranging and controverted debate and even outright conflict that—when combined with many other strains of 19th-century secular thought—culminated in Pope Pius IX’s Quanta Cura (1864) and its appended Syllabus of Errors, mentioned above by Rommen. This 19th- and early 20th-century backdrop also has many other parts, some now long-forgotten by most (e.g., Ralliement and Action française, among others).
Why, then, is Catholic integralism a topic of discussion now? That answer also has many parts. A first part is the work of Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., among the founders of The Josias, the “online manual” of Catholic integralism. Rod Dreher once called Fr. Waldstein “perhaps the foremost advocate of [integralism] today.” For the roots of Catholic integralism stretching back even further than 19th-century Catholic politics, one must read Waldstein’s essay “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” which he described as his “fullest account to date of what I call ‘integralism’.” In the (perhaps) near future, that account will be surpassed by a book-length treatment.
But there is another, non-integralist side to this origin-story that must be noticed, what Deneen in a 2014 American Conservative article called “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching.” Deneen outlined two Catholic responses to political liberalism in the 20th century. The first is an older tradition of Catholic compatibilism—also of late called Catholic fusionism—which proposes that “there is no fundamental contradiction between liberal democracy and Catholicism” or (from the fusionist angle) that “the principles of American conservatism and those of Catholic social teaching might be seamlessly and unproblematically combined.”
The second is a newer “radical” camp (in which Deneen included himself):
The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefiting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism.
Deneen pointed out that this group included (and still includes) prominent thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre and David L. Schindler. As for his own questioning of Catholic-liberal compatibilism—of course, this was before his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed—Deneen pointed to his essay written two years earlier in First Things, “Unsustainable Liberalism.” That essay also sparked a series of debates, including a lengthy one at Public Discourse.
These radical, “illiberal Catholics” (a charge mentioned in Deneen’s 2012 American Conservative piece, and answered, among many others, by Waldstein here) now tends to go by the name “post-liberal Catholicism,” a moniker that became popular after the so-called “Franco-Persian Wars,” the debates between David French and Sohrab Ahmari over the possibility, plausibility, and desirability of “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
The debate over the compatibility of Catholicism and liberalism, then, is a broad question raised both back in the 19th century (about the old liberalism) and now again in the 21st (about a new liberalism, where “liberalism” often signifies a confusing mélange of Locke, Rousseau, post-progressive era thinking, and soixante-huitard leftism). And all this despite its being given an apparently conclusive answer during the 20th century. But the broader, renewed question of compatibility and the new Catholic integralism’s proposed solution did not remain separate.
The Debates, A Brief History
One should know that neither is the question of the coherence or “sustainability” of liberalism new to contemporary debate. Take Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, for instance:
The liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself. This is the great adventure it has undertaken for freedom’s sake. As a liberal state it can only endure if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes some regulation from the interior, both from a moral substance of the individuals and a certain homogeneity of society at large. On the other hand, it cannot by itself procure these interior forces of regulation, that is not with its own means such as legal compulsion and authoritative decree. Doing so, it would surrender its liberal character and fall back, in a secular manner, into the claim of totality it once led the way out of, back then in the confessional civil wars.
That is, Böckenförde’s dilemma or paradox is that liberalism, if it were to attempt to guarantee its institutional, cultural, educational, and moral prerequisites, would have to be illiberal, give up its claims of substantive neutrality concerning the good life for human beings, and “fall back … into the claim of totality.” Besides Böckenförde’s paradox of liberalism, one could consider the debate between perfectionist liberalism and political liberalism. The question of the totalizing claims of the complete human end, then, is inescapably the foundational question of political order—liberalism of any sort cannot claim to be anything more than an answer.
The question of Catholic integralism and the broader, more recent debate about sustainability of liberalism did finally meet. For instance, the Closing Colloquy of the Center for Ethics and Culture’s 2018 Fall Conference at Notre Dame featured a discussion between Patrick Deneen, Phillip Muñoz, Gladden Pappin, and Adrian Vermeule (discussed by Rod Dreher here and here). “Liberalism vs. Integralism” was also the theme of a conference held earlier in 2018 at Harvard, hosted by the Thomistic Institute.
As one can easily see by perusing the conferences and their reports, the substance of the discussions were animated not merely by the debates mentioned above. Some of the new discussion material was from the post-liberalism element—especially Deneen’s recently published Why Liberalism Failed—other was provided by Adrian Vermeule’s integralist critique of Deneen’s solution.
Now, these debates on prominent university campuses over the nexus between the question of liberalism generally and the question of Catholic integralism specifically had already cropped up before these 2018 conferences in various loca of the “Internet Republic of Letters.”
First Things
First Things during 2017 published reviews of Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy (by Vermeule, titled “Liturgy of Liberalism”) and Willard Jones’s Before Church and State (by Waldstein, under the title “An Integralist Manifesto”). It published essays on a strategy for Christians living in liberal nations (again by Vermeule), as well as an interview about “The Possibility of a Catholic Social Order” and a call for a “humane integralism.” The tension continued to be that between the concern for discerning the truth of Catholic principles and the practicality of how to apply them in the concrete historical order, between nostalgia for the achievements of past cultures and strategizing in the now with little-to-no societal room to maneuver.
The question of principle and policy provides the occasion to note Thomas Pink’s earlier, 2012 First Things essay, “Conscience and Coercion.” In it, Pink argues that Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae changed the Church’s policy, not her principles or doctrine, in regard to the religious liberty of individuals, an essay that generated not a few reader responses (wherein one also finds letters about Deneen’s “Unsustainable Liberalism,” published in the same issue as Pink’s essay). The issue of the coercion of believers—that compelle intrare (Luke 14:23) so heatedly debated in the early modern era—is a subset of Pink’s debate with Fr. Martin Rhonheimer in issues of Nova et Vetera, a debate carried on at the 2015 Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference.
The broader issue yet, then, is the same question of Catholic integralism. Pink’s position is decidedly in the minority. The majority view is clear from the vehement and profuse reaction to First Thing’s early 2018 article by Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., “Non Possumus,” a review of the 2017 publication of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara.
As an aside, the “new” Mortara affair was impactful enough to be able to function as the opening framework of Schwartzman and Wilson’s 2019 law review article “The Unreasonableness of Catholic Integralism” (which also has a useful bibliography in its footnotes, apart from citing most of the above sources). However, as Kevin Vallier pointed out about the article’s judgment of Catholic integralism generally, its definitional approach is Rawlsian, and thus conceptually incommensurable with integralism’s premises about the human person and what it means to be reasonable. At issue is not a technical debate, but a deeper metaphysical discussion that answers first-principle level questions about what it means for individuals to act and how they ought to act.
After early 2018, integralism did not make much of an appearance in First Things, at least until the return of talk of “the common good and the Highest Good,” the start of the debate turned speaking tour between Sohrab Ahmari and David French. Ahmari’s essay, “the article that launched a 1,000 think pieces,” did not touch upon integralism or the coercion of the baptized per se. Nonetheless, that debate over the true nature and coherence of liberalism and the America’s political and providential constitution had the long-range effect of continuing to join the two debates. More to come below.
Public Discourse
Nor did the debate over integralism escape the editorial eyes or professorial pens at Public Discourse. In May 2018, citing as occasions the essays from First Things and the Harvard conference noted above, as well as various discussions of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Joseph Trabbic defended the continued, doctrinally normative character of a Catholic confessional state as the ideal political arrangement. (Later in 2019 Trabbic wrote a three-part series for Catholic World Report, “Thomism and Political Liberalism,” to illustrate how “there are some pretty stark and irreconcilable differences between Thomas’s political theory and liberal political theory”; see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)
Trabbic’s essay received a fierce response from Robert Miller, who called Trabbic’s thesis “almost the exact opposite of the truth,” and argued that “integralism is contrary to Catholic doctrine.” Miller’s essay prompted responses, among others, by John P. Joy (at another venue) and by Thomas Pink at Public Discourse in August 2018. Miller, along with Lawrence King, responded to Pink and Joy in early 2019. As one might expect, these debates hinge heavily on how to properly understand Vatican II’s declaration Dignitatis Humanae. A December 2019 article by Matthew Shadle continued the response to Pink, presenting further nuances of the debate over evolution, rupture, or development of religious freedom doctrine in Dignitatis.
But Public Discourse did not merely present debates over fine points of Catholic doctrine; the scope was broadened. The May 2019 essay by Korey D. Maas, “The Coming Anti-Catholicism,” after reviewing and citing nearly all of the above genealogy, concluded that “insofar as prominent and influential Catholics insist that Catholicism is fundamentally incompatible with the liberal tradition, liberals will feel increasingly justified in reaching the same conclusion.” That is, apart from the proper grasp of theological principles, a certain “Realtheologie” looms large in integralism’s and Catholic post-liberalism’s cultural scene. We could, argued Gerard Bradley, learn certain lessons from integralists’s “thought experiments” by taking them as accurate diagnoses of current problems, but that is all. Yet as recently as this May, in “Integralism, Political Philosophy, and the State,” Thomas Pink has replied to both Bradley and Shadle that integralism’s political philosophy is more realistic in its understanding of how states—confessional or secular—actually function.
Church Life Journal
Caleb Bernacchio’s “The Anti-Integralist Alasdair MacIntyre,” published by Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal in early 2018, argued to separate MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism from the integralist position, saying that given MacIntyre’s critique of modernity “there is no need to pursue the impossible and nostalgic goal of returning to an integralist state.” A positive exposition by Waldstein, “What Is Integralism Today?”, was published later in 2018 (coinciding with the above-mentioned Center for Ethics and Culture colloquy at Notre Dame).
Waldstein’s answer to the quid sit question led to a brief debate at CLJ, between Waldstein and Timothy Troutner, over the true nature of integralism. In his “The Integralist Mirroring of Liberal Ideals,” Troutner argued that “criticizing integralism need not imply a defense of liberalism,” and that “integralism flourishes by posing this false dichotomy, by defining itself as the theologically orthodox antithesis to a heretical liberalism.” Waldstein’s response, “Integralism and the Logic of the Cross,” argued that
Troutner’s conclusion that integralism must be rejected by Catholics is, however, false. The arguments that he uses to support it are based on exaggerations and misunderstandings. He tries to distinguish his own understanding of freedom and equality from the liberal understanding. But he does not distinguish them enough. For Troutner, as for liberals, freedom and equality are opposed to hierarchy and obedience. Whereas, in reality, true freedom and true equality depend on hierarchy and on obedience.
Other Criticisms and Defenses
Apart from the above journals, various other criticisms, defenses, and interweaving themes could be mentioned, bringing this review from 2019 to the present. Recent debates over “common good constitutionalism” and the continued rethinking of American conservatism or European populism and nationalism also bear upon this question, to varying degrees of remove. Some of these are listed below, and I’ll not discuss them in detail.
I will, however, note two of the most substantive in passing: Park MacDougald’s thorough review of the recent history of issue, “A Catholic Debate over Liberalism,” published in City Journal, and Michael Hanby’s “For and Against Integralism,” published in First Things in March. MacDougald’s history also illustrates what I’ve sketched here, namely, the joining of general discussions about the sustainability of modern political liberalism. Hanby’s essay and the reader replies show that the debate about Catholic integralism is, ultimately, about the metaphysical foundations of politics and their relevance for political practicalities and deep moral and cultural conversion.
Perennial Questions about the Highest Good
It is patent from reviewing the topics, reasons, and interlocutors in the above debates that the question of Catholic integralism today does not turn upon irrelevant or insubstantial issues, but rather concerns perennial and foundational principles of political order. It is rash to think otherwise when the question is being discussed at the highest levels and in the profoundest terms. If one presses beyond the internet-based essays and into the recent books cited or past thinkers relied upon, it is impossible not to see that the stakes for getting the answer to the question of Catholic integralism right are immense.
This is because the debate has made compelling and even pressing the reconsideration of questions that many had long considered culturally settled. What is the proper understanding—if a rational defense of its existence is to be had—of a common good beyond the political order? What vision of human perfection ultimately sets us free in the profoundest sense? What is the proper relationship between the Church and the modern nation-state? Is there a clear meaning of “liberalism” that proposes the true account of that relationship, or must liberalism cede to the “new Catholic integralist” account? If so, what is the true nature of religious liberty?
And it is not as if clear—albeit controversial and in some cases unconvincing—answers to such questions have failed to be given in the various essays cited throughout this review. And achieving such sound speculative vision is a sine qua non to advance, for, as Fr. Thomas Joseph White said in his closing “exhortation” at the Harvard conference mentioned previously: “Practical truths are grounded more fundamentally in speculative or theoretical visions. And vision always wins out in the end.”
Concluding Thought
I’d like to end by quoting a passage from the introduction to Rommen’s The State in Catholic Thought. There, Rommen defends the idea that a perennial political philosophy exists, and that, in the providential contingencies of history, it has been taken up into the Catholic Church. It is a “Catholic political philosophy” in a contextual and not an essential sense, that is, “the adjective ‘Catholic’ here means, so to speak, the place where this philosophy grew and found its home. It does not imply that this political philosophy is based on theology or revelation. It is based on natural reason and on rational principles” (p. v).
As a consequence, the unfolding application of its principles, like the apparent fluctuations of the content of natural law through history, can be traced to a similar matrix of causes. The “ebb and flow” of human affairs and the human limitations of circumstance and character to the realizing of higher goods in political community causes an apparent but not real variation of the truth:
Some critics forget that this is an everlasting process which is repeated again and again in all fields of intellectual life. Thus the new democratic and social ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be fully received only after a process of toilsome clearance in embittered discussions, as, for instance, in the controversies between Lacordaire, Montalembert, and the Catholic liberals in France, and the adherents of monarchy. These internal disputes do not destroy the unity of polar tension. No new philosophy is founded; only new problems are put before the philosophia perennis, that is by no means a static and brittle system. To be sure, Catholic political philosophy as a part of this philosophia perennis may be called conservative. It does not easily give up what has proved its value in long experience for alluring but unproved new ideas. But, on the other hand, it is not compelled to mummify theories and opinions in a stubborn conservatism that is closed to the perpetually changing life of God’s creation. What may be called linear thinking goes straight out from one pole or from one idea of the cosmos of ideas, which every true philosophy is. This idea, cut off from its interrelations and interdependencies with the cosmos, it then fanatically thinks to a finish. Thus it becomes radical individualism or socialism or totalitarianism or anarchism. This linear thinking, so characteristic of the modem mind and its countless isms, is a stranger to Catholic political philosophy. For Catholic political philosophy is ‘spheric’ thinking. Of the interdependencies and the mutual relations between ideas as united in a spheric cosmos and the concordance of these, spheric thinking must be always aware. This explains the unity in diversity, the conservative perseverance in principles and the flexible progressiveness, promoted by the disputes of the schools, in the application of the identical principles in a ceaselessly changing life. (pp. 22–23)
Recall that the same author, some 500 pages later, defends the possibility and ideal of a Catholic confessional state. Perhaps there are unresolved tensions in Rommen’s presentation of the “spheric thinking” of perennial political philosophy. Clearly they still exist unresolved in the discussion at large today.
* * *
Select Bibliography (Listed in Approximate Order of Appearance/Reference)
Basics and Origins of Integralism
Post-Liberalism
First Things
Public Discourse
Church Life Journal
Scattered Notices, the Latest
American Affairs
Vermeule & Common Good Constitutionalism
Discussions in the Academy
Some Academic Publications
Crean, O.P., Thomas, and Alan Fimister. Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy. Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2020.
Schwartzman, Micah, and Jocelyn Wilson. “The Unreasonableness of Catholic Integralism.” San Diego Law Review 56, no. 4 (2019): 1039–67.
Music: “Bin ich nun frei Wirklich frei,” Das Rheingold, Richard Wagner. Vienna Philharmonic, George Solti, Gustav Neidlinger as Alberich.
Header Image: Alberich, by Arthur Rackham.
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]]>Bibliography
Music:
Johann Sebastian Bach – Chaconne, Partita No. 2 BWV 1004
Header Image: Franz Rösel von Rosenhof, Wolf und Fuchs.
If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.net. We’d love the feedback.
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Header image: William Russel Flint, Penelope Bringing out the Bow and Quiver (detail).
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If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.net. We’d love the feedback.
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]]>On August 30, 1568, Pope St. Pius V issued the bull Horrendum Illud scelus. We present it now on its four hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
–The Editors
| Horrendum illud scelus, quo pollutae foedataeque Civitates a tremendo Dei iudicio conflagrarunt, acerbissimum Nobis dolorem inurit, graviterque animum nostrum commovet, ut ad illud, quantum potest, comprimendum, studia nostra conferamus. | That horrible crime, for which corrupt and obscene cities were destroyed by fire through divine condemnation, causes us most bitter sorrow and shocks our mind, impelling us to repress such a crime with the greatest possible zeal. | |
| § 1. Sane Lateranensi Concilio dignoscitur constitutum, ut quicumque Clerici, illa incontinentia, quae contra naturam est, propter quam ira Dei venit in filios diffidentiae, deprehensi fuerint laborare, a Clero deiiciantur, vel ad agendam in Monasteriis poenitentiam detrudantur. |
§ 1. Quite opportunely the Fifth Lateran Council [1512-1517] issued this decree: “Let any member of the clergy caught in that vice against nature, given that the wrath of God falls over the sons of perfidy, be removed from the clerical order or forced to do penance in a monastery” (chap. 4, X, V, 31). | |
| § 2. Verum ne tanti flagitii contagium, impunitatis spe, quae maxima peccandi illecebra est, fidentius invalescat, Clericos huius nefarii criminis reos, gravius ulciscendos deliberavimus, ut qui animae interitum non horrescunt, hos certe deterreat civilium legum vindex gladius saecularis. | § 2. So that the contagion of such a grave offense may not advance with greater audacity by taking advantage of impunity, which is the greatest incitement to sin, and so as to more severely punish the clerics who are guilty of this nefarious crime and who are not frightened by the death of their souls, we determine that they should be handed over to the severity of the secular authority, which enforces civil law. | |
| § 3. ltaque quod Nos iam in ipso Pontificatus nostri principio hac de re decrevimus, plenius nunc, fortiusque persequi intendentes, omnes, et quoscumque Presbyteros, et alios Clericos saeculares, et regulares, cuiuscumque gradus, et dignitatis, tam dirum nefas exercentes, omni privilegio clericali, omnique officio, dignitate, et beneficio Ecclesiastico praesentis canonis auctoritate privamus. Ita quod per ludicem Ecclesiasticum degradati, potestati statim saeculari tradantur, qui de eis illud idem capiat supplicium, quod in laicos hoc in exitio devolutos, legitimis reperitur sanctionibus con stitutum. | § 3. Therefore, wishing to pursue with greater rigor than we have exerted since the beginning of our pontificate, we establish that any priest or member of the clergy, either secular or regular, who commits such an execrable crime, by force of the present law be deprived of every clerical privilege, of every post, dignity and ecclesiastical benefice, and having been degraded by an ecclesiastical judge, let him be immediately delivered to the secular authority to be put to death, as mandated by law as the fitting punishment for laymen who have sunk into this abyss. | |
| Nulli ergo, etc. | Nothing to the contrary withstanding, etc. | |
| [Bull. Rom., tom. 4, III, p. 33] |
S. Pius V, const. Horrendum, 30 aug. 1568.
A brief note on the continuing relevance of Horrendum illud:
It is occasionally suggested by critics of integralism that the existence of bad or corrupt clergy proves that integralism, with its high concept of the authority of the church, is unworkable. This argument taken to its logical conclusion would of course rule out any authority in the here-below. For integralists, however, the existence of lamentable and execrable corruption in the Church, far from calling her authority into question, rather demonstrates the need for it.
Pope St. Pius V responded to the vicious immorality then widespread among the clergy repeatedly and with force, most prominently, perhaps, here in this bull. His response offers us even today an exemplar of church-state relations and of the medicinal power of the law.
]]>Music for this episode is the “Sanctus” from the Missa Honorificentia Populi Nostri, by Peter Kwasniewski. The header image shows church bells in Nowa Huta, Poland.
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]]>Here, Felix de St. Vincent and Brett Favras argue that—contrary the recent claim that Alasdair MacIntyre is “anti-integralist”—MacIntyre’s thought, if not itself integralist, at least points in that direction. Provocative as always, they offer an excellent exposition of MacIntyre’s own thought and respond to certain, perhaps simplistic, readings of his works.
Regardless of where MacIntyre himself is ultimately placed, MacIntyre’s thought has undeniable value for integralist thinkers for two chief reasons. First, although the relation of church and state is historically the defining feature of integralism, no less defining is integralism’s insistence on the primacy of the common good. Today, indeed, the few thinkers who accept any notion of the common good tend to view it as something instrumental and private. Not so Alasdair MacIntyre. Second, MacIntyre correctly rejects the confusion of nature and grace that was so prominent in 20th century Theology. A correct understanding of this distinction is, as Pater Edmund has argued, vital to a proper account of an integralist dyarchy.
To these two may be added a third reason his thought is a useful admonition (or perhaps corrective in some cases) for integralists: MacIntyre warns that we must be careful not to replace one leviathan with another. MacIntyre’s sees that justice exists in multiple coordinate but separate spheres, each with its own proper end. An integralist state that subsumed family and subsidiarity would not be a just order but yet another tyranny. ——The Editors.
The philosophical work of Alasdair MacIntyre is a touchstone for post-liberal political theory, especially in the English-speaking world, and especially for Christians. Most prominently, his work inspires the Benedict Option movement, although he has repudiated this development. There has been less of a concerted effort to link MacIntyre to the revival of Catholic integralism. Nevertheless, some affinities are obvious: MacIntyre is a Thomist, a critic of the liberal separation of politics from concern with a shared conception of human ends.[1]
MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism seems to open the door to integralism. In brief, integralists are those who would restore the traditional Church-state relationship, one which subordinates the temporal power to the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church about the ends of human life. MacIntyre does not endorse integralism, but, despite his criticism of some historic Catholic regimes that might be called ‘integralist,’ there is no reason to conclude that he is—as Caleb Bernacchio has recently claimed—“anti-integralist.”[2]
While the theological basis of integralism in the magisterium of the Catholic Church is well-established, placing MacIntyre and integralism in conversation is an opportunity to reflect upon whether or not there is a “secular account” of integralism. As a philosopher, MacIntyre is committed to offering a “secular” account of ethics and politics that is silent on questions of “revealed theology.” That is, he is committed to an account of what it is to be and to act as a rational being that addresses itself to all of his fellow rational beings, whether they share his faith or not. On the other hand, Catholic integralism is a political theology. We learn of the authority of the Church and the Pauline teaching in Romans 13 that God ordains the temporal power though revelation.
Integralism is the authoritative interpretation of Romans 13, taught by the popes since Gelasius I in the fifth century, and perhaps brought to its greatest clarity by Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century. Integralism requires one to believe the apostolic teaching that there are “two powers,” that the Church is the Church, and that while the state is a ‘juridically perfect’ society, it too must be shaped according to apostolic teaching. Revelation has political content. It is limited—the Church offers no model of the best regime—and qualified by prudential considerations: one is not automatically exonerated from all duties to temporal powers that deny the rights of the Church and disdain her authority. Despite these limitations and qualifications, integralism is the apostolic teaching about the proper relationship between the Church and the temporal power. The relevant political debate is whether it is prudent to ‘integrate’ the temporal power with the authority of the Church in a given set of political circumstances. A secular account of integralism, however, might help convince Catholics that our time is such a time.
There may be valid reasons for Christians not to actively advance claims of the Church in political life. For prudential reasons, Catholics might accept a temporal power that does not recognize the authority of Church teaching about human beings’ final ends. Unfortunately the exception has become the rule in modern regimes: Catholic immigrants to the secular governments in the United States of America, French citizens ‘rallying’ to the anti-Catholic Third Republic, or perhaps in the future, welcoming a preferable Islamic government as in Michel Houllebecq’s novel Submission.
Even though integralism is part of revealed theology, however, this fact alone does not make a “secular account” of its virtues to non-Christians impossible. Importantly, integralism is not reducible to a politics of altar and throne in which superstition supports arbitrary theocratic power. Non-Catholic Christians are not bound to accept integralism as an aspect of apostolic teaching, as Catholics are. But beyond any private theological reasons they may have, non-Catholics also may have prudential reasons to accept an integralist temporal power, just as Catholics may have prudential reasons to accept a non-integralist temporal power.
We shall focus briefly upon the prudential reasons that would be part of a “secular account” of an integralist regime. Could a Jew or a Muslim, for instance, ever be persuaded of the political content of the Magisterium in isolation? Quite possibly, when an integralist temporal power is preferable to certain alternatives. No Christian temporal power can compel baptism. A regime organized according to Thomistic principles would be a furthermore limited government: human law is ordered to temporal peace and tranquility, and coercion limited to external acts that disturb this peace (ST I-II q.98 a.1), though the law may also consider the internal dispositions that lead to these acts.
The final end of temporal peace is desired, of course, not only by Christians, but by all reasonable people of goodwill. Why would non-Catholics, however, ever prefer an integralist regime to a purely secular account of peace? Here, MacIntyre’s criticism of the evaluative neutrality of the modern state—which resembles many criticisms of “liberal neutrality”—might be useful. If one rejects the notion that liberal regimes can manage to be neutral with respect to the good, we might imagine that many confessional minorities even in historically liberal regimes were persuaded that they should accept Christian rule, just as many Christian and Jewish were persuaded to accept Ottoman rule.
It is characteristic of political regimes to elevate some final end for their citizens; this historical aspect of Aristotle’s Greek polis persists into modernity, for good or for ill. MacIntyre and many others deny that it is possible for the state to be evaluatively neutral. Unavoidably, contemporary political regimes erect some kind of ideal, or at least a vague and incoherent package of irreconcilable ideals. Modern examples of such ‘political ideals’ are the worker who sacrifices to build a better world for her children, or the parents who maintain the purity of the race, or the self-sacrifice of the citizen-soldier that dies for our freedom, or all of the above. In the soviet, the ‘ethno-state,’ and the republican death-cult these politically sanctioned final ends are obvious, but traces of them persist in liberal regimes as well.
Part of our contemporary political crisis stems from a dread of human obsolescence. The “overpopulated” technological society has increasingly devalued the need for human labor, for sexual reproduction, and for battlefield sacrifice. Glorifying God, our true common good and final end, may become the only one left to us. Integralism comes not from nostalgia for the late nineteenth century, or bitterness about being routed in the culture wars of the late twentieth century—as Ross Douthat sometimes claims[3]—but dread and foreboding about the century to come. This may be why integralism has become somewhat popular among younger Catholics, who have few if any living memories of the Cold War or the culture wars of the 1990s.
Against a liberal order that elevates a shifting and incongruous set of values despite itself—from gentle worldliness to republican soldier-sacrifice, from enterprising business acumen to public-sphere “activism” for the marginalized—MacIntyre proposes local moral discourses that can share a vocabulary, and integralists propose the teachings of the Catholic Church. Although Catholic, MacIntyre’s solution is wholly secular. This does not mean, however, that no secularist case can be made for the integralist proposal, or that MacIntyreans must be opposed to it in principle.
Routed conservative Boomer culture warriors come to MacIntyre for different reasons, we have suggested, than (mostly) younger integralists do. It is the former, older conservatives, who seek out MacIntyre, and misappropriate him out of nostalgia and bitterness. These critics of liberalism now enjoining us to build up post-liberal local communities claim MacIntyre as a spiritual father. The closing lines of After Virtue inspire the vision of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option.” Catholic conservatives like Patrick Deneen, also fed-up with the dominant liberal “anti-culture,” are taking up this strategic position as well.[4] But MacIntyre, for his part, blushes at the reports that he has sired some self-described “conservative” progeny.[5] Underneath the glib impasse, however, lay two antithetical conceptions of “tradition.” There is MacIntyre’s sense of a tradition that makes rational inquiry possible, and it is counterpoised to Burke’s sense of a tradition as custom, ‘prejudice,’ and sentiment that is, in turn, counterpoised to rationalism.
While emphatic objections to Burkean traditionalism separate MacIntyre from the ‘BenOppers,’ a restrained philosophical silence separates him from integralism. When he reaches the water’s edge, MacIntyre seldom wades into theological debates. His early understanding of Christianity, he confesses, was naïvely Barthian.[6] Cyril O’Regan points out that the MacIntyrean project launched by After Virtue (1981) is austerely secular.[7] Amidst the detritus of a failed moral Enlightenment project, there is no living Church to recover, only the shattered pieces of attenuated Aristotelian ethics with, as we shall discuss, an important Thomistic modification. It is not clear, for instance, how MacIntyre views the relationship between liturgy and other social practices. In general, MacIntyre constricts his competence to the mundane. He frequently notes, however, the possibility of a common good and the reality of radical evil beyond our philosophical understanding.
On the other hand, MacIntyre is notable as a moral philosopher who insists that happy and fulfilled human lives need to presuppose a final end above all finite and particular ends. MacIntyre’s recent Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity (2016)[8] reveals why this Thomistic modification to Aristotle is necessary, and even poignant:
What Aristotle excludes, but Aquinas does not, is the possibility that there are situations in which defeat in achieving particular finite goals, no matter how great, is not a mark of failure. Consider the common enough case of someone who has treated some finite and particular good as if its achievement were not just a very great good, but her or his final end. They care about the well-being of their child or a spouse of friend, or they aspire to some extraordinary athletic or intellectual feat in such a way and to such an extent that, were that child, spouse, or friend to die or were they to fail to attain their athletic or intellectual goal, their life, so they believe, would no longer have a point or purpose. They might as well be dead and there would be, they take it, no good reason for them not to commit suicide. It is Aquinas’s contention that this is never true of anyone and that rational agents find themselves committed to believing that it is not true of themselves, insofar as they are reflectively aware of the directedness of their lives toward an end that cannot be identified with any finite and particular end” (2016, 230).
For Aquinas there is no life that is no longer worth living. Thomists presuppose that there is always some further good or desire beyond particular and finite goods. And they argue that there is a final end, God, that secures the dignity and worth of each and every human life. MacIntyre stops here, with emphatic abruptness: “here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins” (2016, 315).
A philosopher rather than a theologian, MacIntyre stops short of publicly asking how we come to know we have a final end beyond all finite and particular goods. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990),[9] he is disposed polemically against those Thomists who start from epistemological questions, who locate in Thomas a response to post-Cartesian philosophers, and who thus “doomed Thomism to the fate of all philosophies which give priority to epistemological questions: the infinite multiplication of disagreement” (1990, 75). Thomism has a kind of original sin, according to MacIntyre. The revival of Thomism by the Leonine encyclical Aeterni Patris is initially by the hand of Joseph Kleutgen, S.J. (1811-1883), who bequeathed the epistemological red herring. MacIntyre is content to “begin in the middle”—as Stanley Hauerwas puts it[10]—not the Cartesians’ radical method, ‘Where can I begin if I am to truly know what is true?’ but rather, ‘What do we have at our disposal and is it enough for our society?’ Unlike the Cartesian, MacIntyre argues that human thought must be embedded in a tradition as a condition of discovering the truth.[11]
Serious theological questions attend to how we know our final ends, earthly and resurrected, and the relations between them. This “nature-grace debate” between “two-tiered Thomists” and the ‘nouvelle theologie,’ and how it relates to integralism requires further exploration—not least because the term integralism is used in widely divergent ways.[12]
We have argued that MacIntyre wants to bracket these theological debates, and especially to push past what he calls the “unfortunate generation” of moral theologians in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.[13] But Caleb Bernacchio argues otherwise. Bernacchio offers the one reference to grace in Dependent Rational Animals (1999) as evidence that MacIntyre’s critique of two-tiered Thomism shines through: MacIntyre proposes that divine grace can appear as a secular virtue in Aquinas.[14] (This is of course true—Aquinas makes a strong claim that grace is necessary to wish for or do anything good in ST I-II q. 109 a.2.) Bernacchio calls this, bewilderingly, the “Rahnerian” MacIntyre. But MacIntyre’s lonely theologumenon here is incomplete. Elsewhere MacIntyre admits the opposite: the saint’s infused virtues of divine grace can also appear as “unbalanced extremism.”[15] Perhaps then we have the anti-Rahnerian MacIntyre also. At any rate, it is far from clear how MacIntyre’s recognition that divine grace can be manifested in secular virtue entails a rejection of integralism.
Setting aside the question of secular virtue, a stronger case for an anti-integralist reading of MacIntyre might come from his skepticism of the modern state. Training his sights indiscriminately upon Lutheran princes, the Anglican settlement, Reformed political covenants, and Catholic alliances of throne-and-altar, MacIntyre criticizes the “corrupting integration of church and state” (2016, 137)—as Bernacchio points out, he even fetes the well-known bloody fantasy attributed to Diderot about the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest.[16] Routinely throughout his career, MacIntyre has resisted communitarian proposals that the nation-state become the bearer of final ends; the arch-critic of liberalism even prefers the notionally “neutral” liberal state over a communitarian nation-state with a collectively political doctrine of human ends.[17]
While MacIntyre very much wants moral communities in which we can find some account of our ultimate final end, both the scale and the proper concerns of contemporary political life mean that the modern nation-state cannot simulate such a moral community. And it ought not try, he thinks. MacIntyre’s essay “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict” (1999) is one of the clearer examples of his claim that the state both cannot and should not be the promoter and arbiter of any common good:
The state must not be allowed to impose any one particular conception of the human good or identify some one such conception with its own interests and causes. It must afford tolerance to a diversity of standpoints. But liberals generally have arrived at these conclusions because they believe either that the state ought to be neutral between different rival conceptions of the good or that states ought actively to promote the liberty and autonomy of individuals in making their own choices. I have argued by contrast first that the contemporary state is not and cannot be evaluatively neutral, and secondly that it is just because of the ways in which the state is not evaluatively neutral that it cannot generally be trusted to promote any worthwhile set of values, including those of autonomy and liberty.[18]
Here and elsewhere,[19] MacIntyre is making empirical and historical claims rather than philosophical ones.
While his arguments against “tradition” as custom, prejudice, and sentiment distinguish him sharply from neo-Burkeans like Deneen and Dreher, as a matter of practical politics, MacIntyre’s suspicion of the state also inclines him to political solutions at the level of local communities. MacIntyre’s suspicion of the modern state echoes Aristotle’s suspicion in Politics 3 that political communities are based on some certain partial sense of justice that is said to be justice writ large, as well as Aristotle’s statement in Ethics 9 that a city with 100,000 citizens would be far too large to secure some friendly agreement about their common project, the virtues that contribute to this communal project, and what each is owed commensurate to their contributions.
Integralism does not address these questions of the proper scale, type, and scope of temporal powers.[20] Paul VI was tempted to envision the UN as a temporal reflection of the Church;[21] Leo XIII certainly envisioned an authoritative role for the Church in large, modern nation-states; Pius VII signed a concordat with his foe Napoleon, and a nascent empire that would soon briefly span a swath of Western Europe; Alexander VI’s bulls of donation in the 1490s sanctioned the global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. But integralism was not born of early modernity, European power, and a globalized world, only applied to it. Before the rise of the ‘new monarchs,’ and the states and empires of modernity, medieval societies like thirteenth-century France were organized along an “integral vision” of social reality “before Church and state.”[22] Integralism is a kind of background conception of the political order, seemingly natural to Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition. The roots of integralism reach back to fifth-century Christian Rome, and ultimately into apostolic teaching.
Integralists are well aware of “corrupting integrations” of Church and state. Sometimes Christians do not remonstrate forcefully enough with the temporal power, and cede it too much ground to disastrous effects. The failed ralliement experiment of late nineteenth-century France—a topic well covered by The Josias—is one such case, ending as it did with the lamentable Law of 1905.[23] Other times, of course, the Church can provide apparent legitimacy to tyrannical regimes, which presents grave scandal to Christians.
It is important to distinguish integralism, however, from the kinds of statist communitarianism that MacIntyre is criticizing. Ultimately the Church and not the temporal power is the bearer of moral truths, the authoritative teacher about how human beings can live together in temporal peace, and of course about how to find eternal beatitude with their Creator. The Church may detect that this or that temporal power is unfit to teach moral truths, and wisely refuse to license the temporal power its coercive powers over the baptized.[24]
Although integralists do not propose elevating the state (or any other temporal power) to the position of the ultimate arbiter and teacher of human beings’ moral perfection, along the lines of ancient poleis or twentieth-century totalitarian movements, they do propose “identifying” the authoritative teaching of the apostles with the “interests and causes of states.” It is not clear why MacIntyre thinks this is tantamount to denying “tolerance” to diverse standpoints, if indeed a secular account of an integralist regime can be made to those who do not accept what was revealed to St. Paul and the sacred tradition of the Church, and later expounded upon by the popes. But perhaps, in the last analysis, this does not amount to evidence of MacIntyre’s anti-integralism. Integralists like Thomas Aquinas nevertheless argue that the civitas has a proper competence and sphere of its own, and that its competence has certain limits knowable to natural reason. The ends of the temporal power, in securing temporal peace, are distinguished from the ends of the Church. They belong to the lower, and not the higher, of the “two tiers.”
MacIntyre’s work is valuable to give a secular account of why we need to reflect upon our final ends if we are to enjoy a good, shared political life together. Though claimed as an inspiration by many, MacIntyre proposes no programmatic solutions for a post-liberal politics. Therefore he is a non-integralist, but not an anti-integralist. Nevertheless, MacIntyre can be helpful as integralists think about giving a secular accounting for their politics.
[1] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. “Integralism in Three Sentences,” The Josias, October 17, 2016. https://thejosias.net/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/
[2] Caleb Bernacchio, “The Anti-Integralist Alasdair MacIntyre,” Church Life Journal, May 8, 2018. http://churchlife.nd.edu/2018/05/08/the-anti-integralist-alasdair-macintyre/
[3] Ross Douthat, “Among the Post-Liberals,” The New York Times. October 9, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/among-the-post-liberals.html
[4] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 64-67 and 191.
[5] Rod Dreher, “MacIntyre Is Ben Op and Doesn’t Know It,” The American Conservative. April 27, 2017.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre’ Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, eds., Paul Blackledge and Neil Douglas Davidson, (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 412.
[7] Cyril O’Regan, “The ‘Gift’ of Modernity,” Church Life Journal, March 20, 2018.
[8] Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[9] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990).
[10] Stanley Hauerwas, “The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre,” First Things (October 2007). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/the-virtues-of-alasdair-macintyre
[11] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Relativism, Dogmatism, and Alasdair MacIntyre,” Sancrucensis. February 7, 2013. https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/relativism-dogmatism-and-alasdair-macintyre/
[12] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Critique of Integralism,” The Josias. February 27, 2018. https://thejosias.net/2018/02/27/hans-urs-von-balthasars-critique-of-integralism/
[13] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Postscript: There Is Only One Sadness… Not to Be Saints,” Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, eds. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington: CUA Press, 2010), 366.
[14] Caleb Bernacchio, “MacIntyre’s Philosophy of Mercy’s Clandestine Work in a Secular World” Church Life Journal, q. v. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 124. http://churchlife.nd.edu/2018/02/13/macintyre-on-grace-working-in-the-secular-world-through-the-works-of-mercy/
[15] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Postscript: There Is Only One Sadness… Not to Be Saints,” Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, eds. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington: CUA Press, 2010), 369.
[16] Bernacchio, “The Anti-Integralist Alasdair MacIntyre,” quoting Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (137).
[17] See for instance his rejection of Philip Pettit’s republicanism: Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. Susan Mendus and John Horton (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
[18] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” The Politics of Toleration: Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 143.
[19] MacIntyre can sound very pessimistic indeed: “…those who make the conquest of state power their aim are always in the end conquered by it and, in becoming the instruments of the state, themselves become in time the instruments of one of the several versions of modern capitalism.” Alasdair MacIntyre, Preface, Marxism and Christianity, (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), xv.
[20] See, e.g., Leo XII, Diturnum illud, sec. 7 “There is no question here respecting forms of government, for there is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.” [Concerning the question of scale, cf. the references in the following footnote.–The Editors]
[21] Paul VI, “Address of the Holy Father Paul VI to the United Nations Organization,” 4 October 1965 https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651004_united-nations.html; q. v. “World Government is Required By Natural Law,” The Josias https://thejosias.net/2015/06/24/world-government-is-required-by-natural-law/
[22] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “An Integralist Manifesto,” a review of Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State (Emmaus, 2017). First Things (October 2017). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/10/an-integralist-manifesto
[23] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Catholic Action and Ralliement,” The Josias. February 13, 2016. https://thejosias.net/2016/02/13/catholic-action-and-ralliement/, Felix de St. Vincent, “Four Catholic Political Postures: Lessons of Leo XIII and Ralliement,” The Josias. July 31, 2017. https://thejosias.net/2017/07/31/four-catholic-political-postures-lessons-from-leo-xiii-and-ralliement/ , Adrian Vermuele, “Ralliement: Two Distinctions,” The Josias. March 16, 2018. https://thejosias.net/2018/03/16/ralliement-two-distinctions/
[24] Thomas Pink, “Conscience and Coercion: Vatican II’s Teaching on Religious Freedom Changed Policy, Not Doctrine,” First Things (August 2012). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/08/conscience-and-coercion
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]]>Although the proximate cause of this greater appreciation of various critiques of liberalism is the recent political turmoils and upheavals in American as well as Europe, Meador sees that in some sense these are only the occasions of an instability that is inherent in liberalism’s very heart. In Meador’s analysis, liberalism contains at its core a skepticism towards truth, particularly non-empirical truths such as the nature of the good life and man’s final end. As Meador puts, liberalism’s “skepticism goes beyond a skepticism toward religious faith and goes so far as a skepticism toward any kind of comprehensive moral system that claims to be true in anything beyond a particular, local sense. [Liberals] simply do not trust [their] moral judgments enough to think they can be binding in anything beyond an individualistic, voluntaristic sense.” This creates as a result a “lack of confidence in the ability of anybody to wield coercive authority justly or to infringe upon a person’s autonomy.” Meador thus agrees with E. M. Milco’s analysis that
Liberal institutions are parasitic on metaphysically robust, non-liberal traditions, but the very survival and proliferation of liberal institutions tends to erode the non-liberal cultures and traditions that allow them to survive. This is because liberalism operates on a “least common denominator” model of public discourse, where the “neutral middle ground” favored by institutional structures consists of what the vast majority of people engaging in public discourse agree on. As time goes on, liberalism tends to dissolve divergent traditions into an ideological community defined by their least common denominator, and gradually (with the help of intellectual fads and the glorification of transgression, inevitable in any system of free discourse) the consensus erodes to nothing.
Meador then trenchantly notes that in a liberal society, “The only thing we think we can know with any certainty is the individual self and that self’s experience of reality and so everything about our social order exists to protect that kind of self-expression.” He further observes: “The values of liberalism are not sufficient to create civil society and so liberalism is essentially a doomsday device that will simply wind down until it hits zero, at which point civil society will fracture and something new will have to take its place.” It is at this point that Meador dives into exploring six responses to what might be called the crisis of liberalism.
Meador leads off with integralism, and indeed, all but gives it the place of pride. What occasions this essay, however, is that while we at The Josias are grateful for what is certainly a charitable and generous portrayal of integralism, Meador makes a crucial mistake that causes him to misread an elemental facet of integralism. As Pat Smith has noted over at Semiduplex, this error is a serious one, an error that turns integralism into theocracy.
First, however, let’s lay out again what integralism is, so that we may see more clearly where Meador goes wrong . Integralism may be briefly defined as follows:
Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding 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.
Integralism can be viewed as having two parts. First, Integralism in line with the great historical civilizations and following perennial philosophy rejects liberalism and sees political rule as intrinsically about the common good, about ordering man to his final end. In this, Integralism is not unique for other thinkers, christian and non-christian alike, have also seen this. The second part is, when combined with the first, what makes Integralism distinctive: namely, that following the teaching of the Popes, man’s temporal end must be subordinated to his spiritual end and thus the temporal power to the spiritual power. It is here that Meador makes his error.
Meador describes the integralist vision of society as “fairly hierarchical with the Bishop of Rome quite literally on the throne.” He also states that under an integralist understanding, “in a just society the magistrate would be somehow responsive to or under the authority of the Roman church and specifically the Bishop of Rome because the Bishop of Rome presides over the only true and complete community, the Roman Catholic Church.” (Emphasis added). While these remarks aren’t conclusive, they are at least highly suggestive of a picture of integralism as theocracy, where the temporal powers were somehow either derived from or delegated by the spiritual power. In fact, however, as has been articulated in The Josias, the subordination of temporal to spiritual is not the subordination of a theocracy but rather that of a dyarchy.
This distinction stems from the two sorts of happiness, natural and supernatural. Natural happiness is in the care of the temporal authority, but natural happiness is ordered towards super-natural happiness, which is more complete and higher than natural happiness. Supernatural happiness is under the care of the spiritual power. Nevertheless, this ordination of the natural to the supernatural does not swallow or destroy the natural end. Rather, this end still exists as a distinct end, and, as reason and scripture teaches us, God endows (through the natural law) temporal rulers with their authority as distinct from the supernatural authority. Thus: “The temporal power must be subordinate to the spiritual power, or else it will become mere violence, and yet it does not derive its authority from the spiritual power: it derives its authority from God through the natural law. Nature is not destroyed by grace, and yet nature must be subordinated to grace.” As Pater Edmund further explains: “Each of the two powers is instituted by God, and each has a certain legitimate sphere. But the temporal power can only live properly if it is subordinated to the spiritual power, which is like its soul.” And the reason that there must be this subordination, it is important to note, is because of the wound of sin:
[L]ike any part of creation it saw the political as wounded by sin and in need of healing in the present, and in the eschatological future of elevation, fulfillment, and transcendence by a higher form of communal life. The order of creation was seen as a good, but temporary and preliminary order—a sign of a yet better order to come. The Lord’s famous dictum according to which one must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but unto God the things that are God’s (Mt 22:21) did not at all conform to expectations about the Messiah. The Messiah was expected to end Roman rule and re-establish the rule of God. But our Lord does not immediately destroy the existing order; instead He plants the Kingdom of God as a seed that is to grow in the midst of that existing order. Only at His triumphant return at the end of time will He replace earthly powers with the New Jerusalem.
As a result, the temporal ruler is supreme in his sphere, but not supreme simpliciter. The temporal authority is an authority instituted by God. Importantly, and crucially, this means that the Pope may intervene with an earthly ruler, but not for any reason whatsoever. Rather, the spiritual power will judge the temporal only where the temporal power has transgressed against some supernatural end. Indeed, it is only “by reason of sin” that the temporal authority is subject to the spiritual authority at all. Or perhaps it would be better put as follows: it is only “by reason of sin” that there is a distinction between the temporal and the spiritual authorities and thus, for this reason and because of the ordination of the natural to the supernatural, the temporal is subordinated to the spiritual. “Without the effects of sin, temporal matters would not be a distraction from sacred matters, and there would be no need to distinguish them. Because, however, we live in a fallen world, it is necessary for the spiritual power to be freed of care for earthly matters.” The effect of this is that the spiritual power only intervenes over the temporal power by reason of sin, “ratione peccati.”
As Pope Innocent III stated in the decretal Novit:
Let no one suppose that we wish to diminish or disturb the jurisdiction and power of the king… For we do not intend to judge concerning a fief, judgement on which belongs to him…but to decide concerning a sin, which the judgment undoubtedly belongs to us, and we can and should exercise it against any-one… No man of sound mind is unaware that it pertains to our office to rebuke any Christian for any mortal sin and to coerce him with ecclesiastical penalties if he spurns our correction… That we can and should coerce is evident from what the Lord said to the prophet who was among the priests of Anathoth, “Lo I have set thee over nations and over kingdoms to root up and to pull down and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant” (Jeremias 1:10). (Brian Tierney, The Crisis of the Church and State 1050-1300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 134-135).
It is for this reason, to take a recent example, that some integralists objected to Pope Francis’s handling of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta. As Sacerdos Romanus points out at Rorate Caeli,
the Pope’s right to depose a sovereign can only be exercised in order to ensure that earthly rule is properly ordered toward supernatural ends, and is not instead engaged in mortal sins. But why did the Pope interfere with the Sovereign Military Order of Malta? As Prof. de Mattei argues it was for precisely the opposite reason… This then is… why the intervention is illegitimate; it does not fall under the one case in which the spiritual power can legitimately judge the temporal.
Whether this application of principle to concrete situation is, in fact, correct, is not at issue here, indeed, is far beyond the scope of this essay. Regardless of whether one thinks Pope Francis was meddling unwarrantedly, or was properly stepping in to revive a moribund and decadent institution, the important point for our purposes here is that integralism recognizes a real distinction between the two powers and places real limits on what the spiritual ruler may or may not properly do.
Meador’s essay is an excellent and perspicacious analysis of our times. The Josias is thankful for his thoughtful and charitable handling of integralism as explained here. Nonetheless, we wish to correct any notion that integralism is simply theocracy. Rather, integralism is a dyarchical arrangement, where each power is ultimately directly from God (and thus the temporal authority is not derived from or delegated by the spiritual) but where the temporal is, by reason of sin, subordinate to the spiritual.
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