The term “integralist” was originally applied to Catholic anti-liberal and anti-modernist movements in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries— such as Ramón Nocedal’s party in Spain, and the Sodalitium Pianum, based in Rome. One of the main goals of such movements was to defend traditional Catholic political teaching against liberalism. Liberals have ever pretended (even to themselves) to separate politics with concern for the end of human life, hence their demand for the so-called “separation of Church and state.” In practice, however, they have ever ordered politics to the false and individualistic conception of the human good implicit in liberalism itself. Hence integralists were always particularly opposed to the liberal demand for the separation of Church and state. Integralist movements took various contingent positions on indifferent matters, on which Catholics are free to disagree with them. But on the central points of Catholic political teaching they were merely defending the perennial and infallible teaching of the Church.

It is this essence of the integralist programs that we defend at The Josias. What we mean by integralism is merely this: Political action is naturally and inevitably directed towards what we take to be good for human beings, and ought therefore to be directed towards the true human good, which is a common good. But the common good of human life is twofold: a temporal common good proportioned to human nature, and the eternal common good proportioned to the divine nature in which human beings participate by grace. Hence there are two authorities directing human beings towards these two common goods: a temporal authority and a spiritual authority. The former is subordinate to the later, just as the temporal common good is subordinate to the spiritual common good. On account of the danger of human pride, it is necessary that these two kinds of authority be placed in the hands of different persons—temporal authority in lay hands, and spiritual authority in the hands of bishops.

Integralism in this basic sense has always been taught by the greatest theologians of the Church— from St. Augustine to St. Bernard to St. Thomas. Apart from a few regalist special pleaders it was universally held by the scholastic theologians. In later scholasticism it was held not only by Thomists such as Cajetan, but also by opponents of Thomism. This is shown by the following translation of a passage from the De iustitia et iure of Luis de Molina, S.J. (1535-1600). Molina was the great opponent of Thomists in the controversies on grace and predestination. “I am convinced,” wrote Charles De Koninck, “that in philosophy the most extreme limits of opposition have been reached by Thomism and Molinism.” And yet, so basic to Catholic tradition is the integralist thesis that on this even Thomists and Molinists agree. — The Editors

Translated by Timothy Wilson

Luis de Molina, S.J.
De iustitia et iure, tract. II, disp. xxi
What power is, and regarding the civil and ecclesiastical power

Having explained dominion in general, in order that we might descend to the parts subject to it, it is necessary that we begin from the dominion of jurisdiction—as much because it is more noble, as because knowledge of it conduces to a better understanding of the titles of the dominion of property. It is also the case, that explicating it is a less involved task than that of explaining the dominion of property. But because the dominion of jurisdiction is a certain kind of power, we shall have to begin from the explication of power.

As regards the present design, therefore: power, according to Vitoria in Relectio de potestate Ecclesiæ, q. 1, at the beginning, and Navarrus, c. Novit. de iudiciis, nota. 3. corol. 16. in accordance with St. Thomas in 4. d. 24. q. 1 art. 1. quæstiunc. 2 ad 3, is the faculty of one having authority and eminence over others for their rule and government. This is consonant with Paul, Rom 13, Let every soul be subject to higher powers. In this place, rulers, who have the faculty and authority for the governance of others and thus have superiority and eminence over them in this respect, are called powers, the name of the abstract thing being transferred to signify the suppositum in which that faculty is found, but so that the suppositum is endowed with that faculty. The power, therefore, of which we speak, is only in those who have intellect and free will for ruling and governing others, and thus, amongst all corporeal things, it is in men alone.

Power is twofold, namely, Lay, and Ecclesiastical. Here it should be noted, that albeit man were not fitted for a supernatural end, to be achieved through supernatural means, but only for a natural end, yet still this twofold power could be distinguished. Though both would be natural, and could be more easily conjoined in one and the same supreme chief and head, from whom power—which would be ecclesiastical in its own mode—could be derived from him to others. This is explained thus: albeit man had been made for a natural end only, still, men would recognize that there is one first principle, supremely good, from whom they have received and await their being and other goods, and hence is worthy of being shown obedience and honor. For this reason, just as those gathered to establish one Republic would be able to choose a common ruler, who would restrain them in peace and justice, and defend them, and procure their common temporal good: thus they could also choose another who would preside for the purpose of showing worship and due service to God, and who would be, in that function, superior to the secular ruler. They could also choose at will one common ruler, who would be supreme in both functions, and who either would exercise both kinds of regime by himself, or, if one were insufficient for both, or could be exercised less fittingly by the same, for that different mores and demeanor seem to befit each function; he would substitute for himself another to carry out the functions of the other, who would do so through the power received from him. Wherefore history shows, that sometimes, amongst the gentiles there were priests and ministers of idols, distinct from kings and secular princes, and meanwhile the supreme priesthood was conjoined with the royal office. Even today amongst the Japanese, and other unbelievers, the priests are distinct from the secular princes, whether these depend upon, are promoted by, or deposed by them, or not, according to the custom of the diverse regions. And in a similar way, resting upon only the natural light and end of men, they could be instituted for the worship of the true God, as Vitoria rightly notes, De potestate Ecclesiæ relectio 1, q. 3, n. 3, and relectio 2, q. 1, n. 2.

But now, since man is made for a supernatural end to be attained through supernatural means, the ecclesiastical power is distinguished from the lay power. The lay power, of itself, is established to govern in a manner suitable to the natural end to which it is ordained by its nature. But the ecclesiastical power is instituted to govern in a manner suitable to the supernatural end, namely, by inducing to means accommodated to the supernatural end. In this way it happens, that these two powers are distinguished on the part of diverse ends subordinated one to the other: in a way similar to that by which the equestrian art is distinguished from the art of bridle-making: and this kind of distinction is a familiar one amongst the practical skills. Wherefore, just as it is for the equestrian art to command the bridle-making art, in order that the latter apply its work in a manner suitable to the superior end of the former: so also is it the concern of the ecclesiastical power to command the lay power, in order that the latter administer suitably to the supernatural end of the former, to which end the natural end of the lay power is ordered.[1] But since the nobility and eminence of any faculty is to be considered most of all from its object and end, the nobility and eminence of the ecclesiastical power above the lay power will have to be judged according to the degree that the supernatural end exceeds the natural, and the soul’s spiritual salvation does the temporal interests, and the peaceful and tranquil state of this life.

But now, since in the state of innocency every one would be conceived in grace, and hence would be born furnished with the principles sufficient to obtain by himself the fact of the supernatural end, and would easily be instructed in those things in which he would need to be instructed, and would not require coercion for it: certainly in that state, both powers, namely the ecclesiastical and the lay, would be without coercive force, the superiors directing the inferiors to their ends, as we have shown in our commentary on the Prima pars, in the treatise De opere sex dierum: and it would be expedient for both to be conjoined in the same suppositum, and, granting that supernatural state, neither in this sense would be supernatural, inasmuch as men, directed by the natural light and the illumination of faith, would not be able to set up both by themselves. But since men of that state were composed of body and soul, they would have worshiped God, not otherwise than as we do, not only with an internal but also an external and corporeal worship, and their worship would be uniform, as Vitoria rightly teaches in the cited relectio, q. 4, n. 1.

With nature having been damaged by sin, and grace having been lost, both powers have coercive force, their subjects requiring coercion in order that they might be led by direction to their ends. But it is necessary to distinguish three times, or three states, of the universal Church: namely, of the law of nature, of the written law, and of the law of grace. And indeed, in the law of nature, the faith and supernatural knowledge then necessary for salvation having been granted, and likewise the remedy instituted for that state against the sin of origin, which was of positive divine law, since the men of that state were held only to the natural law, they would have been able to institute by themselves both civil and ecclesiastical power, by which they would be directed to the natural and supernatural end. And they would have been able either to divide them, so that the one would be in one suppositum, and the other in another: or to conjoin them in one and the same suppositum. In this way was Melchisedech at once king of Salem, and priest of God the most high, as is read in Heb 7 and Gen 14. Many weighty authors think, that the firstborn in the law of nature, especially after the flood, were priests; and that Melchisedech was Sem, the firstborn of Noah. And this is the right, which Esau, as the firstborn, sold to Jacob: for which reason Paul calls him profane, in Heb 12. Vitoria, in Relectio 1 de potestate Ecclesiæ, q. 4, n. 2 and 3, and Relectio 2, q.1, n. 2, justly says, that ecclesiastical power was in the law of nature immediately after sin. Indeed I should add, that in order to institute it, in the form it then had, the natural and supernatural knowledge which remained in Adam from the state of innocency was sufficient, being joined with the knowledge of the Fall, and of the promise of a redeemer immediately made to him, and the knowledge of original sin, and of the remedy against it which God revealed to him. Yet I do not think, that there was anything of positive divine law, other than the application of the remedy against original sin, or any ecclesiastical power, or any other sort of oblation or sacrifice instituted by God by divine positive law: but the mode of ecclesiastical power and divine worship was left to men themselves, that they would institute it: and it was instituted in great part by Adam, and by Noah after the flood, who both lived for a long time, and were much illuminated by God.

At the time of the written law, when God chose a people peculiar to himself, from which would be born a redeemer, and in which he would foretell and presignify, what things were to come in the law of grace, inasmuch as in this way they would be rendered more credible, and would prepare a way for the coming of his only-begotten son, he himself instituted the ecclesiastical power, namely, the high priesthood of the Synagogue, and the other grades and ministries of that power, and the sacrifices, rites, and worship by which he would worshiped, all of which were of positive divine law. And he willed the whole ecclesiastical power to be the tribe of Levi only. All these things are plain from the sacred scriptures. Yet that power was not supernatural such as would obtain a supernatural effect, in the way that the ecclesiastical power of the law of grace instrumentally obtains the supernatural effects of the remission of sins, the granting of grace, the confection of the Eucharist, etc. Although in the old law there was the sacrament of circumcision, at whose presence grace was conferred, just as it was also conferred in the law of nature at the presence of the remedy against original sin. Because, therefore, that power obtained no supernatural effect, as Vitoria says, Relectio 1 de potestate Ecclesiæ, q. 3, n. 6, and certain others, that whole power could have been instituted by human law: although men would not have known to institute all those things so that they would be symbols of things to come in the law of grace, nor would they have known to adapt them to the ends to which they were instituted by God in that manner.

That power could have been conjoined in the same suppositum with lay and civil power. No indeed, in very fact it was conjoined in Moses, who both administered the Commonwealth in temporal things, and was a priest, and offered sacrifices, according to Psalm 98:  Moses and Aaron among his priests. It was also conjoined in Samuel, who was a priest, and governed the Commonwealth in spiritual and temporal things, as is clear from 1 Kings. Likewise afterward in the Maccabees, who were high priests, and had supreme care of the Commonwealth in temporal things, as is manifest from the books of the Maccabees. But in the time of the kings, the ecclesiastical power was disjoined from the civil and temporal: for, according to the prescript of the law, the high priest, and other priests could not be otherwise than from the tribe of Levi: but the kings were of the tribe of Benjamin, and of the tribe of Juda. Whence it was that Saul, in 1 Kings 13, offering holocausts and peace offerings, so displeased God, that his degradation from the kingdom drew its origin from that act, as is clear from the words of Samuel: Thou hast done foolishly, and hast not kept the commandments of the Lord thy God, which he commanded thee. And if thou hadst not done thus, the Lord would now have established thy kingdom over Israel for ever: but thy kingdom shall not come. The Lord hath sought him a man, etc. And Ozias, in 2 Para 26, was stricken a leper, because by burning incense, he had wished to usurp the office of the priests.

But now, the ecclesiastical power, which in the time of the law of grace is in the Christian Church, since it is wholly supernatural for the most part, inasmuch as it obtains the supernatural effects of the remission of sins, the granting of grace, the confection of the Eucharist, the creating of priests, and the conferring to these of power for doing those things, the granting of indulgences, by which sins are remitted as regards punishment, excommunication, and other similar things; indeed, of itself and on the whole, it could take its origin neither from the State, nor from human or natural law, but only from positive divine law. In truth, this power was, and is, in Christ as man, according to excellence, and not at all bound to the sacraments. For to him was given all power in heaven and on earth, as it is said in Matt 27, and he was appointed by God the Father as high priest, head, and king of the Church, according to Psalm 2: But I am appointed king by him over Sion, his holy mountain, that is the Church, preaching his commandment. And Heb 2: So Christ did not glorify himself, that he might be made a high priest, but he that said unto him, Thou art my son, this day I have begotton thee: as he saith in another place: Thou art a priest forever, according to the order of Melchisedech, and in ch. 7: For the others indeed were made priests without an oath: but this with an oath, by him that said unto him: The Lord hath sworn and he will not repent: Thou art a priest forever, according to the order of Melchisedech. Finally, the reason for that letter which Paul wrote to the Hebrews, is to show the excellence of the priesthood of Christ in the new law according to the order of Melchisedech, over the priesthood of the old law according to the order of Aaron: which has been set aside, and has ceased to be, by the priesthood and death of Christ. Now this power Christ left in the Church, yet bound by the sacraments, and by certain sure laws. But he left it, not to all of the Church, but to Peter his vicar, and the rest of the successors of Peter, as to the head in place of himself, upon whom the whole depends. For in Matt 16, to Peter especially he promised the keys of the kingdom of heaven, which keys imply this power. Likewise he promised in the same place that he would found his Church upon Peter, as upon the head and vicar in place of himself, against which Church the gates of the underworld would not prevail: which he fulfilled after the resurrection, John 21. He left it also to the other Apostles, and to the Bishops their successors, to whom he also promised the power of the keys in Matt 18, though he conferred it partly at the time of the Last Supper, and partly after the resurrection. And he instituted seventy-two disciples as their ministers and helpers, to whose place the parish priests succeed, and the other priests, inferior to the Bishops, who have a certain part of this supernatural power. And thus it happens, that just as Christ did not have ecclesiastical power from the Church, according to John 15: You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; rather, he had it from the Father: thus also the power which today is in the Church, as much in the Supreme Pontiff as in the Bishops and inferior priests, is not from the Church, but committed by Christ to Peter, to the Apostles, and to the other disciples, and their successors: although Christ committed the future elections by which this power is applied to the Church, and to the ordinance of the Supreme Pontiffs, as has been explained broadly in the discussion on faith.

It is not our design in this place to dispute on the ecclesiastical power in itself, and the comparison of its acts and effects, since we have said many things commenting upon IIaIIæ, q. 1, a. 10,[2] especially regarding that power which resides in the Supreme Pontiff, and upon which the rest depends. The other disputations concerning the ecclesiastical power are concerned with the matter of the sacraments, and other places. What we intend in this place is nothing else, than to distinguish the ecclesiastical power from the lay, and to compare the one, as it resides in the Supreme Pontiff, with the lay power as regards the dominion of jurisdiction, concerning which we now treat.

Regarding the present matter, therefore, in the first place we have it, that the power of the Christian Church which resides in the Supreme Pontiff as in the head of the Church, is distinct from the lay and civil power of secular princes: which Gelasius affirms, capit. Duo sunt, dist. 96, saying: Two there are, emperor, by which this world is principally ruled. Which is confirmed with many things by Soto, In IV Sent., dist. 25, q. 2, a. 1, concl. 1; Vitoria, Relectio 1 de potestate Ecclesiæ, q. 1, from n. 3; Durandus, De origine iurisdictionum, q. 2; John of Paris, De potestate regia et papali, from c. 2; Castro, De potestate legis poenalis, c. 1; Navarrus, on the cap. Novit de iudiciis, from coroll. 16, n. 80, and others: but we have touched upon the chief resources in what has been said thus far.

We have it, then, that the same power of the Supreme Pontiff differs from the power of secular princes subject to him. First, on the part of the end: for the former regards the supernatural end, and the means proportionate to that end; while the latter is concerned with the natural end, and the means accommodated to it. For this reason, since the natural end is ordered to the supernatural end, and since a faculty which concerns a superior end ought to command and order the faculty which concerns an inferior and subordinate end; it happens, that it is for the Supreme Pontiff to command and order the secular princes subject to him (that is, those who are within the bosom of the Church) so that they accommodate themselves to the supernatural end, when they deviate from it in their government. It differs secondly, because the power of the Supreme Pontiff is supernatural, extending itself to supernatural effects: while the power of secular princes is merely natural. Thirdly, because the power of the Supreme Pontiff is instituted, not by the Church, but by Christ in the Church; although its application to this or that person depends upon the election of the Church: for which reason it is of positive divine law. However, the lay power of secular princes is of human law, instituted by the Commonwealth, and committed to the prince, as shall be manifest in the following disputation. It differs fourthly, in that the power of the Supreme Pontiff is one throughout the whole world: while the power of secular princes, unless there be many who, by right of war, or legitimate succession, or the consensus of the commonwealths themselves, have one common ruler, is multiplied according to the diversity of commonwealths choosing for themselves a prince. For as Christ is the single head of the whole universal Church: thus it is fitting, and expedient, that there be appointed a single Supreme Pontiff, whom Christ left on earth as head and his vicar. Moreover, since the faith is one, admitting no variety, it was most expedient, with the multiplication of things to be believed, that a single head be established, which would settle controversies which have arisen concerning the faith, from a chair having for this purpose the infallible assistance of the Holy Spirit, so that the unity of faith and the Church, and peace among the faithful would be better preserved. And this is the reason why when, in the state of the law of nature, when only a very few things were proposed to man to be believed explicitly, one high priest was not established, who would preside over the Church; yet in the Synagogue, and much more in the Church of Christ, with the things to be believed explicitly having increased, one high priest was established, to whom the others would be subject, and would be bound to obey. Finally, it differs in that, although the power of the Supreme Pontiff was instituted posterior in time to the royal power, yet as Gelasius relates from Ambrose, in c. Duo sunt, dist. 96, the former exceeds the latter in nobility as much as gold does lead. Innocent III, cap. Solitæ, de maior. et obedientia, compares these two powers to those two great lights placed in the firmament of heaven: and he says that the power of the Supreme Pontiff is the greater light, which presides over the day of spiritual things: while the power of the Emperor is the lesser light, which presides over the night of temporal things. Nor is it only from the excellence of the end, common to the Ecclesiastical power in the time of the law of nature and of the written law, that the excellence of the Supreme Pontiff’s power over the royal and imperial power is to be considered, but also from the nobility and excellence of the means which it uses for that end, and of the supernatural effects which it obtains. Concerning this matter, see Vitoria, Relectio 1 de potestate Ecclesiæ, q. 3, at the beginning; Soto, In IV Sent., dist. 25, q. 2, a. 1, concl. 2; and John of Paris, c. 5.

[1] This particular similitude is somewhat common amongst the Scholastics of this time; but see the criticism which Bellarmine levels against it, in De Romano Pontifice, lib. V, c. vi. — Trans.

[2] Molina’s commentaries upon the Secunda Secundæ of St. Thomas remained in manuscript form until only very recently, when in the later part of the 20^th century they were published in the Archivo teológico granadino; in particular, his commentary De fide (In IIamIIæ, qq. 1-16) was brought out by Eduardo Moore in 1976. Cf. Alonso-Lasheras, Luis de Molina’s De Iustitia et Iure: Justice as Virtue in an Economic Context, p. 14, fn. 14. — Trans.

CHAPTER VIII.

Whether the Ecclesiastical power for making laws is more excellent than the civil in its end, origin, subject, and other properties.

1. Although this question has been determined in great part in the previous chapters; nevertheless, in order that the excellence of this power be illustrated better, and so that we might answer some difficulties, we have judged it to be opportune in this place. And so firstly we set down as certain, that this Ecclesiastical power in the Evangelical law is far more excellent than the civil power. This truth can readily be shown from the things which we have adduced in chapter 1 of this book, especially the third conclusion, where we have also brought forward the Doctors. It is also the common opinion of the Fathers: Ignatius, Epistola ad Smirnenses: Now I say, honor God as the author and Lord of all, and the Bishop as the Prince of priests, bearing the image of God, and the principality according to God, and the priesthood according to Christ, and after this, it is necessary also to honor the King.[1] Ambrose, De dignitate sacerdotali, cap. 2: The Episcopal honor and loftiness can be equaled by no comparisons. If you compare it with the splendor of kings, and the diadem of princes, they will be so far inferior, as if you compare leaden metal to the brilliance of gold, for indeed I see the necks of kings and of princes bowed to the knees of the priests. These words are referred and approved by Gelasius in the c. Duo sunt, dist. 96. And Innocent [III], in the c. Solitæ, de maiorit. et obedient., compares these two powers to the Sun and the Moon. And, Chrysostom, in De sacerdotio, lib. III, says: The priesthood is so much more excellent than the kingdom, in the same degree as the spirit and the flesh are distant from one another. This opinion he follows, and amplifies, in his Homilia 60 in Matthæum, saying: If the prince be crowned with the diadem, but accedes unworthily, forbid him; you have greater power than he. And he says many similar things in Homiliæ 4 and 5 on the words of Isaiah 6, I have seen the Lord, etc., and in Homilia 3 ad populum, a little ways from the beginning, where, speaking of Flavian, he prefers him to the Emperor, and says that he has a sword, not indeed of iron, but spiritual. And we shall refer many things from the Fathers in the following chapter. But in the aforementioned places, they almost always speak generally of the priestly power according to its entire amplitude, including the power of order, according to which it embraces the power of censuring, of remitting sins, of creating priests, etc., and simultaneously the power of jurisdiction, which also includes the dispensation of the spiritual treasure of the Church, and the power of binding and loosing through censures, and many other things. This power being considered in such universality, it is clearer than day, that it is far more excellent than the civil power. Now here we speak not only in this mode, but also precisely in discussing these powers under the aspect of legislative power. And thus we also say, that the Ecclesiastical power is preeminent, as Pope Boniface clearly says in Extra., Unam sanctam, de maiorit. et obedient. And the reason can be given from what has been said in chapter 1, that this power (even insofar as it is legislative) is of the supernatural order; while the civil power is natural, as has been shown above: therefore the former is more excellent in its being [esse] and substance. And this difference can be established between these two powers, which is sufficiently clear from the things said in chapter 1, and it shall be further explained forthwith. But in order that the excellence of this power be made clearer, there are some other differences which are to be assigned on the part of the causes, and principles, and actions of both powers.

2. The second excellence of this power, therefore, is drawn from the part of the end: the end of Ecclesiastical power is supernatural, while that of the civil is contained entirely within the order of nature; the former is spiritual, the latter material; the former eternal, the latter temporal. Indeed all these things are clear from what has been said in chapter 1 and 2 of this book, and in chapter 6 of the prior. There we show, that the end of civil power and law is not eternal and supernatural felicity, but at most the natural felicity of this life; and that not final and perfect, but insomuch as it can be obtained in the perfect human community; and that power is per se and in its intention not extended to the life to come after death, or to its state. But now, one must think quite differently of the Ecclesiastical legislative power; for it has per se been given to direct men to the eternal and supernatural felicity of the life to come: for this is the final end firstly and per se intended by this power. For just as Christ the Lord poured out his blood for men unto this end, so he instituted his Church for the same end, and committed to men the power for ruling it in the order to the same end. And this is the sense of those words, I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, etc., and of the words, The Holy Spirit hath placed you as bishops, to rule the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. And thus often in the Canon laws there occurs express mention of this end, as in the cap. Inter cætera, de offic. ordin.: Amongst the other things which pertain to the salvation of the Christian people, etc., and in the cap. Quoniam, dist. 10, it is said, that Emperors have need of the Pontiffs for eternal life, and the same in cap. Cum ad verum, dist. 96. And hence it is also, that this power, through its laws, principally intends the salvation of souls, and that sins be avoided, as I have shown from many laws in the previous book, chapter 6, and the same is drawn from cap. 2 de constit. in 6 where it says, So as to meet the perils of souls, and cap. ult. de poenit. et remiss., where it says, Lest peril of souls should threaten on account of the postponement of penitence, and in the entire cap. Omnis utriusque, in the same place, and especially where it says, making use of diverse experiments in order to save him who is ill. Likewise from the cap. Ut constitueretur, dist. 50, where Augustine says, that the ancient irregularity imposed upon those doing public penance on account of unusually great crimes, was introduced from the rigor of discipline pertaining to the power of the keys, signifying, that this most of all was given for the spiritual correction of crimes, and for procuring the salvation of souls. Finally, it is manifest from almost the whole of canon law, and the decretal Letters of the Pontiffs.

3. The reason is also clear, because this power is supernatural, as we have shown broadly above in chapter 1; therefore per se and by its very nature, it tends to the supernatural end, whether that of the future life, or of the present: for these two are so connected and subordinated between themselves, that the one cannot be separated from the other; therefore in this end, this power differs most of all from the civil power, which is merely natural, and of itself can tend only to the natural end, as has been shown above. And thus it is clear, that the opinion of Fortunius discussed above, in book 3, chapter 11, insofar as it confounds the ends of these powers, is not probable, and can furnish an occasion for many errors. For surely, if the ultimate end of both powers is the same, the means will also be the same, and the matter will be the same, and consequently the acts also, and whatever the one is able to do, the other will also—all of which are plainly erroneous. Now the reason is, that these powers in their very being [esse] are very much distinct in terms of their genus; therefore it is necessary that they be distinguished in their ends also. The antecedent is clear from the things said, because the one is supernatural, not only because it is granted by God in an extraordinary mode, but because, of itself, and by its very nature, it cannot be found in nature itself, nor can it arise from its principles, which is not the case with the civil power. Wherefore the royal power, even as it was in Saul, or David, although it had in these men a kind of supernatural mode, was very different from this power: for theirs was only civil power, and of itself natural in its substance, although it had been granted in a preternatural mode; but this power is per se supernatural, and of the divine order, because it can in no way be connatural to men. Now the first consequence is clear, because the whole being [esse] of any power whatsoever is in the order to its end and object; therefore, if a power is supernatural, it is necessary that it tend, by its very nature, to a supernatural end and object.

4. You might say: canonical laws often make ordinances regarding things which are merely exterior and natural: for canon law also intends external peace, and the conservation of justice, as it is said in the proœmium of the Decretals, and unto this end it coerces and punishes vices. Many are also found in the canon laws, which pertain only to the order of causes and contracts, as is clear from Book II, and from a great part of Book III of the Decretals. Therefore, although the Ecclesiastical power, insofar as it is a power of handing on the doctrine of the faith, and the sacraments, and insofar it is a power of remitting sins, or of dispensing spiritual things, is supernatural, and concerns a supernatural end—nevertheless, insofar as it is legislative, it seems to be of the same nature and order with the civil power. It is answered by denying the consequence. First of all, because even in the matter of faith and the sacraments, it commands many supernatural things, and that supernaturally, such as, to believe this or that, to receive such sacraments in such a way, or at such a time, to offer a supernatural sacrifice, or to assist at it, and similar things: and in all these things it conducts itself insofar as it is a legislative power, according to the things which John XXII discusses in Extrav. Quia quorundam, de verbor. significat. Secondly, because even in all these things which this power establishes, and which pertain to external Ecclesiastical polity, or to lawsuits, contracts, etc., it always commands supernaturally, that is, under a supernatural aspect, and in the order to the supernatural end. For the legislative power is the same in any matter whatsoever, and always operates under the proper aspect of its object. This can be declared, according to a similitude, from the acts of the infused virtues. For by faith, e.g., we not only believe the supernatural mysteries, but also many natural things, such as, that God exists, or that the soul is immortal, yet just as faith is concerned with these things, it tends under a supernatural aspect, and operates supernaturally; the same can be seen in charity and hope, and most of all in the per se infused moral virtues; therefore this power has itself thus in making these laws which seem to be political and quasi-civil: for always in these it has regard for the salvation of souls, and for the religious worship of God, as can be regularly apparent from the tenor of the canons themselves. And there is a very good example in the cap. Qualiter et quando, 2. de accusat. where, discussing the order to be observed in judgments or denunciations, the Pontiff works to gather this from the authorities of the new and old Testament. From which, he says, canonical sanctions afterward proceed. Now the reason is, that since this power is of a superior order, it comprehends lower things also, insofar as they are of use to higher things in some way, either according to the mode of a subject, or according to the mode of an instrument, or some similar way, and thus it can make laws regarding things or matters of an inferior order, yet always under the superior and supernatural aspect.

5. The third excellence of this power can be assigned from the part of the efficient cause and of origin: for this power is as it were per se infused, wherefore it can flow immediately from God alone, insofar as he is its author, and the supernatural governor, as from its first and chief principle; while the civil power is given by God insofar as he is the author of nature, and is not properly conferred per se, but through the mode of a property flowing from nature itself, in the manner explained in book III. Whence it is clear, that even on this point, this power is far more excellent. This is more importantly declared thus: for this power, according to its adequate character and excellence, has been conferred by Christ the Lord, and in him it was as a property flowing from the hypostatic union of the humanity to the Word, as we have explained at length in the first tome of the Third Part, disp. 47. From this it is clear, that this power is so much the more excellent in its source than the civil power, as the hypostatic union surpasses the human community. Now this power is derived from Christ and through Christ to his Vicar through a certain very great kind of participation of that power of excellence which was in Christ, and thus had its foundation not only in the incarnation itself, but also in the merits of Chris the Lord, and in his blood, which cannot be said of the civil power considered in itself; therefore from all these things, the excellence of the Ecclesiastical power is manifestly apparent.

6. This excellence can be asserted, fourthly, from the part of the subject, because the Ecclesiastical power much surpasses the civil in its primary and as it were immediate subject. For the civil power is immediately in the human community; while this power resides principally in Christ the man, whence it happens, that as regards the proximate subject, the civil power is in that man to whom the community has committed it, or in his successors; whereas this power is in him to whom Christ has committed it, or his successors; or through his mediation in others. But amongst these persons, there are three differences to be noted. The first, that the civil power is able to be in any man whosoever, even one unbaptized, whereas this Ecclesiastical power can be in none except such as have the Baptismal character. For Baptism is the door of the Church, and thus, just as before the character of Baptism no man is directly subjected to the Church, so also, without that character, no man is capable of Ecclesiastical power, whence neither can he have the power of orders. You might say, hence that inconvenience can be inferred which we inferred above regarding a mental heretic, because if, faith having been lost, he were to lose power, this power would be very uncertain; so also in the present it is uncertain whether someone has the Baptismal character, because in many ways it can happen that the Sacrament is not valid; therefore the same incertitude follows from the necessity of the character. Yet it is responded, that the cases are not similar, because the certitude of Baptism, although it is not wholly infallible, nevertheless has that moral certitude which can be had in human things, and the character, once impressed, can never be removed, while faith can easily be lost.

7. Another difference is, that the civil power can be in men and women; but the Ecclesiastical power cannot be in women, at least by ordinary law. We speak regarding the power of jurisdiction, with which legislation is concerned: for as regards the power of orders, it is certain that women are incapable of it, as is to be shown explicitly in the matter on Orders against the authors of novelties stirring up the ancient heresy of the Papuzians, which was rebutted by Augustine, De hæresibus in 27, and Epiphanius in 49, from Paul, 1 Cor 14 and 1 Tim 2, where he permits women neither to teach nor to speak in the Church. Now, I have said it cannot, because this power, inasmuch as it is given immediately by Christ, that is, the supreme and Pontifical power, cannot be in a woman, because she is not capable of orders, or of Episcopal consecration, and thus is not capable of the Pontificate either. That which some have dreamt up regarding John VIII, is fabulous, as Bellarmine, De Romano pontifice, lib. III, cap. ult., has shown from Onuphrius, and Baronius copiously, ann. 853, n. 56ff, where he refers other authors. And in n. 63 he rightly notes, that even if that fabulous story had occurred as it is thus related, that woman would not have been Pontiff, but the see would have been vacant for that time, and afterward, in the election of Benedict, the succession would have continued, concerning which more elsewhere. But hence I gather, that this phrase it cannot is to be extended to the whole of ordinary Ecclesiastical jurisdiction. For he who is incapable of the power of orders, is also incapable of ordinary Ecclesiastical jurisdiction, because from the divine institution of the Church, she ought to be governed, in spiritual things, by priests or clerics, according to ordinary law. And nevertheless, I have added, at least according to ordinary law, on account of Ecclesiastical jurisdiction, insofar as it can be delegated by the Pontiff, concerning which there is a controversy whether an act of this power can be committed to a woman. In this it is certain, that it ought not to be committed, and it is the more received view that it cannot be, as I have discussed in the matter on Censures, disp. II, sect. 3, from n. 5. And as regards the present legislative power, it has never been seen in the Church, which is a sign that it cannot occur.

8. Finally, there is a difference in this part, that the civil power can be in mere laymen; while this power cannot but be in clerics, which is to be explained in the same way as the preceding. Although regarding the Pontifical power, it is not so certain that a mere layman is wholly incapable of it, if he be otherwise duly elected, provided that he be immediately ordained. But it is certain that it has never occurred in the Church, nor ought it, on account of the novelty and the peril. And it is similarly certain, that one thus elected ought not to use the power of jurisdiction, unless he be ordained, although he is able to use it prior to the Pontifical consecration, as soon as he is elected and placed on the chair. Now, regarding inferior power, the ordinary law of the Church is that it not be committed to laymen, and thus, lower than the supreme Pontiff, no one can commit it to a layman. Wherefore, although it has sometimes been seen that a layman is elected, or postulated for the Episcopate, such as Ambrose, and others, yet it has not been seen, that the use of power is given to him, until he receives some sort of ordination. And thus the supreme Pontiff, making use of the ordinary law, does not grant it except to a man constituted in some clerical grade, at least of the first tonsure, although in respect of his absolute power, he could perhaps do otherwise. Finally, there are other excellences in this Ecclesiastical power which can be considered, namely, that it is much more universal, and is, in its supreme degree, unique for the whole world, and that it is most of all necessary, and that in its mode it is the foundation of the Church, as the blessed Thomas said in 2. dist. 44 in ult. dub. lit. And finally, that it has more noble effects, which shall be made clearer by explaining its laws.

[1] But see e.g. Bardenhewer’s summary and account regarding the authenticity of the Long Recension of the letters of Ignatius, from which Suárez here quotes. — Trans.

Introduction
Text
PDF

Introduction

by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Pope St. Gelasius I’s letter to the Emperor Anastasius I Famuli vestrae pietatis, better known as Duo Sunt,^[1] written in 494, is the classical statement of the Church’s teaching on the relation of the authority of pontiffs to the power of worldly rulers. It was to be quoted and paraphrased again and again by later popes. The key passage has been translated numerous times, but until now there have been only two complete translations into English, neither of which is in the public domain.^[2] As the context of the letter is particularly important for understanding the meaning of the key passage correctly, we are pleased to offer the following collaborative translation of the whole letter on The Josias.^[3]

St. Gelasius’s Life and Times

St. Gelasius reigned from 492-496, when the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West, and Italy was ruled by barbarians, who stood in an ambiguous relationship to the Byzantine emperor—at times recognizing his authority, at other times styling themselves “kings” of Italy. In 476 (conventionally seen as the end of the Empire) Odoacer, who was already in power, had forced Romulus Augustulus to abdicate. In 493, the year after St. Gelasius’s accession to the See of Peter, the Arian Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great killed Odoacer and established his rule in Italy.^[4] In the unsettled situation of Italy, the pope was an important source of order for the city of Rome and beyond. Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen have shown how St. Gelasius was a “micro-manager” of the ecclesiastical, social, and political affairs of Rome in a manner reminiscent of St. Gregory the Great a century later.^[5]

Gelasius was “a Roman born,” as he himself testifies (§1 below), and the Liber pontificalis notes that he was “of African nationality.”^[6] In “The African Gelasius,” writes Hugo Rahner, in the slightly histrionic tone of his book on the liberty of the Church, “the ideals of Augustine and the devotion of Leo for the Roman See were combined with a will of steel and eloquence of style.”^[7] Not everyone has been so admiring of Gelasius’s style.^[8] Nor has everyone credited him with a will of steel.^[9] But it is certainly true that Gelasius was formed in the traditions of St. Augustine and of St. Leo the Great. Dionysius Exiguus, who probably did not know Gelasius personally, but knew many others who had known him, writes of him in glowing terms as an exemplary pastor and scholar.^[10]

The Acacian Schism

Although Gelasius was pope for less than five years, a large number of documents from his pontificate have come down to us,^[11] as well as several letters thought to have been drafted by him as a deacon under his predecessor Pope Felix II/III (reigned 483-492).^[12] Famulae vestrae pietatis is by far the most famous of his letters. It was written in the context of the Acacian Schism, the first major schism between Rome and Constantinople.

The schism had originated in the Emperor Zeno’s attempt to reestablish ecclesial unity with the many Egyptian Christians who had rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451). Chalcedon had condemned the monophysite heresiarch Eutyches, and deposed the Alexandrian patriarch Dioscurus, appointing Proterius in his stead.^[13] In 457 the Alexandrian mob elected Timothy the Cat patriarch, and murdered Proterius.^[14] Timothy died in 477, and his followers elected his ardent disciple Peter the Hoarse to succeed him.^[15]

In 482 Zeno sent out a formula of faith, the Henotikon, to the Egyptians.^[16] The document was not heterodox in its Christological statements. But it was unacceptable to Rome from an ecclesiological point of view. Its underlying assumption was that the emperor could define the faith (“Caesaropapism”). Moreover, it was “political theology” in the derogatory sense, seeing the unity of faith as being ordered to the unity of the empire, “the origin and composition, the power and irresistible shield of our empire.”^[17] But what was least acceptable to Rome was its cavalier dismissal of Chalcedon, the great triumph of the teaching of Pope Leo. After emphasizing that the only creed is the one defined at Nicea I and Constantinople I, Zeno writes, “But we anathematize anyone who has thought, or thinks, any other opinion, either now or at any time, whether at Chalcedon or at any Synod whatsoever.”^[18]

Peter the Hoarse accepted the Henotikon, and Acacius, Patriarch of Constantinople accepted him into communion, and was therefore excommunicated by Pope Felix II/III in 484.^[19] This was the beginning of the Acacian Schism, which was to last till 519. Acacius himself died in 489.^[20] His successor, Fravitta tried to assure both Pope Felix and Peter the Hoarse that he was in communion with them.^[21] In 491 the Emperor Zeno was succeeded by Emperor Anastasius I (491-518), who had monophysite sympathies and continued Zeno’s policy.^[22]

Famuli vestræ pietatis

When Gelasius was elected to the See of Peter in 492 he did not write to the  Emperor Anastasius to announce his election, as was customary. But two Romans, Faustus and Irenaeus, having been in Constantinople as part of a legation from Theodoric the Great, brought word to him that the Emperor was offended by his failure to write. This was the occasion of Famuli vestræ pietatis.

Gelasius begins the letter by excusing himself for not having written before and addresses the Emperor patriotically as the Roman princeps. He hints that his desire to supply “something (however little) lacking from the fullness of the Catholic Faith” in Constantinople, by which he means that he wants to bring the schism to an end (§1). He then clarifies his right to do this by explaining the relation of his “sacred authority” to the “royal power” of the Emperor— this is the celebrated locus classicus for the relation of lay and clerical authority (§2). He further explicates this by laying out the primacy of the Apostolic See—the “firm foundation” laid by God (§3). He then tries to persuade the Emperor to end the schism, by having Acacius’s name deleted from the diptychs, the lists of names prayed for in the Divine Liturgy (a sign of ecclesial communion). Acacius was in Communion with heretics and should be condemned with them. (§§4-9). He rebuffs the objection that removing Acacius from the diptychs would cause a rebellion at Constantinople, and urges the emperor that he is even more bound to combat heresy than he would be bound to combat offenses against temporal laws (§§10-11). Finally, he defends himself against the charge of arrogance, by turning the accusation against those who, contrary to the tradition of the Fathers, refuse to submit to the Apostolic See (§12).

Auctoritas and Potestas

“For there are two, O emperor Augustus, by which the world is principally ruled: the sacred authority (auctoritas) of pontiffs and the royal power (potestas).” This famous line was to be cited in favor of rival medieval theories of the relation of the two: curialists cited it in favor of papal supremacy while their opponents cited it to prove imperial or royal autonomy.^[23] More recently, it has been cited by Whig Thomists in favor of American-style “religious freedom.”^[24] Its meaning continues to be debated among historians.

The modern debate has tended to focus on the meaning of the terms auctoritas and potestas. Erich Caspar argued that auctoritas meant something like moral influence, whereas potestas meant coercive power:

In Roman constitutional law there was a clear distinction between the conceptually and morally superior auctoritas, founded on tradition and social standing, which the senate, for example, enjoyed, and a potestas equipped with executive power, which in republican times belonged only to the people and was delegated to their officials only for a set period of office.^[25]

Caspar approached things from a typically modern understanding of power dynamics, but a similar reading of the auctoritas and potestas distinction has been given by authors less in thrall to Realpolitik. Allan Cotrell notes that some see potestas as “the mere ability to use force without legitimate authority.’”^[26] Michael Hanby has recently argued for such a view.^[27] According to Hanby auctoritas “possesses no extrinsic force,” but compels “by its own self-evidence.”^[28] To the extent that it is not bound and guided by auctoritas, potestas is “an indeterminate force, the brute strength to realize arbitrary possibilities.”^[29]

Readings such as Hanby’s cannot, however, be sustained. As Walter Ullmann showed, the popes of the fifth century saw themselves as having the authority to enact laws backed up by sanctions.^[30] That is, their auctoritas did possess an extrinsic as well as an intrinsic force. But it is clear also that Gelasius does not see the emperor’s potestas as mere brute force—he sees it also as a moral authority that binds the consciences of subjects: “inasmuch as it pertains to the order of public discipline, even the bishops themselves obey your laws, knowing that rule [imperium] has been bestowed to you from on high” (§2). Auctoritas and potestas are more similar than such authors think. Caspar himself seems to admit as much, when he goes on to argue that Gelasius’s letter was meant to bring the two concepts closer together:

What was new and important was that Gelasius I now defined the state’s potestas and papal auctoritas (which functioned as potestas ligandi et solvendi) as ‘the two things… through which this world is ruled,’ and thereby put them on the same level as commensurable magnitudes in the same conceptual category.^[31]

Ullmann argued for a different interpretation of the auctoritas-potestas distinction. According to him, auctoritas meant sovereign authority, whereas potestas meant delegated authority:

Auctoritas is the faculty of shaping things creatively and in a binding manner, whilst potestas is the power to execute what the auctoritas has laid down. The Roman senate had auctoritas, the Roman magistrate had potestas. The antithesis between auctoritas and potestas stated already by Augustus himself, shows the ‘outstanding charismatic political authority’ which his auctoritas contained. It was sacred, since everything connected with Roman emperorship was sacred emanating as it did from his divinity. It was therefore all the easier to transfer these characteristically Roman ideas to the function of the Pope and to his auctoritas.^[32]

While Ullmann is essentially right about how Gelasius saw his relation the emperor, he is wrong to put so much weight on the semantic distinction between auctoritas and potestas. Ernst Stein and Aloysius K. Ziegler showed convincingly that Gelasius did not mean to make any semantic distinction between auctoritas and potestas at all. For reasons of style he did not wish to use the same word twice in the same sentence, and therefore he used synonyms. In his damning review essay on Caspar, Stein points out that in Tractate IV, written only two years after Famuli vestræ pietatis, Gelasius writes of “both powers” (potestas utraque), showing that he was quite willing to use potestas to refer to the pontifical auctoritas.^[33] Ziegler, for his part, looks at the letters of Felix II/III, drafted by Gelasius as a deacon, and finds conclusive evidence for Stein’s thesis in Felix’s Epistle XV:

These things, most reverent Emperor, I do not wrest from you as vicar of the blessed Peter, by the authority of the apostolic power as it were [auctoritate velut apostolicae potestatis], but I confidently implore you as an anxious father desiring that the welfare and prosperity of my most clement son endure long.^[34]

Perhaps Epistle XV is using the two terms in slightly different senses, but it is clear that it sees both as belonging to the Apostolic See.^[35]

Gelasius’s Integralism

George Demacopoulos has recently argued that the scholarly focus on the semantic distinction between auctoritas and potestas is regrettable, since with “that singular focus, scholars have failed to acknowledge many of the other significant moves that Gelasius makes in the letter.”^[36] On that I think he is right. He is wrong, however, to fault Caspar and Ullmann (especially the later) for reading Gelasius too much in the light of the subsequent development of the papacy.^[37] Demacopoulos argues on historical-critical grounds, but it is hard not to see his approach as being motivated by Greek Orthodox suspicion of Catholic teaching on the papacy. Even from a purely historical perspective, it is helpful to look at the developments to which a teaching gives rise to understand it better. As St. John Henry Newman put it, the principle that “the stream is clearest near the spring” does not apply to the development of a teaching or belief, “which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full.”^[38] And, of course, this is all the more true if it is a question of interpreting the authoritative teachings of the Church. Since the bishops of Rome teach under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, their pronouncements can only be adequately understood in the light of later developments. Thus Gelasius ought to be read in the light of the authoritative teachings of St. Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Boniface VIII.

It is, therefore, all the more significant that, despite his methodological shortcomings, Demacopoulos ultimately comes to a reading of Gelasius very close to Ullmann’s. He argues, namely, that Gelasius is indeed teaching a certain subordination of the imperial under the pontifical power:

Among Gelasius’ impressive rhetorical demonstrations is his transformation of the argument for the divine derivation of imperial authority into an argument for the subordination of the emperor to the priesthood. […] Noting that imperial governance is a beneficium from God for which the emperor will be accountable, Gelasius quickly notes that he too will personally be required to render an account before God for whether or not Anastasius properly administers the imperial beneficium. In other words, Gelasius boldly inserts himself into the ruling/responsibility paradigm to imply that his own responsibility (and, therefore, his own authority) was superior to that of the emperor. The emperor, of course, retains a certain responsibility for the Roman population, but above that hierarchical paradigm exists another, more exalted layer, placing the pope between the emperor and God.^[39]

The “hierarchical paradigm” to which Demacopoulos refers is founded on a teleological understanding of society and authority. No one grasped this more firmly than Walter Ullmann. That is why, despite his exaggeration of the auctoritas-potestas distinction, I still think Ullmann the best reader of Gelasius.

“Gelasius,” Ullman argues, “bequeathed to all Papal generations a set of ideas based upon an interpretation of history in the light of Christian teleology.”^[40] This Christian teleology sees the Church as a body with many members who have distinct functions related to the single spiritual end of communion with God. The members of this body belong to it with all that they are: “Christianity seizes the whole of man and cannot, by its very nature, be confined to certain departmental limits.”^[41] The Christian Body therefore “is not merely a pneumatic or sacramental or spiritual body, but also an organic, concrete and earthy society.”^[42] In this visible society there are certain functions which are immediately directed to its end, what Gelasius calls “the distribution of the venerable mysteries,” (infra §2) and there are others which are mediately directed to its end—everything, for example, that serves the preservation of bodily life. It is essential that those “temporal” functions remain mediately ordered to the final end: “in the Christian corpus the administration of the temporal things should be undertaken, in order to bring about the realization of the purpose of the corpus.”^[43] In other words, “in a Christian society all human actions have an essentially religious ingredient.”^[44] What Gelasius is doing therefore, is not clarifying the relation of church and state (as Whig Thomists suppose), but rather the relation of clerical and lay power within the one Christian body. In the Henotikon Zeno had implicitly presented himself as the head of the whole Christian mundus, but Gelasius is teaching his successor that he is not qualified for headship:

[Since] in a Christian society, of which the emperor through baptism is a member, every human action has a definite purpose and in so far has an essential religious ingredient, the emperors should submit their governmental actions to the ecclesiastical superiors.^[45]

Turning to Tractate IV, Ullmann shows that Gelasius saw the purpose of the royal power in the Christian world as the care of temporal matters, so that clerics “are not distracted by the pursuit of these carnal matters.”^[46] Thus, Ullmann concludes,

The direction of [the] royal power by those who are, within the corporate union of Christians, qualified to do so, is as necessary as the direction of the whole body corporate. In this way this body will fulfil the purpose for which it was founded. The material or corporeal or temporal element in this body demands the guidance, that is orientation and government, by the spiritual or sacramental element of this self-same body.^[47]

R.W. Dyson has shown in detail how this Gelasian teaching on the relation of the temporal to the spiritual was based on premises which he found in his North African tradition: in St. Augustine’s proportioning of spiritual and carnal needs onto the offices of bishops and Roman officials. Augustine had not followed those principles through to their ultimate conclusions, but it was an easy step for Gelasius to take, since it is obvious that spiritual goods exceed bodily ones.^[48]

The same point was made earlier by Hugo Rahner:

What Augustine regarded as a lofty ideal, Gelasius made tangible: the ideal of the state as the Church’s helper, of two powers in peaceful collaboration “ruling the world”. Gelasius’ genius lay in the fact that he did not declare that the two powers deriving directly from God, Creator and Savior, should exist side by side, an impossible situation and one repugnant to God’s will, but rather that they should be hierarchically ordered, like soul and body, the spiritual superior to the material, because only in subordination is the material power’s true worth maintained.^[49]

The functional division of the two powers is not a division into separate spheres that never overlap. While Gelasius sees the purpose of the emperor as being primarily the regulation of temporal affairs, he is also emphatic that the emperor must use imperial force to help the Church more directly in the preservation of the faith from charity. In Famuli vestræ pietatis he argues that, because Anastasius curbs popular tumults arising from secular causes, so much more should he restrain heretics and thereby “lead them back into the Catholic and Apostolic communion” (§10). He is essentially calling for the emperor to act as the bracchium sæculare of the Church:

If anyone perhaps were to attempt something against public laws (perish the thought!), for no reason would you have been able to suffer it. Do you not reckon it to concern your conscience that the people subject to you should be driven back from the pure and sincere devotion of Divinity? (§10)

Far from being a Whig avant la lettre, Gelasius was in fact what we would now call an integralist.

FAMULI VESTRÆ PIETATIS

Translated by HHG et al.

Pope St. Gelasius I to the Emperor Anastasius.

§ 1 Your Piety’s servants, my sons, the master Faustus and Irenaeus, illustrious men, and their companions who exercise the public office of legate, when they returned to the City, said that Your Clemency asked why I did not send my greeting to you in written form. Not, I confess, by my design; but since those who had been dispatched a little while ago from the regions of the East had spread [word] throughout the whole City that they had been denied permission of seeing me by your commands, I thought that I ought to refrain from [writing] letters, lest I be judged burdensome rather than dutiful. You see, therefore, that it came not from my dissembling, but rather from proper caution, lest I inflict annoyance on one minded to reject me. But when I learned that the benevolence of Your Serenity had, as indicated above, expected a word from my humility, then I truly recognized that I would not unjustly be blamed if I remained silent. For, glorious son, I as a Roman born love, honor, and accept you as the Roman Prince. And as a Christian I desire to have knowledge according to the truth with one who has zeal for God. And as the Vicar of the Apostolic See (of whatever quality), whenever I see something (however little) lacking from the fullness of the Catholic Faith, I attempt to supply it by moderate and timely suggestions. For the dispensing of the divine word has been enjoined on me: «woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel» (1 Cor 9:16). Because, if the vessel of election, blessed Paul the Apostle, is afraid and cries out, how much more urgently must I fear if in my preaching I omit anything from the ministry of preaching which has been divinely inspired and handed down by the piety of the fathers.

§ 2 I pray your Piety not to judge [my] duty toward the divine plan as arrogance. Far be it from the Roman Prince, I beg, that he judge the truth that he senses in his heart to be an injury. For there are two, O emperor Augustus, by which the world is principally ruled: the sacred authority of pontiffs and the royal power. Among which how much heavier is the burden of priests, such that they will have to render an account to the Lord at the time of judgment even for those very kings. For you know, O most merciful son, that although by dignity you preside over the human race, nevertheless you devoutly bow your neck to the leaders of divine matters, and from them you await the causes of your salvation, and you recognize that, in partaking of the celestial sacraments, and being disposed to them (as is appropriate), you must be submitted to the order of religion rather than rule over it. Therefore you know that in these matters you depend on their judgement, not willing to force them to your will. For if, inasmuch as it pertains to the order of public discipline, even the bishops themselves obey your laws, knowing that rule [imperium] has been bestowed to you from on high, lest they seem in mundane things to oppose the eminent sentence; with what passion, I ask, does it become you to obey those, who have been assigned for the distribution of the venerable mysteries? Just as the danger does not fall upon pontiffs lightly, to have been silent on behalf of the cult of the Divinity, which is fitting; thus there is no slight peril to those who (perish the thought!) when they ought to obey, look askance. And if it is settled that the faithful submit their hearts to all the priests in general who pass on divine things rightly, how much more must they submit to the prelate of that See, whom the highest Divinity willed also to be preëminent above all priests, and which the piety of the universal Church subsequently celebrated.

§ 3 Clearly, wherever Your Piety turns, no one at all has been able to raise himself to the privilege or confession of that one, whom the voice of Christ has put over all, who has been always confessed and venerated by the Church, and has the first devotion. Those things which have been constituted by divine judgement can be attacked by human presumption, but they cannot be conquered by any power. And if only boldness would not be so pernicious against those struggling, as those things which have been fixed by the very founder of sacred religion cannot be dislodged by any force: the foundation of God stands firm (2 Tim 2:19). For is religion, when it is infested by some [persons], able to be overcome by novelties? Does it not rather remain unconquered by the thing supposed to be able to defeat it? And I ask you therefore, may they desist, who under your aegis run about headlong seeking the disruption of the church, which is not permitted: or at least that these should in no way achieve those things which they wickedly desire, and not keep their measure before God and men.

§ 4 For this reason, before God, I beg, adjure, and exhort your piety purely and earnestly that you not receive my request disdainfully: I say again: I ask that you hear me beseeching you now in this life rather than (later) accusing you—perish the thought!—before the divine tribunal. Nor is it hidden from me, O Emperor Augustus, what the devotion of Your Piety has been in private life. You always chose to be a participator of the eternal promise. Wherefore, I pray you, be not angry with me, if I love you so much that I want you to have that reign, which you have temporarily, forever, and that you who rule the age, might be able to rule with Christ. Certainly, by your laws, Emperor, you do not allow anything to perish, nor do you allow any damage to be done to the Roman name. Surely then it is not true, Excellent Prince, who desires not only the present benefits of Christ but also the future ones, that you would suffer anyone under your aegis to bring loss to religion, to truth, to the sincerity of the Catholic Communion, and to the Faith? By what faith (I ask you) will you ask reward of him there, whose loss you do not prohibit here?

§ 5 Be they not heavy, I pray thee, those things that are said for your eternal salvation. You have read it written: «the wounds of a friend are better than the kisses of an enemy» (Prov. 27:8). I ask your piety to receive what I say into your mind in the same sentiment in which I say it. No one should deceive Your Piety. What the Scriptures witness figuratively through the prophet is true: «One is my dove, one is my perfect one» (Cant. 6:8), one is the Christian faith, which is Catholic. But that faith is truly Catholic, which is divided by a sincere, pure, and unspotted communion from all the perfidious and their successors and associates. Otherwise there would not be the divinely commanded distinction, but a deplorable muddle. Nor would there be any reason left, if we allow this contagion in anyone, not to open wide the gate to all the heresies. For who in one thing offends, is guilty of all (James 2:10); and: who despises little things shall little by little fall (Sirach 19:1)

§ 6 This is what the Apostolic See vigorously guards against, that since the pure root is the glorious confession of the Apostle, it might not be soiled by any fissure of perversity, nor by any direct contagion. For if something like that were to happen (which God forbid, and which we trust is impossible), how could we dare to resist any error, or from whence could we request the correction to those in error? Moreover, if Your Piety denies that the people of a single city can be brought together in peace, what would we do with the whole world, if (God forbid) it were to be deceived by our prevarication? If the whole world has been set right, despising the profane traditions of its fathers, how could the people of a single city not be converted if the preaching of the faith persevere. Therefore, glorious Emperor, do I not will the peace, I who would embrace it even if it came at the price of my blood? But, I prithee, let us hold in our mind of what sort the peace ought to be; not any kind, but a truly Christian peace. For how can there be a true peace where chaste charity is lacking? But how charity ought to be, the Apostle evidently preaches for us, who says, Charity is from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith (1 Tim. 1:5). How, I pray thee, shall it be from a pure heart, if it is poisoned by an external contagion? How shall it be from a good conscience, if it is commingled with depraved and evil things? How shall it be from an unfeigned faith if it remains united with the perfidious? While these things have often been said by us, it is nevertheless necessary to repeat them incessantly, and not to be silent as long as the name of “peace” continues to be put forward as an excuse; it is not for us (as the is enviously asserted) to make “peace”, but we nevertheless teach that we want that true peace, which is the only peace, apart from which none other can be shown.

§ 7 Certainly if the dogma of Eutyches, against which the caution of the Apostolic See vigilantly watches, is believed to be consistent with the saving Catholic faith, then it ought to be brought forward plainly and asserted and supported with as much force as possible, for then it will be possible to show not only how inimical it is to the Christian faith itself, but also how many and how deadly are the heresies it contains in its dregs. But if rather (as we are confident you will) you judge that this dogma should be excluded from Catholic minds, I ask you why you do not also suppress the contagion of those who have been shown to be contaminated by it? As the Apostle says: Are only those who do things that ought not to be done guilty, and not also they that consent to them that do them? (cf. Rom 1:32). Accordingly, just as one cannot accept a participant in perversity without equally approving of the perversity, so too, one cannot refute perversity while admitting an accomplice and partisan of perversity.

§ 8 Certainly, by your laws, accomplices of crimes and harbourers of thieves are judged to be bound equally by the same punishment; nor is he considered to have no part in a crime, who, though he did not do it himself, nevertheless accepts the familiarity and the alliance of the doer. Accordingly, when the Council of Chalcedon, celebrated for the Catholic and Apostolic faith and the true communion, condemned Eutyches, the progenitor of those detestable ravings, it did not leave it at that, but likewise also struck down his consort Dioscorus and the rest. In this way, therefore, just as in the case of every heresy there is no ambiguity about what has always been done or what is being done: their successors Timothy [the Cat], Peter [the Hoarse], and the other Peter, the Antiochian, have been cut out— not individually by councils called again to deal with them singly, but once and for all as a consequence of the regular acts of the synod. Therefore, as it has not been clear that even those who were their correspondents and accomplices are all bound with a similar strictness, and are by right wholly separated from the Catholic and Apostolic communion, We hereby declare that Acacius, too, is to be removed from communion with Us, since he preferred to cast in his lot with perfidy rather than to remain in the authentic Catholic and Apostolic communion (though for almost three years he has been authoritatively advised by letters of the Apostolic See, lest it should come to this). But after he went over to another communion, nothing was possible except that he should be at once cut off from association with the Apostolic See, lest on his account, if We delayed even a little, We also should seem to have come into contact with the perfidious. But when he was struck with such a blow, did he come to his senses, did he promise correction, did he emend his error? Would he have been coerced by more lenient treatment, when even harsh blows left no impression? While he tarries in his perfidy and damnation, it is both impossible to use his name in the liturgy of the church, and unnecessary to tolerate any external contact with him. Wherefore he will be led in good faith away from the heretical communion into which he has mixed himself, or there will be no choice but to drive him away with them.

§ 9 But if the bishops of the East murmur, that the Apostolic See did not apply such judgments to them, as if they had either convinced the Apostolic See that Peter [the Hoarse] was to be accepted as legitimate, or had not yet been fully complicit in this unheard-of acceptation: just as they cannot demonstrate that he was free of heretical depravity, neither can they in anyway excuse themselves, being in communion with heretics. If perhaps they should add that they all with one voice reported the reception of Peter [the Hoarse] by Acacius to the Apostolic See, then by the same token they know how he responded to them. But the authority of the Apostolic See— that in all Christian ages it has been set over the universal Church— is confirmed both by a series of canons of the Fathers, and by manifold tradition. But even hence, whether anyone should prevail to usurp anything for himself against the ordinances of the Synod of Nicaea, this can be shown to the college of the one communion, not to the opinion of external society. If anyone has confidence amongst them, let him go out into the midst, and disprove and instruct the Apostolic See concerning each part. Therefore let his name [Acacius] be removed from our midst, which works the separation of churches far from Catholic communion, in order that sincere peace of faith and of communion should be repaired, and unity: and then let it competently and legitimately be investigated which of us either has risen up or struggles to rise up against venerable antiquity. And then shall appear who by modest intention guards the form and tradition of the elders, and who irreverently leaping beyond these, reckons himself able to become equal by robbery.

§ 10 But if it is proposed to me that the character [persona] of the Constantinopolitan people makes it impossible (it is said) that the name of scandal, that is Acacius, be removed; I am silent, because with both the heretic Macedonius formerly having been driven out, and Nestorius recently having been thrown out, the Constantinopolitan people have elected to remain Catholic rather than be retained by affection for their condemned greater prelates. I am silent, because those who had been baptized by these very same condemned prelates, remaining in the Catholic faith, are disturbed by no agitation. I am silent, because for ludicrous things the authority of Your Piety now restrains popular tumults; and thus much more for the necessary salvation of their souls the multitude of the Constantinopolitan city obeys you, if you princes should lead them back unto the Catholic and Apostolic communion. For, Emperor Augustus, if anyone perhaps were to attempt something against public laws (perish the thought!), for no reason would you have been able to suffer it. Do you not reckon it to concern your conscience that the people subject to you should be driven back from the pure and sincere devotion of Divinity? Finally, if the mind of the people of one city is not reckoned to be offended if divine things (as the matter demands) are corrected— how much more does it hold that, lest divine things should be offended, we ought not (nor can we) strike the pious faith of all those of the Catholic name?

§ 11 And nevertheless these same ones demand that they should be healed by our will. Therefore they allow that they can be cured by competent remedies: otherwise (Heaven forfend!) by crossing over into their ruin, we can perish with them, whereas we cannot save them. Now here I leave to your conscience under divine judgement what must rather be done: whether, as We desire, we should return all at once unto certain life; or, as those demand, we should tend unto manifest death.

§ 12 But still they strain to call the Apostolic See proud and arrogant for furnishing them with medicines. The quality of the languishing often has this: that they should accuse rather the medics calling them back to healthful things by fitting observations, than that they themselves should consent to depose or reprove their noxious appetites. If we are proud, because we minister fitting remedies of souls, what are those to be called who resist? If we are proud who say that obedience must be given to paternal decrees, by what name should those be called who oppose them? If we are puffed up, who desire that the divine cult should be served with pure and unblemished tenor; let them say how those who think even against divinity should be named. Thus also do the rest, who are in error, reckon us, because we do not consent to their insanity. Nevertheless, truth herself indicates where the spirit of pride really stands and fights.

^[1] Sometimes also as Ad Anastasium, Epistle XII (Thiel), or Epistle VIII (Migne).

^[2] Matthew Briel, trans. in: George E. Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 173-180; Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen, trans., The Letters of Gelasius I (492-496) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 73-80.

^[3] The translation was made by numerous online friends of The Josias in a shared google spreadsheet. The style is therefore uneven. For technical reasons we used Migne’s edition in PL 59, col. 41-47, but we have corrected it in some places with reference to Thiel’s critical edition: Andreas Thiel, ed., Epistolae Romanorum pontificum genuinae et quae ad eos scriptae sunt: a S. Hilaro usque ad Pelagium II., vol. 1 (Braunsberg: E. Peter, 1867), pp. 349-358. For the paragraph numbering we have followed Thiel.

^[4] For an account of the period, see: Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chs. 9-10.

^[5] Neil and Allen, trans., The Letters of Gelasius I, Introduction.

^[6] Neil and Allen, trans., The Letters of Gelasius I, p. 71.

^[7] Hugo Rahner, S.J., Church and State in Early Christianity, trans. Leo Donald Davis, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1961), p. 151. As Rahner notes, his book was originally written at a time “when the struggle between Church and state in Nazi Germany was at its height” (p. xi), which goes someway in explaining its tone.

^[8] Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen call it “sententious and pompous” and complain that it is repetitive and overburdens subordinate clauses: The Letters of Gelasius I, p. 67.

^[9] George Demacopoulos portrays him as an ineffectual blusterer The Invention of Peter, ch. 3.

^[10] See: Aloysius K. Ziegler, “Pope Gelasius I and His Teaching on the Relation of Church and State,” in: The Catholic Historical Review 27.4 (1942), pp. 412-437, at pp. 416-417.

^[11] Thiel’s edition contains 43 letters, 49 fragments, and six tractates, filling over 300 pages: Thiel, Epistolae, vol. 1, pp. 285-618.

^[12] See: Mario Spinelli, s.v. “Gelasius I,” in: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., vol. IV, eds. Walter Kasper, et al. (Freiburg: Herder, 1995), col. 401-402.

^[13] Dioscurus had (verbally) agreed with Eutyches that there was only one nature in Christ. In Alexandria this was held to be the orthodox position, since St. Cyril of Alexandria had used the formula μία φύσις τοῦ θεοῦ λόγου σεσαρκωμένη (“one incarnate nature of God the Logos”). Chalcedon, however, defined that Christ was in two natures (ἐν δύο φύσεσιν). It is now generally held that the disagreement is based on an equivocal use of the word φύσις (nature). See: Theresia Hainthaler, s.v. “Monophysitismus,” in: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. VII, (1998), col. 418-421; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

^[14] Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, p. 155.

^[15] Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement,, p. 174.

^[16] For the story of the Henotikon see: Ibid., pp. 174-183.

^[17] Zeno, Henotikon, in: The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, trans. Michael Whitby (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), III,14; pp. 147-149, at p. 147.

^[18] Zeno, Henotikon, p. 149.

^[19] One of the orthodox “Sleepless Monks” was able to pin the pope’s excommunication to Acacius’s vestments during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy: Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, pp. 182-183.

^[20] Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement,, p. 190.

^[21] Neil and Allen, trans., The Letters of Gelasius I, pp. 37-38.

^[22] Rahner, Church and State, pp. 154-155.

^[23] See: Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 10; Robert Louis Benson, “The Gelasian Doctrine: Uses And Transformations,” in: George Makdisi, et al., eds., La notion d’autorité au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, Occident: Colloques internationaux de La Napoule, session des 23-26 octobre 1978 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982), pp. 13-44.

^[24] See: John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), especially pp. 202-203; George Weigel, “Catholicism and Democracy: Parsing the Other Twentieth-Century Revolution,” in: Michael Novak, William Brailsford, and Cornelis Heesters, eds. A Free Society Reader: Principles for the New Millennium (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), pp. 141-165, at pp. 150-151. Cf. my critique of the Whig Thomists: “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” in: The Josias, March 3, 2016: https://thejosias.net/2016/03/03/integralism-and-gelasian-dyarchy (accessed March 28, 2020), part 4.

^[25] Erich Caspar, Geschichte des Papsttums von den Anfängen bis zur Höhe der Weltherrschaft, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1933), p. 67 (translation my own).

^[26] Alan Cottrell, “Auctoritas and Potestas: A Reevaluation of the Correspondence of Gelasius I on Papal-Imperial Relations,” in: Medieval Studies 55 (1993), pp. 95-109, at p. 96. (This is not Cottrell’s own view).

^[27] Michael Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” in: First Things 301.4 (2020), pp. 43-50. Hanby does not explicitly mention Gelasius, but it is clear that the Gelasian teaching is in the background of his discussion of auctoritas and potestas, especially since he quotes Walter Ullmann’s interpretation of Gelasius (p. 45).

^[28] Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” p. 45.

^[29] Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” p. 45.

^[30] Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power, 2^nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 12-13, note 5.

^[31] Caspar, Geschichte des Papsttums, p. 66.

^[32] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 21.

^[33] Ernst Stein, “La Période Byzantine de la Papauté,” in: The Catholic Historical Review 21.2 (1935), pp. 129-163, at p. 135. Hanby complains about me: “Waldstein does not think philosophically about the distinction between auctoritas and potestas, which he treats more or less synonymously” (Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” p. 47). I wonder if he would make the same complaint about St. Gelasius in Tractate IV.

^[34] Ziegler, “Pope Gelasius I and His Teaching,” p. 432, note 66; the quotation from Felix can be found in: Thiel, Epistolae, vol. 1, p. 272; translation in: Jeffrey Richards, The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476-752 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 62.

^[35] In the light of the subsequent development of Church teaching one could save something like Erich Caspar’s interpretation as follows: The relationship between the spiritual and temporal powers in temporal matters would be modeled on the relationship between the senate and the magistrates in the Republic. Auctoritas would mean moral authority. Potestas would be coercive force, prescinding from whether it is united to moral authority or not. So it would be wrong to see potestas as mere violence but violence would be included as well as rightly ordered force. The pope would have both auctoritas and potestas in the spiritual order. In the temporal order he would exercise auctorias, and his auctoritas would guarantee the right order of the potestas of temporal rulers. See: Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2020), p. 72.

^[36] Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter, p. 90.

^[37] Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter, pp. 8-9.

^[38] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 8th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and co., 1891), p. 40.

^[39] Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter, pp. 90-91; cf. Ullmann’s similar argument in The Growth of Papal Government, pp. 23-26.

^[40] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 28.

^[41] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 11.

^[42] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 3.

^[43] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 12.

^[44] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 20.

^[45] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 22.

^[46] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 24.

^[47] Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 28.

^[48] Robert W. Dyson, St. Augustine of Hippo: The Christian Transformation of Political Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), ch. 5.

^[49] Rahner, Church and State, p. 157.

The English translation is taken from the Vatican website, corrected with a view to the Latin original.

REPUTANTIBUS SAEPE

ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII
ON THE LANGUAGE QUESTION IN BOHEMIA

To Our Venerable Brothers Theodore, Archbishop of Olomouc,
and the Archbishops and Bishops of Bohemia and Moravia.

As We reflect often on the condition of your churches, it seems to Us that at this moment nearly everywhere everything is full of fear, full of concern. However, this situation is more serious in your case because, while the Catholic cause is exposed to the hatred and cunning of external enemies, domestic issues also divide it. For while heretics both openly and covertly endeavor to spread error among the faithful, seeds of discord grow daily among Catholics themselves – the surest means to hinder strength and break down constancy.

2. Surely the strongest grounds for dissension, especially in Bohemia, are to be found in the languages which each person, according to his origin, employs. For it is implanted by nature that everyone wishes to preserve the language inherited from his ancestors.

3. To be sure, We have decided to refrain from settling this controversy. Indeed one cannot find fault with the preservation of one’s ancestral tongue, if it is kept within defined limits. However, what is valid for other private rights, must be held to apply here also: namely, that the common utility of the polity [communis rei publicae utilitas] must not suffer from their preservation. It is, therefore, the task of those who are in charge of the state to preserve intact the rights of individuals, in such a way that the common good of the polity [commune tamen civitatis bonum] be secured and allowed to flourish.

4. As far as We are concerned, Our duty admonishes Us to take constant care that religion, which is the chief good of souls and the source of all other goods, not be endangered by controversies of this nature.

5. Therefore we earnestly exhort your faithful, although of various regions and tongues, to preserve that far more excellent kinship which is born from the communion of faith and common sacraments. For whoever are baptized in Christ, have one Lord and one faith; they are one body and one spirit, insofar as they are called to one hope. It would be truly disgraceful that those who are bound together by so many holy ties and are seeking the same city in heaven should be torn apart by earthly reasons, rivaling with one another, as the Apostle says, and hating one another. Therefore, that kinship of souls which comes from Christ must constantly be inculcated in the faithful and all partiality must be eradicated. “For greater indeed is the paternity of Christ than that of blood: for the fraternity of blood touches the likeness only of the body; the fraternity of Christ, however, conveys unanimity of heart and spirit, as is written: One was the heart and one the spirit of the multitude of believers.”(1)

6. In this matter the holy clergy should surpass in example all others. Indeed, it is at variance with their office to mingle in such dissensions. If they should reside in places inhabited by people of different races or languages, unless they abstain from any appearance of contention, they may easily incur hatred and dislike from both sides. Nothing could be more detrimental to the exercise of their sacred function than this. The faithful, to be sure, should recognize in fact and practice that the ministers of the Church are concerned only with the eternal affairs of souls and do not seek what is theirs, but only what is Christ’s.

7. If, then, it is well known to all alike that the disciples of Christ are recognized by the love that they have for one another, the holy clergy must observe this same love mutually among themselves far more. For not only are they thought, and deservedly so, to have drunk much more deeply from the charity of Christ, but also because each one of them, in addressing the faithful, ought to be able to use the words of the Apostle, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”(2)

8. We can easily admit that this is very difficult in practice, unless the elements of discord are erased from their souls at an early time when they, who aspire to the clerical state, are formed in our seminaries. Therefore, you must diligently see to it that the students in seminaries early learn to love one another in a fraternal love and from a genuine heart, as those born not from a corruptible seed but an incorruptible one through the word of the living God.(3) Should arguments break out, restrain them strongly and do not allow them to persist in any way; thus those who are destined for the clergy, if they cannot be of one language because of different places of origin, still may certainly be of one heart and one spirit.

9. From this union of wills, indeed, which must be conspicuous in the clerical order, as we have already intimated, this advantage among others will follow: that the ministers of the sacraments will more efficaciously warn the faithful not to exceed the limits in preserving and vindicating the rights proper to each race [gentis], or by excessive partisanship not to do violence to justice and overlook the common advantages of the polity [communes reipublicae utilitates]. For we think that this, according to the circumstances of your various regions, should be the principal task of priests, to exhort the faithful, in season and out, to love one another; they should warn them constantly that he is not worthy of the name of Christian who does not fulfill in spirit and action the new command given by Christ that we love one another as He has loved us.

10. Certainly, he does not fulfill it, who thinks that charity pertains only to those who are related in tongue or race. For if, as Christ says, you love those who love you, do not the publicans do so? and if you salute your brothers only, do not the pagans do so?(4) For to be sure a characteristic of Christian charity is that it extends equally to all; for, as the Apostle warns, there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for there is the same Lord of all, rich to all who invoke him.(5)

11. May God, who is Love, kindly grant that all be united in their thoughts and in their convictions, thinking the same and having no contention; grant that in humility they may think each other better than themselves, each not looking to his own interests, but to those of others.

12. May the Apostolic blessing, which we grant most lovingly in the Lord, to you, Venerable Brothers, and the faithful committed to each of you, be a token of this and also of Our benevolence.

Given in Rome at St. Peter’s, 20 August 1901, in the 24th year of Our Pontificate.

LEO XIII

REFERENCES:

1. St. Maximus, among the sermons of St. Augustine, 100.

2. Phil 3.17.

3. Pt 1.22 f.

4. Mt 5.46 f.

5. Rom 10.12.

Header Image: The Austrian Reichsrat

Back to English

June 30, 2018, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Blessed Paul VI’s proclamation of the Credo of the People of God. This event will likely be overshadowed by two other major events pertaining to Paul VI. One is, of course, the fiftieth anniversary of Paul’s prophetic encyclical letter On the Regulation of Birth, known around the world by its incipit, Humanae vitae. The encyclical, which cut through the error and confusion of its age and ours like lightning, remains a central point in the ongoing struggle against modernism and liberalism in the Church. The other event is the likely canonization of Paul by Pope Francis sometime this fall. However, it would be a shame to let the fiftieth anniversary of the Credo of the People of God pass unremarked.

Paul’s Credo of the People of God was, according to Paul himself, an act by the successor of Peter to confirm his brethren in the faith of Peter. Confronted with the explosion of heresy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, especially the infamous Dutch Catechism, Paul declared a Year of Faith, which culminated in the proclamation of the Credo of the People of God. Seen in this context, it is clear that Paul, exercising solemnly his office as Supreme Pontiff, sought to combat the errors of the age with his profession of faith. Additionally, in preparing and proclaiming a profession of faith, Paul was making good a significant failure of the Second Vatican Council.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, there were two professions of faith required of clergy and professors in ecclesiastical faculties. One was the creed prepared by Pius IV in 1564 pursuant to the mandate of the Council of Trent. In two bulls, Iniunctum nobis and In sacrosanctum beati Petri, Pius IV formulated a profession of faith binding on clergy and public teachers on ecclesiastical faculties. This Tridentine creed was modified in 1870 following the dogmatic definitions of the Vatican Council. Pius’s creed achieved wide use both as an admirable summation of the Faith and as a profession of faith by converts to the Church. The other was the Anti-Modernist Oath of St. Pius X. In 1910, Pius X handed down his motu proprio, Sacrorum antistitum, which included an oath to be sworn against the principal errors of the Modernists, as condemned in Pascendi and Lamentabili. Thus, most clerics and professors in Catholic colleges and universities had to make the profession of faith handed down by Pius IV as it was modified following the Vatican Council and swear Pius X’s Anti-Modernist Oath.

In the preparatory sessions for the Second Vatican Council, on November 9, 1961, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani presented a draft of a new profession of faith. As Cardinal Ottaviani explained in his relatio to the Central Preparatory Commission, the draft creed was proposed to resolve several issues. First, it was thought best to consolidate the creed of Pius IV and the Anti-Modernist Oath into one formula, not least to avoid unnecessary duplications. Second, there had been some major doctrinal developments since Pascendi, especially Pius XII’s Humani generis, that ought to be reflected in an official profession of faith. On the other hand, certain issues addressed in the two existing formulas were no longer live controversies. And, perhaps the best reason: St. John XXIII had asked Cardinal Ottaviani to prepare a new formula.

 Of course, the liberals on the Central Preparatory Commission hated the proposal. In what would be a sad spectacle repeated over and over, especially during the Council itself, the liberal cardinals lined up to rubbish the proposed profession of faith. Many of the critics objected strenuously to the inclusion of Pius XII’s Humani generis in the draft. Most notably, Josef Cardinal Frings of Cologne stated that, unless the references to Humani generis and Pascendi were excised, he would vote non placet on the entire draft. Other cardinals expressed concerns about offending protestants unnecessarily with certain formulas in the proposed creed. Of course, it all came to naught: by the end of the Council, no creed was proclaimed. Given the other setbacks incurred by Cardinal Ottaviani—and the traditionalists generally—at the Council, it is not surprising that it proved impossible to get a new creed prepared and promulgated. The Second Vatican Council, unlike Trent and the First Vatican Council, did not promulgate a creed. This omission was noticed at the time.

In an extraordinary 2008 essay, Sandro Magister told the story of the Credo of the People of God. In early 1967, George Cardinal Journet wrote to the philosopher Jacques Maritain, telling him that he would soon be meeting with Paul VI. Maritain wrote back and mentioned to Cardinal Journet that it had occurred to him that Paul should prepare a profession of faith setting forth explicitly all that is contained in the Nicene Creed. Cardinal Journet met with Paul at the end of January 1967 and gave the pope a copy of Maritain’s letter. Paul and Cardinal Journet commiserated about the explosion of heresy and the Dutch Catechism. About a month after Paul’s meeting with Cardinal Journet, Paul proclaimed his Year of Faith, which included the first meeting of the Synod of Bishops in the fall of 1967. Among the things that that first Synod recommended was that Paul prepare a statement of the fundamental tenets of the Faith.

Then, in December 1967, Cardinal Journet met with Paul VI again. They discussed once more Maritain’s idea of Paul issuing a new creed. Paul told Cardinal Journet that there had been many requests for a new profession of faith at the end of the Council and that he had even gone so far as to ask Yves Congar, the Dominican theologian so prominent during that time, to prepare a text. However, Paul was not pleased with Congar’s draft. In a moment of inspiration, according to Magister, Paul told Cardinal Journet to work with Maritain and prepare a proposed creed. Cardinal Journet told Maritain about the pope’s request and Maritain duly prepared a draft for review by Cardinal Journet, who sent it to Paul VI at the end of January 1968. Maritain’s text rebutted the novelties found, for example, in the Dutch Catechism. In the early spring of 1968, Cardinal Journet received a polite note of thanks from Paul VI and a letter from a theologian at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, containing a positive appreciation of the text.

 According to Magister, neither Cardinal Journet nor Maritain heard anything more about the proposed creed until July 2, 1968. On that date, Cardinal Journet learned that, on June 30, 1968, at the conclusion of his Year of Faith, Paul VI had made a solemn profession of faith in St. Peter’s Square, surrounded by cardinals, bishops, religious, and laity. A quick check confirmed that Paul’s Credo of the People of God matched very closely the text that Maritain and Cardinal Journet had prepared for him. One notable change was a revision to Maritain’s language about the witness of Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike give to the one God; Paul removed that language and instead referred to “believers” who share faith in the one God with Christians.

Paul’s introduction to the Credo of the People of God reveals that the developments that had disturbed him in early 1967 still weighed on his mind in the summer of 1968. Paul saw the profession of faith that he was about to make as inextricably tied up with the Petrine office: “we deem that we must fulfill the mandate entrusted by Christ to Peter, whose successor we are, the last in merit; namely, to confirm our brothers in the faith.” He went on to declare, “[i]n making this profession, we are aware of the disquiet which agitates certain modern quarters with regard to the faith.” He went on to say that, “[w]e see even Catholics allowing themselves to be seized by a kind of passion for change and novelty.” Paul acknowledged the duty of the Church to study ever more deeply the Faith and to find new and better ways of presenting the Faith to the world; however, he proclaimed “the greatest care must be taken, while fulfilling the indispensable duty of research, to do no injury to the teachings of Christian doctrine. For that would be to give rise, as is unfortunately seen in these days, to disturbance and perplexity in many faithful souls.”

Paul’s Credo is not as technical as either the creed of Pius IV or St. Pius X’s Anti-Modernist Oath, nor is it as technical as the draft profession of faith prepared by Cardinal Ottaviani in 1961. But it is clear that Paul did not intend to promulgate the Credo as a formal profession of faith to be sworn by clergy and professors in ecclesiastical colleges and universities. Instead, Paul’s Credo lives up to the promise of the Second Vatican Council—a promise that the Council itself failed to live up to at times—by presenting the timeless Faith anew to modern men and women. Seen in this regard, that is, seen as Peter’s successor proclaiming Peter’s faith to the men and women of his age, the Credo of the People of God is a document as significant in its own was as Humanae vitae.

Even Paul’s critics recognized the Credo of the People of God as an extraordinary event. In his justly famous Open Letter to Confused Catholics, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre described it as “an act which from the dogmatic point of view is more important than all the Council.” The Credo “was an event of quite exceptional solemnity”: Paul VI, successor of Peter and vicar of Christ, rose alone to affirm the faith of Peter in clear, solemn terms, free of confusion. Lefebvre observed that in this profession of faith, “[w]e have thereby the consolation and the confidence of feeling that the Holy Ghost has not abandoned us. We can say that the Act of Faith that sprang from the First Vatican Council has found its other resting point in the profession of faith of Paul VI.”

The doctrine of the two cities, which finds its greatest expression in the work we are to examine today, is not the construct of some theologian, however great. It is an essential element in God’s revelation to mankind, vital to the correct understanding of the personal and institutional history of each individual and society and of every book of scripture from Genesis to Revelation. The great Pope Leo XIII frequently alluded to this doctrine in his encyclical letters, not least in the thundering opening of Humanum Genus promulgated in 1884.

“The race of man, after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and the Giver of heavenly gifts, ‘through the envy of the devil,’ separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other for those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ; and those who desire from their heart to be united with it, so as to gain salvation, must of necessity serve God and His only-begotten Son with their whole mind and with an entire will. The other is the kingdom of Satan, in whose possession and control are all whosoever follow the fatal example of their leader and of our first parents, those who refuse to obey the divine and eternal law, and who have many aims of their own in contempt of God, and many aims also against God. This twofold kingdom St. Augustine keenly discerned and described after the manner of two cities, contrary in their laws because striving for contrary objects; and with a subtle brevity he expressed the efficient cause of each in these words: ‘Two loves formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an earthly city; and the love of God, reaching to contempt of self, a heavenly one.’ At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons and of warfare, although not always with equal ardour and assault.”

 The doctrine of the two cities also underlies a key paragraph in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church one of the foremost jewels in the crown of St John Paul II’s magisterium, for which we are daily made more grateful.

 “2244. Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain preeminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man: Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows.”

In order to understand The City of God by St Augustine of Hippo one needs to understand the event which inspired it.

On 24^th August 410 AD the City of Rome which had remained unconquered for 800 years was captured and sacked by King Alaric of the Visigoths and his followers. Even when Rome had been sacked in 390 BC by the Gaulish chieftain Brennus the Capitoline Hill seat of the chief shrines of Roman Paganism had not fallen. The sacred geese of Juno alerted the defenders to the sneak attack and prevented its capture. If the sack of 390 BC is therefore deemed incomplete, Rome had never fallen in its entire history from 753BC to 410AD – 1163 years. That the defenders in 390 should have been aroused by creatures sacred to Juno was particularly significant as according to its civic mythology Rome was founded by descendants of the exiles of Troy whose city was put to the sword by Greeks inspired by the wrath of Juno and whose poeple were driven across the Mediterranean by the same jealousy until they settled in Latium. Thus even the goddess least well disposed to the Roman people had by 390BC apparently got with the project. Rome had a lot for which to thank her gods. They had, as Virgil reminded every Roman school boy, promised her imperium sine fine – empire without limit – and they had delivered. For the last five hundred years one quarter of the human race had lived under the dominion of the Roman People. The vast majority of those beyond (so far as the Romans knew) lived in misery and squalor in desolate lands unworthy of the attentions of the Roman army. Edward Gibbon plausibly imagined the motivations of the Romans in omitting to invade the country now known as Scotland,

 “The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills, assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.”

 The people of the Roman Empire had no desire for independence. They were Romans, an identity which from the beginning had a civic rather than an ethnic basis. As the poet Claudian explained just before the catastrophe of 410, Rome:

Took the conquered to her bosom,
Made mankind a single family,
Mother not mistress to the nations,
Conquering the world a second time by the bond of affection.

And the Romans enshrined in the heart of their commonwealth the most eloquent possible reminders that failure to maintain the favour of the gods could have the most catastrophic consequences. The Temple of Vesta goddess of the hearth in the centre of the Forum preserved the Palladium, the sacred image of Athena, that Aeneas, last member of the Trojan Royal house had borne from the ruins of Illium, and forever tended by its virgin priestesses was the perpetual flame ignited by the prince from the fires that consumed his city and carried before him to Italy in the course of his founding migration.

The idea that religion might be a special separate sphere to the life of the city (or indeed the tribe or kingdom) was unthinkable to the peoples of the ancient world. In classical mythology the concept of an afterlife of bliss or indeed punishment was remote and exceptional. The vast majority of the dead, good or bad, inhabited a shadowy half-life of memories and regrets. Happiness, if it was on offer, was on offer in this life of love and laugher, flesh and blood, here and now under the sun. If prosperity in this life was to be secured then the propitiation of the powers was its first and indispensable requirement. The highest official of the Roman Republic was the Pontifex Maximus – the high priest or bridge builder in chief – supreme practitioner of the Roman religion. This ancient office was held in his lifetime by Julius Caesar and then by his great nephew and adopted son Augustus and by every Roman Emperor after him.

The concern of the Roman authorities was that the gods be propitiated for the good of the empire. They did not care which gods were propitiated so long as each of their subjects gave due honour to the gods to whom they owed honour and so preserved the good of the lands subject to Rome and so long as the citizens of Rome gave due honour to the gods of Rome herself. Impiety and atheism ought to be punished and it was the Roman magistrate’s business to punish them should they come to his attention; but systematically to seek out and punish impiety was a duty only in respect of Roman citizens. At least, that is, until 212 when the emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to all free-born men in the empire.

The persecution of the Church in the empire had up to this moment been sporadic. Now the elimination of the Christian impiety was a grave duty upon any emperor with a serious concern for the preservation of the state. At the same time, the character of Roman paganism underwent a dramatic transformation.

Up to this moment the Romans desired only that each one worship his ancestral gods. The Jews’ insistence that their God was the only God might be distasteful and gauche but there was a place the Mediterranean syncretism for their national traditions, if only perhaps a despised place. The Christians were another matter entirely. By seeking to win the Emperor’s subjects and fellow citizens away from the gods of their ancestors they struck at the roots of Roman prosperity. They already threatened the stability of his dominions before 212 but now that a vastly greater multitude were citizens of Rome herself the Christians threatened the very survival of the Republic.

Before the third century philosophy had been generally critical of traditional religion. Whatever the plebeian adherent of the gods might seek, the philosopher, particularly the Platonist sought eternal life in a better and higher world. As Gibbon delightedly and admiringly observed “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.” In the second century St Justin Martyr’s account of Platonism as the penultimate stage on his journey to the Gospel could hardly be more positive. The journey to the Gospel for Justin is the journey to the true philosophy. With the rise, in the third century, of Neo-Platonism the philosophers no longer considered paganism to be false, but rather as a picture language for the higher mysteries of which they were the guardians. Far from merely useful the maintenance of traditional religion was seen by the Neo-Platonists as vital for the preservation and perfection of an empire re-envisaged as the political manifestation of the ontological unity of the cosmos. Christianity in contrast they saw as a dangerous rival. Mumbo jumbo that threatened the social, political and intellectual integralism which was so tantalisingly close to realisation under the reforming government of the Emperor Diocletian.

Of course, this conception of Christianity was quite absurd. It was Neo-Platonism that represented the novelty in the third century. Its attempt to marshal Imperial autocracy, classical myth and pagan ritual into a coherent body of belief and practice underpinned by a mighty systematisation of Platonic thought was a direct response to the imminent prospect of Christian triumph. The Neo-Platonic project was concocted in imitation of the Church and bore no resemblance to traditional paganism. The Great Persecution of 303 to 313 was the terrible offspring of this last desperate attempt to prevent the conversion of the Roman Empire. It failed. Constantine embraced the Gospel. He took the Palladium away with him to his new capital of Constantinople. The Church was compensated for its material losses under persecution. Her clergy were given the privileged status of the pagan priesthood. The privileges and subsidies of the traditional religion were withdrawn one by one. In 380 the Catholic Faith was decreed to be the religion of the Roman Empire. The title of Pontifex Maximus was transferred to the Bishop of Rome. The altar of victory was removed from the Senate House and finally in 394 the vestal fire itself was extinguished by the Emperor Theodosius. At the First Council of Nicaea Constantine read out Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, his ecstatic vision of the coming of a divine child who would redeem the world. Far from being the great enemy of the Roman Empire the Church was the reason the One True God had created Rome in the first place.

As Prudentius, a statesman and liturgical poet in the administration of Theodosius, explained:

“What is the secret of Rome’s historical destiny? It is that God wills the unity of mankind, since the religion of Christ demands a social foundation of peace and international amity. Hitherto the whole earth from east to west had been rent asunder by continual strife. To curb this madness God has taught the nations to be obedient to the same laws and all to become Romans. Now we see mankind living as citizens of one city and members of a common household. Men come from distant lands across the seas to one common forum, the peoples are united by commerce and intermarriage. From the intermingling of peoples a single race is born. This is the meaning of all the victories and triumphs of the Roman Empire: the Roman peace has prepared the road for the coming of Christ.”

In his Oration in Praise of Constantine Eusebius of Caesarea had already provided the perfect triumphalist synthesis of Imperial political theory and Christian ecclesiology.

“No mortal eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor can the mind in its vesture of flesh understand what things are prepared for those who have been here adorned with the graces of godliness; blessings which await you too, most pious emperor, to whom alone since the world began has the Almighty Sovereign of the universe granted power to purify the course of human life: to whom also he has revealed his own symbol of salvation, whereby he overcame the power of death, and triumphed over every enemy. And this victorious trophy, the scourge of evil spirits, you have arrayed against the errors of idol worship, and hast obtained the victory not only over all your impious and savage foes, but over equally barbarous adversaries, the evil spirits themselves. For whereas we are composed of two distinct natures, I mean of body and spirit, of which the one is visible to all, the other invisible, against both these natures two kinds of barbarous and savage enemies, the one invisibly, the other openly, are constantly arrayed. The one oppose our bodies with bodily force: the other with incorporeal assaults besiege the naked soul itself. Again, the visible barbarians, like the wild nomad tribes, no better than savage beasts, assail the nations of civilized men, ravage their country, and enslave their cities, rushing on those who inhabit them like ruthless wolves of the desert, and destroying all who fall under their power. But those unseen foes, more cruel far than barbarians, I mean the soul-destroying demons whose course is through the regions of the air, had succeeded, through the snares of vile polytheism, in enslaving the entire human race, insomuch that they no longer recognized the true God, but wandered in the mazes of atheistic error. For they procured, I know not whence, gods who never anywhere existed, and set him aside who is the only and the true God, as though he were not.”

Indeed, Eusebius explains while the pagan theorists saw the Roman polity as the one universal legitimate commonwealth, in fact legitimacy belongs exclusively to that polity which worships the One True God in the manner He has appointed.

“truly may he deserve the imperial title, who has formed his soul to royal virtues, according to the standard of that celestial kingdom. But he who is a stranger to these blessings, who denies the Sovereign of the universe, and owns no allegiance to the heavenly Father of spirits; who invests not himself with the virtues which become an emperor, but overlays his soul with moral deformity and baseness … surely one abandoned to such vices as these, however he may be deemed powerful through despotic violence, has no true title to the name of Emperor. For how should he whose soul is impressed with a thousand absurd images of false deities, be able to exhibit a counterpart of the true and heavenly sovereignty? Or how can he be absolute lord of others, who has subjected himself to the dominion of a thousand cruel masters? A slave of low delights and ungoverned lust, a slave of wrongfully-extorted wealth, of rage and passion, as well as of cowardice and terror; a slave of ruthless demons, and soul-destroying spirits?”

And yet, even as Theodosius extinguished the Vestal Hearth there were signs that the immortal empire was imperilled. In 376 a vast host of Goths had appeared at the Danube on the Imperial frontier. They were seeking permission to migrate to the Empire for fear of the Huns, an Asiatic tribe that had driven them from their homes above the Black Sea. The Romans had little interest in settling barbarian auxiliary troops on a frontier they were only crossing in terror of the very tribes against which they would be expected to defend it. On the other hand, they had arrived in worrying numbers. The Romans resolved to pretend that they were acceding to the Goths’ petition, invite them across the Danube, isolate their leaders at a banquet, murder them and then massacre the rest at leisure. Unfortunately for the peace of the world this desecration of sacred hospitality was detected in time by the Goths who rose up in fury, rampaged across the Balkans, and defeated and slew the Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378.

It was in response to the chaos engendered by this defeat that Theodosius himself was raised to the purple. He managed to restore order to the frontier but there was no crushing victory. The Goths were bought off. On 31^st December 406 in the reign of Theodosius’s sons Arcadius and Honorius the other great European frontier river of the Empire froze sold and a vast host of Vandals, Alans and Suebi poured into Gaul across the Rhine. The Empire never recovered. It was in the midst of the ensuing anarchy that Alaric and his Visigoths resolved to blackmail the Western Emperor by laying siege to the Eternal City itself. They assumed their demands would be met and that Honorius would never allow the capital to be desecrated. Honorious in turn assumed the Goths would starve before they were ever able to breach the Aurelian walls. They were both wrong and, as Jerome put it, “The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”

Rome herself was a bastion of Paganism. Despite being the seat of the first of bishops and the resting place of the prince of the apostles the capital was also the residence of the greatest patrician families of the empire, the people whose ancestors had built the temples and held the sacred offices of the pagan priesthood. They protested strongly against the disestablishment of the Roman religion. The removal of the altar of victory had occasioned a long struggle between the leaders of the Senate and St Ambrose bishop of Milan (the city where the emperor actually resided at the time). Although Rome had long ceased to be the habitual residence of the Emperors who needed to station themselves much closer to the frontiers, this had only served to strengthen its sanctity and greatness in the minds of men.

The reaction of the pagan aristocrats of Rome can easily be imagined. A mere sixteen years after the quenching of the Vestal fire Rome had fallen. What more eloquent testimony to the madness of Constantine need there be? The promise of his vision that the Triumphant Cross would be the guarantee of endless victory had been cast into the ashes of the Capitol. The pagan account of human history had been vindicated.

It was in response to this catastrophe that St Augustine wrote his greatest work. The magnum opus et arduum the twenty-two books concerning the City of God, Against the Pagans.

Augustine was of course a native of North Africa. It is a constant frustration to the modern historian that we do not know whether the ancient Punic language was his mother tongue (or even if he spoke it at all). He was raised and educated most thoroughly in the classical style until he ate, drank, dreamed and breathed the words of Cicero, Virgil, Caesar and Sallust. And yet, he was a native of the land of Rome’s greatest enemy and we may suspect that he allowed himself a little more emotional distance from the calamities of 410 than the majority of his contemporaries.

How most of Augustine’s fellow Christian’s reacted to the charge that they had deprived the empire of its genius and fortune we shall never know but it is often supposed that their answer may have resembled that implied by Augustine’s friend and admirer Paul Orosius in his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. Orosius sought to show that worse disasters had befallen man in the past when paganism prevailed everywhere outside of Israel and thus placed in perspective, the vicissitudes of the present time could not be laid as a convincing charge against the truth and efficacy of the Gospel.

Augustine’s approach was altogether more radical. Already the title De Civitate Dei implied that the great African would refuse to accept the assumptions behind the question posed to him by his pagan opponents. The purpose of history and of God’s providential guardianship thereof was not, Augustine argued, to preserve and glorify the temporal commonwealth of the Roman people, nor was that commonwealth, even as transfigured by its acceptance of the Christian Revelation, the supreme community of man and final recipient of his loyalty. This honour belongs by right and alone to the Catholic Church – the City of God. Thus the argument of the work is phrased as a defence of this eternal city against those who disparage it and the good for which it is established in favour of the temporal good of the city of Rome or any other earthly polity.

The work is divided into two parts corresponding, in reverse order, to the subjects indicated in its title: On the City of God, Against the Pagans. The first part consisting of the first ten books may be designated ‘Against the Pagans’ and the second part ‘On the City of God’. Part one is further divided in two. Books one to five refute the arguments of those who prefer the earthly city to the City of God because they seek in it and in its gods temporal happiness. Books six to ten refute the argument of those who prefer the earthly city and its gods because they seek from them happiness in the life to come. That is, the first five books are a refutation of the more traditional paganism of the ancient world while the next five are a refutation of the newly minted Neo-Platonic version in which Augustine was well schooled as it had played a decisive role in his own journey to Christianity.

Augustine has a number of effective rhetorical opening salvos. If the Roman gods were so wonderful why did they abandon Troy, forcing the Trojans to migrate to Italy in the first place? The pagans of Rome who never embraced Christianity anyway can hardly blame it for their own misfortune. They were however happy to shelter in the churches and basilicas of the faithful during the sack where they were left unmolested by the Goths who, having been converted to the Arian form of Christianity did not wish to desecrate these shrines. Where, Augustine wonders, is it recorded in the history of earlier times and the annals of pagan warfare that such scrupulosity was maintained by the conquerors of a fallen city?

Even by their own lights the pagans knew that true happiness, even in this life, is the reward of, indeed is to be identified with the exercise of, virtue. Such virtue as the pagans boast is not truly worthy of the name because it is not, in fact, directed towards the true glory prepared for man with God in eternity. It is practiced for the sake of pride and earthly glory. But the Lord is as good as His word. As He says ‘they have had their reward’. While the Romans practiced this simulacrum of true virtue God gave them temporal prosperity. But the even pseudo-virtue practiced in the service of demons whose every fable, rite and ritual is bent towards the moral destruction of their worshipers cannot long endure and Augustine chronicles the moral and civil decline of the Roman people even by the corrupted light of natural reason until the final demise of the Republic amidst the incessant civil war and personal squalor of the first century before Christ. By the time the Saviour entered the world to establish the universal boundaries of His City, the Roman commonwealth and the virtues it claimed had already by the testimony of their own greatest authors (overwhelmingly republicans) perished from the earth. In truth, the sort of earthly peace the pagans of the more recent centuries really desire is the minimum of security and wealth necessary to indulge an empty hedonism unmolested by external interference. To be deprived of this kind of peace is a blessing.

Augustine has much fun describing the lurid details of popular superstition and the clumsy and self-contradictory efforts of pagan authors to rationalise the members of the traditional pantheon. As he passes on to the second section of part one – against those who worship the pagan Gods for happiness in the next life – he finds no more difficulty in destroying the attempts of the Neo-Platonists to reconcile traditional religious practice with their hierarchies of emanations. Why would such entities, if the pure angelic beings the Neo-Platonists allege, wish to be honoured with sacrifices and spectacles inextricably bound up with the treacheries, lusts and perversions recounted of Jupiter, Venus, Mars and their gang? Why would pure angelic beings desire to usurp the worship of the One God? Why would they encourage the foolish blasphemies of magicians and sorcerers? Insofar as there are benign entities corresponding the beings the Neo-Platonists postulate they are the angels of the True God who have no desire to be worshiped by men and who will assist their Lord in punishing such idolatry at the end of time. Insofar as there are invisible beings who do indeed approve of the practices that the pagan philosophers seek to salvage with their speculations they are the unclean demons fallen from the divine service at the beginning of time and tireless in their determination to involve mankind in their rebellion and their ruin.

All of which brings us neatly to the second part of the City of God, books eleven to twenty-two, divided into three sets of four, dedicated to the exposition of the origin, progress and destiny of the heavenly City and its rival the diabolical city of the world. For the two cities were divided at the dawn of history when the Devil and his confederates fell from the worship of God. This catastrophe was recapitulated in the Fall of Man and although Adam and Eve were repentant, the consequences of their fall endured and were manifested in the murder of Abel by Cain. Cain and Seth thereafter became the founders among men of the rival cities already established in the angelic realm. Augustine notes the numerous earthly achievements of Cain’s descendants recounted in Genesis, starting with Cain himself, literally the founder of the first human city. Like the pagan Romans they have their reward in this life. Their concern is here on this earth with the proud achievements of their own hands not with the gift of God that surpasses all human understanding. He traces the destruction of the antediluvian world to the intermarriage of the sons of God (descendants of Seth) and the daughters of men (descendants of Cain). Hitherto the two cities had been socially segregated their unification spelled the triumph of the earthly city, the extraction of a remnant of eight souls, and the destruction of the primeval world. But even before the murder of Abel within the very flesh of the repentant Adam and Eve raged the war between the penitent spirit, the principle of life and redemption, and the downward pull of delinquent creation. The waters of the flood had no power to end this war or cure man’s essential malady. Once more the bulk of human society was swept into the cause of the earthly city and God extracted in the person of Abraham the remnant from which He fashioned the people of election from which the Saviour would be born.

The Doctor of Grace and Love lays down the path of the two cities through the histories of the Jewish people and the great Empires identified in the visions of the prophet Daniel. Above all however, he focuses on the first and fourth, Babylon and Rome. Babylon as the original Postdiluvian geo-political expression of the earthly city represents a type of which Rome was the fulfilment. In the story of Romulus and Remus Augustine sees a crucial echo of the history of Cain and Abel. As the two cities were separated at the beginning of human history by one innocent and one fratricidal brother so the supreme expression of the earthly city was founded by two equally fratricidal brothers. For the peace of the earthly city is a mere truce of convenience it is only their pragmatic pact to secure the perishing goods of this world which prevents its citizens from turning on each other. Likewise, the faculties and desires of the citizens of the mystic Babylon are perpetually at war with each other for without harmony between God and man there can be no harmony within man himself.

At last Augustine turns to the eternal destinies of the two cities. Strictly only the Heavenly City has such a destiny. For, when the elect depart from it the earthly city and the flesh of its citizens will turn in upon itself and devour itself and it will no longer be a city any more.

 And yet, Augustine writes,

 “…not even the saints and faithful worshippers of the one true and most high God are safe from the manifold temptations and deceits of the demons. For in this abode of weakness, and in these wicked days, this state of anxiety has also its use, stimulating us to seek with keener longing for that security where peace is complete and unassailable. There we shall enjoy the gifts of nature, that is to say, all that God the Creator of all natures has bestowed upon ours—gifts not only good, but eternal—not only of the spirit, healed now by wisdom, but also of the body renewed by the resurrection. There the virtues shall no longer be struggling against any vice or evil, but shall enjoy the reward of victory, the eternal peace which no adversary shall disturb. This is the final blessedness, this the ultimate consummation, the unending end. Here, indeed, we are said to be blessed when we have such peace as can be enjoyed in a good life; but such blessedness is mere misery compared to that final felicity. When we mortals possess such peace as this mortal life can afford, virtue, if we are living rightly, makes a right use of the advantages of this peaceful condition; and when we have it not, virtue makes a good use even of the evils a man suffers. But this is true virtue, when it refers all the advantages it makes a good use of, and all that it does in making good use of good and evil things, and itself also, to that end in which we shall enjoy the best and greatest peace possible.”

And it is in the contemplation of this peace, when the City of God alone remains, transfigured in the glory of the Eternal Jerusalem that Augustine ends his great work.

It would be no exaggeration to say that as Marx’s Capital was to the Soviet Union and the other Communist tyrannies of modern times so was the City of God to Mediaeval Christendom but with results that could hardly be more different. The patriarch of the Mediaeval West, Charlemagne, kept his copy of the City of God beside his bed. St Thomas More lectured on it to the Carthusians of London as he discerned his vocation as the last great statesman of Catholic England. The very same Carthusians who would precede him to martyrdom at the hands of the tyrant who restored his country to the dominion of Babylon.

Central to its political power is Augustine’s republicanism. The term Res Publica remained the official designation of the Roman state into Augustine’s own time. The first emperor had claimed not to be founding a monarchy but restoring the republic. The pretence was officially maintained largely until the end of the third century when the Neo-Platonic totalitarianism took over and still in some part up to and beyond Augustine’s own time. But Augustine and the other great Latin writers of antiquity knew all the same that it was a pretence. Augustine relied on the republican writers who witnessed the last embers of Roman liberty, Sallust and Cicero, for his claim that the Roman commonwealth had perished before the coming of Christ. We know from his other writings that, while he held there was place for monarchy, he saw it as a sign of a degenerate age. As he writes in De Libero Arbitrio,

 “Human beings and peoples [do not] belong to the class of things that are eternal, and can neither change nor perish … [but are] changeable and subject to time… Therefore if a people is well-ordered and serious minded, and carefully watches over the common good, and everyone in it values private affairs less than the public interest, is it not right to enact a law which allows this people to choose their own magistrates to look after their own interests – that is the public interest?… But suppose that the same people becomes gradually depraved. They come to prefer private interest to the public good. Votes are bought and sold. Corrupted by those who covert honours they hand over power to wicked and profligate men. In such a case would it not be right for a good and powerful man (if one could be found) to take from this people the power of conferring honours and to limit it to the discretion of a few good people, or even to one?”

But the credentials of the Republic to be a true city bound together by justice and the common good are only in a very secondary sense founded for Augustine on the external liberty of its political institutions. Far more fundamentally they are rooted in the liberty of grace, the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

For this argument which really is the central argument of the City of God Augustine is reliant on a key definition of Cicero’s as to the nature of a Republic. Literally of course a republic is the public thing. That which belongs to the people as a whole and thus it presupposes the existence of a people. Not a mere multitude but a rationally ordered multitude. As Cicero defines it “a multitude united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest.” This common sense of right or ius cannot exist without justice – iustitia, as defined by the ancients “the constant and perpetual resolve to render under each one that which is his due”. The first requirement of justice is therefore that we render what is due to the One to Whom we owe most, indeed to Whom we owe all things. The first requirement of justice is that we worship the One True God in the manner He has appointed. For “kingdoms without justice” Augustine declares “are but latrocinia” criminal gangs. Brigandage, multitudes of thieves united in association by a common agreement on the objects of their brigandage and the division of the loot. As the first deceiver stretched out his hand to take the divine likeness as if his by right rather than humbly to receive it as God’s gift so all those who have followed him on the road to eternal ruin are thieves and brigands. But only one community is authorised, only one community is able, to worship the One True God in the manner He has appointed through the offering that He Himself made as man on our behalf upon the Cross. For, Augustine concludes “there is no justice save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ”. When Romulus founded Rome he gathered its citizens by proclaiming to the outlaws and criminals of the world that they could gather in his city and start afresh as citizens. Here, as in the splendid vices the Romans took to be virtues, we see a shadowy figure of the true Eternal City gathered together by the new song of the Gospel, fashioned by sinners washed clean in the blood of the lamb.

The virtues of the pagans are but splendid vices. They are truly vices but they are truly splendid. For the Romans to embrace the heavenly city and its path is to find everything they wrongly imagined to be great in their earthly republic restored, purified and made true in the grace of God. St Augustine calls out to them,

 “In former times you had glory from the peoples, but, through the inscrutable decision of divine providence, the true religion was not there for you to choose. Awake! The day has come. You have already awakened in the persons of some of your people, in whose perfect virtue we Christians boast, and even in their suffering for the true faith; they have wrestled everywhere against hostile powers, have conquered them by the courage of their deaths, and ‘have won this country for us by their blood.’

It is to this country that we invite you, and exhort you to add yourself to the number of our citizens. The refuge we offer is the true remission of sins. Do not listen to those degenerate sons of yours who disparage Christ and the Christians, and criticize these times as an unhappy age, when the kind of period they would like is one which offers not a life of tranquillity but security for their vicious pursuits. Such satisfactions have never been enough for you, even in respect of your earthly country. Now take possession of the Heavenly Country, for which you will have to endure but little hardship; and you will reign there in truth and for ever. There you will find no Vestal hearth, no Capitoline stone, but the one true God, who fixes no bounds for you of space or time but will bestow an empire without end.”

by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

1. Occasion and Intention

The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 shook the Roman world to its foundations. Although Rome was no longer the residence even of the Western Emperor, nevertheless she was the symbol of the civilized world. To many Romans this catastrophe seemed to be a refutation of Christianity. Clearly, the Christian God was unable or unwilling to protect the city in which he was now honored. Christianity was unable to fulfill the function that political theology assigned to it of assuring the safety of the empire, and especially of that city from which the empire had originally sprung.^[1] Saint Augustine of Hippo responded to this argument in The City of God.

The City of God is a comprehensive attack on pagan political theology and political philosophy. In elaborating his attack, Augustine is led to expound the full scope of the Christian understanding of reality— of God and the world, and the way in which God’s providential plan is realized in history. The resulting “magnum opus et arduum,” great and arduous work,^[2] manages to cover every conceivable subject, but always with the main aim in view. The first ten books refute the idea that the pagan gods ought to be worshiped— whether for the prosperity of this life (I-V) or of the life to come (VI-X)— the remaining 12 books treat the origins (XI-XIV), development (XV-XVIII), and ends (XIX-XXII) of two cities: the City of God and the Earthly City.^[3] It would be a mistake, however, to see the treatment of the two cities in the second half as straying from the original intention of the work.^[4] The most convincing refutation of the charge against the Christians is to show that far from being of detriment to civil life, Christianity is true civil life, true politics.

In order to understand Augustine’s argument it is necessary to recall some of the main features of the pagan political philosophy and political theology that he was attacking, and how that political theology interacted with Christianity before Augustine. In this introduction I will therefore give a sketch of those themes (2-3), before outlining the main line of Augustine’s argument (4).

The City of God was a key influence on the development of Catholic teaching on the relation of spiritual and temporal power, and on the common good of political society. The great medieval popes and theologians constantly referred to Augustine, or paraphrased him in their exposition of these themes. Modern interpreters have, however, tended to deny that the medieval developments were really Augustinian, arguing that Augustine’s own position would imply a much less “integralist” view of political life. I will defend the medieval interpretations, giving reasons for thinking that the medieval “Political Augustinianism” was really a development from premises to be found in The City of God (5-6). Finally I will offer a detailed outline of the structure of the work (7).

2. Pagan Political Theology

In the Greek city-states the worship of the gods was deeply interwoven with social and political life. Political authority was as religious as it was political, because, as Ittai Gradel puts it, the dichotomy “was unknown to, or at least irrelevant to, traditional Graeco-Roman worship.”^[5] Historians have recognized this as far back as Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s enduring classic, The Ancient City, first published in 1864. Fustel argued that in the early phase of the development of ancient cities gods were seen as being tied to specific cities, “patriotism was piety, and exile excommunication[.]”^[6] Important religious rites were performed by the rulers themselves to ensure the security, peace, and prosperity of the city. In short, “religion, law, and government were confounded, and had been but a single thing under three different aspects.”^[7] Fustel’s interpretation of the evidence has of course been qualified in various ways by later historians, but his basic insight into the unity of the religious and the political has only been confirmed.

The character of ancient civic religion was slowly modified by the development of philosophy, which debunked primitive myths, as well as social factors such as increased trade and political alliances.^[8] But this did not lead to a separation of religion and politics. Aristotle still considered worship to be an essential function of the πόλις, the city: “Fifthly, or rather first, there must be a care of religion, which is commonly called worship.”^[9] To Aristotle the independent city-state or πόλις was the complete human community, in which the goal of human life was to be attained. Politics, the art of directing the πόλις, was therefore an architectonic activity to which all other human activities were ordered. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that since politics directs all the other activities of man, its end must be the end for the sake of which those other activities pursue their ends. Political philosophy, therefore, is chiefly concerned with understanding the final end and highest good achievable by human action.^[10] The point can be difficult for modern readers, accustomed to a liberal, procedural understanding of the state that sees the end of life as being a private matter. For Aristotle, as for much of classical philosophy, the end of life was a public matter. And therefore, religion had to be fully integrated into politics.

The early religion of the city of Rome was similar to that of the Greek cities. Through the development of Roman power over large swaths of the Mediterranean world, and through the influence of Greek philosophy, it was slowly modified. But the function of divine worship continued to largely to the securing of political/imperial success. As John Scheid puts it, “the Romans regarded the gods as earthly partners maintaining relations with mortals with an eye toward reciprocal earthly benefits.”^[11] Thus the word religio, which we tend to translate with “religion” meant reverence not only towards the gods, but also towards human superiors.^[12] The Romans considered themselves to be particularly pious, and the city cult of Rome was “an integral part of the Roman constitution.”^[13] The saw in it an important reason for their spectacular military successes. In the Aeneid, the national epic that he wrote for Rome, Virgil describes Rome as having a divine mission to give the whole world the order of law: “totum sub leges mitteret orbem;”^[14] to impose peace by crushing the proud and sparing the weak: “pacique imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.”^[15] Roman imperialism was supposed to preserve what was best about the Greek philosophical ideal of the city-state— concern with the good of the citizens— the empire was still nominally the res publica, the common good of the people. And it was to overcome the petty particularism of individual cities by realizing the Stoic ideal of a universal society of all rational beings. Virgil saw a certain tension remaining between those two elements, since the scale of imperial life seemed to render the sort of political participation that the Greek tradition saw as an essential element of human happiness impossible. But for Virgil too, politics was the architectonic art, in which religion was included.^[16]

As polytheists, the Romans respected the civic religion of other cities that came under their sway. Everyone was to worship the gods of their ancestors. But Romans were not allowed to worship foreign gods, unless their worship had been ordered by the senate, since this implied disrespect for the gods of Rome.^[17] The Senate tended to order new cults only under the pressure of crisis. Thus, when the Roman gods seemed to be too weak to defend Rome against Carthage in the Second Punic War, the Senate decided to import the Phrygian goddess Cybale.^[18] Religions without the ancestral sanction of a respectable city, however, were looked at with mistrust. Oriental sects associated with ecstatic disorder, insubordination of the lower classes, sexual immorality, and cannibalism were looked on with special disapproval.^[19] In imperial times,^[20] the offering of sacrifices to the emperor’s genius, or to the emperor himself, was seen as “the token of loyalty to the Imperial house.”^[21]

3. Christianity and Caesar Before Augustine

Roman officials looked with suspicion on the movement of the Christians, whose founder had been a criminal executed by a Roman governor, and whose adherents were initially found mostly among the lower classes. Pliny the Younger, in his correspondence with the Emperor Trajan, writes that his custom when persons are accused of being Christian is to ask them three times whether they are, and if they persist in claiming that they are Christians he puts them to death: “For I do not doubt that, whatever kind of crime it may be to which they have confessed, their pertinacity and inflexible obstinacy should certainly be punished.”^[22] He considers their religion a “depraved and extravagant superstition,” but does not actively seek them out, and ignores anonymous denunciations.^[23] Anyone who denied that he was a Christian, and proved it by offering incense to the emperor, was discharged.^[24] Trajan approved Pliny’s method of proceeding, and his letter can be taken as having legal weight.^[25]

The Christians reacted to the attitude of the Roman officials by stressing that they were loyal to the emperor in all things, paying him taxes and praying for him, but they would not pray to him.^[26] The distinction made little sense to the Roman officials, for whom, as noted above, the difference between honor paid to gods and honor paid to powerful humans did not differ in kind.^[27]

Christian apologists were, however, able to make use of the rational approach to the divine in classical philosophy to argue for the plausibility of the Christian God as a transcendent and unique principle on which reality depended. Thus, as time went on, Christianity came to be seen as a locus of skepticism towards the irrationality of traditional pagan religion. By the time of Constantine, Christianity had adherents among the educated elite, as well as among the poor.^[28]

A turning point in the history of the relation of Christianity to worldly power was the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (c. 272 – 337).^[29] The Christians formed only about 10% of the population of the empire, but in a Christian catechumen emperor they found a powerful patron, who assured them legal rights, built them churches, and gave them an unprecedented prestige. Christian writers such as Eusebius of Caesarea greeted him as a kind of savior who had honored God and the Church and “destroyed all polytheistic error,” and therefore deserved to receive the reward of a prosperous reign on earth, and eternal glory in Heaven.^[30] Constantine’s conversion seems to have been sincere.^[31] His abolition of pagan sacrifices at state functions not only opened up the way for Christians to seek public office, it also dealt a massive blow to Roman political theology.^[32] And yet, of course, Constantine was inclined to think of Christianity in terms borrowed from pagan political theology: the worship of the true God would assure the prosperity of the empire.^[33]

Constantine’s successors also saw Christianity’s role as being analogous to that of the gods in Roman civic religion. This lead at times to tension with Church leaders. Christian bishops were happy to take imperial help in suppressing heresy and preserving Church unity,^[34] but they also thought that the Church should be able to criticize worldly power. As Martin Rhonheimer argues, they developed two principles for the relation of Christianity to imperial power: first, “the primacy of the spiritual over the earthly/worldly affairs,” and second, “the ordering of all earthly/worldly affairs to the heavenly and eternal.”^[35]

An important figure here was Augustine’s friend St. Ambrose of Milan (c. 340 – 397). In 390, when the Emperor Theodosius I ordered a massacre to punish the murder of magistrates in a riot, Ambrose sent him an astonishing rebuke (Epistle 51), calling him to repentance, and threatening him (in thinly veiled terms) with excommunication if he refused to do penance.^[36] Subsequent generations were to see this as an inspiring example of the primacy of the spiritual. As Hugo Rahner put it, the letter, “remains for all time a monument of courage in the face of autocracy, a hymn to strength of conscience and liberty of spirit.”^[37]

Already six years earlier, in a letter to the young emperor Valentinian, Ambrose had forcefully argued that the Christian emperor is a servant of God, and must promote the true religion. He must be “zealous for the true faith,” and not give equal rights to error. Political justice cannot be reduced to a balance of interests in which various influential groups are conceded something of what they want. Rather, justice consists in giving what is truly due to each, especially in giving the one, true God what is His due, by promoting Christian worship and suppressing pagan idolatry.^[38]

4. True Civil Life

The main theme of The City of God is that the true “city,” the complete community, in which the highest end of human life is attained, is not the ancient free πόλις, but rather the community of those who love God. The true eternal city that will grant peace and unity to the world is not Rome, but rather the community of Christ. This community is hidden now, living by faith in the fleeting course of time, but it will be revealed at the last judgement when it will rejoice in final victory and peace. Already now it is submitting the whole world to a new law: the law of love and grace. The City of God is the true res publica, because she is united in the love of the true supreme and common good of all, God Himself. The love of this true good is unifying because it is not competitive, it is not diminished by being shared:

For a person’s possession of the good is by no means diminished when another comes or continues to share in it. On the contrary, goodness is a possession that spreads out more and more widely insofar as those who share it are united in undivided love. In fact, anyone who is unwilling to share this possession will find that he does not possess it at all, but, the more he is able to love the one who shares it with him, the greater he will find that his own possession of it becomes.^[39]

Rome, in contrast, is not a true city or a true res publica at all. It is an instantiation of the rebellious anti-city that has since the beginning opposed the City of God: the Earthly City. This city is founded on “the love of self, even to the point of contempt for God.”^[40] In his relentless polemic against Rome, Augustine shows that her claims to serving the common good were mere pretense. Roman imperialism did not serve the true good of its subjects, but rather the love of praise (amor laudis) and the lust for domination (libido dominandi) of its leaders. These passions are destructive of true human community, because they are by nature competitive— to have the glory of great praise presupposes that others receive less praise, and to dominate many demands many who are dominated. Thus, Romulus murdered Remus, so that the whole glory of founding Rome could be his alone.^[41]

Cicero had defined the res publica as the common good of a people who are bound together “juris consensu et utilitatis communione” (“by a common sense for what is right and a community of interest”).^[42] But, Augustine asks, how can there be a common sense for what is right (jus) when there is no justice? Justice is, after all, to give each his due (i.e. his “right”). A truly common sense for what is right would therefore mean that perfect justice was being done. But in the Rome justice was undermined at its very root, because Rome did not give God his due, because the Romans did not give themselves to God who created them.^[43] Therefore Rome was not truly a res publica at all. Its civic life was turned into a mockery by that fundamental injustice, because, as Rowan Williams puts it, “a social practice which impedes human beings from offering themselves to God in fact denies that central impulse in human nature which Augustine defined as the unquenchable desire for God and his truth.”^[44] Roman politics was therefore not truly politics, but anti-politics. Roman imperialists had claimed that Rome’s rule of her subjects was just because it was advantageous to them, like the rule of the soul over the body. But, if the souls of the Romans did not serve God, then there was no legitimacy to the rule of their souls over their bodies, or of their city over other cities.^[45]

The civic virtues of the Romans were therefore in a fundamental sense vices. They were able in some sense to subordinate the passions to reason, but since reason itself was enslaved the love of praise and the lust of domination, the civic courage and devotions of the Romans was ultimately anti-civic. Since, however, on Augustine’s view evil has no independent being, but is always only a misdirecting of the good, it must therefore render and unwilling tribute to the good by imitating it. Thus, the Roman virtues bear a certain resemblance to true virtue, and the earthly peace that Roman virtues established is an imitation of true peace. Thus, in a less strict sense, Rome was a res publica, a group of persons united by “common agreement on the objects of their love.”^[46]

Augustine can therefore understand the relation between the true peace of the City of God, and the imitation peace of the Earthly City as the relation between a Platonic form and its image in the world of change. The purpose of such images is to point the “receptive soul” to “what lies beyond.”^[47] Thus Augustine holds up the Roman virtues as an example to be emulated by the citizens of the City of God.^[48] Indeed, in the greatest of the Romans, Marcus Regulus, the pagan semblance of virtue comes so close to true virtue that it almost achieves it: “a paganism on the point of over-coming itself, of an earthly city in process of becoming—but it is impossible—a heavenly city.”^[49]

The citizens of the City of God make a certain use of the earthly peace, and directs it toward the true peace of Heaven.^[50] Here Augustine counters the pagan suspicion that loyalty to the City of God would undermine concern for the common good of visible cities like Rome.^[51] On the contrary, he argues, it is of great advantage for the earthly peace if the rulers are Christians, since they understand what true virtue is.^[52] They understand that true virtue cannot be attained by human effort but only received by the repentant who submit to Christ.^[53] They use the sword to restrain evil-doers, but moderately; they are “slow to punish and quick to pardon,”^[54] because they understand that “the just society is penitential.”^[55] Above all, they use their power to “spread the worship of God as much as possible.”^[56] Augustine praises Christian emperors such as Constantine and Theodosius for living according to such principles.^[57] But even they were not able to achieve true peace on earth. True peace is to be found only in Heaven. And therefore, God does not always give earthly prosperity to Christian emperors for “no one should be Christian except for the sake of eternal life.”^[58]

Here Augustine strikes at the very heart of ancient political theology. True religion does not exist for the sake of securing the transitory order of this world, but rather for the sake of building up a city that will only be realized in eternity. Since earthly cities are not the highest goods, Christians are not committed to preserving them at any cost. A Christian ruler will therefore not suspend the ordinary rules of right and wrong (for example by killing innocents) even if the survival of the city depends on it. But this radicalization of the Socratic principle that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, does not subordinate the political to some “private” moral concern; rather it subordinates the uncertain fortunes of earthly politics to the common good of a better city whose advantage can never be served by injustice.

5. The Question of Political Augustinianism

The City of God was a key influence on medieval theories of the relation of the two powers, and particularly on the development of theories of the plenitude of power of the pope. It tended to be interpreted in a very particular way. The City of God came to be more and more identified with the visible Church and the pope as its visible head. And since no justice could exist except in the City of God, political powers could only be just if they recognized the authority of the visible Church. As R.W. Dyson puts it:

The political community can become a moral community, a community in which justice is present; but it can do so only through submission to the authority of the visible Church: an authority not subject to the deficiencies that infect the institutions created by fallen men.^[59]

This was the principle from which the teaching of the papal plenitude of power was to be developed. In the 20^th century, Msgr. Henri-Xavier Arquillière was to dub this medieval use of Augustine “political Augustinianism.” Arquillière argued that while Augustine’s later followers were to go much further than Augustine himself in subordinating temporal power to the hierarchy of the visible Church, Augustine’s own pessimism about nature and insistence that true justice could only be found through grace were the seeds from which the medieval developments sprung.^[60]

There has been much debate about the extent to which “political Augustinianism” was really developed out of Augustine’s own thought. Many have seen it as “the reverse of true Augustinism.”^[61] Augustine’s actual principles, they argued, imply something more like the modern separation of church and state. R. A. Markus, building on the work of Henri-Irénée Marrou, gave a sustained account of this position in his landmark study Saeculum. According to Markus, Augustine’s comprehensive refutation of political theology leaves no room for a Christian re-sacralization of political power:

Augustine’s attack on the ‘sacral’ conception of the Empire liberated the Roman state, and by implication, all politics, from the direct hegemony of the sacred. Society became intrinsically ‘secular’ in the sense that it is not as such committed to any particular ultimate loyalty. It is the sphere in which different individuals with different beliefs and loyalties pursue their common objectives in so far as they coincide. His ‘secularisation’ of the realm of politics implies a pluralistic, religiously neutral civil community. Historically, of course, such a society lay entirely beyond the horizons of Augustine’s world.^[62]

Markus is not of course arguing that Augustine himself was a modern liberal, but rather that his idea of the saeculum as the passing age in which the City of God and the Earthly City live mixed together, and must cooperate on practical penultimate concerns, implies a sort of pluralism that was only to be realized centuries later, after a long detour through a Medieval Christendom that was really a betrayal of true Augustinianism.

Markus’s liberal reading of Augustine has itself been contentiously debated. A particularly insistent critic is John Milbank, who argues that Markus’s reading is “almost totally erroneous.”^[63] Milbank appeals that far from implying that worldly politics ought to be individualistic and pluralistic, Augustine is actually criticizing Roman politics for being too individualistic.^[64] Appealing to the sort of reading that I have been offering in this section of the City of God as truly fulfilling the Roman civil ideals that Rome herself was not able to realize, Milbank argues that Augustine is indeed calling for social and political life to be integrated into the Church. Christian rulers will use political force for the ends of the Church, coercion will become “pastoral” coercion.^[65]

Milbank thus moves back in the direction of Arquillière’s political Augustinianism thesis.^[66] Other thinkers associated with Milbank’s “Radical Orthodoxy” movement, however, have developed Milbank’s reading in a direction which, while opposite to Markus’s, is nevertheless equally opposed to “political Augustinianism.” Thus, William T. Cavanaugh reads Augustine in a Christian anarchist direction. Worldly, coercive power belongs in the Earthly City which is always in conflict with the Heavenly City. The citizens of the Heavenly City should reject the coercive political projects of the age, and live in an anticipatory counter-city that serves as a perpetual sign of contradiction to earthly powers.^[67] Cavanaugh of course admits that Augustine countenanced the use of coercive measures by the city of God,^[68] nevertheless, Cavanaugh wants to insist that coercive government and the peaceful city of the Church cannot be integrated into one society with a Gelasian division of duties; coercive government will always remain outside the City of God and opposed to her.^[69] It is therefore hard to see, how, on Cavanaugh’s reading, Augustine’s endorsement of the use of political power for spiritual ends is consistent with his principles.

R.W. Dyson’s careful analysis of the relation of Augustine’s texts to “political Augustinianism” seems to me more convincing. Although Dyson calls the medieval reception Augustine “selective and tendentious,”^[70] nevertheless he shows how Augustine’s principles are open to development in the medieval direction. One might say, Dyson argues, that Augustine “did not follow his theological and metaphysical principles through to their most obvious conclusions.”^[71] He illustrates this by references to Augustine’s correspondence with Roman officials. Augustine suggests that the governors rule over bodily life, while he as bishop has the rule of the life of the soul.^[72] Augustine’s relations with Roman governors in Africa was not a competitive one, and in trying to enlist their help for his aims, he writes as though they were his equals in a different order. But it is clear that for Augustine the soul is superior to the body, and therefore the relation between bishops and governors is “asymmetrical.”^[73] In a changed situation, therefore, in which disputes arose between rulers and bishops it was logical for the “political Augustinian” position to emerge. In other words, Arquillière’s thesis still stands.

Dyson notes that what was just 70 years after Augustine that Pope Gelasius I wrote his famous letter Famuli vestrae pietatis (also known as Duo sunt), which already drew “political Augustinian” conclusions from premises taken from Augustine.^[74] Indeed, Dyson calls the Gelasian Dyarchy “Augustinian/Gelasian principle,” since “Augustine is effectively the originator of the view that historians more usually associate with Pope Gelasius I.”^[75] Political Augustinianism is thus identical to the “Gelasian Dyarchy,” which would continue to be taught in the most solemn manner by subsequent popes, and it amounts to what I have called “integralism.”^[76]

6. Is Man by Nature Political?

Now, Arquillière thought that political Augustinianism was a bad thing. Augustine, he argues, did not distinguish sufficiently between nature and grace, and therefore his later followers were able to absorb the legitimate natural-law institution of political power into the Church.^[77] Only the re-discovery of Aristotle in the 13^th century would enable the natural character of political life to re-emerge. This argument raises serious questions. Do those 20^th century theologians who allegedly made nature a mere “vacuole for grace”^[78] have a true predecessor in Augustine? Or, on the other hand, did those 16^th century thinkers who found in Augustine an idea of nature totally depraved by original sin find the true Augustine?

I cannot treat these questions in any great detail here. But I would like to give some indications of where an answer is to be sought by comparing Augustine with the greatest of 13^th century Aristotelians: Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the great debate between extreme Augustinians and extreme Aristotelians in the 13^th century, Saint Thomas refused both sides, and argued that Aristotle and Augustine are actually compatible.^[79] But is his resulting synthesis truly Augustinian? Augustine does indeed speak of the Greek philosophers as discovering the natural law of right and wrong.^[80] And in the praises of Regulus he portrays a virtue achieved in fallen nature that almost attains to the full being of virtue. Chad Pecknold has argued that Thomas’s understanding of the definition of virtue that he takes from Augustine— “a good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us”^[81]— is truly Augustinian.^[82]

One way of approaching the question is to look at whether Augustine thought that political rule was rooted in man’s original nature, or was a consequence of original sin. In other words: would there have been politics if Adam had never sinned? Thomas argues that the political common good is a locus of natural perfection, and since the common good of its nature demands a ruler who directs the multitude to it, there would have been political rule even without original sin.^[83] In the first objections to the article in which Thomas makes this argument, he cites a passage of The City of God that later interpreters have often used to argue that Augustine holds the opposite position: “[God] did not want a rational creature, made in his own image, to have dominion [dominari] except over irrational creatures— not man over man but man over beasts.”^[84] Dominion is the word that Augustine uses for possession of slaves and private property, as well as coercive political rule, suggests that all of these have been introduced by divine providence after the fall in order to punish and restrain evil-doers. In the body of the article, however, Thomas argues that there are two kinds of rule: one for the sake of the ruler, and one for the sake of the ruled. In saying that there would have been no dominion absent original sin, Augustine was speaking only of the former kind, Thomas argues, and not the later. And Thomas refers to the immediately preceding text of The City of God as evidence:

In the household of the just person who lives by faith and is still on pilgrimage far from the heavenly city, however, even those who give commands are at the service of those whom they appear to command. For they do not give their commands out of any desire for domination but rather out of dutiful concern for others, not out of any pride in ruling but rather out of compassion in providing for others. This is what the order of nature prescribes; this is the way God created man.^[85]

Robert Markus, however, argues that “this is the way God created man” refers not to the preceding text about benevolent rule, but only to the following text about God setting man over animals, rather than his fellow men.^[86] He argues that Augustine really means that political life in its entirety is a result of the Fall. Man would have been social without the fall, but not political.^[87] “Men are driven ‘by the laws of their nature’ to enter a social existence; but Augustine conceives this ‘natural’ society as a society of equals living in concord and subject only to God.”^[88] Markus recognizes a text that presents certain problems to his position. Namely De genesi ad literam XI, 37, in which Augustine argues that women would still have been subject to their husbands before the fall, and distinguishes two sorts of subjection:

The punishment, then, given to the woman is also understood in a literal sense; and furthermore we must give consideration to the statement And you shall be subject to your husband, and he shall rule over you, to see how it can be understood in the proper sense. For we must believe that even before her sin woman had been made to be ruled by her husband and to be submissive and subject to him. But we can with reason understand that the servitude meant in these words is that in which there is a condition similar to that of slavery rather than a bond of love (so that the servitude by which men later began to be slaves to other men obviously has its origin in punishment for sin). St. Paul says, Through love serve one another. But by no means would he say, “Have dominion over one another.”^[89]

Many interpreters had seen in this text the same distinction between two kinds of rule that Thomas made, and have argued that it is reasonable to presume that Augustine would have held that this sort of rule would have held in a state of innocence. But Markus argues that while we can conceive of a father directing a family without coercion, we cannot conceive of non-coercive politics. Politics he thinks is essentially coercive.

But why would Markus presume that Augustine shared his Hobbesian/Weberian understanding of politics? The reason, I think, has to do with a claim that he wants to make about freedom. “The Augustinian tradition, in excluding political authority from [the state of innocence], implied that any interference with a subject’s activities constitutes a restriction of his freedom.”^[90] He goes on to argue that while Augustine had a “negative” understanding of freedom, Thomas and other Aristotelians had a “positive” understanding of freedom—in the sense given those terms by Isaiah Berlin.^[91] I believe that we have here another example of Markus’s “almost totally erroneous” attempt at finding a protoliberal in Augustine. The idea of Augustine as promoting a negative concept of freedom is frankly bizarre.^[92]

I am therefore in agreement with interpreters such as Otto Schilling, John Neville Figgis, and Ernest Fortin, who read Augustine as distinguishing between the sort of dominium involving coercion that is a result of the original sin, and the benevolent direction of political affairs that would have existed even in the absence of sin.^[93] They can point to Augustine’s “table of peace,” in which the peace of a particular city is seen as an intermediate good between the household and the City of God:

The peace of the body is, then, the properly ordered arrangement of its parts; the peace of the irrational soul is the properly ordered satisfaction of the appetites; the peace of the rational soul is the properly ordered accord of cognition and action; the peace of body and soul together is the properly ordered life and wellbeing of a living creature; peace between mortal man and God is properly ordered obedience, in faith, under eternal law; peace among men is the properly ordered concord of mind with mind; the peace of a household is the properly ordered concord, with respect to command and obedience, of those who are living together; the peace of a city is the properly ordered concord, with respect to command and obedience, of its citizens; the peace of the heavenly city is perfectly ordered and wholly concordant fellowship in the enjoyment of God and of each other in God. The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order, and order is the arrangement of things equal and unequal that assigns to each its due place.^[94]

And they can point to Civ. Dei, XV,4 where the good of earthly cities is defended as a true good.

Rightly understood, therefore, political Augustinianism does not deny the natural common good of particular cities. But it sees that the natural common good of temporal life must be healed and elevated by grace, and directed by the infused virtue of charity to the supernatural common good of the Heavenly City.^[95] Grace does not destroy nature; it liberates it: “What gives birth to citizens of the earthly city is a nature vitiated by sin, and what gives birth to citizens of the heavenly city is grace liberating that nature from sin.”^[96]

7. Analytical Division of the Text

Augustine himself gives us a detailed account of the structure of The City of God in his Retractions, which I quote at length:

Meanwhile, Rome was destroyed as a result of an invasion of the Goths under the leadership of King Alaric, and of the violence of this great disaster. The worshipers of many false gods, whom we call by the customary name pagans, attempting to attribute its destruction to the Christian religion, began to blaspheme the true God more sharply and bitterly than usual. And so, ‘burning with zeal for the house of God,’ I decided to write the books, On the City of God, in opposition to their blasphemies and errors. This work kept me busy for some years because many other things, which should not be deferred, interfered and their solution had first claim on me. But finally, this extensive work, On the City of God, was completed in twenty-two books.
The first five of these books refute those persons who would so view the prosperity of human affairs that they think that the worship of the many gods whom the pagans worship is necessary for this; they contend that these evils arise and abound because they are prohibited from doing so. The next five books, however, speak against those who admit that these evils have never been wanting and never will be wanting to mortals, and that these, at one time great, at another time slight, vary according to places, times, and persons; and yet they argue that the worship of many gods, whereby sacrifice is offered to them, is useful because of the life to come after death. In these ten books, then, these two false beliefs, contrary to the Christian religion, are refuted.
But lest anyone charge that we have only argued against the beliefs of others, and have not stated our own, it is just this that the second part of this work, which consists of twelve books, accomplishes; although, when there is need, both in the first ten books I state my own opinions, and, in the last twelve, I argue against those opposed to them. The first four of the following twelve books, then, deal with the origin of the two cities, one of which is of God, the other of this world; the next four books treat of their growth or progress; but the third four books, which are also the last, deal with their destined ends. And so, although the entire twenty-two books were written about both cities, yet, they have taken their title from the better one, and consequently are called, On the City of God.^[97]

And in a letter to Firmus he writes:

There are twenty-two sections [quaternions]. To put all these into one whole [corpus] would be cumbersome. If you wish that two volumes [codices] be made of them, they should be so apportioned that one volume contain ten books [libros], the other twelve. For, in those ten, the empty teachings of the pagans have been refuted, and, in the remainder, our own religion has been demonstrated and defended—though, to be sure, in the former books the latter subject has been dealt with when it was more suitable to do so, and in the latter, the former.
If, however, you should prefer that there be more than two volumes, you should make as many as five. The first of these would contain the first five books, where argument has been advanced against those who contend that the worship, not indeed of gods, but of demons, is of profit for happiness in this present life. The second volume would contain the next five books, where [a stand has been taken against those] who think that, for the sake of the life which is to come after death, worship should be paid, through rites and sacrifices, whether to these divinities or to any plurality of gods whatever. The next three volumes ought to embrace four books each; for this part of our work has been so divided that four books set forth the origin of that City, a second four its progress— or, as we might choose to say, its development,— the final four its appointed ends.^[98]

Those passages, together with internal evidence in The City of God itself give us the following general division of the text:^[99]

Part One: Books 1 – 10: Against those who believe happiness comes from the worship of the Roman gods

1 – 5: Against those who believe that the worship of the gods leads to happiness in this life

1 – 3: The gods did not prevent moral and physical evils in Rome’s history

1: The Fall of Rome not due to conversion to Christianity. Why disasters happen.

2: Moral evils not prevented, but caused by the Gods

3: Physical disasters not prevented by the Gods

4 – 5: Roman power and glory not due to the gods, but the one God

4: Roman power is not due to the Roman gods

5: Power and glory was given by God to the Romans

6 – 10: Against those who believe that the worship of the gods leads to happiness in the life to come

6 – 7: Official Roman polytheism

6: The civil religion of Rome cannot provide eternal happiness

7: The select or principal gods of Rome cannot provide eternal happiness

8 – 10: The religion of the Platonists

8: Platonic religious philosophy and polytheism

9: Worship of good and bad demons among Platonists

10: The religion of the Platonists and the Christian religion compared

Part Two: Books 11 – 24: The origin, development and ends of the city of God and the earthly city

11 – 14: The origin of the city of God and the earthly city

11 and 12: The origin of two cities among angels

11: The origin of the city of God in the good angels; creation of a good world

12: The origin of the earthly city in the fall of the angels; the creation of man

13 and 14: The origin of two cities among men

13: The fall of man: Adam and Eve; death

14: Detailed analysis of the fall and its effects

15 – 18: The development of the two cities

15: The two cities in the first age (Adam to Noah)

16: The two cities in the second age (Noah to Abraham);

the city of God in the third age (Abraham to David)

17: The city of God in the fourth age (David to Babylonian captivity)

and the fifth age (Babylonian captivity to Christ)

18: The earthly city in the third to fifth ages;

the city of God in the sixth age (Jesus to the end-times)

19-20: The ends of the two cities

19: The supreme good and evil: definitive peace and definitive war

20: The end-times and the final judgment separates the two cities

21: The end of the earthly city: eternal damnation

22: The end of the city of God: eternal happiness

Notes

^[1] See: Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), ch. 25.

^[2] Augustine, Civ. Dei, I, praef.; Sancti Aurelii Augustini episcopi De civitate Dei libri XXII., ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, 5th ed. (Stuttgart-Leipzig: Teubner, 1993), 2 vols.; The City of God, trans. William Babcock, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21^st Century, vols. I,6-7 (New York: New City Press, 2012).

^[3] For the division of the books see section 7 below.

^[4] For such a reading see, e.g.: Thomas Merton, Introduction to Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, The Modern Library (New York: Random House, 1993), p. xii.

^[5] Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 3.

^[6] Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, trans. Willard Small (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 381.

^[7] Fustel, The Ancient City, p. 381.

^[8] Fustel, The Ancient City, Bk. V.

^[9] Aristotle, Politics VII,8 1328b 13; trans. Benjamin Jowett, in: The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).

^[10] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, I,1-2 1094a-b; cf. Politics, I,1 1252a.

^[11] John Scheid, The Gods, the State, and the Individual: Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome, trans. Clifford Ando (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 139.

^[12] Gradel, Emperor Worship, p. 4.

^[13] Gradel, Emperor Worship, p. 12.

^[14] Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 231, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

^[15] Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 852-853.

^[16] See: John Alvis, Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), ch. 3. I would not, however, go as far Eve Adler, who argues that Virgil’s religion was a “noble lie,” an esoteric teaching meant to prop up imperial authority, but which Virgil himself did not believe: Eve Adler, Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Here it seems to me that the Victorian critic Frederic Myers’s reading of Virgil’s religion is still more convincing: F.W.H. Myers, “Virgil,” in: Essays: Classical (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp. 106-176.

^[17] See: W.H.C Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014), p. 106.

^[18] Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, p. 107.

^[19] Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, pp. 108-114.

^[20] Frend sees the cult of rulers as being principally an imperial development, and as being influenced by Greek customs. Against this see Grandel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion, ch. 2, who argues that emperor worship had deep roots in republican custom.

^[21] Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, p. 118.

^[22] Pliny the Younger, Ep. 10, in: Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, 3^rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 3-4, at p. 4.

^[23] Pliny, Ep. 10, p.4.

^[24] Pliny, Ep. 10, p.4.

^[25] See: T. D. Barnes, “Legislation against the Christians,” in: The Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968), pp. 32-50.

^[26] See: Hugo Rahner, S.J., Church and State in Early Christianity, trans. Leo Donald Davis, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 9.

^[27] See: Gradel, Emperor Worship, pp. 1-4.

^[28] See: Mark Edwards, “The Beginning of Christianization,” in: Noel Lensky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 137-158; Gradel, Emperor Worship, pp. 368-369.

^[29] A clear and concise account of Constantine’s life and reign is given by Hans A. Pohlsander, The Emperor Constantine, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).

^[30] Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), IV.75; p. 182.

^[31] See: Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2010).

^[32] Leithart, Defending Constantine, ch. 6.

^[33] Leithart, Defending Constantine, pp. 84-90.

^[34] See: Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat, pp. 49, 51.

^[35] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat, p. 46: “der Primat des Spirituellen über das Irdisch-Weltliche […] die Hinordnung alles Irdisch-Weltliche auf das Himmlische und Ewige.”

^[36] Ambrose, Epistle 51; Saint Ambrose: Letters, trans. Mary Melchior Beyenka, O.P. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 26, (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), pp. 20-26.

^[37] Rahner, Church and State, p. 78.

^[38] Ambrose, Epistle XVII: https://thejosias.net/2016/11/17/the-altar-of-victory/ (accessed July 24, 2017); cf. Hans A. Pohlsander, “Victory: The Story of a Statue,” in: Historia 18 (1969), pp. 588-597.

^[39] Civ. Dei XV,5; trans. Babcock.

^[40] Civ. Dei XIV,28; trans. Babcock.

^[41] Civ. Dei, XV,5; cf. Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 116.

^[42] Civ. Dei, II,21, XIX,21, trans. Babcock.

^[43] Civ. Dei, XIX,21.

^[44] Williams, On Augustine, p. 112.

^[45] Civ. Dei, XIX,21, 25.

^[46] Civ. Dei, XIX,24; trans. Babcock.

^[47] Robert W. Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo: The Christian Transformation of Political Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 67.

^[48] Civ. Dei, V,18.

^[49] Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic, trans. Marc Lepain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 249; cf. Chad Pecknold, “Reading St. Augustine’s City of God with St. Thomas Aquinas,” Lecture, The Thomistic Institute at Harvard, Cambridge, MA, April 27, 2017: https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/reading-st-augustines-city-of-god-with-st-thomas-aquinas-chad-pecknold-42717 (accessed July 24, 2017). Regulus had been a prisoner of the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians sent him to Rome to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, binding him by an oath to the gods that if he was unsuccessful he would return. Regulus, however, persuaded the Romans not to agree to the exchange, since he thought it was not conducive to Rome’s advantage. He then kept his oath, returning to Carthage to be tortured to death. Civ. Dei, I,15. For Augustine, Regulus is thus an example both of selfless devotion to the common good of Rome, and of recognition that justice towards the divine requires giving up all earthly advantages for the sake of fidelity to divinity. His virtue was, however, radically vitiated by the fact that his devotion was payed to false gods, rather than the one true God.

^[50] Civ. Dei, XIX,17.

^[51] See: Ernest L. Fortin, “The City of God,” in: Ever Ancient, Ever New: Ruminations on the City, the Soul, and the Church, Collected Essays, vol. 4, ed. Michael P. Foley (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), pp. 71-81, at p. 73.

^[52] Civ. Dei, V,19.

^[53] See: Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

^[54] Civ. Dei, V,24; ed. Dombart and Kalb, vol. 1, p. 237; trans. Babcock, vol. I,6, p. 178.

^[55] Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society, p. 112.

^[56] Civ. Dei, V,24; ed. Dombart and Kalb, vol. 1, p. 237; trans. Babcock, vol. I,6, p. 178.

^[57] Civ. Dei, V,25-26.

^[58] Civ. Dei, V,25; ed. Dombart and Kalb, vol. 1, p. 238; trans. Babcock, vol. I,6, p. 179.

^[59] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, p. 144.

^[60] See: Michael J. S. Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), especially pp. 36-39.

^[61] Thus Henri de Lubac, cited in: Bruno, Political Augustinianism, p. 40.

^[62] R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 173.

^[63] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 404.

^[64] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 405.

^[65] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 410-411, 423-425.

^[66] Milbank indeed argues that the “tragic” character of political life in Augustine gets glossed over in medieval Augustinianism [Theology and Social Theory, p. 425], but Arquillière would not disagree.

^[67] William T. Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space,” in: Political Theology 7.3 (2006), pp. 299-321; cf. my paper “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” in: The Josias, March 3, 2016: https://thejosias.net/2016/03/03/integralism-and-gelasian-dyarchy/ (accessed July 24, 2017). In that paper I read Milbank as interpreting Augustine in a way similar to Cavanaugh; I now see that Milbank’s interpretation is actually closer to Arquillière’s.

^[68] Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two,” p. 312.

^[69] Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two,” p. 309.

^[70] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, p. 142.

^[71] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, p. 156.

^[72] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, pp. 149-150.

^[73] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, p. 151.

^[74] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, p. 156.

^[75] Dyson, St Augustine of Hippo, p. 149; cf. Rahner, Church and State, p. 138.

^[76] See my paper: “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy.”

^[77] See: Bruno, Political Augustinianism, p. 36.

^[78] Steven Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

^[79] Pecknold, “Reading St. Augustine’s City of God with St. Thomas Aquinas.”

^[80] Civ. Dei, II,7.

^[81] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 55, a. 4; cf. Augustine, De libero arbitrio, II,19.

^[82] Pecknold, “Reading St. Augustine’s City of God with St. Thomas Aquinas.”

^[83] Thomas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 96, a. 4; cf. Paul J. Weithman, “Augustine and Aquinas on Original Sin and the Function of Political Authority,” in: Journal of the History of Philosophy 30.3 (1992), pp. 353-376.

^[84] Civ. Dei, XIX,15, trans. Babcock.

^[85] Civ. Dei, XIX,14-15, trans. Babcock.

^[86] Markus, Saeculum, Appendix B. Markus’s reading is aided by the traditional break between chapters 14 and 15 which separates “This is what the order of nature prescribes…” from the preceding text. The chapter divisions in Civ. Dei are, however, most likely not from Augustine himself. See: Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 277-278.

^[87] Markus, Saeculum, p. 210.

^[88] Markus, Saeculum, pp. 204-205.

^[89] Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., vol. 2 (New York: The Newman Press, 1982), pp. 170-171.

^[90] Markus, Saeculum, p. 229.

^[91] Markus, Saeculum, pp. 229-230.

^[92] See my paper: Contrasting Concepts of Freedom, presented at the conference Heute gerecht leben: Impulse zu Ordnungskonzeptionen aus katholischer, orthodoxer und schiitischer Tradition, ViQo Circle, Vienna, September 19, 2016: https://viqocircle.org/2016/11/11/waldstein-on-freedom/ (accessed July 24, 2017) for a reading of Augustine as holding a strongly positive account of freedom.

^[93] Otto Schilling, Die Staats- und Soziallehre des hl. Augustinus (Freibug im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1910), pp. 34-76; John Neville Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s ‘City of of God’ (London: Longmans, Green, and co., 1921), pp. 52-59; Fortin, “The City of God,” p. 74.

^[94] Civ. Dei, XIX,13, trans. Babcock (emphasis added).

^[95] See: Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Integralism in Three Sentences,” in: The Josias, October 17, 2016: https://thejosias.net/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/ (accessed July 24, 2017).

^[96] Civ. Dei, XV,2, trans. Babcock.

^[97] Augustine, The Retractions, trans. Mary Inez Bogan, RSM, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 60, (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968), II,69; pp. 209-210.

^[98] Augustine, Epistle to Firmus 2*, in: The City of God: Books I-VII, trans. Demetrius B. Zema, S.J. and Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 8 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1950), pp. 399-400.

^[99] The divisio textus was made by Michael Waldstein as a handout for a seminar on The City of God, International Theological Institute, Gaming, 1999. I am grateful to him for sharing it with me. I have linked the headings to the translation by Marcus Dods et al. digitalized by Project Gutenberg (vol. I, vol. II). The Dods translation is, on the whole, excellent; Dods’s grand, Victorian prose is a better equivalent to Augustine’s rhetorically polished Latin than more modern translations. The modern translations are, however, sometimes more precise. Hence my references to the Babcock translation above.

Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical on the Church and the German Reich, Mit brennender Sorge (With burning concern), is today probably most known for the circumstances under which it was brought into Germany. Composed in German—allegedly by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, then secretary of state, and Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, longtime Archbishop of Munich—the encyclical was smuggled into Germany, distributed by the nuncio by courier, and printed in the utmost secrecy. Then, on Palm Sunday 1937, it was read out from the pulpit to German Catholics throughout the Reich. Hitler’s furious response came quickly: the Gestapo was sent out to round up those who participated in the distribution of the encyclical and to shut down the printing presses used. To Hitler and his circle, there was no mistaking what Mit brennender Sorge was: it was a declaration of war against the Reich by the Church.

However, it is fair to say that Mit brennender Sorge represents a recognition by the Church that a state of war, as it were, existed between it and the Reich. In 1933, Hitler signaled a willingness to enter into negotiations for a national concordat. This was welcome news to the Vatican after long negotiations with the Reich government and the Länder governments, which had produced mixed results. A treaty—the famous Reichskonkordat—was quickly concluded after Hitler took power. In Mit brennender Sorge, Pius explains that he assented to the Reichskonkordat with grave misgivings, but nevertheless did so in the hopes of obtaining for the German Catholics the rights promised in the treaty and of sparing them the hostility of the Reich. However, by 1937, it was clear that Hitler’s hostility to the Church was not leavened by any treaty, and that he intended to stamp out the Church in Germany as he intended to stamp out any institution that did not share his aims or bless his means. In the Pope’s view, Hitler made regular violation of the Reichskonkordat his policy. Based upon these actions by the Reich government, Pius seized the moment to condemn the errors of the Nazis.

According to Pius, the Nazi ideology was ultimately an “aggressive paganism,” which denied “the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world.” However, this paganism has several components. First, a “pantheistic confusion” that seeks to identify God with the universe. Second,  a tendency to replace God with “a dark and impersonal destiny,” which has its roots in pre-Christian Germanic belief. Third, an idolization of “race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community.” Fourth, a tendency to treat God as merely another concept on a level with any other purely human concept. Finally, the notion of a national God or national religion. To hold these views is to deny God his absolute sovereignty over all peoples and places, and to withhold from Him the obedience that is rightly His alone. This obedience is necessary to harmonize man’s actions and laws with the eternal law and the divine law.

Pius clarifies his teaching on race in a couple of key dimensions. First, he reminds us that faith in Christ requires faith in the Church, which exists, by Christ’s mandate, in unity and indivisibility. The Church is the same for everyone, regardless of race or nation, and to interfere with that unity through racial division is to do violence to God’s plan for His Church. In the same vein, Pius teaches us that, while there is nothing wrong with patriotism or ethnic community necessarily, the Catholic is, in addition to his ethnicity or national origin, a child of God and a citizen of the heavenly country. Speaking to the youth of Germany, Pius reminds us that we may not set our earthly citizenship at odds with our status as a member of the Body of Christ, the Church. Still less should we discount the moral heroism required of Christians.

Pius also teaches at considerable length about the connection between faith, morality, and law. For one thing, the exercise of the power of the state requires a morality founded upon faith in Christ to be obeyed. Removing faith in Christ as the basis of morality leads on one hand to moral collapse and on the other to disobedience to lawful exercises of state power. For another thing, abandonment of faith in Christ leads to laws without moral force. The natural law, Pius tells us, provides a criterion by which human laws may be judged. Pius’s warnings could not be clearer: the Nazis’ rejection of faith in God would lead inexorably both to moral collapse and to laws without moral force. While Pius, in 1937, was particularly concerned about laws that prevented parents from educating their children in Church schools, with the benefit of hindsight, one sees that still worse consequences would follow from the Nazis’ rejection of faith in Christ. In this, as on so many other topics, Pius proved to have almost prophetic vision.

The integralist intuitively understands the connection between faith, morality, and law. It is no less important to understand those things corrosive of faith and therefore of morality and law. Ideologies that idolize race (or the state, for that matter) are incompatible with faith in Christ. This has stark consequences for any regime—or any group—that find themselves separated from faith in Christ. Once it abandons faith in Christ, especially by adopting the aggressive paganism espoused by the Nazis, it starts down the road to immorality and tyranny.  Mit brennender Sorge certainly has historical importance; it marked a watershed moment in German and Church history, the beginning of a time of great trial for Catholics in Germany. But, so long as persons purporting to be Christian adopt racialist ideologies, Pius’s encyclical cannot be altogether declared a historical curiosity.

Encyclical on the Position of the Catholic Church in the German Reich

Pope Pius XI

March 14, 1937

AAS 29 (1937) 145–67.

Venerable Brethren, Greetings, and Apostolic Blessing.

IT IS WITH DEEP ANXIETY and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God’s Kingdom.

And what the representatives of the venerable episcopate, who visited Us in Our sick room, had to tell Us, in truth and duty bound, has not modified Our feelings. To consoling and edifying information on the stand the Faithful are making for their Faith, they considered themselves bound, in spite of efforts to judge with moderation and in spite of their own patriotic love, to add reports of things hard and unpleasant. After hearing their account, We could, in grateful acknowledgment to God, exclaim with the Apostle of love: “I have no greater grace than this, to hear that my children walk in truth” (John iii. 4). But the frankness indifferent in Our Apostolic charge and the determination to place before the Christian world the truth in all its reality, prompt Us to add: “Our pastoral heart knows no deeper pain, no disappointment more bitter, than to learn that many are straying from the path of truth.”

When, in 1933, We consented, Venerable Brethren, to open negotiations for a concordat, which the Reich Government proposed on the basis of a scheme of several years’ standing; and when, to your unanimous satisfaction, We concluded the negotiations by a solemn treaty, We were prompted by the desire, as it behooved Us, to secure for Germany the freedom of the Church’s beneficent mission and the salvation of the souls in her care, as well as by the sincere wish to render the German people a service essential for its peaceful development and prosperity. Hence, despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our consent for We wished to spare the Faithful of Germany, as far as it was humanly possible, the trials and difficulties they would have had to face, given the circumstances, had the negotiations fallen through. It was by acts that We wished to make it plain, Christ’s interests being Our sole object, that the pacific and maternal hand of the Church would be extended to anyone who did not actually refuse it.

If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on her Head. The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men – the “enemy” of Holy Scripture – oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.

We have never ceased, Venerable Brethren, to represent to the responsible rulers of your country’s destiny, the consequences which would inevitably follow the protection and even the favor, extended to such a policy. We have done everything in Our power to defend the sacred pledge of the given word of honor against theories and practices, which it officially endorsed, would wreck every faith in treaties and make every signature worthless. Should the day ever come to place before the world the account of Our efforts, every honest mind will see on which side are to be found the promoters of peace, and on which side its disturbers. Whoever had left in his soul an atom of love for truth, and in his heart a shadow of a sense of justice, must admit that, in the course of these anxious and trying years following upon the conclusion of the concordat, every one of Our words, every one of Our acts, has been inspired by the binding law of treaties. At the same time, anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation, how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy. The moderation We showed in spite of all this was not inspired by motives of worldly interest, still less by unwarranted weakness, but merely by Our anxiety not to draw out the wheat with the cockle; not to pronounce open judgment, before the public was ready to see its force; not to impeach other people’s honesty, before the evidence of events should have torn the mask off the systematic hostility leveled at the Church. Even now that a campaign against the confessional schools, which are guaranteed by the concordat, and the destruction of free election, where Catholics have a right to their children’s Catholic education, afford evidence, in a matter so essential to the life of the Church, of the extreme gravity of the situation and the anxiety of every Christian conscience; even now Our responsibility for Christian souls induces Us not to overlook the last possibilities, however slight, of a return to fidelity to treaties, and to any arrangement that may be acceptable to the episcopate. We shall continue without failing, to stand before the rulers of your people as the defender of violated rights, and in obedience to Our Conscience and Our pastoral mission, whether We be successful or not, to oppose the policy which seeks, by open or secret means, to strangle rights guaranteed by a treaty.

Different, however, Venerable Brethren, is the purpose of this letter. As you affectionately visited Us in Our illness, so also We turn to you, and through you, the German Catholics, who, like all suffering and afflicted children, are nearer to their Father’s heart. At a time when your faith, like gold, is being tested in the fire of tribulation and persecution, when your religious freedom is beset on all sides, when the lack of religious teaching and of normal defense is heavily weighing on you, you have every right to words of truth and spiritual comfort from him whose first predecessor heard these words from the Lord: “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not: and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren” (Luke xxii. 32).

Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who “Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.

This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God’s sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators’ right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.

None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are “as a drop of a bucket” (Isaiah xI, 15).

The Bishops of the Church of Christ, “ordained in the things that appertain to God (Heb. v, 1) must watch that pernicious errors of this sort, and consequent practices more pernicious still, shall not gain a footing among their flock. It is part of their sacred obligations to do whatever is in their power to enforce respect for, and obedience to, the commandments of God, as these are the necessary foundation of all private life and public morality; to see that the rights of His Divine Majesty, His name and His word be not profaned; to put a stop to the blasphemies, which, in words and pictures, are multiplying like the sands of the desert; to encounter the obstinacy and provocations of those who deny, despise and hate God, by the never-failing reparatory prayers of the Faithful, hourly rising like incense to the All-Highest and staying His vengeance.

We thank you, Venerable Brethren, your priests and Faithful, who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God’s rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism. Our gratitude, warmer still and admiring, goes out to those who, in fulfillment of their duty, have been deemed worthy of sacrifice and suffering for the love of God.

No faith in God can for long survive pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in Christ. “No one knoweth who the Son is, but the Father: and who the Father is, but the Son and to whom the Son will reveal Him” (Luke x. 22). “Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent” (John xvii. 3). Nobody, therefore, can say: “I believe in God, and that is enough religion for me,” for the Savior’s words brook no evasion: “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son hath the Father also” (1John ii. 23).

In Jesus Christ, Son of God made Man, there shone the plentitude of divine revelation. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by His Son” (Heb. i. 1). The sacred books of the Old Testament are exclusively the word of God, and constitute a substantial part of his revelation; they are penetrated by a subdued light, harmonizing with the slow development of revelation, the dawn of the bright day of the redemption. As should be expected in historical and didactic books, they reflect in many particulars the imperfection, the weakness and sinfulness of man. But side by side with innumerable touches of greatness and nobleness, they also record the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise, repeatedly straying from God and turning to the world. Eyes not blinded by prejudice or passion will see in this prevarication, as reported by the Biblical history, the luminous splendor of the divine light revealing the saving plan which finally triumphs over every fault and sin. It is precisely in the twilight of this background that one perceives the striking perspective of the divine tutorship of salvation, as it warms, admonishes, strikes, raises and beautifies its elect. Nothing but ignorance and pride could blind one to the treasures hoarded in the Old Testament.

Whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the Biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty’s plan of salvation, and makes limited and narrow human thought the judge of God’s designs over the history of the world: he denies his faith in the true Christ, such as He appeared in the flesh, the Christ who took His human nature from a people that was to crucify Him; and he understands nothing of that universal tragedy of the Son of God who to His torturer’s sacrilege opposed the divine and priestly sacrifice of His redeeming death, and made the new alliance the goal of the old alliance, its realization and its crown.

The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. Since Christ, the Lord’s Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved (Acts iv. 12). No man, were every science, power and worldly strength incarnated in him, can lay any other foundation but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. iii 11). Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: “He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them” (Psalms ii. 3).

Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in the Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. iii. 15); for Christ Himself, God eternally blessed, raised this pillar of the Faith. His command to hear the Church (Matt. xviii. 15), to welcome in the words and commands of the Church His own words and His own commands (Luke x. 16), is addressed to all men, of all times and of all countries. The Church founded by the Redeemer is one, the same for all races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven, there is but one country for all nations and tongues; there is room for the development of every quality, advantage, task and vocation which God the Creator and Savior has allotted to individuals as well as to ethnical communities. The Church’s maternal heart is big enough to see in the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more than a mere danger of divergency. She rejoices at the spiritual superiorities among individuals and nations. In their successes she sees with maternal joy and pride fruits of education and progress, which she can only bless and encourage, whenever she can conscientiously do so. But she also knows that to this freedom limits have been set by the majesty of the divine command, which founded that Church one and indivisible. Whoever tampers with that unity and that indivisibility wrenches from the Spouse of Christ one of the diadems with which God Himself crowned her; he subjects a divine structure, which stands on eternal foundations, to criticism and transformation by architects whom the Father of Heaven never authorized to interfere.

The Church, whose work lies among men and operates through men, may see her divine mission obscured by human, too human, combination, persistently growing and developing like the cockle among the wheat of the Kingdom of God. Those who know the Savior’s words on scandal and the giver of scandals, know, too, the judgment which the Church and all her sons must pronounce on what was and what is sin. But if, besides these reprehensible discrepancies be between faith and life, acts and words, exterior conduct and interior feelings, however numerous they be, anyone overlooks the overwhelming sum of authentic virtues, of spirit of sacrifice, fraternal love, heroic efforts of sanctity, he gives evidence of deplorable blindness and injustice. If later he forgets to apply the standard of severity, by which he measures the Church he hates, to other organizations in which he happens to be interested, then his appeal to an offended sense of purity identifies him with those who, for seeing the mote in their brother’s eye, according to the Savior’s incisive words, cannot see the beam in their own. But however suspicious the intention of those who make it their task, nay their vile profession, to scrutinize what is human in the Church, and although the priestly powers conferred by God are independent of the priest’s human value, it yet remains true that at no moment of history, no individual, in no organization can dispense himself from the duty of loyally examining his conscience, of mercilessly purifying himself, and energetically renewing himself in spirit and in action. In Our Encyclical on the priesthood We have urged attention to the sacred duty of all those who belong to the Church, chiefly the members of the priestly and religious profession and of the lay apostolate, to square their faith and their conduct with the claims of the law of God and of the Church. And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that “the salt of the earth,” the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today – prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God – the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt “the Spirit breatheth where he will” (John iii. 8): “of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs” (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.

In your country, Venerable Brethren, voices are swelling into a chorus urging people to leave the Church, and among the leaders there is more than one whose official position is intended to create the impression that this infidelity to Christ the King constitutes a signal and meritorious act of loyalty to the modern State. Secret and open measures of intimidation, the threat of economic and civic disabilities, bear on the loyalty of certain classes of Catholic functionaries, a pressure which violates every human right and dignity. Our wholehearted paternal sympathy goes out to those who must pay so dearly for their loyalty to Christ and the Church; but directly the highest interests are at stake, with the alternative of spiritual loss, there is but one alternative left, that of heroism. If the oppressor offers one the Judas bargain of apostasy he can only, at the cost of every worldly sacrifice, answer with Our Lord: “Begone, Satan! For it is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve” (Matt. iv. 10). And turning to the Church, he shall say: “Thou, my mother since my infancy, the solace of my life and advocate at my death, may my tongue cleave to my palate if, yielding to worldly promises or threats, I betray the vows of my baptism.” As to those who imagine that they can reconcile exterior infidelity to one and the same Church, let them hear Our Lord’s warning: – “He that shall deny me before men shall be denied before the angels of God” (Luke xii. 9).

Faith in the Church cannot stand pure and true without the support of faith in the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. The same moment when Peter, in the presence of all the Apostles and disciples, confesses his faith in Christ, Son of the Living God, the answer he received in reward for his faith and his confession was the word that built the Church, the only Church of Christ, on the rock of Peter (Matt. xvi. 18). Thus was sealed the connection between the faith in Christ, the Church and the Primacy. True and lawful authority is invariably a bond of unity, a source of strength, a guarantee against division and ruin, a pledge for the future: and this is verified in the deepest and sublimest sense, when that authority, as in the case of the Church, and the Church alone, is sealed by the promise and the guidance of the Holy Ghost and His irresistible support. Should men, who are not even united by faith in Christ, come and offer you the seduction of a national German Church, be convinced that it is nothing but a denial of the one Church of Christ and the evident betrayal of that universal evangelical mission, for which a world Church alone is qualified and competent. The live history of other national churches with their paralysis, their domestication and subjection to worldly powers, is sufficient evidence of the sterility to which is condemned every branch that is severed from the trunk of the living Church. Whoever counters these erroneous developments with an uncompromising No from the very outset, not only serves the purity of his faith in Christ, but also the welfare and the vitality of his own people.

You will need to watch carefully, Venerable Brethren, that religious fundamental concepts be not emptied of their content and distorted to profane use. “Revelation” in its Christian sense, means the word of God addressed to man. The use of this word for the “suggestions” of race and blood, for the irradiations of a people’s history, is mere equivocation. False coins of this sort do not deserve Christian currency. “Faith” consists in holding as true what God has revealed and proposes through His Church to man’s acceptance. It is “the evidence of things that appear not” (Heb. ii. 1). The joyful and proud confidence in the future of one’s people, instinct in every heart, is quite a different thing from faith in a religious sense. To substitute the one for the other, and demand on the strength of this, to be numbered among the faithful followers of Christ, is a senseless play on words, if it does not conceal a confusion of concepts, or worse.

“Immortality” in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order.

“Original sin” is the hereditary but impersonal fault of Adam’s descendants, who have sinned in him (Rom. v. 12). It is the loss of grace, and therefore of eternal life, together with a propensity to evil, which everybody must, with the assistance of grace, penance, resistance and moral effort, repress and conquer. The passion and death of the Son of God has redeemed the world from the hereditary curse of sin and death. Faith in these truths, which in your country are today the butt of the cheap derision of Christ’s enemies, belongs to the inalienable treasury of Christian revelation.

The cross of Christ, though it has become to many a stumbling block and foolishness (1 Cor. i. 23) remains for the believer the holy sign of his redemption, the emblem of moral strength and greatness. We live in its shadow and die in its embrace. It will stand on our grave as a pledge of our faith and our hope in the eternal light.

Humility in the spirit of the Gospel and prayer for the assistance of grace are perfectly compatible with self-confidence and heroism. The Church of Christ, which throughout the ages and to the present day numbers more confessors and voluntary martyrs than any other moral collectivity, needs lessons from no one in heroism of feeling and action. The odious pride of reformers only covers itself with ridicule when it rails at Christian humility as though it were but a cowardly pose of self-degradation.

“Grace,” in a wide sense, may stand for any of the Creator’s gifts to His creature; but in its Christian designation, it means all the supernatural tokens of God’s love; God’s intervention which raises man to that intimate communion of life with Himself, called by the Gospel “adoption of the children of God.” “Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God” (1 John iii. 1). To discard this gratuitous and free elevation in the name of a so-called German type amounts to repudiating openly a fundamental truth of Christianity. It would be an abuse of our religious vocabulary to place on the same level supernatural grace and natural gifts. Pastors and guardians of the people of God will do well to resist this plunder of sacred things and this confusion of ideas.

It is on faith in God, preserved pure and stainless, that man’s morality is based. All efforts to remove from under morality and the moral order the granite foundation of faith and to substitute for it the shifting sands of human regulations, sooner or later lead these individuals or societies to moral degradation. The fool who has said in his heart “there is no God” goes straight to moral corruption (Psalms xiii. 1), and the number of these fools who today are out to sever morality from religion, is legion. They either do not see or refuse to see that the banishment of confessional Christianity, i.e., the clear and precise notion of Christianity, from teaching and education, from the organization of social and political life, spells spiritual spoliation and degradation. No coercive power of the State, no purely human ideal, however noble and lofty it be, will ever be able to make shift of the supreme and decisive impulses generated by faith in God and Christ. If the man, who is called to the hard sacrifice of his own ego to the common good, loses the support of the eternal and the divine, that comforting and consoling faith in a God who rewards all good and punishes all evil, then the result of the majority will be, not the acceptance, but the refusal of their duty. The conscientious observation of the ten commandments of God and the precepts of the Church (which are nothing but practical specifications of rules of the Gospels) is for every one an unrivaled school of personal discipline, moral education and formation of character, a school that is exacting, but not to excess. A merciful God, who as Legislator, says – Thou must! – also gives by His grace the power to will and to do. To let forces of moral formation of such efficacy lie fallow, or to exclude them positively from public education, would spell religious under-feeding of a nation. To hand over the moral law to man’s subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations.

Such is the rush of present-day life that it severs from the divine foundation of Revelation, not only morality, but also the theoretical and practical rights. We are especially referring to what is called the natural law, written by the Creator’s hand on the tablet of the heart (Rom. ii. 14) and which reason, not blinded by sin or passion, can easily read. It is in the light of the commands of this natural law, that all positive law, whoever be the lawgiver, can be gauged in its moral content, and hence, in the authority it wields over conscience. Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend. In the light of this principle one must judge the axiom, that “right is common utility,” a proposition which may be given a correct significance, it means that what is morally indefensible, can never contribute to the good of the people. But ancient paganism acknowledged that the axiom, to be entirely true, must be reversed and be made to say: “Nothing can be useful, if it is not at the same time morally good” (Cicero, De Off. ii. 30). Emancipated from this oral rule, the principle would in international law carry a perpetual state of war between nations; for it ignores in national life, by confusion of right and utility, the basic fact that man as a person possesses rights he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect. To overlook this truth is to forget that the real common good ultimately takes its measure from man’s nature, which balances personal rights and social obligations, and from the purpose of society, established for the benefit of human nature. Society, was intended by the Creator for the full development of individual possibilities, and for the social benefits, which by a give and take process, every one can claim for his own sake and that of others. Higher and more general values, which collectivity alone can provide, also derive from the Creator for the good of man, and for the full development, natural and supernatural, and the realization of his perfection. To neglect this order is to shake the pillars on which society rests, and to compromise social tranquillity, security and existence.

The believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law. Parents who are earnest and conscious of their educative duties, have a primary right to the education of the children God has given them in the spirit of their Faith, and according to its prescriptions. Laws and measures which in school questions fail to respect this freedom of the parents go against natural law, and are immoral. The Church, whose mission it is to preserve and explain the natural law, as it is divine in its origin, cannot but declare that the recent enrollment into schools organized without a semblance of freedom, is the result of unjust pressure, and is a violation of every common right.

As the Vicar of Him who said to the young man of the Gospel: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matt. xix. 17), We address a few paternal words to the young.

Thousands of voices ring into your ears a Gospel which has not been revealed by the Father of Heaven. Thousands of pens are wielded in the service of a Christianity, which is not of Christ. Press and wireless daily force on you productions hostile to the Faith and to the Church, impudently aggressive against whatever you should hold venerable and sacred. Many of you, clinging to your Faith and to your Church, as a result of your affiliation with religious associations guaranteed by the concordat, have often to face the tragic trial of seeing your loyalty to your country misunderstood, suspected, or even denied, and of being hurt in your professional and social life. We are well aware that there is many a humble soldier of Christ in your ranks, who with torn feelings, but a determined heart, accepts his fate, finding his one consolation in the thought of suffering insults for the name of Jesus (Acts v. 41). Today, as We see you threatened with new dangers and new molestations, We say to you: If any one should preach to you a Gospel other than the one you received on the knees of a pious mother, from the lips of a believing father, or through teaching faithful to God and His Church, “let him be anathema” (Gal. i. 9). If the State organizes a national youth, and makes this organization obligatory to all, then, without prejudice to rights of religious associations, it is the absolute right of youths as well as of parents to see to it that this organization is purged of all manifestations hostile to the Church and Christianity. These manifestations are even today placing Christian parents in a painful alternative, as they cannot give to the State what they owe to God alone.

No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country. What We object to is the voluntary and systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty. That is why we tell the young: Sing your hymns to freedom, but do not forget the freedom of the children of God. Do not drag the nobility of that freedom in the mud of sin and sensuality. He who sings hymns of loyalty to this terrestrial country should not, for that reason, become unfaithful to God and His Church, or a deserter and traitor to His heavenly country. You are often told about heroic greatness, in lying opposition to evangelical humility and patience. Why conceal the fact that there are heroisms in moral life? That the preservation of baptismal innocence is an act of heroism which deserves credit? You are often told about the human deficiencies which mar the history of the Church: why ignore the exploits which fill her history, the saints she begot, the blessing that came upon Western civilization from the union between that Church and your people? You are told about sports. Indulged in with moderation and within limits, physical education is a boon for youth. But so much time is now devoted to sporting activities, that the harmonious development of body and mind is disregarded, that duties to one’s family, and the observation of the Lord’s Day are neglected. With an indifference bordering on contempt the day of the Lord is divested of its sacred character, against the best of German traditions. But We expect the Catholic youth, in the more favorable organizations of the State, to uphold its right to a Christian sanctification of the Sunday, not to exercise the body at the expense of the immortal soul, not to be overcome by evil, but to aim at the triumph of good over evil (Rom. xii. 21) as its highest achievement will be the gaining of the crown in the stadium of eternal life (1 Cor. ix. 24).

We address a special word of congratulation, encouragement and exhortation to the priests of Germany, who, in difficult times and delicate situations, have, under the direction of their Bishops, to guide the flocks of Christ along the straight road, by word and example, by their daily devotion and apostolic patience. Beloved sons, who participate with Us in the sacred mysteries, never tire of exercising, after the Sovereign and eternal Priest, Jesus Christ, the charity and solicitude of the Good Samaritan. Let your daily conduct remain stainless before God and the incessant pursuit of your perfection and sanctification, in merciful charity towards all those who are confided to your care, especially those who are more exposed, who are weak and stumbling. Be the guides of the faithful, the support of those who fail, the doctors of the doubting, the consolers of the afflicted, the disinterested counselors and assistants of all. The trials and sufferings which your people have undergone in post-War days have not passed over its soul without leaving painful marks. They have left bitterness and anxiety which are slow to cure, except by charity. This charity is the apostle’s indispensable weapon, in a world torn by hatred. It will make you forget, or at least forgive, many an undeserved insult now more frequent than ever.

This charity, intelligent and sympathetic towards those even who offend you, does by no means imply a renunciation of the right of proclaiming, vindicating and defending the truth and its implications. The priest’s first loving gift to his neighbors is to serve truth and refute error in any of its forms. Failure on this score would be not only a betrayal of God and your vocation, but also an offense against the real welfare of your people and country. To all those who have kept their promised fidelity to their Bishops on the day of their ordination; to all those who in the exercise of their priestly function are called upon to suffer persecution; to all those imprisoned in jail and concentration camps, the Father of the Christian world sends his words of gratitude and commendation.

Our paternal gratitude also goes out to Religious and nuns, as well as Our sympathy for so many who, as a result of administrative measures hostile to Religious Orders, have been wrenched from the work of their vocation. If some have fallen and shown themselves unworthy of their vocation, their fault, which the Church punishes, in no way detracts from the merit of the immense majority, who, in voluntary abnegation and poverty, have tried to serve their God and their country. By their zeal, their fidelity, their virtue, their active charity, their devotion, the Orders devoted to the care of souls, the service of the sick and education, are greatly contributing to private and public welfare. No doubt better days will come to do them better justice than the present troublous times have done. We trust that the heads of religious communities will profit by their trials and difficulties tO renew their zeal, their spirit of prayer, the austerity of their lives and their perfect discipline, in order to draw down God’s blessing upon their difficult work.

We visualize the immense multitudes of Our faithful children, Our sons and daughters, for whom the sufferings of the Church in Germany and their own have left intact their devotion to the cause of God, their tender love for the Father of Christendom, their obedience to their pastors, their joyous resolution to remain ever faithful, happen what may, to the sacred inheritance of their ancestors. To all of them We send Our paternal greetings. And first to the members of those religious associations which, bravely and at the cost of untold sacrifices, have remained faithful to Christ, and have stood by the rights which a solemn treaty had guaranteed to the Church and to themselves according to the rules of loyalty and good faith.

We address Our special greetings to the Catholic parents. Their rights and duties as educators, conferred on them by God, are at present the stake of a campaign pregnant with consequences. The Church cannot wait to deplore the devastation of its altars, the destruction of its temples, if an education, hostile to Christ, is to profane the temple of the child’s soul consecrated by baptism, and extinguish the eternal light of the faith in Christ for the sake of counterfeit light alien to the Cross. Then the violation of temples is nigh, and it will be every one’s duty to sever his responsibility from the opposite camp, and free his conscience from guilty cooperation with such corruption. The more the enemies attempt to disguise their designs, the more a distrustful vigilance will be needed, in the light of bitter experience. Religious lessons maintained for the sake of appearances, controlled by unauthorized men, within the frame of an educational system which systematically works against religion, do not justify a vote in favor of non-confessional schools. We know, dear Catholic parents, that your vote was not free, for a free and secret vote would have meant the triumph of the Catholic schools. Therefore, we shall never cease frankly to represent to the responsible authorities the iniquity of the pressure brought to bear on you and the duty of respecting the freedom of education. Yet do not forget this: none can free you from the responsibility God has placed on you over your children. None of your oppressors, who pretend to relieve you of your duties can answer for you to the eternal Judge, when he will ask: “Where are those I confided to you?” May every one of you be able to answer: “Of them whom thou hast given me, I have not lost any one” (John xviii. 9).

Venerable Brethren, We are convinced that the words which in this solemn moment We address to you, and to the Catholics of the German Empire, will find in the hearts and in the acts of Our Faithful, the echo responding to the solicitude of the common Father. If there is one thing We implore the Lord to grant, it is this, that Our words may reach the ears and the hearts of those who have begun to yield to the threats and enticements of the enemies of Christ and His Church.

We have weighed every word of this letter in the balance of truth and love. We wished neither to be an accomplice to equivocation by an untimely silence, nor by excessive severity to harden the hearts of those who live under Our pastoral responsibility; for Our pastoral love pursues them none the less for all their infidelity. Should those who are trying to adapt their mentality to their new surroundings, have for the paternal home they have left and for the Father Himself, nothing but words of distrust, in gratitude or insult, should they even forget whatever they forsook, the day will come when their anguish will fall on the children they have lost, when nostalgia will bring them back to “God who was the joy of their youth,” to the Church whose paternal hand has directed them on the road that leads to the Father of Heaven.

Like other periods of the history of the Church, the present has ushered in a new ascension of interior purification, on the sole condition that the faithful show themselves proud enough in the confession of their faith in Christ, generous enough in suffering to face the oppressors of the Church with the strength of their faith and charity. May the holy time of Lent and Easter, which preaches interior renovation and penance, turn Christian eyes towards the Cross and the risen Christ; be for all of you the joyful occasion that will fill your souls with heroism, patience and victory. Then We are sure, the enemies of the Church, who think that their time has come, will see that their joy was premature, and that they may close the grave they had dug. The day will come when the Te Deum of liberation will succeed to the premature hymns of the enemies of Christ: Te Deum of triumph and joy and gratitude, as the German people return to religion, bend the knee before Christ, and arming themselves against the enemies of God, again resume the task God has laid upon them.

He who searches the hearts and reins (Psalm vii. 10) is Our witness that We have no greater desire than to see in Germany the restoration of a true peace between Church and State. But if, without any fault of Ours, this peace is not to come, then the Church of God will defend her rights and her freedom in the name of the Almighty whose arm has not shortened. Trusting in Him, “We cease not to pray and to beg” (Col. i. 9) for you, children of the Church, that the days of tribulation may end and that you may be found faithful in the day of judgment; for the persecutors and oppressors, that the Father of light and mercy may enlighten them as He enlightened Saul on the road of Damascus. With this prayer in Our heart and on Our lips We grant to you, as a pledge of Divine help, as a support in your difficult resolutions, as a comfort in the struggle, as a consolation in all trials, to You, Bishops and Pastors of the Faithful, priests, Religious, lay apostles of Catholic Action, to all your diocesans, and specially to the sick and the prisoners, in paternal love, Our Apostolic Benediction.

Given at the Vatican on Passion Sunday, March 14, 1937.

Pope Benedict XV’s letter Celeberrima evenisse resulted from one of the diplomatic triumphs of his brief pontificate: the reëstablishment of diplomatic relations with Portugal. The anti-clerical revolutionaries, who in 1910 had overturned the Portuguese monarchy and established a republic, had soon passed laws on the “separation” of Church and state that in reality amounted to a programme of persecution of the Church. Monasteries and seminaries were closed, Catholic teaching in the schools was abolished, bishops were expelled from their dioceses, even the wearing of the cassock was forbidden. Pope St. Pius X vehemently protested these outrages in the encyclical Iamdudum in Lusitania. Such extreme anti-Catholic measures contributed to deep divisions in Portuguese society, and the country was torn by unrest in the years following the Revolution of 1910. By 1918 the government was ready to compromise with the Holy See, and it reëstablished diplomatic relations, asking that in return the Holy See “insist on the faithful’s fuller acceptance of the Republic.”[1]

And in Celeberrima evenisse Pope Benedict XV did so insist with remarkable vehemence. He states that it is “a Christian’s duty faithfully to submit to the authority which is actually in power,” because, “on this depends the common good.” This follows from the traditional teaching that political powers ordered to the common good are established by God. So that, as Henri Grenier put it, “after a usurper has established himself in power citizens are bound to submit to his decrees if they are in the interest of the common good, for otherwise there would be no legislator, and the State would perish.” Intransigent Portuguese Catholics might have countered that given the persistent civil unrest, not to mention the outrageous attacks on the common good through the law of separation, it was not at all clear whether the usurping republicans had “established” themselves.

In any event, the Benedict XV’s letter can be seen as part of a wider policy of returning to Pope Leo XIII’s controversial policy of ralliement, and extending it to countries other than France. He explicitly cites Leo XIII’s Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, the encyclical inaugurating the ralliement in France. The ralliement was a clever but risky strategy for re-Catholicising post-revolutionnary nations. Pope Leo had wanted French Catholics to use republican political processes to change the republic from within, transforming it into a Catholic republic. Many Catholics, however, balked at a policy which implied recognizing the legitimacy of a republic founded in the unspeakable crimes of the Revolution. Pius X had grave doubts about the prudence of the ralliement. And he essentially reversed the policy when he became pope. His fear was that instead of leading to a reëstablishment of Christendom through a transformation of republics, it would instead lead to a transformation of Catholics into liberal republicans. He saw his fears realized in the Sillon movement, which he condemned in the apostolic letter Notre Charge Apostolique.

Benedict XV was in turn was deeply disturbed by St. Pius X’s reversal of the Leonine policy, and immediately sought to undo it when he ascended the chair of St. Peter— much to the dismay “integralists” in the Roman curia, such as Pius X’s Secretary of State, Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val. Writing of Benedict XV’s much heralded reëstablishment of diplomatic relations with Portugal, Spain, and France, Merry del Val wrote:

…too much politics, worldly diplomacy and intrigue that are hardly in keeping with the lofty ideals of our mission, nor profitable to the best interests of God and his Church. Here, alas, we come up against it at every step, all day and every day… We are drifting . . . Surely at a time when the world has lost its bearings and is anxiously seeking that which we alone are able to provide, we should not drift ourselves, or appear to juggle with principles, but hold up the lesson of light as God gave it to us and refrain from the tactics of human politics.[2]

Both Cardinal Merry del Val and Pope Benedict XV were orthodox and God-fearing Churchmen who had the good of the Church and the salvation of souls at heart. And Cardinal Merry del Val, as a strong ultramontane, was entirely loyal to the Benedict XV as ruler and teacher of the universal Church. Their sharp disagreements about the proper approach of the Church in relating to modernity can be a consolation to us today facing similar disagreements. The programme of engagement with the world laid out in Gaudium et Spes can be seen as a kind of extended ralliement— a hope that the modern ideal of progress could be “subverted” by the Church. And it carried similar risks. Far too many Catholics in the post-conciliar period have instead themselves been transformed into secular liberals, while those who have their doubts about the wisdom of the programme are too often accused of being disloyal to the living magisterium of the Church. But they are no-more disloyal than was Merry del Val.

Letter To António Cardinal Mendes Bello, Patriarch of Lisbon, and to the other archbishops and bishops of Portugal: Counseling submission and obedience to the constituted civil power.

Pope Benedict XV

December 18, 1919

AAS 12 (1920) 32-33, as translated in Principles For Peace: Selections From Papal Documents Leo XIII to Pius XII, ed. Harry C. Koenig (Washington, DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1943), pp. 280-282, lightly edited for The Josias.

We were indeed very glad to hear that the solemnities were very well attended which took place recently in honor of Blessed Nonius Alvares at Lisbon, and that very many of you took part in them. For thus taking advantage of the excellent opportunity you not only took counsel over the state of affairs with one another, in order to set forth a joint program for your flocks in matters which pertain to Religion and State, but you also learned from the Apostolic Nuncio Our opinion in this most serious matter. Nevertheless, Venerable Brethren, on account of Our special love for the most noble Portuguese nation We wish to speak to you paternally. First of all We cherish a well-founded hope that all whether clergy or laity, whose sincere love of country is certainly most clearly established will be second to none in re-establishing peace and good-will among their fellow citizens. For since the Church, as is evident, must neither be responsible to political parties, nor serve political interests, it is, therefore, her duty to urge the faithful to obey those who are in authority, whatever be the constitution of the State. For on this depends the common good, which is certainly, according to God’s plan, the first law of the State, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, clearly set forth in his Encyclical, Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, of February 16, 1892. Moreover, writing to the Cardinals of France on the 3rd of May of the same year, he stated that it was a Christian’s duty faithfully to submit to the authority which is actually in power. Following, therefore, the teaching and practice of the Church, which has always been accustomed to be on friendly terms with States of whatever constitution, and which has recently restored relations with the Republic of Portugal, let Catholics, with a clear conscience, submit also to this civil authority as it is now constituted, and for the common good of Religion and State let them willingly accept public offices if they are conferred. We make these exhortations all the more willingly because, from what has been reported to Us, We are confident that the Portuguese authorities will uphold the complete freedom of the Church and the exercise of her sacred rights that she may there most profitably carry out her divine commission. It will be your task, Venerable Brethren, together with the clergy to urge the faithful from time to time that, considering Mother Church more important than worldly interests and political parties, they strive by all means to protect her rights with united strength. For thus they will greatly contribute to the increase and prosperity of their native Portugal, that she may successfully continue to carry out the most glorious task she has received from Divine Providence especially in spreading the Faith and civilization throughout the vast extent of her colonies.  As an earnest of divine gifts and a pledge of Our benevolence, We impart from Our heart to you, beloved Son, and to your Venerable Brethren, and to all your clergy and people the Apostolic Benediction.

Given at Rome, at St. Peter’s on the 18th of December, 1919, the sixth year of Our Pontificate

Notes

[1] R. A. H. Robinson, “The Religious Question and the Catholic Revival in Portugal, 1900-30,” in: Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977), pp. 345-362, at pp. 355-356.

[2] Letter to Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, November, 192, cited in: John F. Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1999), p. 158. Merry del Val had long mistrusted Giacomo della Chiesa/Benedict XV. He had arranged for della Chiesa to be moved from the powerful post of Sostituto of the Secretary of State, and made Archbishop of Bologna (promoveatur ut amoveatur). When the ballot that elected della Chiesa pope was counted in the Sistine chapel, Cardinal Merry del Val was heard to murmur ‘Oh, this is a calamity!’ (Ibid. p. 67).