Translated by Timothy Wilson

Today we continue our series of original translations of important texts relating to Catholic political philosophy.  Cardinal Tommaso Maria Zigliara was a prominent Thomist philosopher and theologian in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Among many other accomplishments, he was closely involved with the preparation of the Leonine edition of the Angelic Doctor’s Opera Omnia (the first volume of which contains his synopses and annotations on St. Thomas’ Organon commentaries), and assisted in preparing the encyclicals Aeterni Patris and Rerum novarum.

The chapter translated here is taken from book two of the third part of Zigliara’s widely circulated Summa philosophica (14^th ed., 1910). Having treated of domestic, civil, and religious society in their principles and particulars in the preceding books and chapters of this part, he now sets himself the task of treating in brief the relations which should obtain between those two perfect societies, the Church and the State. The original text can be found here.

This is the first of the five articles of the chapter, treating of political atheism. The remaining articles will be posted serially over the next few days.

CHAPTER FIVE
On the mutual relations between Church and State

The nature of the Catholic Church having been set forth, and its power, consequently it remains to speak of the mutual relations existing between the Church and the civil State. And indeed it is proper to the Catholic Church, that it have members in every part of the world, and thus would rule over subjects of all nations; whence it comes about, that its power is found in intimate relation with civil States. It is necessary, therefore, that we speak of these mutual relations between the Church and the civil State. Indeed it is a difficult subject, not by its nature, but on account of the injustice of times and the malice of men. But that we might plainly determine the aforesaid relations, we begin from more remote principles, inquiring firstly of political atheism: whether indeed the political State thus is able to conduct itself as if no religion existed, and as if God did not exist;—secondly, of liberty of conscience, as they call it;—thirdly, of liberty of cult;—fourthly, of liberty of teaching;—fifthly, of the subordination of the State to the Church.

FIRST ARTICLE
On political atheism

I. The notion of political atheism. Earlier in our treatise we distinguished atheism into the species of theoretical and practical, insofar as either the existence of God is positively denied, or life is conducted as if God did not exist. In this second sense do we inquire concerning political atheism. For the elements of society are two: the governing element, in which there rests social authority, and the governed element, or the subjects, who are ordered by the ruler to the common good. And with respect to the governing element—whether he be called a prince, or is called by another name—is he able, in the drawing up of laws, in their execution, or in exercising judiciary power, to act as if God did not exist, and consequently to have no regard for divine laws, whether natural or positive? Behold the question.

II. The principles of political atheism. To the question proposed, the political atheist responds affirmatively; it is not difficult to assign the erroneous principles from which it is logically inferred, for they are both designated and proscribed many times in the lauded Syllabus, delivered by the authority of our most holy lord Pope Pius IX. Accordingly, whether the existence of God is denied; or, as with pantheism, his nature is confounded with the nature of the world; or, the existence of God having been posited, His divine providence is denied—God is always excluded from the world, such that «any action of God upon men and the world is to be denied» (Prop. II).

From this it follows, 1° that «Human reason, having no regard at all for God, is the single arbiter of the true and false, good and evil; it is a law unto itself, and suffices, by its natural powers, for procuring the good of men and peoples» (Prop. III).

— 2° Thus, «They derive all truths of religion from the native force of human reason; hence reason is the chief norm by which man may be able and ought to arrive at knowledge of all the truths of any sort of knowledge whatsoever» (Prop. IV).

— 3° Therefore «the laws of morals by no means require divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary, that human laws should be conformed to the law of nature, or that they should receive binding force from God» (Prop. LVI).

— 4° Therefore «Knowledge of philosophic and moral matters, and likewise civil laws, are able and ought to decline from divine and ecclesiastical authority» (Prop. LVII).

— 5° «Therefore the State, as the origin and font of all rights, enjoys a certain right circumscribed by no bounds» (Prop. XXXIX).

— 6° Therefore «right consists in material fact, and all duties of men are a hollow name, and all human deeds have the force of right» (Prop. LIX).

— 7° Therefore «the chance injustice of a deed causes no harm to the sanctity of right» (Prop. LXI).

— 8° Therefore «Authority is nothing other than the sum of number and material powers» (Prop. LX).

Errors of this sort, as anyone may see, are connected: for from the denial of God, descending, one arrives at materialism, and material force is opposed to individual right, and the despotism of the stronger to social right. Behold political atheism, both in its principles, and in its inferences proved by fact itself. Bayle, with whom Voltaire himself disagreed concerning this matter, dreamt of an atheistic society; Rousseau, for the most part, consented to Bayle in Book IV, ch. 7 of the Social Contract; both are more or less followed by those politicians who argue for the absolute separation of the State from the Church. Against all these, the conclusion is set forth:

III. Political atheism is absurd. It is proved. Political atheism dissolves society itself: because it is directly opposed so much to the end as to the essential elements of society. Therefore political atheism is absurd. — The antecedent is proved.

It is directly opposed to the end of society. The end of society is the perfection of the citizens, to be obtained through means which each and every person is not able to have from himself, and has from society; which perfection consists chiefly in the knowledge of one’s proper duties, and in the virtue by which those duties are carried out. But we have proved (32, IV) that the more principal duties of religion are the foundation of all other duties.^[1] Therefore in society, and from society, the citizens principally ought to have the means by which they might carry out the duties of religion. But political atheism is either the denial of those things which pertain to religion, or at least an indifference and carelessness concerning the same, as it indeed defines itself. Therefore political atheism is directly opposed to the more principal end of human society. Wherefore Rousseau himself, in the text cited, against Bayle and indeed against himself, acknowledges that never was there any State founded, the basis of which was not religion. But if religion is the basis of society, then, religion having been expelled, it is necessary that human society should collapse.

It is opposed to the essential elements of society. The elements of this sort, as has been said, are the sovereign and the subjects: the former commands; the latter should be subject to him by the laws. Again, according to the hypothesis of political atheism, social authority depends upon no moral foundation and has no reason for existing. And this is indeed the case. Social authority is not the sum of number and material powers (51, V), but is something essentially moral, claiming for itself the right of ruling the human multitude. And thus it is not from the individual reason, to which no command or authority belongs of itself over other men, nor from an impersonal source, which is something abstract and fantastical, but is immediately from God, as a derivation or participation of the divine authority (ibid. IV). Therefore, political authority is not able to call itself atheistic, lest by this very act it necessarily and essentially negate itself. — The same result comes to pass if social authority were considered with respect to setting forth laws. For civil laws are naught except either proclamations of the law of nature, or determinations of that law of nature (25, VIII): but the law of nature is nothing other than a participation of the eternal law, from which every other law has its force. In consequence, political atheism is the denial of authority in itself; it is the denial of human legislation, which is null, for according to this hypothesis, it has no moral force to obligate. — Finally it should be added, that political authority, if it removes in whatever degree from God, should be said to depend on nothing other than itself. But this is State-theism, or, as it is called in the vulgar tongue, il Dio Stato, which in fact is able to be nothing other than the individual reason or will of rulers, governed not by a moral and superior principle, but by the force of arms and a supremely powerful ruler. Evidently, in political atheism, human society is not ruled by moral authority, but by the will and violence of individual reason, in that manner by which brute animals are governed.

The same conclusion is entirely proved, if we should consider the subjects. For these are men, that is, moral beings, to be directed in their course not through violence, but through law. Seeing, therefore, that the political authority professing atheism depends upon no moral principle, and the laws drawn up by it rest upon no principle superior to the individual reason, the citizens, reasoning in an ad hominem manner (L.41, XI), are not able to consider the authority as morally superior to themselves, and its laws as having the force of moral obligation; but they oppose individual reason to the individual reason of the one ruling. There remains the material force which prevails in the ruler; but material force is not a social bond of men; thereon to be shunned by means of ill will, no indeed, it is able to be overcome; and thus, by means of force, impious and foolish sovereigns are able to rob majesty from the citizens, which majesty they abuse against God. And so it happens that political authority, rising up against God in a most impious manner, sees its subjects rising up against itself.

I do not speak of the impiety of political atheism: for this is clear in itself. For if it is impious, that a citizen deny to God the duties of religion, it is most impious among those who rule society. For these latter are men, and so are obliged to fulfill those things which are man’s for God; they are rulers, and so ought to lead the way for all their subjects in the example of virtue and religion; they are for the good of society, and so ought not to subvert or subordinate religion, but ought, with all their powers, to promote it, so that men might not draw detriment from society—from which they have the right of aspiring to moral perfection—in those things which chiefly look to perfection, that is, religion and the eternal salvation of the soul.

NOTES

^[1] Zigliara here makes reference to earlier sections in the Ethica (lib. I, cap. 1, a. III no. III; cap. 2, a. I, no. IV) where, treating of right, duties, and religion considered in itself as a virtue, he writes:

«III. Nevertheless, in a created moral person, duty is more prior than right. And in fact, the first thing which is found in an existing man (and the same is said of any other created moral person) is the creaturely esse, which essentially implies a dependence, physical as well as moral, upon the Creator, so that the creature might observe the laws of the Creator, pursuing faithfully the order to the end set in place by Him. This primitive and essential duty having been posited, there spring forth the rights of preserving and defending life, of employing means necessary for perfecting themselves and for achieving their end, and others of this sort; but, that primitive and essential duty having been removed, all rights crumble because destitute of rational foundation: which is also clear from other quarters from the things said before (29, II). Whence that is to be retained as an unshaken principle: Human rights proceed from duties toward God.

[…] IV. The duties of religion are the chiefest duties, and are the foundation of all duties. This proposition is the corollary of the preceding. For the duties of religion emerge from the very essence of man, and from the very essence of God, as we have proved in no. II. Therefore they are the chiefest. — In addition, God having been removed by hypothesis, there also perishes by that very fact the reason for any duty whatsoever. Therefore religion, which implies an ordering to God, as has been said, is the foundation of all duties. Let St. Thomas be heard, who, by reason of the end to which the virtues are ordered, infers that religion is preeminent among the other moral virtues, and consequently that the duties of religion are chief among all our other duties: “Those things which are for an end, draw their goodness from the order to the end; and thus, however much they are nearer to the end, so much are they better. But the moral virtues, as has been said above, are concerned with those things which are ordered to God, as to an end. But religion approaches more nearly to God than the other moral virtues, insofar as it works those things which directly and immediately are ordered to the divine honor. And thus religion is preeminent among the other moral virtues” (ST IIaIIæ, q. 81, a. 7).»

Ludwig von Pastor’s History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages is a great gem of recent Catholic scholarship.  Spanning forty volumes and five centuries, Pastor’s history traces the Papacy from the Babylonian Captivity at Avignon, through the Conciliarist crises of the mid 15th century, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and beyond, up to the outbreak of the French Revolution.  For his work, Pastor was given free use of the Vatican Secret Archives, and was commended by both Leo XIII and Pius XI.

The excerpt below is taken from the first volume of the series, which discusses the Avignon Popes and the Great Schism.  Our readers will find it interesting for the light it throws on the relationship between the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, the corruption of the Papal Court at Avignon, and the emergence of a school of political and religious thought identical in essence to the liberalism which still plagues the Church today.

Financial Difficulties at Avignon

The financial difficulties from which the Popes had suffered in the thirteenth century became much more serious after they had taken up their abode on French soil. On the one hand, the income they had drawn from Italy failed; and on the other, the tributary powers became much more irregular in the fulfillment of their obligations, because they feared that the greater part of the subsidies they paid would fall into the hands of France.

The Papal financiers adopted most questionable means of covering deficits. From the time of John XXII. especially, the hurtful system of Annates, Reservations, and Expectancies, came into play, and a multitude of abuses were its consequence. Alvaro Pelayo, the most devoted, perhaps even over-zealous, defender of the Papal power in the fourteenth century, justly considers the employment of this system, liable to excite the cupidity of the clergy, as one of the wounds which then afflicted the Church. His testimony is all the more worthy of consideration, because, as an official of many years’ standing in the Court, he describes the state of things at Avignon from his own most intimate knowledge. In his celebrated book, On the Lamentation of the Church, he says : “Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the Papal Court, I found brokers and clergy, engaged in weighing and reckoning the money which lay in heaps before them.”

This system of taxation and its consequent abuses soon aroused passionate resentment. Dante, “consumed with zeal for the House of God,” expressed, in burning words, his deep indignation against the cupidity and nepotism of the Popes, always, however, carefully distinguishing between Pope and Papacy, person and office.

Conflict between the Empire and the Church

It was not long, however, before an opposition arose which made no such distinctions, and attacked not only the abuses which had crept in, but the Ecclesiastical authority Itself. The Avignon system of finance, which contributed more than has been generally supposed to the undermining of the Papal authority, greatly facilitated the attacks of this party.

From what has been said it will be clearly seen that the long-continued sojourn of the Popes in France, occasioned as it was by the confusion of Italian affairs, was an important turning-point in the history of the Papacy and of the Church. The course of development which had been going on for many centuries, was thereby almost abruptly interrupted, and a completely new state of things substituted for it. No one who has any idea of the nature and the necessity of historical continuity, can fail to perceive the danger of this transference of the centre of ecclesiastical unity to southern France. The Papal power and the general interests of the Church, which at that time required quiet progress and in many ways thorough reform, must inevitably in the long run be severely shaken.

To make matters worse, the conflict between the Empire and the Church now broke out with unexpected violence. The most prominent antagonists of the Papacy, both ecclesiastical and political, gathered around Louis of Bavaria, offering him their assistance against John XXII. At the head of the ecclesiastical opposition appeared the popular and influential order of the Friars Minor [the Franciscans], who at this very moment were at daggers drawn with the Pope.

The Friars Minor and John XXII.

The special occasion of this quarrel was a difference between them and him, regarding the meaning of evangelical poverty; and the great popularity of the Order made their hostility all the more formidable. The Minorites, who were irritated to the utmost against the Pope, succeeded in gaining great influence over Louis of Bavaria, an influence which is clearly traceable in the appeal published by him in 1324, at Sachenhausen, near Frankfort.

In this remarkable document, amongst the many serious charges brought against “John XXII., who calls himself Pope,” is that of heresy, and it is asserted that he exalts himself against the evangelical doctrines of perfect poverty, and thus against Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the company of the Apostles, who all approved it by their lives. After a passionate dogmatic exposition of the poverty of Christ and a shower of reproaches, comes the appeal to the Council, to a future legitimate Pope, to Holy Mother Church, to the Apostolic See, and to everyone in general to whom an appeal could be made.

This document, in which political and religious questions were mingled together, was sedulously disseminated in Germany and Italy. It must have greatly embittered the whole contest. A religious conflict was now added to the political one. Louis, a simple soldier, was unable to measure its consequences and powerless to control its progress. It grew more and more passionate and violent. The Minorites no longer confined themselves to the province of theology, in which the conflict between them and the Pope had at first arisen, but also took part in the political question. Led on by their theological antagonism, they proceeded to build up a political system resting on theories which threatened to disturb all existing ideas of law, and to shake the position of the Papacy to its verv foundations.

Subversive Doctrines of Occam, Marsiglio, and Jean de Jandun

The special importance of the action of the Minorites consists in the assertion and maintenance of these principles, which indeed did not at once come prominently forward, for the writings of the Englishman, William Occam, in which they are chiefly propounded, collectively date from a period subsequent to the Diet of Rhense. There can, however, be no doubt that the views which Occam afterwards expressed in his principal work, the Dialogus, had already at an earlier period exercised great influence.

According to the theory of Occam, who was deeply imbued with the political ideas of the ancients, the Emperor has a right to depose the Pope should he fall into heresy. Both General Councils and Popes may err, Holy Scripture and the beliefs held by the Church at all times and in all places, can alone be taken as the unalterable rule of Faith and Morals. The Primacy and Hierarchical Institutions in general are not necessary or essential to the subsistence of the Church; and the forms of the ecclesiastical, as of the political, constitution ought to vary with the varying needs of the time.

With the Minorites two other men soon came to the front, who may be considered as the spokesmen of the definite political opposition to the Papacy. It was probably in the summer of the year 1326 that the Professors of the University of Paris, Marsiglio of Padua and Jean de Jandun, made their appearance at the Royal Court of Nuremberg. The “Defender of Peace” (Defensor Pacis), the celebrated joint work of these two most important literary antagonists of the Popes of their day, is of so remarkable a character that we must not omit to give a further account of its subversive propositions. This work, which is full of violent invectives against John XXII., “the great dragon and the old serpent,” asserts the unconditional sovereignty of the people. The legislative power which is exercised through their elected representatives, belongs to them, also the appointment of the executive through their delegates. The ruler is merely the instrument of the legislature. He is subject to the law, from which no individual is exempt. If the ruler exceeds his authority, the people are justified in depriving him of his power, and deposing him. The jurisdiction of the civil power extends even to the determination of the number of men to be employed in every trade or profession. Individual liberty has no more place in Marsiglio’s state than it had in Sparta.

Still more radical, if possible, are the views regarding the doctrine and government of the Church put forth in this work. The sole foundation of faith and of the Church is Holy Scripture, which does not derive its authority from, her, but, on the contrary, confers on her that which she possesses. The only true interpretation of Scripture is not that of the Church, but that of the most intelligent people, so that the University of Paris may very well be superior to the Court of Rome. Questions concerning faith are to be decided, not by the Pope, but by a General Council.

This General Council is supreme over the whole Church, and is to be summoned by the State. It is to be composed not only of the clergy, but also of laymen elected by the people. As regards their office, all priests are equal; according to Divine right, no one of them is higher than another. The whole question of Church government is one of expediency, not of the faith necessary to salvation. The Primacy of the Pope is not founded on Scripture, nor on Divine right. His authority therefore can only, according to Marsiglio, be derived from a General Council and from the legislature of the State; and for the election of a Pope the authority of the Council requires confirmation from the State.

The office of the Pope is, with the College appointed for him by the Council or by the State, to signify to the State authority the necessity of summoning a Council, to preside at the Council, to draw up its decisions, to impart them to the different Churches, and to provide for their execution. The Pope represents the executive power, while the legislative power in its widest extent appertains to the Council. But a far higher and more influential position belongs to the Emperor in Marsiglio’s Church; the convocation and direction of the Council is his affair; he can punish priests and bishops, and even the Pope.

Ecclesiastics are subject to the temporal tribunals for transgressions of the law, the Pope himself is not exempt from penal justice, far less can he be permitted to judge his ecclesiastics, for this is the concern of the State. The property of the Church enjoys no immunity from taxation; the number of ecclesiastics in a country is to be limited by the pleasure of the State; the patronage of all benefices belongs to the State, and may be exercised either by Princes, or by the majority of the members of the parish to which an ecclesiastic is to be appointed. The parish has not only the right of election and appointment, but also the control of the official duties of the priest, and the ultimate power of dismissal. Exclusion from the Christian community, in so far as temporal and worldly interests are connected with it, requires its consent.

Like Calvin in later days, Marsiglio regards all the judicial and legislative power of the Church as inherent in the people, and delegated by them to the clergy. The community and the State are everything; the Church is put completely in the back-ground ; she has no legislature, no judicial power, and no property.

The goods of the Church belong to the individuals who have devoted them to ecclesiastical uses, and then to the State. The State is to decide regarding sale and purchase, and to consider whether these goods are sufficient to provide for the needs of the clergy and of the poor. The State has also power, should it be necessary for the public good, to deprive the Church of her superfluities and limit her to what is necessary, and the State has the right to effect this secularization, notwithstanding the opposition of the Priests.

But never, Marsiglio teaches, is power over temporal goods to be conceded to the Roman Bishop, because experience has shown that he uses it in a manner dangerous to the public peace Like Valla and Macchiavelli, in later times, Marsiglio assumes the air of an Italian patriot, when he attributes all the troubles of Italy to the Popes. This is a palpable sophistry, for that reproach was in no way applicable to Marsiglio’s days. Italy was then under the sway of her most distinguished monarch, King Robert of Anjou, whom the Popes had protected to the best of their power, and Louis of Bavaria’s expedition to Rome was certainly neither their wish nor their work. On the contrary, at a later period, Pope John XXII. issued a Bull with the object of separating Italy from Germany, and thereby destroying the influence of the ” Ultramontanes,” or non-Italians in Italy.

In face of these outrageous attacks and this blank denial of the Divine institution of the Primacy and the Hierarchy, there were never wanting brave champions of the Apostolic See and of the doctrine of the Church. Most of them, unfortunately, were led by excess of zeal to formulate absurd and preposterous propositions. Agostino Trionfo, an Italian, and Alvaro Pelayo, a Spaniard, have, in this matter, gained a melancholy renown. As one extreme leads to another, in their opposition to the Caesaro-papacy of Marsiglio, they exalted the Pope into a kind of demigod, with absolute authority over the whole world. Evidently, exaggerations of this kind were not calculated to counteract the attacks of political skepticism in regard to the authority of the Holy See.

Envenomed Struggle between Church and State

The theory put forward in the Defensor Pacis, regarding the omnipotence of the State and the consequent annihilation of all individual and ecclesiastical liberty, far surpassed all preceding attacks on the position and constitution of the Church in audacity, novelty, and acrimony. Practically this doctrine, which was copied from the ancients, meant the overthrow of all existing institutions and the separation of Church and State. Many passages of the work go far beyond the subsequent utterances of Wyclif and Huss, or even those of Luther and Calvin, whose forerunner Marsiglio may be considered. The great French Revolution was a partial realization of his schemes, and, in these days, a powerful party is working for the accomplishment of the rest. Huss has been styled “the Precursor” of the Revolution, but the author of the Defensor Pacis might yet more justly claim the title.

Louis of Bavaria accepted the dedication of the book which brought these doctrines before the world and promulgated political principles of so questionable a character, but a still greater triumph was in store for Marsiglio. In union with the anti-papal Minorites and the Italian Ghibellines, he succeeded in inducing Louis to go to Rome and to engage in the Revolutionary proceedings of the year 1328. The collation of the Imperial Crown by the Roman people, their deposition of the Pope and election of an anti-Pope in the person of the Minorite, Pietro da Corvara, were the practical results of the teaching of the Defensor Pacis.

Some of the Emperors of the House of Hohenstaufen had been men of stronger characters than Louis was, yet none had ever gone to such extremes. He appealed to doctrines whose application to ecclesiastical matters was equivalent to revolution, and whose re-action on the sphere of politics after their triumph over the Church would have been rapid and incalculable. For a century and a half the Church had been free from schism; by his action he let loose this terrible evil upon her. His culpable rashness gave a revolutionary and democratic turn to the struggle between the Empire and the Papacy. He repudiated all the canonical decisions regarding the Supremacy of the Pope which the Emperors of the House of Hapsburg had accepted, degraded the Empire to a mere Investiture from the Capitol, and despoiled the Crown of Charles the Great, in the eyes of all who believed in the ancient imperial hierarchy, of the last ray of its majesty. It is strange that under Louis the Roman Empire should actually have been thus desecrated and degraded, so soon after Dante’s idealization had crowned it with a halo of glory.

It is impossible in the present retrospect to describe all the vicissitudes of Church and State during the struggle which was so disastrous to both. Envenomed by the dependence of the Popes on France, the exasperation on both sides was intense. The ecclesiastical power was implacable, lost to all sense of moderation, dignity, or charity. The secular power, cowardly but defiant, shrank from no extreme, sought the aid of the lowest demagogues, and by its vacillations frustrated each favourable chance that arose. The long and obstinate warfare, so little honourable to either party, could have no result save the equal humiliation of both and the complete ruin of social order in Church and State. John XXII., restless and active to the last, died at a great age on the 4th December, 1334.

If we wish to investigate the heart of Thomas Hobbes’ political teaching in the Leviathan, there is no better place to look than Hobbes’ conception of war.  After all, although Hobbes denies that there is any summum bonum, a greatest good toward which all our pursuits and actions are hierarchically ordered by nature (p. 70),[1] he does posit a greatest evil, namely, the war of all against all which characterizes the state of nature (p. 231).[2]  Thus Hobbes justifies the need for an absolute sovereign because the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life in the state of nature is the one thing above all else to be avoided:  “And though of so unlimited a Power, men may fancy many evill consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbor, are much worse” (pp. 144-145).  For Hobbes, the peace established by the political art is not, as it was for the ancients and the medievals, the end toward which men are directed by nature which is necessary for the fulfillment and perfection of their being; rather, peace is to be sought because it is the absence of war,[3] which absence allows men to pursue their relentless quest for gratification of one desire after another (p. 70).

Now just as Hobbes sees the prevention of the war of all against all as the justification for his radical political proposition, he also recognizes that war presents the greatest limit to the authority of his sovereign, to say nothing of the challenge it presents to Hobbes’ own authority as the self-proclaimed founder of the true science of politics.  Indeed, Hobbes devotes much of his review and conclusion to the problems occasioned by war, and he even finds it necessary to set forth an additional law of nature, namely, “That every man is bound by Nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he is himself protected in time of Peace” (p. 484).  But are the subjects of Hobbes’ sovereign obliged to protect their protection?  In what immediately follows his setting forth of this additional law of nature, Hobbes maintains that it would be self-contradictory for a subject to do otherwise:  “For he that pretendeth a Right of Nature to preserve his owne body, cannot pretend a Right of Nature to destroy him, by whose strength he is preserved:  It is a manifest contradiction of himselfe” (p. 484).  As we shall see, however, the contradiction would not be in the subject who refuses to protect his protection, but in the author of the Leviathan whose mistaken first principles and subsequent deductions necessarily lead him into manifest contradiction with himself.

In Hobbes’ chapter on liberty of subjects, we first encounter the problem which war presents not only for the soldier, but also for every subject of the commonwealth; for although Hobbes makes certain distinctions between civilian and soldier which would be pertinent to an exhaustive study of this question (pp. 150-154), we are justified in focusing on the hard case alone since Hobbes himself acknowledges there, as well as in the additional law of nature, that there are times when these distinctions disappear:  “And when the Defence of the Commonwealth, requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear Arms, every one is obliged; because otherwise the Institution of the Commonwealth, which they have not the purpose, or courage to preserve, was in vain” (p. 152).  Thus Hobbes argues that subjects must protect their protection, even though he maintains repeatedly that men cannot through any covenant give away their fundamental right to preserve themselves from wounds, chains, imprisonment, or death:

A Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is alwayes voyd.  For (as I have shewed before) no man can transferre, or lay down his Right to save himselfe from Death, Wounds, and Imprisonment, (the avoiding whereof is the onely End of laying down any Right,) and therefore the promise of not resisting force, in no Covenant transferreth any right; nor is obliging (p. 98).

Since each man enters into a covenant to establish a commonwealth for the sole purpose of preserving his own life, and not the lives of others, it follows that he is not under any circumstances obliged to make the ultimate sacrifice since “the avoiding whereof is the onely End of laying down any Right.”  As Hobbes says elsewhere, “the motive, and end for which this renouncing and transferring of Right is introduced, is nothing else but the security of a mans person, in his life, and in the means of so preserving life, as not to be weary of it” (p. 93).  Indeed, Hobbes repeatedly tells us what he already supposes our passions to know, namely, that at any time in which we discover our life to be in danger, we may do whatever is necessary to preserve ourselves, for we can never give up our right to self-preservation.

But how are we, as subjects of a Hobbesian commonwealth, able to reconcile our obligation to protect the commonwealth in time of war with our natural right to preserve ourselves at all costs?  Clearly Hobbes thinks that when “push comes to shove” we will and ought to preserve ourselves rather than the commonwealth since the commonwealth exists for the sake of preserving our lives, and not our lives for the sake of preserving the commonwealth:  “The end of Obedience is Protection; which, wheresoever a man seeth it, either in his own, or in anothers sword, Nature applyeth his obedience to it, and his endeavor to maintain it” (p. 153).  Nonetheless, since it is the desire to escape from the state of nature which drives men to establish the commonwealth in the first place, Hobbes thinks men will not readily plunge themselves into that abyss without good cause.  The subjects of the Hobbesian ship-of-state, like Odysseus, must choose between two evils:  the Charybdis of the state of nature or the Skylla of the sovereign’s sword.

It is for good reason that Hobbes does not try to resolve this tension by spelling out in any great detail how one knows that one has returned to the state of nature, for an analysis of this kind would merely highlight the insoluble nature of the problem.  Picture, if you will, a battle in full tilt in which the sovereign has declared the commonwealth to be in danger and thus in need of the protection of all.  Given Hobbes’ radically materialist epistemology,[4] each man’s passions will prompt his own judgment in a radically subjective manner.  In fact, any similitude between one man’s perceptions of danger and that of another would be wholly accidental.[5]  In the midst of battle, each man, being the measure of all things, would be guided by his own bombarded sense impressions, for violent death is, at it were, in the eye of the Hobbesian beholder.

Hobbesian men in battle would be nothing but a quivering mass of matter and motion in tension, whose reason, acting as the scout and spy of the passions (p. 53), would be continually assessing the quantitative balance between fear of the sovereign on the one hand and fear of the enemy on the other.  Such men, whose fear of violent death would be fully operative in battle, could not be counted upon to lay down their lives for each other, to say nothing of the commonwealth, the only justification for which was to have preserved them from this very danger.  Certainly the calculus of reason, which was clever enough to discover the covenant that saved men from the state of nature, would quite easily discover the simple solution of a well-placed bullet in the back of an officer, thus removing the fear of death more easily than one might by trying to destroy an unknown and perhaps superior enemy.  One can see then, why Hobbesian sovereigns have never relied upon Hobbesian principles in times of war.  Joseph Stalin, an otherwise devout student of Hobbes, was astute enough to depart from orthodox Hobbesian theory when, in the face of the Nazi threat, he stopped persecuting the Orthodox Church and rallied the Soviet people around Mother Russia.  William Jefferson Clinton, identifying himself more with the Hobbesian soldier than the sovereign, revealed his more orthodox Hobbesian principles when as president he stated that he would be willing to send American soldiers to Sarajevo as long as they did not have to die.

It is worth noting that the picture we have painted of Hobbesian men in battle would, according to Hobbes’ own psychology, be mirrored within each man, whether he were in battle or not.  Consider the following axiom from Hobbes’ political science:  “So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death” (p. 70).  But, as we immediately learn, this desire of which Hobbes’ writes is not one, but many.  Indeed, the passions, like individual men in the state of nature, must contend with each other for predominance, submitting only to the passion for self-preservation when the circumstances demand it.  The desire for glory, for example, is in a perpetual state of war with the desire for ease and sensual delights (pp. 70-71), while lust, avarice, ambition, envy and pride all demand their fulfillment.  Reason, far from even attempting to govern this unruly crowd, merely serves as a slave to the temporary victor, the soul thereby achieving an equilibrium of sorts that operates according to the eternal laws of physics.

Hobbes himself acknowledges these “great difficulties” at the beginning of his review and conclusion:

From the contrariety of some of the Natural Faculties of the Mind, one to another, as also of one Passion to another, and from their reference to Conversation, there has been an argument taken, to inferre an impossibility that any one man should be sufficiently disposed to all sorts of Civill duty . . .

And amongst the Passions, Courage, (by which I mean the Contempt of Wounds, and violent Death)[6] enclineth men to private Revenges, and sometimes to endeavor the unsettling of the Publique Peace:  And Timorousnesse, many times disposeth to the desertion of the Publique Defence.  Both these they say cannot stand together in the same person (p. 483).

Hobbes’ solution is to suggest that education and discipline may be able to reconcile these and other contraries of the soul, and to that end he supplies his additional law of nature as something worthy of inculcation.  That law, however, which we had occasion to quote at the beginning and which we must now quote again, merely restates the contradiction found in the psychic order as it appears in the political order:  “That every man is bound by Nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he is himself protected in Time of Peace” (p. 484).  Hobbes, as we previously noted, then accuses that man who would not feel obliged to protect his protection as acting in a self-contradictory manner:  “For he that pretendeth a Right of Nature to preserve his owne body, cannot pretend a Right of Nature to destroy him, by whose strength he is preserved:  It is a manifest contradiction of himselfe” (p. 484).  Note, however, that Hobbes has altered the terms of his own law in an effort to make the charge of contradiction stick and to diminish the likelihood of the charge being redirected at him.  To that end, Hobbes equates a man’s unwillingness to risk his own life to protect his protection with a man claiming a right to destroy the sovereign.  But while the destruction of the sovereign may be the accidental outcome of a man’s fleeing from battle due to his fear of death, the fleeing man does not intend the death of the sovereign, to say nothing of claiming a right to destroy him.  Furthermore, we must presume on Hobbes’ own terms that the sovereign’s ability to defend the man from violent death had become sufficiently compromised, else the man would not have felt the need to reassert his natural right to preserve his own life by fleeing.

Having, by means of his analysis, unleashed the passions and reduced the reason to the role of slave boy, there is something deeply ironic about both Hobbes’ criticism of those who despair of controlling the passions and his suggestion that education and discipline be used to reduce or eliminate the tensions between sovereign and subject, one subject and another, and a man and himself.  In this context one cannot help but think of Plato’s Republic, a book devoted to education and discipline because, for Plato, politics is “the art the business of which is to care for souls.”[7]  In fact, the Republic could be fairly characterized as a sustained reflection upon the way in which the political order and the order of the soul necessarily mirror one another,[8] and hence the need for the proper habituation and discipline of the passions through the governance of reason in alliance with the spirited part of the soul.  Needless to say, Plato did not reduce education and discipline to the Hobbesian self-contradiction of attempting to set one fear against another in an effort to create a political and psychological equilibrium.

It might be argued that, although Hobbes cannot explain how political equilibrium can be maintained when subjects are required to risk their lives for a commonwealth the sole justification for which is to preserve their lives, nevertheless these situations are outside of the normal course of events and therefore do not undermine Hobbes’ overall political teaching.  Far from being an exception, however, the problem posed for the man who is obliged to protect his protection would seem to be paradigmatic of Hobbesian political life.  As Hobbes frequently reminds us, it is fear of the sovereign and fear alone that can ensure the survival of the commonwealth since the laws of nature cannot compel compliance.  And if that fear is to be effective, it must be ever-present to the minds of the subjects, lest they feel free to break the covenant to their own advantage and revert to the state of war.  If the sovereign be that powerful, however, as he must needs be, and if the subsequent fear and terror that he engenders in his subjects be sufficiently intense, then what word other than “war” ought we to use to describe the relationship between the sovereign and his subjects?  For war, as Hobbes instructs us in his famous chapter on the natural condition of mankind,

Consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known:  and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre . . . So the nature of Warre, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary (pp. 88-89).

But who is the measure of when the will to contend is sufficiently known?  It is not sufficient to say the sovereign’s judgment will determine this matter since it is precisely the sovereign who is feared.  Clearly then, according to Hobbes, each man must be the measure, for no man, not even the sovereign, can be the measure of another man’s fear of violent death.  In this respect, therefore, one can never fully leave the state of nature.  After all, Hobbes himself tells us that we cannot lay down our right to resist not only death, but also wounds, chains and imprisonment:  “as also because a man cannot tell, when he seeth men proceed against him by violence, whether they intend his death or not” (p. 93).  Along with the right to resist wounds, chains, imprisonments, and death, each man necessarily retains the right to judge when those things threaten him, as well as when men proceed against him by violence.  If this were not the case, then the unalienable right to avoid violent death would be empty since it could only be acted upon when the point of the sword was already in position such that it could not be avoided.  Thus even after the establishment of the commonwealth the prudent man must plot and plan lest he find himself suddenly outmaneuvered by the sovereign, his neighbors, and even his friends.[9]  How then does this scenario differ in kind from that of the man already in battle?  Apparently there is no real difference in kind, but only a difference of degree between life in the Hobbesian commonwealth and life in the state of nature.

Finally, given his first principles, Hobbes cannot even give an adequate account in the Leviathan of the very phenomenon that he insists justifies the harsh remedy of an absolute sovereign who is himself not subject to the social contract he defends.  For if Hobbes were right about the nature of war, and if self-preservation dominated our motives to the extent that he claims, there would never be a war since nobody would be willing to die for anything.  While Hobbes’ analysis can perhaps account for the vain-glorious fools and villains who have brought about their own deaths as well as the deaths of their victims, there is no place in his analysis for the countless others who went to war if only to stop such men, and who accepted the risk of death knowing it was a sacrifice required for something greater than themselves.  But to say that the Hobbesian commonwealth could make such a claim to men’s allegiance by virtue of its being “greater” than the individuals who compose it, is only to equivocate on the word “greater” in such a way as to eliminate, in true Hobbesian fashion, the distinction between greatness of quality and greatness in quantity.  This distinction, with respect to the political order, is nothing less than the difference between a unified devotion to the common good (in which the private good of the individual is realized) and an accidental unity held together by fear in which the individual men who compose it live lives of quiet desperation in their senseless quest for satisfaction.  And though it is true, as Hobbes suggests, that war provides an occasion for the worst excesses of selfishness, greed, lust, ambition, depravity, perversity and pride, it is also true, which Hobbes neglects, that war provides an occasion for the greatest expressions of selflessness, sacrifice, self-denial, humility, hope, faith and charity.  “Greater love than this no man hath than to lay down his life for his friends.”

NOTES

[1] All citations are to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

[2] Consider the beginning of Aristotle’s Ethics where Aristotle anticipates Hobbes’ definition of happiness as “a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later” (p. 70), but rejects it because “the process will go on to infinity and our desire will be empty and vain” (1094a21-22).

[3] Note that Hobbes defines peace negatively; it is “all other time than war” (pp. 88-89).  But peace, which is a positive good, should not be defined as the absence of war; rather war, which is a deprivation of a good, should be defined as the absence of peace.  We do not, for example, define light as the absence of dark, but darkness as the privation of light.

[4] “The World, (I mean not the Earth onely, that denominates the Lovers of it Worldly men, but the Universe, that is, the whole masse of all things that are) is Corporeall, that is to say, Body; and hath the dimensions of Magnitude, namely, Length, Bredth, and Depth:  also every part of Body, is likewise Body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the Universe, is Body; and that which is not Body, is not part of the Universe:  And because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it, is Nothing” (p. 463).

[5] Note that Hobbes cannot really account for what he calls “similitude” (cf. pp. 10, 26).  Since he denies that we can know things as they really are—which denial is itself self-contradictory since he claims to know that he can know this very fact—how can he know that men experience similitude, not only within their own minds, but also with respect to the minds of others?  For according to Hobbes’ epistemology, each man’s perception of an object would be different not only from that of any other man, but also from his own subsequent perception of that same object, the similitude of which he would never be able to recognize if Hobbes’ analysis is correct.  One wonders how Hobbes accounts for our apparent ability to distinguish one thing from another since all qualitative distinctions have been reduced to quantity.  As if, for example, we could know what red is, having been told that it is such and such a wavelength, or know what sound is, having been told that it is a certain number of decibels.  Not only would this account fail to explain to a man who is blind and deaf what color or sound is, but it would also lead such a man to think that color and sound are the same kind of thing, differing from one another only in terms of “how much.”

[6] Given this definition of courage, we cannot be surprised by Hobbes’ failure to include courage in his discussion of the moral virtues, i.e., the laws of nature (pp. 91-111).  Hobbes reduces all the virtues to social virtues since the development of virtue for the sake of perfecting a man’s nature is contrary to his desire to maintain the commonwealth at all costs.  Accordingly, Hobbes dismisses the virtue of temperance as being, for the most part, irrelevant (p. 109).  Note also the almost casual attempt to reduce the theological virtue of charity to obedience (p. 404).

[7] Plato’s Laws 650b.

[8] Consider also the opening discussion of Plato’s Laws.  Here the Athenian Stranger demonstrates to his interlocutors that the political regime which begins with the principle that the whole of life is an endless war, must not only set itself against every other regime, but also each of its neighborhoods against each of its neighborhoods, and each household against each household, and each man against each man, and finally each man against himself (624a-626d).

[9] Conspicuous by virtue of its absence is any discussion of friendship in Hobbes’ Leviathan (cf. p. 88).  For the ancients and medieval, friendship constituted an important part of both ethics and politics.  For Hobbes, however, there could be nothing higher than a friendship of utility.

All the same, one might enquire how what happens under the impulse of desire can be self-determined [i.e., voluntary] when desire leads one to what is outside oneself and has deficiency in it; for that which desires is led, even if it is led to the good. And a difficulty must be raised about intellect itself, whether, when its activity is what it is by nature and as it is by nature, it could be said to have freedom and anything in its power, when it does not have it in its power not to act [for the sake of the good]. . . . But then how can there be freedom when even these higher beings [intellects] are slaves to their own nature? Now, to speak the truth, where there is no compulsion to follow another, how can one speak of slavery? How could something borne towards the good be under compulsion, since its desire for the good will be voluntary if it knows that it is good and goes to it as good?

—Plotinus, Ennead VI.8

The connection between choosing the good and attaining greater freedom is not easy to set forth deductively. Let us begin with the end. Willing and final causality are utterly wed to each other. Where there is a natural power, there is a natural purpose. There is no willing that is not for some end; there is no voluntary end which is lacking a moral content. This moral content, the object of the act of willing itself, is what gives the species or type to the action. The moral content, the intentional target of the deed, is what enables us to classify an act of killing as murder or as self-defense—the former punishable, the latter praiseworthy.

The will is a power that inclines towards the good apprehended by reason. That the will can choose false goods or lesser goods over genuine or higher goods is due to the fact that reason is capable of viewing things from many different angles, and can therefore see some limited good in what is nonetheless evil for the whole man. If a good is cognizable, reason can apprehend it and the will can choose it. Hence, we may glimpse the answer to the question, Does choosing the good necessarily lead to more freedom? Freedom is the perfection of the natural faculty of will; the ultimate perfection of a faculty results from its proper use, its being put to the right use again and again. If a state of freedom (self-command) is the result of choosing what is objectively best, namely the genuine good, then freedom should be defined as a perfection of the will when it has chosen consistently well. In light of this, we see the extent to which the will’s perfection depends upon the condition of man’s reason, how reason views various desirable things. If reason is in good estate, the will is the first beneficiary.

Is the truth of things the object of the intellect? Is the goodness of things the object of the will? If one answers “no” to either question, one is compelled to maintain either that there is no natural end to the intellect and the will, i.e., the power is wholly indeterminate and has no orientation whatsoever, or that the end is arbitrarily chosen and set up, in the manner of an idol. Either position destroys objectivity and morality, leaving us with no way of arguing against any intellectual or moral position, however absurd, cruel, or disgusting. Any human being who takes his own life and the lives of other people seriously implicitly accepts an objective order (however difficult it may be to articulate it) by which the wiser and better person can judge the actions of others who offend against the principles of this order. Try to think or live as though there were not a built-in predetermined purpose to your faculties; it will not work. The orientation to goodness is not a gloss on the dark purposelessness of nature, nor is it a condition that compromises freedom. In order to be truly free, does one have to be free to create oneself? Contemporary existentialists look upon all determination or form as irrational impositions over which the individual has no control; the individual, they say, ought to be absolutely free to determine what and who he will be. This is none other than a doctrine of uninhibited metaphysical license that has as its counterparts political anarchy, ethical relativism, and intellectual nihilism.

Is it problematic, on the other hand, to say that one is free to determine the way in which one will realize his own good—that one can choose what is to count as happiness for himself in this life, even though happiness is the end all men desire by nature? Such an individual does not lose his freedom, if, with an eye towards happiness, he can choose the manner of life he wants to lead. What sort of freedom is the existentialist looking for—freedom to create new worlds, to pursue unhappiness as an end, to annihilate himself, to experiment with the space-time continuum? Even God has an end, namely, Himself, the Goodness that is He. Judging from the remarks of some philosophers, one would think the very notion of an end is arbitrary and stifling. Yet nothing can exist without ordering to an end; it is against the nature of being itself. One cannot think “being” without co-thinking “end”—another way of saying, with Aristotle, that the formal cause cannot be divorced from the final cause. In short, only nothing has no purpose.

Moderns assert that to have freedom is to be able to determine oneself absolutely. To be free, they hold, one must be able to give oneself an end. But what else could this mean, except to give oneself a nature—which amounts to creating oneself? The very thing which distinguishes creation from making is that the maker (or poet) only makes some part or aspect of the thing made, whereas the creator brings the whole thing, including its act of being, into being. Now to bring a thing into being means to bring a “this something” into being; there is no creatio without some boundaries as to the appetites and abilities characterizing the creatum. To create is to give being to something—and this something, even to be a something, must have a certain form and thus a certain end, since form and end are unintelligible apart from each other.

It seems to me, therefore, that to speak of a rational creature, a creature having as its highest reality a power by which to apprehend the true and the good, which nonetheless does not have as its necessary end the resting in that very truth and goodness, is to speak without meaning. It is to say that a creature is made capable of partaking in the perfections of its origin, yet is left wholly on its own as to the end towards which it will be inclined to go, or without determination as to whether or not it will even have an end. I do not see how any sense can be made out of that.

All men desire happiness, or, if the word reminds you too much of Hollywood, substitute another term: completion, fulfillment, enduring bliss. There is nobody who does not will this end, because to be rational is to be the sort of creature that (a) is capable of knowing or being aware of itself; (b) in knowing itself recognises that there is such a thing as the full possession of and rejoicing in what is good, viz., happiness; (c) upon glimpsing the possibility of happiness, desires it ardently as a way of reaching the zenith of what it is; and (d) strives always to reach this maximum actuality. The question of what exactly is taken as the end should not be mixed up in this discussion. We are only concerned with the universal question: what does it mean to live a human life? It means to work for one’s completion. We should not ask why man desires this end; for how could he not? A creature endowed with the power to partake of truth and goodness necessarily tends towards that which he takes to be true and good. This is not compulsion or slavery, this is simply a precondition of all action and passion. If a man did not naturally want something, he could never move himself to want anything voluntarily. We never deliberate about means until some end is fixed; we would never deliberate at all were there no distant target which was seen as the ultimate justification of our actions. If we designated our final end, if we created our own natures, action could not be other than totally arbitrary, neither right nor wrong, and neither describable in itself nor communicable to others. We could not act in concert with other human beings; we could not even act as a single subject of a life of action. Each man would be his own species, or non-species; each act would be an isolated fact with no prelude, no postlude, no context. And then we would have to ask: could love or hatred, the most basic of our responses to the world and its inhabitants, survive in this metaphysical wilderness?

A large impediment to accepting the Thomistic account is the routine failure to distinguish between the end as given generically, and the end as “coloured” by a particular person’s life, choices, habits, opinions. Our perceptions of what makes for happiness can differ dramatically, as is obvious from living in a world where some people would identify fulfillment with (say) endless and unfatiguing electronic entertainment. Because reason can have different apprehensions of the good, the will can tend towards different goods in the right or the wrong order, putting lower goods above higher ones, or, albeit more rarely, higher goods above lower ones when it is not appropriate to do so. The will is not automatically harnessed to the natural and supernatural means of human perfection, nor is the intellect prepackaged with instructions as to what will ultimately fulfill it. This is why Aristotle says that education counts for just about everything, together with habituation to virtuous or vicious actions (and, as Christians, we can add the presence or absence of grace). If men can mentally locate their fulfillment in wealth or pleasure, the two most common follies of our fallen race, then they can go about living as though wealth or pleasure really were the final end for which they exist. There has been a conscious decision, a choice or free act to orient oneself to some “x” as constitutive of happiness, where “x” can be anything that is perceived to have some degree of goodness in it.

Perhaps, after all, the modern replies: to have freedom to choose what I will construe to be my happiness is no freedom at all, if I am still naturally made for a certain final end and will be miserable if I do not choose it.

Yet is this argument sound? Consider some examples. Is the murderer not free because he commits an action that will make him miserable? Is any man less free for doing something stupid? In one sense, of course, he is not as free as he might be if he were acting in a way that would perfect him rather than damage him, but he is free as long as the origin of action remains in him and is not the result of instinct, chance, or coercion. If this freedom were not real, would there be any basis for distinguishing between manslaughter and murder, as criminal investigators and courts of law do on a daily basis? It seems as though moderns need to go back to school with Socrates in the Gorgias. The entire point of having morals, of striving to be virtuous, is to live in such a way that one will not be miserable. To be tending towards happiness or misery is, at least on the natural level, within our power.

The modern may still object that if the rational creature has been given a will, it should be free to choose what it is going to be for. That is perfectly true if by “choosing what it is going to be for,” one means the choices all men make about what goods to pursue here and now, what to construe as happiness, for what (or whom) am I living my life. It is obvious that not only are we free to do this, we are always doing it. Our experience of freedom is undeniable and all-pervasive: we are in charge of ourselves whenever we say “I could do this or that or neither, but I choose to do this.” All of a man’s life is taken up with decisions about this step or that, this object or that. Reading the plays of Sartre, one might almost begin to think that such decisions are irrelevant and somehow too ignoble to be taken seriously as free acts! Comparatively speaking, speculation about the final and absolute good is a luxury for the few who are capable of bearing the strain of concentration. Most people carry on from day to day trying to be happy in some fashion, without rising to the level of secondary reflection where we pose the question “what’s it all for.”

On the other hand, if by the statement “the rational creature should be free to choose what it is going to be for” one means that a rational creature should be free to endow itself with an end or have authority over its orientation to the good, then I say: impossible. Doing so would involve defining what is actually good, producing goodness as an artist produces an artifact. The creature would cease to be a creature; it would become God, and a strange God at that, since there would no longer be any such thing as “the good.” All would be chaos, relativity, meaninglessness. But the Good Itself cannot be defined by the creature; not even God defines the Good. He is the Good, He cannot be otherwise, and there is no need for Him to be able to be Not-Good in order for Him to be free.

The existentialist is worried about preserving the creature’s freedom. If he were thinking rationally, he might rather turn his mind to the problem of God’s freedom. For on his view, God not only could not be free, He would be the most unfree being of all—He would be a total and complete slave. Yet what fool at this point would not blush from embarassment and retire to his room, eager to find a less ridiculous position?

]]> http://thejosias.net/2015/08/05/freedom-as-choosing-the-good-against-the-nihilists/feed/ 0 josiasrex http://thejosias.net/2015/07/22/on-the-utility-and-necessity-of-prohibiting-harmful-books/ http://thejosias.net/2015/07/22/on-the-utility-and-necessity-of-prohibiting-harmful-books/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2015 05:56:06 +0000 http://thejosias.net/?p=1065 Read more On the Utility and Necessity of Prohibiting Harmful Books]]> St. Alphonsus Liguori

To protect the faithful from pernicious ideas, Pope Paul IV established the Index of Prohibited Books, which remained in use as a safeguard for the protection of public morals from 1559 A.D. until the reorganization of the Holy Office under Bl. Pope Paul VI in 1966 A.D. The Index came under attack during the time of St. Alphonsus Liguori, and he chose to include a treatise defending it in an Appendix to the first book of his great Theologia Moralis. St. Alphonsus was named a Doctor of the Church by Bl. Pope Pius IX in 1871 A.D. 

Alphonsus’s magisterial moral manual, which was praised by Pope Benedict XIV as being “of great profit for the salvation of souls”, has never yet been translated into English. Here we are pleased to present a translation of one chapter of Alphonsus’s Treatise on the Just Prohibition and Destruction of Dangerous Books, for the first time in English. The original text can be found here. —The Editors

The occasion of this treatise.
I have come across two hand-written letters recently, in which that very wholesome and entirely indispensible practice of the Church concerning the prohibition of books is wickedly assailed. The authors rashly maintain that, the law of the Church notwithstanding, any person may read any book whatsoever, so long as that book does not obviously appear to contain dangerous or subversive material.

The authors rely on two false arguments. First, that the practice of prohibiting books has been introduced into the Church only in recent times and is not founded in ancient practice. Second, that in ordering this practice the Church fails to observe due process of canon law, and therefore that a law of this sort bears no force of obligation.

I confess that I was quite amazed to see these novel opinions bruited with such impudence by the letters’ authors, since it is well enough established, first of all, that the practice of forbidding the reading of erroneous books has been promoted vigorously in the Church from the very earliest centuries, and upheld without interruption since then; and that the Catholic Church, in Her proscription of books, has always proceeded with careful discernment and due process.

My intention here is to treat this question copiously, principally because experience clearly shows how the aforementioned erroneous opinions considerably erode the authority of the Church and withdraw the minds of the faithful from that deference which is owed to the Church’s definitions. As a result, the poor faithful fall easily into many other errors contrary to faith and morals, resulting in an immense loss of souls.

For these reasons, I thought it worthwhile to publish this treatise, in which I will first show the necessity of prohibiting all books that can lead readers into error. Second, I will prove that the Church’s law forbidding books was established from its very origin and confirmed by uninterrupted custom. Thirdly, we will demonstrate how prudently and lawfully the church has always proceeded and even now proceeds in this prohibition. Finally, we will refute the frivolous objections of a number of heretics, from whom Catholics have incautiously borrowed opinions and shamelessly spread them among the public, causing great ruin among the faithful.

CHAPTER I.
THE UTILITY AND NECESSITY OF PROHIBITING
HARMFUL BOOKS IS DEMONSTRATED

That we must avoid the society of heretics.
1. The Lord explicitly commands us to avoid heretical men with all effort and zeal, as much in the Old Testament[1] as in the New.[2] Most notably, we find in St. John (II Jn. 10): “If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.” For as St. Paul wisely said (II Tim. 2:16-17), their words “will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will spread like a cancer.”

Hence John made every effort to avoid Ebion. He even scorned to enter a bathhouse if Cerinthus had used it.[3] Polycarp comported himself in the same way towards Marcion.[4] Eusebius of Vercelli preferred to die of hunger than to take bread from the hands of Arians.[5] St. Cyprian, speaking about certain excommunicates, warned his flock in this way: “Do not easily give ear to deceptive words, lest you mistake shadows for light…, poison for medicine, death for health… Keep yourselves far from these men’s contagion, and avoid their conversations as if you were fleeing a cancer or the plague.”[6]

Further, the Church always made sure that the faithful avoided any association with heretics and excommunicates, a fact to which St. Ephrem,[7] Alexander Alexandrinus,[8] St. Athanasius,[9] and St. Leo[10] testify together with the councils, Popes, and all the Fathers.

That dangerous books are much more to be avoided.
2. Therefore, if the Church so insistently commanded the faithful to avoid the company of anyone who speaks falsely, how much more ought Christians to avoid harmful books, which corrupt readers much more easily than speech? If the spoken word that instantly flits away still creeps in like a cancer and deals a mortal wound, what evil might not come from a dangerous book, which remains a perpetual font of subversion? An impious book can make its way into any home, even if the author himself is denied entry.

If religion and public order cannot be maintained while wicked men are allowed to spread false doctrines or circulate dangerous opinions contrary to accepted norms of morality—as the Congruit law says[11]—how much more will they be threatened if worthless rascals such as these are permitted to disseminate these same opinions even more widely in writing, and make them more compelling with cunning arguments that are more dangerous when read than heard? For whatever we read makes a stronger impression on our minds and more easily slips into our hearts. Just as holy reading can foster virtue, perverse reading urges us into vice; and more strongly so, since men are more naturally inclined to vice than to virtue. St. Basil was right to call books the food of the soul; because just as food is pleasurable while we eat it, and goes on to become human blood, so a book pleases when read—for who reads unwillingly?—and thus is more quickly digested.

Further, a reader gives himself like a student to the author he reads, offering him a docile and benevolent heart, and thus leaves himself vulnerable to deception. For it is very difficult not have some affection toward an author, from which it easily comes about that the impiety and error latent in the text is absorbed insensibly, and later tenaciously retained.

How impious writers disguise their poison.
3. Consider also that impious writers embellish their errors with great care, in order to deceive both the simple and the educated. They never state their case openly, at least in the beginning. Instead, they vest it in specious arguments, impressive erudition, and an attractive style, thus slipping a lethal venom past our guard.

While they earnestly profess their sanctity and zeal, protest their solicitude for the public good, and offer sound rules of perfection, they lurk like a snake in the grass. You will see them making innumerable references to Scripture and the Fathers, all of it either distorted or falsely interpreted. Thus the heretics have learned to deceive many, knowing that their fetid concoctions will not easily please if taken alone; and so with heavenly eloquence they dilute them with pleasing perfumes, so that some people who otherwise abhor impiety are led to hold divine revelations in contempt. About these the Savior cried: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”(Matt. 7:15). What does “sheep’s clothing” signify, if not that pretended piety with which deceptive authors skillfully endue themselves? what “ravening wolves” except the notions of heretics, who tear apart the Christ’s flock? “See,” Origin writes, “that the brilliance of the work does not deceive you, lest the beauty of its golden diction seize and carry you off.”[12] St. Gregory says the same: “The heretic mixes together truth with perversity in his speech, so that, by exhibiting good things, he captures the goodwill of his audience; and by giving out the bad, he corrupts them with hidden errors.”[13]

4. It is very pertinent here to refer to the words of a learned heretic, Abraham Le Moine, who, speaking about the many books published in English smacking of atheism, said this:

Books likes these, when many of them fall into the hands of the people, engender infinite harm, the more so because they appear at first so very well presented, with laudable intention and convincing argument. Each one defeats all incredulity. But these English authors, under the pretext of handing down the Gospel’s truth, supplant its very foundations with their subtle “difficulties” and subvert its principles, omitting nothing by which its teachings might be rendered deeply suspect. They foment a disease that much more lethal, as it is more subtle and casually admitted. Hence, persons of unsound mind drink deeply, seeing nothing to cause suspicion. They mix ironic taunts with erudite sayings, the better to obscure the truth with their filth. And because novelty causes delight, and religious instruction in this country is deplorable whilst the inclination to depravity is great, it is no wonder if books of this sort pervert the spirits and hearts of those who read them carelessly. The efforts of the agnostics bear quick fruit: readers are ensnared, scruples enter in, and finally they become unbelievers almost without knowing it. Thus an unrestrained liberty of thought necessarily and irresistibly creates license in the heart; these things indulge the passions and enlarge the dominion of the vices. Hence it may truly be said, that this great polity [he speaks of London] was never more depraved than it is today. And indeed nearly every other European state and kingdom is so miserably infected; but without a doubt they would be even worse off, if in them was permitted that liberty of thought, expression, and publication which exists here.

Thus far Le Moine. Certainly this heretic’s loud complaints alone suffice to show how indispensible it is for the support of religion and public peace to prohibit pernicious books.

And would what this author asserts in the last place were false, namely that the plague of atheism has infected many Catholics! To what ought this fact be attributed, except to the reading of books condemned for their false doctrines? Other Englishmen join this heretic in decrying this pestilence spreading among their nation; but meanwhile they take little care to suppress that excessive liberty of publication and access to books. In the times when England obeyed the Roman Church, there was not so much lament over agnostics, atheists, deists, or latitudinarians, for the very reason that none of them were allowed to publish, and none of the books promoting their doctrines were allowed to be read.

That men are corrupted by reading impious books.
5. Now we ought to demonstrate this through examples. Bl. Dionysius Alexandrinus, in Baronius,[14] attests that the harmful books of Nepos, a bishop on the side of the chiliasts, won over nearly half the Orient. In Mesopotamia, Bardesanes Syrus had already converted to the faith and was for a long time so conspicuous for his piety and so dutiful in opposing heretics in speech and writing that all Catholics admired him. But upon reading some volumes of the Valentinians, he not only subscribed to their errors but invented even more strange and atrocious errors, and thereby seduced innumerable men.[15] — St. Jerome asserts that Spain and Portugal would not have been contaminated, if the books of the Priscillians had not been published there.[16] — Similarly St. Turibius, in his letters to Idacius, Ceponius and Bl. Leo, deplores the corruption of Spain and Gaul of Narbonne on account of some wicked books, which he blamed as the sole cause of such a disaster.[17] — Eutyches, before an unconquerable defender of the faith, after one reading of a book of some Manichean, was changed into the unspeakable fount of innumerable heretics.[18] Afterwards, detained in a monastery, he was forced to keep his voice quiet, but notwithstanding the silence of their author his writings never ceased to conquer the East with their corruption. — Julian of Halicarnassus, in Caria, similarly defected from the faith after reading Valentinus’s books.[19] Avitus also, a Spanish priest, reading Origen’s books, although he read a confutation of them at the same time and had been admonished by Jerome to avoid his errors, mortally quaffed the disease.[20]

The mournful Heinrich Bullinger, a Catholic doctor, once not only very pious, but zealous for perfection, soon before he would have entered a Carthusian monastery happened upon a book of Melanchthon, and even though he was warned by a terrifying inner voice, compelled to read by a demon he read and he fell: and so, from the holy service of God the poor priest went to Satan.[21]

John Wycliffe, after many of his evil works were published in England, never made many followers for his errors as long as he taught them by word of mouth, even though he spoke almost nothing but calumny; but when he poured out his wicked books upon the public, he caused all Bohemia, which he had never even visited, to be lost, and handed the poisoned cup to even more. For when Jan Hus received Wycliffe’s books from a Bohemian who had studied at Oxford, he disseminated their impious doctrines everywhere.[22]

For the sake of brevity we have omitted other similar stories, which are found everywhere in history. It is plain enough to the educated that in nearly every case new heresies are drawn and copied from the books of other, older heretics.

That the Fathers protected the faithful from erroneous books.
6. Hence councils, Pontiffs, and saintly princes, by both pen and voice, by both censure and other penalties, were all for the extirpation of books that in any way worked to pollute faith and morals. — Hence the Fathers in their writings especially tried to steer the faithful from reading books of this sort. Origen maintained that those who peruse immodest or impious books without cause are guilty of the same sin as those who eat meat sacrificed to false gods.[23] St. Isidore wrote that reading impious works is the same as burning incense to the devil; and he added that it is not licit for Christians to read the lies of the poets, because they can excite the mind to lust. St. Jerome says: “No one steps into a leaky boat if he wants to learn to avoid shipwreck; would you then turn your innocent soul to a book full of heresies in order to learn the Catholic truth?” More strongly Tertullian: “No one is built up by that which destroys him; no one is illuminated by that which casts him into shadow.”[24]

Even heretics have done the same.
Even the blasphemous Luther published a book supporting the destruction of books containing false doctrines.[25] Calvin too would rail against bad books.[26] It is also known that in 1533, the books of Michael Servetus, together with their impious author, were all burned in Geneva by Calvin’s orders.

As have the Gentiles.
Even the gentiles, led by reason and experience alone, came to the same conclusion concerning the destruction of bad writings. Plato, for example, thought it necessary that books be subjected to examination by the wise before being passed on to others.[27]

The custom of burning books among the pagan nations.
7. Indeed, the custom of removing books of ill-repute prevailed in all the civilized nations of the world. Among the Hebrews, when he had received a book transmitted by Jeremiah through Baruch, Joachim cast it into the flames fearing it might be a scandal to the Jews.[28] King Herod, as well, wanted to burn all books of Hebraic origin, as dangerous to public peace.[29] — Among the Syrians, Antiochus Epiphanes decreed by public edict that the books of the Hebrews must be burned.[30] — Among the Athenians, Protagoras was abolished everywhere by legislative decree and his works consigned to public burning, since in them he cast doubt on the existence of the Gods. Cicero[31] and Lactantius. — [32] Among the Greeks, the works of Epicurus were also burned.[33]

Among the Romans, a farmer plowing his fields found an ancient tomb containing some works of Numa, in which Numa spoke unfavorably (though truly) about Roman religion. The Senate ordered them burned.[34] Marcus Aemilius, discovering a cargo of books being shipped to Rome, ordered that all of them be burned, since they contained novel rituals and prayers. In Baronius,[35] Arnobius asserts that the Romans tried to extirpate Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, where Cicero clearly seemed to speak against their religion.[36] Many Roman laws are extant commanding books of ill-repute to be burned.[37] Livy testifies that one duty of the Pontifex Maximus was to censure, condemn, and burn books.[38] Emperor Augustus burned over two thousand books whose authors were either unknown or disreputable.[39] The same emperor tried to prevent Ovid’s De Arte Amandi being read and sent its author into exile.

That obscene books and tracts about love must be removed.
8. Here we must insist that bishops and priests make every effort to remove from their sheep all books that are obscene or that treat of illicit love, books that Origen wisely called the cups of Babylon, full of venom, and St. Augustine: “Frogs climbing out of the mouths of beasts.” — Even the gentiles denounce this kind of indecent writing. Plato said that immodest books ought to be kept entirely out of cities. Among the Lacedaemonians and the whole Spartan realm, it was forbidden to read and own the books of Archilochus, because they were obscene.[40] There is a rumor passed on by Beyerlinck that Virgil ordered the Aeneid burned because of Dido’s immoral love affair.

On the emergence of “romance” literature.
Many books of this genre called “romance” (romanzi in the vernacular) are in common circulation everywhere today, and fall into the hands of simple adolescents. The creator of this Romance genre was Heliodorus, Phoenix, a bishop of Trikala in Thessalia, as Nicephorus has it.[41] This bishop had written such a book in his youth, which easily induced youths to immorality. A provincial synod, apprised of this danger, ordered Heliodorus to either burn his work or renounce his episcopate. He preferred to relinquish his office than to destroy his work.

That romances are dangerous and to be condemned.
9. The romance genre is not condemned universally by church law, for the Index bans only “books, which treat, narrate, or teach lascivious or obscene matters as their chief subject.”[42] Nevertheless, as a learned author Continuator Tournely notes, such books are often to be avoided per se, on account of the grave damage they cause to readers, for they are more dangerous when their intent is more disguised.[43] — Alexander Tassoni writes about this genre:

By reading about amorous chance incidents and schemes and obscene books, particularly in the solitude and leisure that literature requires, obscene phantasms and thoughts and desires for illicit things arise under the guise of pleasure and delight and the prudent faculties are abandoned.[44]

Further, these impurities do not gush forth upon him openly, but cloud his heart mysteriously by enkindling profane passions, alienating him from God and urging him strongly towards evil; just as, when the occasion is given, a man easily rushes into sinful lusts, and more intractably perseveres in them afterward.

This should be noted too, that sometimes fathers of families are guilty, because their duty is to keep these indecent books from the hands of their children. If they fail to do so, they must understand that they are guilty of sin. And let them not complain if their children neglect their studies because, obsessed with romances, they refuse to read more edifying books. Thus they remain uncultivated and turn out vicious. — John Gerson, writing against some romance book called On the Rose, mentions Augustus’s ban on Ovid’s book, exclaiming: “O God!…O the morals of our time! A pagan judge condemned another pagan whose teachings seduced men to immorality; and among Christians and by the agency of Christians this book and far worse are not only sold, but even praised and defended!”

10. Of a similar vein is the book entitled Faithful Shepherd (today explicitly condemned, for good reason); Peter Bayle says that there used to be an ignorant man who took it upon himself to defend this pernicious little book, arguing foolishly that it would cause no harm, if only girls would refuse the lovers who come to them! Bayle—though he is otherwise impious and irreligious—rightly berated that idiotic apologist (I translate from the French):

This response is sophistical because it demands a condition that the book itself makes very difficult. You ask two things: that we read the book, and that we refuse lovers. If you ask both these things, you are unjust, because the same poem undermines our strength to resist them. It fills us with sexual passions, ignites concupiscence, clouds the mind, impels us violently to seek the presence of lovers… But even granting we are able to refuse them: on account of these stories won’t we poor wretches still be tossed and turned by impure passions?

Bayle continues to insist that this genre of books ought to be everywhere entirely abolished.

That we must avoid the pagan poets.
11. Cicero wrote: “Do you see how much evil the poets bring? …they soften our hearts…, they destroy every fiber of virtue.”[45] Thus Quintilian forbade the works of Horace and poets of his ilk to be read to his boys.[46] St. Jerome said: “The songs of poets are the food of demons.”[47] Even Luther, himself a man of the lowest morals, wrote: “The books of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus, and the Priapeia of Virgil must be removed from all cities and schools because they write such vile and obscene things that they cannot be read by the young without great harm coming of it.[48] — Even more dangerous is that wicked book of Boccaccio (which after being expurgated remains in circulation). In my opinion, it can do more damage to youths than the works of Luther and Calvin.

That the excuse of teaching language is a pretense.
Some argue that from these works students may learn not only choice idiom but also many things that are conducive to good morals. John Gerson responds well in his critique of the romance On the Rose: “I ask you, are the objectionable parts in them deleted? Fire is more dangerous. The baited hook still hurts the fish, and a honeyed blade cuts none the worse.” Gretserus sagely adds: “For these purposes you will find everything you need, but more pure, whole, and sincere in the writings of Catholic writers. What need is there to turn to those muddy little streams? Who would not more eagerly drink limpid water, than water tinctured with venom, even if he knows how to filter out the venom? At least the one who drinks water free of any contagion is spared the danger of death and the labor of filtration.”[49] — Augustine also wrote against those who would read Terence to learn vocabulary: “You will not learn those words more easily through their uncleanness; rather the uncleanness they teach will become easier to perpetrate. I do not blame the words…, but the draught of error to be found in them.”[50]

Wicked books must be rooted out and destroyed completely.
12. But let us return to our theme and draw the conclusions following from all the arguments adduced: Nature herself teaches that books offending religion or good morals should be destroyed by all possible means. All theologians teach the same, adding that not even the Pope Himself could permit someone to read a book that could be damaging to his faith. Juenin,[51] Continuator Tournely,[52] Graveson,[53] Busenbaum (see Lib. II, n. 19, ad 6), Habert.[54] The most learned Silvius adds, according to Continuator Tournely, that no one can read the works of heretics without proximate danger of grave sin, unless he has studied theology for at least three or four years.

Therefore if the gentiles, as we saw above, thought it necessary for the preservation of their false religion to destroy subversive books, how much harder must the Church strive to guard the true religion unscathed? “It is imperative,” said Theodosius, “that no one should so much as hear about any book provoking God’s wrath or tempting men’s souls to wickedness and deceit.” And Marcianus said: “The occasion of error is removed, if neither teacher nor listener are to be found.” And “May all the vestiges of wickedness perish utterly in flames.”[55] Charles V wisely offered these words: “If we throw away even the most expensive food when we suspect it of being tainted with poison harmful to the human body, how much more ought we to avoid those writers which are everywhere infected with such noxious venom for souls, and, so that no harm comes to others, should we not obliterate them from the memory of mankind?”[56]

NOTES

[1] Deuter. XIII, 6 et seqq.

[2] Rom. XVI, 17; Tit. III, 10.

[3] Baronius, Annal., ad ann. 74, n. 8 et 9.

[4] Euseb., Histor. Eccles., lib. 4, cap. 14.

[5] Baronius, Annal., ad ann. 365, n. 96.

[6] Epist. 40, ad plebem, etc., n. 4 et 5.

[7] De Virtute, cap. 8.

[8] Epist. Ad Alexand. Constantinop., 13.

[9] Vita S. Anton., n. 68

[10] Serm. 16, de Ieiun., cap. 5.

[11] Edit.–The law Congruit referred to here contains this article: “The good and serious ruler must assure that the region he governs remains quiet and peaceful. This will not be difficult, if he takes care to find and rid the province of bad men, namely, the sacrilegious, robbers, kidnappers, and thieves.”

[12] Origen., in libr. Iesu Nave, homil. 7, n. 7.

[13] Moral., lib. 5, cap. 11, n. 28

[14] St. Dionysius Alexandrinus, in Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici, 264 A.D., n. 5, says that a false dogma (from a book of Nepos) was published: “so that not only were schisms born, but whole churches fell away from the faith.”

[15] Ephraim Chambers, Dizionar. Univers., v. Bardesanisti.

[16] St. Jerome, in Isaiam, lib. 17, cap. 64, v. 4 et 5, says that many young girls in Spain and Portugal were deceived by reading the apochryphal books, “to seek the portents of Basilis, Balsamus, and Thesaurus, Barbelo and Leusibora, and other names.”

[17] Zaccaria does relate this in Storia polemica delle proibizioni de’ libri, lib. 2, diss. 1, cap. 4, n. 5; but the letter of St. Turibius of Asturia is written only to Idacius and Ceponius, and is found among the epistles of St. Leo. Nor does the substance refer to Gaul of Narbonne, but to Gallicia, as it seems we can gather from Leo’s epistle 14.

[18] See Anastasius Sinaita

[19] Viae dux advers. Acephalos, cap. 14.

[20] Baronius, ad ann. 414, n. 10 et 11.

[21] Ladvocat, Dizionar. Portat, v. Bullinger.

[22] Cochleus, Historia Hussitarum, lib. 1, pag. 7 et seqq.; see also Bon. Blanciotti, Nota c ad doctrinam 6 Wicleffitarum, apud Thomam Waldensem, tom. 1, fol. 19.

[23] In Numer., homil. 20, num. 3.

[24] De Praescript., capit. 12.

[25] See Sleidanus.

[26] Braschius, De Libert. Eccl., tom. 3, capit. 26, num. 5.

[27] Plato, de Republ., dialog. 2, v. f.

[28] See Bodinus.

[29] Eusebius

[30] Joseph Hebraeus

[31] De Natur. Deor., lib. 1, cap. 23.

[32] Lib. De Ira Dei, cap. 9.

[33] Erasmus

[34] Valerius Maximus and Pliny

[35] Annal, ad ann. 302, n. 19.

[36] Advers. Gent., lib. 3, cap. 7; cfr. Migne, Patrol. Lat., tom. 5.

[37] L. Caeterae 4, ff. Familiae erciscundae, § Tantumdem; Paul. Jul. Sententiar. Receptar., lib. 5, tit. 23, § 12; L. Damnato 6 et 1. Quicumque 8, § ult., C. De haeret. et Manich.

[38] Lib. 6, cap. 1; cfr. IX, 46, et lib. 39, 16 (edit. Taurin.).

[39] Suetonius, In Octav. August., cap. 31. Origen, in Jerem., homil. 21, n. 7 et seq. Plato, de Repub., dialog. 2 et 10.; and Nicephorus

[40] Valerius Maximus

[41] Eccles. Hist., lib. 12, cap. 34.

[42] Reg. VII; cfr. et Constit. Officiorum, cap. 14, n. 9.

[43] De Decal., cap. 1, art. 1, punct. 3, § 2, concl. 2.

[44] Pensieri diversi, lib. 7, cap. 11, v. Che similmente.

[45] Tuscul. Disputat., lib. 2, cap. 11.

[46] De Institut. Orator., lib. 1, cap. 8, n. 6.

[47] Epist. 21, ad Damas., n. 13.

[48] Serm. Convivial., tit. de Authoribus; Gersonius, tract. Contra Romanti. De Rosa, v. Si dicatis.

[49] De Iure et more prohib. etc. libros haeret. etc., lib. 1, cap. 29.

[50] Confess., lib. 1, cap. 16, n. 26

[51] Instit. Theol., part. 7, diss. 4, qu. 1, cap. 6, art. 3, § 2, qu. 2.

[52] Decal., cap. 1, art. 1, punct. 3, § 2, concl. 2.

[53] Histor. eccl., saec. XVI, colloq. 6, i. f.

[54] Tr. De Fide, etc., cap. 4, qu. 9.

[55] Act. Concil. Halcedon., part. 3, cap. 12 et cap. 19. Cfr. 1. Quicumque 8, C. de Haeret. et Manich.

[56] Edict. Wormat. 1521, apud Petram, inconstit. Gelasii Valde, sect. un., n. 8.

There are several ways one might answer these questions (for instance, considering and applying natural law), but the first thing faithful Catholics must do is turn to the teachings of the Church in this matter for direction. We are fortunate to live in a time where the Church has given a good deal of pertinent direction for just this sort of situation. We have, among many other resources, three encyclicals in recent history devoted to elucidating the Catholic teachings on marriage or particular aspects of marriage: Arcanum Divinae, Casti Connubii, and Humanae Vitae by Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Paul VI respectively.

Based upon these (Casti Connubii most of all), we Catholics must recognize three things at least which we are bound to hold according to the doctrines of our Faith. First of all, we are bound to defend the proposition that the nature of marriage, both natural and sacramental, is not under the authority of the state. Secondly, the state is obliged to protect and preserve the set-apart character of the family, and this for the sake of the state itself. Thus a civil institution usurping the place of the family is of grave import. Finally, based upon the nature of true marriage, we must recognize the full breadth of the problem presented by the legalization of gay marriage. While the legalization of contraception and divorce diminish our nation’s capability of understanding marriage – and while abortion is a greater evil in itself –the recognition and legalization of homosexual marriage destroys our nation’s capability to understand the nature of marriage. The former errors definitely – when accepted by the culture and sanctioned by law – oppose the ends of marriage, but the latter actively denies the essential nature of the marital union.

The following does not argue to particular remedies or policies that need to be adopted. It is ordered to the Catholic reader who wants to see more precisely, in light of magisterial teaching, what the problems with the ruling are, why they are problems, and the general principles which will underlie any particular remedies

The Nature of Marriage

The Catechism of Trent, using Scripture and St. Augustine as guides, declares that marriage is an institution created by God, not man,[1] and that it is ordered to the goods of offspring, conjugal faith (or spousal fidelity), and the sacrament — the signification of Christ’s love for the Church.[2] The encyclicals we are examining clarify and further define this teaching.

1)   Marriage is instituted by God

Pius XI first notes that this is indeed the Catholic understanding.

[M]atrimony was not instituted or restored by man but by God… This is the doctrine of Holy Scripture; this is the constant tradition of the Universal Church; this the solemn definition of the sacred Council of Trent, which declares and establishes from the words of Holy Writ itself that God is the Author of the perpetual stability of the marriage bond, its unity and its firmness. (Casti, 5)

A few paragraphs later, he states this again while explaining man’s role.

From God comes the very institution of marriage, the ends for which it was instituted, the laws that govern it, the goods[3] that flow from it; while man, through generous surrender of his own person made to another for the whole span of life, becomes, with the help and cooperation of God, the author of each particular marriage, with the duties and goods annexed thereto from divine institution. (Casti, 9)

Marriage is not something man-made; it is not something merely constructed by society for some level of convenience and stability (though it is a principle of stability). Rather, the Creator establishes it, and as such His are the laws that govern its nature even before Christ raises it to the level of a sacrament.

This is not to say, of course, that man’s will is of no consequence whatsoever in marriage. Man’s will is indeed involved through the “generous surrender of his own person to another for the whole span of life.” But this is to be a cooperating author with God in this or that particular marriage, not an originator or definer of marriage compacts. Man’s will is important in the institution of a particular marriage, because he freely must will to enter it, but he has no say over what marriage is and what it is ordered to.[4]

Thus, all marriage, even the natural marriage, is of divine institution, its essence beyond man’s power or authority to define.

2)   Marriage is ordered to Offspring

Of the three aforementioned goods (offspring, spousal fidelity, and the sacrament), the fundamental one is offspring:

[T]he child holds the first place. And indeed the Creator of the human race Himself, Who in His goodness wishes to use men as His helpers in the propagation of life, taught this when, instituting marriage in Paradise, He said to our first parents, and through them to all future spouses: “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth.” (Casti, 11)

This good is not to be understood to be completed in procreation, but rather:

[S]omething else must be added, namely the proper education of the offspring. For the most wise God would have failed to make sufficient provision for children that had been born, and so for the whole human race, if He had not given to those to whom He had entrusted the power and right to beget them, the power also and the right to educate them. (Casti, 16)

And thus it is clear that of the goods of marriage the child has priority, and not just the conception of the child, but his perfection as well. Moreover, this perfection is the responsibility of parents. They have the “power” and “right” to be the educators. This is true, again, in even the natural marriage. The perfection of offspring is the first good of any marriage, and the first responsibility of the parents. It is not to the state that we must look for the primary educators of children, but to the parents. This authority is theirs according to the nature of the institution.

3)   Marriage is ordered to spousal fidelity

The second good of marriage is that of the fidelity of the spouses. Again, Pius XI explains:

The second good of matrimony … is the good of conjugal honor which consists in the mutual fidelity of the spouses in fulfilling the marriage contract, so that what belongs to one of the parties by reason of this contract sanctioned by divine law, may not be denied to him or permitted to any third person; nor may there be conceded to one of the parties anything which, being contrary to the rights and laws of God and entirely opposed to matrimonial faith, can never be conceded. Wherefore, conjugal faith, or honor, demands in the first place the complete unity of matrimony which the Creator Himself laid down in the beginning when He wished it to be not otherwise than between one man and one woman. (Casti, 19-20)

Marriage, every marriage, is definitively between one man and one woman; it is therefore both an exclusive union of two spouses, and a union only of man and woman. The pope’s aim in this part of the encyclical[5] is primarily to demonstrate from Scripture and Tradition  that polygamy is not allowed to the Christian – or to the marriage instituted by God and restored by Christ – but he is also stating that one cannot have marriage without the complementarity of man and woman. Other popes repeatedly confirm this point,[6] as does Trent.[7]

Complementarity is important in its own right, inasmuch as it demonstrates that Catholics must indeed defend the truth that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman, of course, but it is also significant in that it denotes the unity of matrimony is first characterized by male-female complementarity.

Paul VI clarifies the nature of this complementarity, by considering the nature of the marital act in particular.

[T]he fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. (Humanae, 12)

The union of husband and wife is a relationship uniquely oriented precisely insofar as it is a union that in its expression, its ‘making manifest’ the nature of the unity in question, renders the two capable of generating life. The unity of spouses is defined according to its natural openness to new life.

Moreover, as Paul is clear to state, this unity is ordered to not just procreation, but “responsible parenthood.” The perfection, not simply the existence, of the child is the end of the union. Paul confirms Pius’ earlier argument; the union of marriage brings with it the responsibility of perfecting offspring.

None of this is to deny that the love of spouses is for the sake of the spouses, or that their unity is not for their own sakes. The popes are adamant that this fidelity is for the sake of the spouses, for they are bound by it “to give one another an unfailing and unselfish help.” (Arcanum, 11) The popes, however, are concerned to make a deeper point. The unity of spouses –which is the good of conjugal fidelity – is in itself an openness to new life. The desire for the good of one’s spouse cannot be intrinsically separated from the good of offspring.[8]

It must here be remarked that infertile spouses, while their situation is deeply regrettable for accidental reasons, still have that unity “written into the actual nature of man and woman.” Infertility, even when it is foreseen, does not alter the nature of man and woman, nor of this man and this woman (husband and wife), and therefore it does not alter the nature of their relationship. (Humanae, 11) It is merely an impediment beyond anyone’s will that makes it impossible for them to conceive. Moreover, since as they are indeed man and woman, their unity can be ordered to the generation of life and therefore its perfection.[9]

Thus, to follow out the popes’ teachings in respect to the second good, we see that it connects to and completes our understanding of the first. The unity of spouses in any marriage is to be understood as that sort of unity that according to its nature renders the agents capable of generating and perfecting new life. The spouses’ love for each other and their conjugal faith is to be understood according to its life-giving and life-perfecting complementarity.

4)   Marriage is ordered to the Sacrament

Finally, marriage is a union ordered to the sacrament of marriage. What does this mean? It means that Catholics must understand even the natural marriage in light of and for the sake of the sacrament whereby the spouses symbolize the union of Christ and His Church.

Pius XI argues this by first clarifying what Augustine (and Trent) mean by saying that ‘the sacrament’ is a good of marriage.

But this accumulation of benefits is completed and, as it were, crowned by that good of Christian marriage which in the words of St. Augustine we have called the sacrament, by which is denoted both the indissolubility of the bond and the raising and hallowing of the contract by Christ Himself, whereby He made it an efficacious sign of grace. (Casti, 31)

This indissolubility, to be clear, is characteristic  of all marriages (even non-sacramental). Pius first notes that there is an inviolable bond which belongs to every marriage:

And this inviolable stability, although not in the same perfect measure in every case, belongs to every true marriage, for the word of the Lord: “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” must of necessity include all true marriages without exception. (Casti, 34)

Immediately after this, he points out that the seeming “exceptions” to this permanent character (he is thinking of the Petrine and Pauline Privileges) do not contradict the inviolable stability in the nature of all true marriages:

And if this stability seems to be open to exception, however rare the exception may be, as in the case of certain natural marriages between unbelievers, or amongst Christians in the case of those marriages which though valid have not been consummated, that exception does not depend on the will of men nor on that of any merely human power, but on divine law, of which the only guardian and interpreter is the Church of Christ. However, not even this power can ever affect for any cause whatsoever a Christian marriage which is valid and has been consummated, for as it is plain that here the marriage contract has its full completion, so, by the will of God, there is also the greatest firmness and indissolubility which may not be destroyed by any human authority. (Casti 35)

Hence, even natural marriages cannot be dissolved by any natural authority. Catholics must recognize that the consummated, sacramental marriage is the completion of the marriage contract and is indissoluble simply speaking, but even the natural marriage is unable to be dissolved by any human authority and therefore indissoluble by any natural power.

The indissoluble character of all marriages is explained by the good introduced when Christ raised marriage to the level of a sacrament, since it is in the raising of the institution to the level of a sacrament (and to the “mystical signification of Christian marriage”)” that one sees the “intimate reason” (Casti, 36) in the decree. All true marriages, in other words are in themselves naturally inviolable for the sake of making it a fit institution to bear the sacramental character Christ now bestows upon it in a Christian context.

Thus it is clear that even the natural marriage is in itself inviolable, and Christians must see the good of the sacrament in all marriages. Even the true marriage of unbelievers bears a certain implicit testament to the relationship of Christ and his Church (though it does not symbolize this relationship).

5)   Marriage defined

The four points above set out a definition of marriage that is totally beyond the power/authority of man. Marriage is the naturally indissoluble institution, established by God through the wills of the spouses, wherein a man and a woman are made one in such a way as to render them capable of generating and perfecting life, for the sake of offspring, conjugal fidelity, and the sacrament. Without all these aspects being respected (at least implicitly), there is no marriage, natural or sacramental.

The Authority of the State

6)   The State has no authority over the nature of any true  marriage

It is evident from the above that the nature of marriage is in no way under the authority of man, for it is established by God. Whatever authority man has, it is as a participating agent in God’s plan.

The popes also argue that the authority of the state extends neither over the nature of marriage, nor over rights of individual men and women seeking real marriages. Recall, first of all, that the perpetual bond of any true marriage is beyond the power of civil law. .

[I]n such a marriage, inasmuch as it is a true marriage there must remain and indeed there does remain that perpetual bond which by divine right is so bound up with matrimony from its first institution that it is not subject to any civil power. (Casti, 34)

The perpetual bond of marriage is beyond civil power because it is bound up with the very institution of marriage. The civil power, in other words, does not extend to the nature of the institution of marriage.

Furthermore,

To take away from man the natural and primeval right of marriage, to circumscribe in any way the principal ends of marriage laid down in the beginning by God Himself in the words ‘Increase and multiply,'[8] is beyond the power of any human law.” (Casti, 8)

So also, then, are the ends of marriage – the goods and purposes for which it exists according to the nature of its institution – are similarly beyond the power of the state.

Finally, Pius Xi states that a civil power that seeks to claim authority over the faculty of marriage, is in reality “arrogat[ing] to itself a power over a faculty which it never had and can never legitimately possess.” (Casti, 68)

Thus, the state has no power to define marriage (for it is only God’s to define), it has no power to circumscribe the ends of marriage, and it cannot claim authority over the faculty of marriage.

Therefore, Catholics must recognize that the intrinsic goods of marriage (offspring, spousal fidelity, and the Sacrament) cannot be stripped away from any true marriage and that the state has no power to do so or to re-define the marital union (whether it be the natural or the sacramental union).

7)   The State has authority to act against the vices opposing marriage

Yet, the state does have obligations in regards to this holy institution. For, while it has no power over it or the marriage faculty, it does have authority to preserve and protect society. And the popes clearly argue that marriage and family are the foundation of society.

Just laws must be made for the protection of chastity, for reciprocal conjugal aid, and for similar purposes, and these must be faithfully enforced, because, as history testifies, the prosperity of the State and the temporal happiness of its citizens cannot remain safe and sound where the foundation on which they are established, which is the moral order, is weakened and where the very fountainhead from which the State draws its life, namely, wedlock and the family, is obstructed by the vices of its citizens. (Casti, 123)

Leo XIII also points out that the effects of marriage must be protected, to ensure that no harm comes to the children. (Arcanum, 40) The perfection of offspring is the principle of conjugal unity; it is the responsibility and therefore the right of conjugal pairs to work for that perfection. The very union of marriage is ordered to the upbringing of children, and therefore the formation of citizens. This means the state must take an interest in the safety and security of marriage, if only for the sake of its own stability. It has no authority over the essential nature of marriage, as demonstrated above, so its power lies in protection. The moral law must be promoted, vices must be opposed, especially those vices and anything else that threaten the life of marriage and the family.

Leo XIII further clarifies the basis of the state’s authority in relation to marriage by noting that it consists first and foremost in a state’s recognition of true marriages.

Further, the civil law can deal with and decide those matters alone which in the civil order spring from marriage, and which cannot possibly exist, as is evident, unless there be a true and lawful cause of them, that is to say, the nuptial bond. (Arcanum, 40)

The state is concerned with those aspects of marriage that connect to civil order, but the state must order itself to the nuptial bond as it is in itself; any laws for the sake of civic order must be based upon a recognition of the truth.

In sum, though the state cannot assume authority over the essence of the institution, it must strive to preserve and protect it insofar as it may. The popes urge, first and foremost, that laws be made that protect chastity and aid conjugal fidelity (some easy examples of such laws would be anti-pornographic laws, or laws against prostitution). Furthermore, any legitimate authority the state has in relation to marriage must begin with a recognition (in the laws themselves) of the true nuptial bond.

The Significance of the Legalization of Homosexual ‘Marriage’

In light of these statements and reasons, Catholics must recognize the grave dangers this ruling compounds, and those it introduces.

8)   The state’s legal recognition of homosexual ‘marriage’ confirms and adds to the errors already present in our culture

The state has long been failing in its duty inasmuch as the legalization of such things as divorce, contraception, and abortion solidifies and lends credence to false notions of marriage. Among other moral problems, these notions make it harder for true marriages to be entered into by would-be spouses who are formed according to these errors. The state should be defending the institution precisely against these errors, but we find in our nation the laws rather confirm them. Since the culture of the nation supposes that marriage is what it is not, these would-be spouses’ wills have obstacles to true union. For example, if one goes into a ‘marriage’ with the explicit notion that it is dissolvable, or explicitly intending never to have children, one is not truly married.

For all this, however, a non-believer who goes into a marriage intending it to be for the rest of his life and for the sake of raising children still aims to enter that union which renders him generative and perfective of life. The basic character of marriage is retained in the midst of the errors promoted by divorce and contraception. The non-believer may not fully grasp what he is doing, but he may indeed intend the reality.

The acceptance of homosexual ‘marriage,’ however, compounds and adds to these errors against the holy institution by putting forth the notion that the complementarity of the sexes is not intrinsic to the sexual union. The marital act, and through it the marital union, is stripped of all the intrinsic characteristics that allows for the direct link to acting with God in generating new life, and therefore also the intrinsic responsibility and right for perfecting new life. Thus, not only is marriage seen to be merely a state sanctioned promise of living together and sharing in sexual matters (and other vague ways), but society explicitly loses sight of the sacred, set-apart union responsible for the upbringing of children. The state again fails in its duty to protect marriage by confirming society in this error, and it sets the nation against true marriage in an even more fundamental way by denying the life-giving nature of the marriage union.

The ‘spouses’ (even those who are male-female) set in this false understanding will not be intending to have the sort of union that is the context for the family. They may want a family, but the mutual promise comprising their union will not be defined according to the end of family. The will of man works through his understanding (we can only desire what we in some way know), and thus when one’s understanding of the character of marriage is so flawed as to admit of a relationship totally devoid in itself of openness to new life (and of the perfection of new life), one’s will is severely impeded in making the vows of a true marriage.

Hence, the errors of earlier legalizations are compounded and added to (i.e. a difficulty for would-be spouses to enter into marriage).

9)   The legal recognition of homosexual marriage directly opposes the security of the family

Further, in damaging the notion of marriage so profoundly, the legalization of homosexual marriage directly opposes the correct understanding of the role of husband and wife as parents and primary educators of their children. The popes (as shown above) all point to the connection between the generation and perfection of offspring. Insofar as the perfection of children is the first responsibility of married couples according to the nature of marriage, the state must see itself as secondary to the parents in regards to the education of children, and this because of the nature of the institution of marriage.

Yet, as soon as one denies the essential connection between marriage and the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, there is no longer an intrinsic protection of these rights and responsibilities. As marriage becomes (in the view of the state) an institution without intrinsic connection to the generation and perfection of children, the parents’ role with their children is no longer clear. The state must be concerned with the welfare of children, since children are citizens in need of formation. With a healthy understanding of marriage and the family, the state can recognize its secondary role with respect to children’s formation. But insofar as marriage is no longer considered to be an institution beyond the authority of the state, the state has no clear limits in its authority over the formation of children. The parent is no longer seen as intrinsically the primary educator. (

In brief as society further holds (beyond the errors of divorce and contraception) that the homosexual union is a marital union, it cannot but abandon the most basic good of marriage, namely the generation and perfection of offspring. The essence of marriage, whereby it is the origin of the family, consists in it being the sort of union that renders the spouses capable of generating life. With that generation comes the right and responsibility of raising children as the primary educator. If one denies by law this aspect of marriage, one denies the rights and responsibilities of parents, and directly opposes the security of the family. Consequently, the security of the family is not merely attacked by this law as by previous laws and permissions, but in a real sense destroyed.

Conclusion

This much, then, Catholics must in conscience hold concerning civil and sacramental marriage, and particularly the recent ruling on marriage. (a) The state cannot determine the nature of marriage, and (b) it is in fact bound for its own sake to preserve the institution as inviolate. (c) Finally, the Supreme Court’s decision directly violates the principles enumerated above. It takes an authority not its own, and it acts directly against what is – as indicated by the Church – the very foundation of society and the state. Not only, then, is the truth at stake, but the truth about the first principles of society. Catholics must recognize and work assiduously to combat these errors – they are of enormous significance. The Church’s teaching explicated above does not, perhaps, give us all the precise laws (or remissions of laws) concerning marriage we must promote, but it does give us the general principles according to which we must apply ourselves. And it demonstrates the significance of the evil we are presented with. This recognition must be clarified to our brothers and sisters in Christ, and through them to our nation.

[1] The Council implies it at the beginning of Session Twenty-Four, and the Catechism of Trent states it explicitly.

[2] This is again, explicitly in the Roman Catechism (the Catechism of Trent).

[3] I use all the English translations taken from the Vatican website.However, I have substituted ‘good’ as a translation of the Latin ‘bonum’, which was rendered in the original with the word ‘blessing’. While I think bonum can be translated as ‘blessing,’ it loses something of the notion of an end, which is fundamental for understanding what the pope will later be talking about.

[4] This does not, by the way, make marriage a non-natural relationship, for it arises out of that love which is “according to nature” and a “naturally indivisible union.” (Arcanum, 9) The union is a “foreshadowing of the Incarnation,” in which there is something “holy and religious…implanted by nature.” (Arcanum, 19) This will be clearer when considering some of Paul VI’s passages later on, but in proving that marriage is instituted by God, the popes are not so much declaring it outside of nature as they are showing that it is part of the fundamental nature of things.

[5] Casti, 20-21.

[6] Arcanum, 5, 9, 24; Humanae, 8-9, 11-12.

[7] Council of Trent, Session 24, Doctrine; Roman Catechism, Definition of Matrimony.

[8] The depth of this conjugal love is infinitely deepened by the sacrament, and it is in the sacrament that one best understands the good of conjugal faith. For, as all the popes point out, the Christian couple image Christ’s relationship to His Body, the Church.[8] Thus, the Christian couple is ordered to the spouses’ mutual salvation, and through that ordination they also intend, not accidentally, the salvation of new life.

[9] It is in these points that one must recognize the essential, natural law problem with homosexual activity.  The agents are attempting to express a unity their act simply and by its ‘nature’ cannot express. There is no impediment, for there is no marital complementarity in the agents. No matter how much one may want it, it is intrinsically absent. Thus, when one also considers the good of children and the perfection of children, it is also clear that a homosexual couple cannot parent. Their relationship cannot be the life-generating unity context that children are to be raised in. The love that members of the same sex can have for each other, while great, cannot be the love of parents.

Preamble

Among the Catholic faithful the conviction grows that the ongoing crisis in the Church and the drastic moral decline of our civilization have entered a critical new phase which represents a turning point in the history of the world.

In the Church, a Synod on the Family has devolved into a battle to defend the indissolubility of marriage from an attack within, pitting cardinal against cardinal and bishop against bishop. The Synod has produced a midterm relatio, approved by the Pope himself, which calls for the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion on a “case by case” basis without any renunciation of adulterous relations, contrary to the explicit teaching of Pope John Paul II in line with the perennial discipline of the Church.[1] The same document speaks of “valuing” the “homosexual orientation” while recognizing the “precious support for the life of the partners” supposedly provided by “homosexual unions.”[2] Bishop Athanasius Schneider rightly observes that “[t]his is the first time in Church History that such a heterodox text was actually published as a document of an official meeting of Catholic bishops under the guidance of a pope, even though the text only had a preliminary character.”[3]

In Ireland, a popular referendum has legalized “gay marriage” in that once exemplary Catholic country, while in the United States a bare majority of the Supreme Court has imposed “gay marriage” on all fifty states. Yet the Pope and the Vatican observe a resounding silence. At the same time, the Vatican hosts conferences on climate change with notorious atheists who advocate population control and “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) that would only oppress ordinary people, including the poor, while leaving untouched the hegemony of multinational corporations which, in fact, are working with the United Nations to fashion a worldwide SDG regime. The Vatican itself has endorsed a SDG calling on member nations to “ensure universal sexual and reproductive health and rights.”[4]

As the nations descend ever more rapidly into an abyss of depravity, the Pope has issued a 185-page encyclical on an ecological crisis that diverts attention from the catastrophic collapse of sexual morality in a civilization ridden by divorce, contraception, and abortion. As to abortion, the encyclical speaks of the “human embryo” in the context of “concern for the protection of nature,” while earlier lamenting the extinction of plant and animal species as a loss to our children and a diminution of the glory owed to God.^[5]

Echoing the belief of many Catholics, Bishop Schneider has stated that we are in the midst of the “fourth great crisis” in Church History, involving “a tremendous confusion over doctrine and liturgy. We have already been in this for 50 years.”[6] In this context the Roman Forum, founded by the late Dietrich von Hildebrand, has decided to issue this Statement on the ecclesial and civilizational crisis, calling upon the leadership of the Church, above all the Supreme Pontiff, to return to the path from which much of the human element of the Church has strayed since the Second Vatican Council. Because we believe this twin crisis is Christological, not ecological, we call in particular for a recovery of the Church’s traditional teaching on the Social Reign of Christ the King as the only sure remedy for the temporal and spiritual ills that now threaten both the Church and human society.

Introduction

Only eleven years before the commencement of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Pius XII issued a prophetic admonition. Speaking of the long history of the Church’s members “using every endeavor to convert their fellow citizens to the religion of Jesus Christ and to fashion their morals according to its pattern, so as to safeguard both religion and the state from approaching danger,” Pius XII urged a renewal of missionary activity in the face of the rising specter of a civilizational apostasy and its fatal consequences:

Venerable Brethren, you are well aware that almost the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation by Christ, or in its dire destruction.[7]

Pius XII’s assessment, in line with that of his predecessors in the Church’s long confrontation with the errors of modernity, was abruptly abandoned after the Council in favor of the now prevailing “conciliar optimism” regarding what Gaudium et spes described as the “current trend of the world.”

Within the Church, moreover, we have witnessed during the post-conciliar epoch what the future Pope Benedict XVI famously described as “a continuing process of decay that has gone on largely on the basis of appeals to the Council, and thus has discredited the Council in the eyes of many people.”[8] An ill-defined ecumenism promotes what Pope Pius XI called “a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed”—meaning the idea that Christian unity no longer requires “the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it”[9]­—as if membership in the Catholic Church no longer mattered for the salvation of souls. A perpetual process of “dialogue” replaces the Church’s forthright proclamation of the necessity of conversion to the one true religion for both human flourishing in this life and eternal happiness in the life to come. Along with these developments, an unprecedented liturgical reform devised by a committee has ended with what Cardinal Ratzinger called “the collapse of the liturgy”[10] and later, as Pope Benedict XVI, the “banalization of the liturgy.”[11]

Although the traditional teaching is still to be found in the Church’s official documents, in practice churchmen appear to repudiate her divinely bestowed status as the axis mundi, along which all earthly things are ordered to the glory of God and the transcendent common good of eternal beatitude. This alarming tendency, described as if it were an eminently favorable “opening to the world,” has taken its toll on all aspects of the life of the Church, including the focus of this Statement: Catholic social teaching on the duties of men and nations to Christ the King and the dire consequences of failing to honor those duties in personal, civic, and political life.

The Authentic Social Teaching

The authentic social teaching of the Catholic Church has constantly reminded the faithful of their divinely imposed duty to attend to the needs of the poor according to the universal destination of earthly goods and in obedience to Our Lord’s injunction: “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”[12] No merely human organization has ever excelled the Church in her care for the poor, even if this is not her primary mission on earth. But nowhere does she enjoin upon the faithful any duty to submit the administration of justice and charity either to an “invisible hand” or to regulatory bureaucracies controlled by men without faith who are more often than not oppressors of the poor under the guise of defending their rights. We see the consequences of such submission, for example, in the grinding poverty of Latin America, where global capitalism has callously exploited labor and “liberation theology” has fomented violent revolution while liberating no one.

Catholic social teaching obliges us to recognize and oppose capitalist individualist materialism as well as socialist collectivist materialism. Both lack the proper sense of Catholic and natural order and both have been brutally disrespectful of Christian morality and God’s earth. Globalist capitalism, enabled by governmental privileges and protections, as well as militant appeals to “American exceptionalism,” has gained much favor in conservative Catholic circles. On the other hand, millenarian socialist programs, involving such elements as “sustainable development goals,” worldwide regulatory regimes, and intrinsically anti-Christian juridical frameworks, including the United Nations, are now regaining favor with the aid of the current pontiff. Both are equally destructive to a proper grasp of how to deal with the real problems of the family, the civic order as a whole, universal peace, and the environment. For both equally neglect the crucial context of man’s destiny as the only creature possessed of an immortal and rational soul in need of grace for redemption, perseverance in the avoidance of gravely evil conduct, and the ultimate attainment of eternal beatitude—the highest good to which all earthly activities should be ordered. Thus, as Pope Leo XIII stressed in his landmark social encyclical Rerum Novarum:

Life on earth, however good and desirable in itself, is not the final purpose for which man is created; it is only the way and the means to that attainment of truth and that love of goodness in which the full life of the soul consists. It is the soul which is made after the image and likeness of God; it is in the soul that the sovereignty resides in virtue whereof man is commanded to rule the creatures below him and to use all the earth and the ocean for his profit and advantage. “Fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”[13]

The Church’s True Appeal to Men of Good Will

Respecting society’s observance of the universally applicable moral principles embodied in Catholic social teaching, the popes before the Second Vatican Council never wavered in their insistence that by virtue of her divine founding and universal mission the Church has the unique capacity to establish that brotherhood among men which is otherwise a utopian dream destined to produce dystopian outcomes.

The Church has never ceased to issue an appeal to all men of good will who, by the light of natural reason, seek the good and deplore the evils that assail human society in our time. This appeal, however, ought not to be confused with an indiscriminate collaboration with secular leaders whose plans and sociopolitical and economic structures so often show themselves to be inimical to the eternal values that men of good will naturally recognize. It is, rather, an invitation to enter into the way of the Catholic Church, where seekers of truth will find what they seek in superabundance. This is no mere “triumphalism,” but rather a joyful recognition of the incomparable goods, both natural and supernatural, that God bestows upon humanity through His Church. The Church does not reject the world, but rather seeks its perfection in grace.

As Pope Pius XI declared in Ubi Arcano Dei (1922), his great encyclical on “the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ,” the Holy Catholic Church is “by divine institution the sole depository and interpreter of the ideals and teachings of Christ” and “she alone possesses in any complete and true sense the power effectively to combat that materialistic philosophy which has already done and, still threatens, such tremendous harm to the home and to the state.” Accordingly, it is the Church, and only she, that “is able to set both public and private life on the road to righteousness by demanding that everything and all men become obedient to God…”[14]

As Pope Pius X declared, concerning misguided efforts to entangle the Church in worldly undertakings for the promotion of a universal brotherhood, if “the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.”[15]

Today, however, the Church’s leaders present her role as merely that of proposing a “contribution” to a vast and quite hopeless neo-Pelagian project in which the United Nations or some other “world political authority” would serve as the juridical framework for a solidaristic world order in which “believers,” regardless of religion, and unbelievers would be co-equal participants. This project is directed, not upward toward Heaven for the salvation of souls, but forward in history toward a godless, hopeless, and painfully trite City of Man falsely lauded as a “civilization of love” or a “renewal of humanity.”

But the truth is that the Catholic Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, is the renewal of humanity, a renewal made possible only by the translation of fallen men into the state of sanctifying grace and the consequent elevation of human society to heights it could never attain by any purely human effort. Thus it is the world that is obliged to contribute to the work of the Church. Yet we witness with amazement a historically sudden inversion of the proper order of things in the Church’s approach to her mission in human society.

Whither the Social Kingship of Christ?

With all of these considerations in view, we must ask: What has happened to the Church’s certitude concerning her exclusive and divinely ordained role in the right ordering of human affairs and the fostering of true brotherhood among men? Have the Church’s leaders forgotten that her founder is God Incarnate? Have they somehow misplaced the divine commission to “make disciples of all nations”?[16] Do they still believe the defined dogma that the Church is the sole ark of salvation? Are they still mindful of Our Lord’s warning: “without me you can do nothing”?[17] Do they no longer have confidence in His promise: “But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things will be added unto you”?[18]

If the worldwide breakdown in social order could in any respect be characterized as an ecological crisis, how could it be anything but a manifestation of a deeper Christological crisis­—a universal mutiny against Christ and the Law of the Gospel lamented by pope after pope before the emergence of the inexplicable conciliar optimism? In a return to the sober realism of his predecessors­, who are now belittled as “prophets of doom,” Pope Benedict warned in an address to the clergy of Rome, less than two years before the abrupt end of his pontificate, that the “fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage” has been lost, the “place of moral reasoning… is taken by an instrumental rationality,” “the most elementary rules of humanity collapse” and with the consequent “eclipse of reason… [t]he very future of the world is at stake.”[19]

The fate of the world in every epoch since the Incarnation has been bound up with the state of the Church. The Church’s power to renew the face of the earth­ involves not only a restoration of faith, hope and charity in the souls of men, but also the defense of natural reason against the onslaughts of sophists in every age. She alone has upheld the correct synthesis of fides et ratio.[20] The Church’s success in accomplishing this mighty work throughout history has always depended upon her vigor in advancing what she calls the Social Kingship of Christ. But it is precisely Christ’s social reign that the “modern world” has rejected, while churchmen fall silent regarding the claims of Christ the King on men and nations. Today, she not only retreats from any confrontation with “the rulers of the world of this darkness” and “the spirits of wickedness in the high places,”[21] but seeks obsessively to dialogue and collaborate with the very forces that desire nothing more ardently than the Church’s final surrender to the spirit of the age.

And yet the truth remains. As Pius X insisted at the turn of the 20^th century: “Society cannot be set up unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO.”[22]

In remarkable contrast, the prevailing mentality that is at the root of the ecclesial crisis considers the conviction of this sainted Pope to be nothing other than an idyllic fantasy—even though it reflects the form and pattern nurturing and guiding our entire Christian civilization. Lost on the exponents of this facile rejection of the Social Kingship doctrine is the irony of their own ideological pursuit of what Pius X called “a mere verbal and chimerical construction in which we shall see, glowing in a jumble, and in seductive confusion, the words Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Love, Equality, and human exultation, all resting upon an ill-understood human dignity” and producing, were it ever to be realized, “a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion… more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men [as] brothers and comrades at last in the ‘Kingdom of God’….”[23]

Conclusion

The conversion of nations to Christ and trust in Divine Providence are the twin pillars of any truly just society. Yet, after fifty years of an imaginary ecclesial “renewal,” the generality of the Church’s leaders appear to have repudiated in practice the duty to seek the conversion of nations, as if they believed that social metanoia were now impossible even for God. Behind this loss of militancy is a dimming of the Faith itself. In his masterwork on the post-conciliar crisis, Iota Unum, the great Romano Amerio observed that “Faith in Providence thus proclaims the possibility that the world might rise and be healed by a metanoia which it cannot initiate but which it is capable of accepting once it is offered.”[24] That offer must come from the Church, as it has in every age when the collapse of civilization was reversed in miraculous fashion under her supernatural influence.

The ecclesial crisis and the intimately related civilizational crisis will end only when the Church’s offer of social metanoia is renewed once again. But only the Vicar of Christ can effectively extend that offer to the world. Only he can end what amounts to an unprecedented de facto suspension of the Church’s true mission in the name of a Council whose restless “spirit,” moving far beyond even the problematical conciliar texts, has produced what Benedict XVI, speaking just days before his mysterious abdication of the papacy, described as “so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering” in the Church.[25]

Therefore, we implore the reigning Roman Pontiff to reverse the Church’s course of the past fifty years, abandoning a disastrous “opening to the world” and an endless “dialogue” and fruitless collaboration with the Church’s implacable opponents. With respect to the Synod, we urgently petition the Pope to put a stop to all further efforts to use the synodal process to undermine the indissolubility of marriage—and thus the entire moral edifice of the Church—by means of a sophistical disjunction between doctrine and practice, making a mockery not only of the words of Our Lord Himself but also of the teaching of John Paul II that “only by the acceptance of the Gospel are the hopes that man legitimately places in marriage and in the family capable of being fulfilled.” [26]

And finally, we beseech the Roman Pontiff to fulfill his duty as Vicar of Christ and Universal Shepherd by leading the way to a restoration of the continuity between the Church’s venerable teaching on the Social Kingship of Christ—never repealed—and the practice of churchmen both high and low. This is in accord with the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, which recalls the sacred obligation of Catholics to evangelize their fellow citizens and work for the transformation of social order in keeping with Christ’s kingship:

By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works toward enabling them “to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in which [they] live. The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love of the true and the good. It requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church. Christians are called to be the light of the world. Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies.[27]

For these intentions, we make our own the Lord’s prayer for the first Pope, which surely also applies to every one of his successors, especially in this age of unparalleled diabolical disorientation: “And the Lord said: Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”[28]

Mary, Help of Christians, Pray for Us!

July 9^th, 2015

23^rd Annual Summer Symposium of the Roman Forum

Gardone Riviera

John C. Rao, D.Phil. (Oxford)
Director, The Roman Forum

Rev. Richard A. Munkelt, Ph.D.
Board Member, The Roman Forum

Prof. Dr. Thomas Heinrich Stark
Faculty Member, Roman Forum

Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq.
President, American Catholic Lawyers Assn.

Michael J. Matt
Editor, The Remnant

John Vennari
Editor, Catholic Family News

Sebastian Morello
Faculty Member, Roman Forum

Notes

[1]John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (1981), n. 84.

^[2]“Relatio post disceptationem” (official Italian translation), nn. 47, 50, 52 @ vatican.va.

[3]Interview with LifeSiteNews, November 5, 2014.

[4]Voice of the Family, “Vatican endorsement of UN development goals threatens unborn children,” LifeSiteNews, April 30, 2014; accessed at https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/vatican-endorsement-of-un-development-goals-threatens-unborn-children.

[5]Francis, Laudato si (2015), nn. 33, 120.

[6] Sarah Atkinson, “Bishop Athanasius Schneider: ‘We are in the fourth great crisis of the Church’”, catholicherald.co.uk, June 6, 2014.

[7]Pius XII, Evangelii Praecones (1951), n. 70. Emphasis added here and throughout.

[8]Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, L’Osservatore Romano, November 9, 1984, later to be known as The Ratzinger Report.

[9]Pius XI, Mortalium Animos (1928), n. 10.

[10]Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones, p. 148.

[11]Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013.

[12]Matt. 25:40.

[13]Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891), n. 40.

[14]Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei (1922), nn. 42-43.

[15]Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique (1910)

[16]Matt. 28:19.

[17]Jn. 15:5.

[18]Matt. 6:33.

[19]Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 20, 2010.

[20]Cf. First Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, Ch. 4: On Faith and Reason; John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, n. 6.

[21]Eph. 6:12.

[22]Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique.

[23]Ibid.

[24]Iota Unum, p. 761.

[25]Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013.

[26] Familiaris consortio, n. 3

[27]Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2105.

[28]Lk. 22:31-32.

            –Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred

INTRODUCTION

In the ancient world, legitimate political forms ranged across a wide spectrum in which “rule of the people” was only one of many political forms conducive to the common good—and a very unfavorable one at that. But today, “democracy has become almost a synonym for legitimate government, for the rule of law.”^[1] Pundits declaim that democracy ensures freedom and fair government, while a new colonialism seeks to spread “democratic values” to every corner of the world. If we are clued in to the reductive tendencies of modern thought, we should be wary of such absolute claims. In fact, with a little digging, we discover that the democratic ideology of modernity is built upon a novel philosophy and cosmology. Early moderns like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau sought to replace the worldview of Christian religion with their own, and in the process created new philosophies and myths that still legitimize modern political forms. A democracy bedizened with the false hopes of Enlightenment scripture becomes a Leviathan irreconcilable with church teachings; if it is disengaged from this unfruitful union, however, and defended under the aegis of Catholic Logos theology, it may be the political form most well adapted for securing the common good of modern nations.

We will first explain the nature of government according to the classical and Catholic understanding. Then, we will trace the discarding of this image in the early modern period. Finally, we will suggest how democracy might be disengaged from its current anti-Logos framework and put to good use in a Catholic political order.

I. THE DISCARDED IMAGE: A Logos-Oriented Politics

A. The Classical Cosmos

Edmund Waldstein succinctly explains the classical understanding of law, that discarded image of the cosmos upon which the Catholic Church has largely built its social teaching. Classical Greek thought, as found in Plato and Aristotle, presupposes that there is an “objective good that is knowable by human reason.”^[2] Today the term “objective good” seems to denote a rather vague notion of reason, but it was rather more colorful for the Greeks. In broad terms, it meant nothing less than the total harmonious order of the universe. They saw the “cosmos” as a marvelous hierarchy of things each tending towards the perfection of a unique principle called nature. Nature is the essence of a thing, its ordering principle, the plan or purpose of its birth, unfolding, and consummation. Nature uses its powers to perfect itself in fruitful interaction with other natures. A horse, for example, is born from its mother, grows to maturity by eating grass, propagates its species, and dies: it has fulfilled its nature in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

Man too has a nature struggling to work itself out, and it is a rational nature. Man’s unique identity consists in his ability to know his own objective good and also comprehend something of the order of the cosmos. But there is a problem:

The problem is that there are different powers in the human soul; there are the senses (touch, taste and so one) and then there is reason. The senses know a limited kind of goodness, and from this kind of knowledge come certain passions such as hunger and thirst and lust. Only reason knows the complete good, wherein happiness really lies, and understands it as good.^[3]

In other words, there are competing powers within man, and it is reason’s job to order those powers to man’s true good: man must be educated. Reason must “train the human soul…to help produce a harmony among its different parts….This harmony is called virtue.”^[4]

But Greek virtue was not “moral” in the Kantian sense, a self-actualizing quest for self-mastery. Rather, it presupposed a real participation in the order of the cosmos, an order that not only gives man a static model from which to work out his own perfection. Plato’s world of forms did serve that exemplary function, but in a much more religious sense, the forms were the real source of perfective power. There was a “givenness” about Greek virtue, a sense of being drawn up into a mysterious cosmic dance. As Waldstein explains:

The order of the whole universe is what Charles De Koninck calls “the good of the universe” and “God’s manifestation outside Himself.” Man as the micro-cosmos can reflect this order in his own person through virtue. This is why virtue can be identified with happiness—because virtue is a participation in that order which is the greatest image of the divine beauty and goodness.^[5]

Seen in this light, communion among men is a crucial part of this great order. Since personal virtue is not really individual, but a participation in a cosmic pageant, a virtuous community shows an even greater participation in the cosmic order. This is how Aristotle argues the point:

Even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states.^[6]

St. Thomas Aquinas took up the insights of Plato and Aristotle, and fashioned a Christian notion of the common good. He argued that:

order is what God principally intends in creation: every individual creature reflects some aspect of God’s glory, but it is the order, the harmony, the beauty of their unity, that most perfectly reflects the creator.^[7]

Something in the sum total of perfected beings is also god-like. Waldstein continues:

It is good for man to realize the order of the universe in his own soul but it is more godlike for him to realize it in the state…the community of men reflects God more than an individual man, just as the universe reflects Him more perfectly than any one creature.^[8]

We are finally ready to discuss the role of law. Since the goal of community is to manifest the divine order, law has the principal function of “producing this unity of order, both in the individual soul, and more especially in the community.”^[9] In other words, all law aims at the perfection of man’s nature within the context of a community. It is illegitimate otherwise: “legitimacy on this view does not depend on the ‘consent of the governed’ given through democratic rituals, but rather it depends on the objective good.”^[10]

B. Authority in the Catholic State According to Leo XIII

The discussion must inevitably pass to practical matters, to the forms of government in which this harmonious order can be instantiated. Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclicals provide a coherent Catholic teaching about the nature and forms of political authority, its relation to religious authority, as well as the proper relationship of the citizen to this authority.

It is first to be remarked that Leo is not opposed to any benign form of government in principle:

Catholics, like all other citizens, are free to prefer one form of government to another precisely because no one of these social forms is, in itself, opposed to the principles of sound reason nor to the maxims of Christian doctrine.^[11]

In fact, Leo is largely indifferent to the form or the means by which authority is constituted, so long as the source of authority be rightly conceived:

There is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.^[12]

Leo immediately goes on to explain this right conception of authority:

But, as regards political power, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God, for it finds this clearly testified in the sacred Scriptures and in the monuments of antiquity; besides, no other doctrine can be conceived which is more agreeable to reason or more in accord with the safety of both princes and peoples.^[13]

The pope does not go on to suggest some sort of divine right of political leadership; rather, he makes a metaphysical argument about the nature of political authority: Man cannot find perfection except in society; thus society is part of nature and willed by God. But every association of man needs a ruling authority, or else there will be mere anarchy. No man has in himself the authority to constrain the will of others; that power resides only in God. Thus, all political power comes from heaven, and “it is necessary that those who exercise it should do it as having received it from God.”^[14] In other words, society is one of the instruments God has ordained for the perfection of man’s nature; over and above individual reason, God constitutes social authority as a necessary means for man’s perfection. Authority, in this view, most emphatically does not arise from the will of the people, even if they are the efficient cause of its peculiar shape. Rather, it is from God and for Him.

From this metaphysical principle, it follows that the social organism must acknowledge its source by offering public worship to the true God:

For men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings.^[15]

In fact, Leo calls it a “public crime to act as though there were no God”; it is “one of [government’s] chief duties to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws.”^[16]

Any wholly natural and metaphysically consistent society, therefore, must acknowledge its dependence on God and explicitly enforce the laws of the Church. To do otherwise is to undermine the very nature of human society. In fact, Leo argues that unless the state acknowledges God, its authority will lack any sure stability.^[17] The doctrine of social contract is bound to lead to contempt for authority and an incessant revolutionary spirit. On the contrary, the Catholic doctrine will cause citizens to love and obey their rulers, and rulers to love and serve their citizens.

To summarize traditional Catholic teaching on the nature of political authority: society is the normal means ordained by God for the perfection of men’s souls, and its right ordering puts it in consonance with the rest of the cosmic order. Thus, authority takes its legitimacy from its place in this divine plan. Legitimate authority acknowledges this dependence on God, and orders the state according to the laws of the true religion.

II. LEVIATHAN: Liberty and Authority in Modern Political Thought

What we have described is the Logos-oriented politics of the classical and Catholic tradition. Government is the art of moving men and communities toward their final end in God, who has instituted governments for this very purpose. For government to work, laws must be drawn in accordance with the objective good, citizens must respect legitimate authority, and the true religion must be enshrined.

Now we must consider modern political philosophy. Modernity prides itself on being objective, practical and this-worldly, but as we examine its roots in the early modern period, we will find that it too rests on hidden, theocratic foundations. Its cosmology is, of course, not so rich as the antique, but it nevertheless exists as an a priori, mythological backdrop to modern political thought. The modern predilection for democracy must be understood as the necessary corollary of an erroneous cosmology that divinizes man.

Continuing trends of late medieval nominalism and humanism, the early moderns developed a novel conception of human freedom that, as Waldstein argues, was “disengaged from the good.” This development had several aspects. The first was philosophical. Late medieval nominalists scorned the delicate synthesis by which Thomas and the ancients had knitted nature to the divine, and offered a radically simplified cosmic image: Essences became disconnected from ends, the symphonic cosmos a mundane world of individual objects moved by the arbitrary will of God. Humanism ushered in the next stage when, poring over rediscovered treasures of pagan literature, they imbibed the classical sensibility to the glories of human accomplishment. They began to exalt what they perceived to be the infinite indeterminacy of the human will, its capacity to achieve nearly anything.^[18]

But if humanism retained some affinity with the old virtue tradition, early moderns who followed the Reformation radicalized the concept of freedom, stripping from it any connection to the good. In the emerging view, man’s dignity consists above all in being unimpeded. Freedom is no longer what is accomplished, but the condition of accomplishment: a radical autonomy, the absence of any restraint on the will.

Another aspect was political. As post-reformation nations were raked with internecine religious conflict, it became convenient to argue

that the objective good for man is too hard to know, too difficult to agree about, that in order to avoid the bloodshed of religious wars, it is necessary to limit politics to the care of a bare minimum of peace necessary to allow for the non-violent coexistence of persons with different views of what the true good is.^[19]

This is the thrust of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. ^[20] Whatever theoretical consensus remained to Europeans concerning some common objective good was destroyed in this final political development. From then on, politics decided not to concern itself with religion or any sort of claims about the objective good. Or so it thought. As Michael Hanby has argued in a recent article for First Things, the liberal state makes an implicit metaphysical claim: by denying God any role in the polity, it posits “that a thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent.”^[21] In this denial, modernity effects the apotheosis of man in a new mythology.

This apotheosis has a long history, including those steps discussed above, but took a great leap in the Scientific Revolution. Encouraged by pioneers like Francis Bacon and Galileo, early modern thinkers discarded Aristotelian conceptions of the universe for more empirical methods. Most importantly, they redefined motion, the concept underlying all classical cosmology. In classical physics, motion was a interior, teleological phenomenon directing natures toward their final ends; in modern physics, motion becomes a mere external happening, the blind action of material forces whirling objects around per inane quietum. This divorce from final causes leads to a new way of seeing and relating to the natural world. If the old world functioned organically, as a sort of garden of natures growing in participatory being towards fruition in God, the new world is a machine, a collection of empirical objects jostled here and there in space according to fixed laws of nature.^[22] Man is no exception. His natural activity, deprived of a final end in God, becomes the autonomous working of his own nature. Thus, man “attains his end,” or in the new metaphor “functions most efficiently,” when he enjoys that power most characteristic to him, the law of reason.

On this basis of mechanistic physics, early moderns built an edifice of mechanistic politics. Throwing out the organic metaphors, early moderns conceived the state in terms of a vast mechanism of forces checked and balanced against one another. For example, Hobbes’s systematic political treatise Leviathan takes as its theoretical foundation a mechanistic epistemology. In his account, man is not even really free, but like a floundering ship, is carried this way and that by his passions, which are in turn merely determined responses to external stimuli. Like atoms in the void, men bump into each other constantly in a state of incessant war. The only way to peace is for an absolute sovereign to be invested with all power of coercion. Hobbes’ sovereign stands like a lid on a kettle, tasked with keeping the effervescent passions of his people from boiling over into civil war.

Locke’s views are more pertinent to the discussion of democracy. Like Hobbes, he begins by considering a state of nature. Before society, however, man is also in a state of war, (though endowed with a more respectable rational faculty than Hobbes allows). Society is joined not for moral improvement, but for physical protection against predatory raids, and a guarantee of more economic prosperity than was attainable in the state of nature. Locke’s ethos is that of a very reasonable gentleman, and he often seems to invoke some sort of natural law; but he too ultimately deploys mechanist metaphors to explain the working of his system. Explaining the necessity of majority rule, he quite bluntly appeals to the physical principle of inertia according to which the greater force must always yield to the lesser.^[23] Locke’s state too is an engine, and human beings its cogs. And like an engine in a factory, its end is only the production of material prosperity.^[24]

If Locke and Hobbes gave to modern political thought its theoretical matter, Rousseau composed modernity’s mythological form. Surprisingly, underlying the new rationalist philosophy about man’s nature, there stands a veritable myth: the state of nature. This myth, in its various forms, underlies and legitimizes the political project of each of these thinkers.^[25]

According to Rousseau, men were born into a paradisical state of absolute self-sufficiency and contentment. Far from needing the help of other men, he wandered through warm forests eating plentiful food, hardly meeting other men. He was entirely sustained in a tranquil, dispassionate state by what Rousseau calls pity. This pity prevented him from harming other creatures or his fellow man. Only later, by a series of witless concessions of freedom, did mankind form families, cities, and states. Each step towards civilization further enslaved mankind.

But this makes of man a God, casting him in the form of entirely self-sufficient and undetermined rational agent. As James Kalb observes:

To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot know anything about God, but only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world. In short, you will say that we are God.^[26]

In Pierre Manent’s analysis, this is the dark myth lurking behind the progress of the democratic spirit: yearning for the pseudo-divine state of our ancestors.

What would sum up in the same or a like way our society and its extraordinary or paradoxical character of dis-society? It would be the notion of the state of nature . . . . How can we be interested in the individual in the state of nature as Rousseau describes, eating acorns and quenching his thirst at the first stream? The animal nonetheless interests us since ultimately this individual is each one of us: he is what we want to be. To put it in a nutshell, the state of nature is defined as a state of independence, liberty, and equality. We want to live independent, free, and equal. In this sense, the state of nature forms our horizon.^[27]

By seeking the ordering principle of society in the beginning, rather than in the end, the state of nature hypothesis inverts the traditional political order. For classical politics, it was not so much where man came from, or how he existed in an indeterminate past, but how he ought to be, and what he could be that mattered. Politics concerned itself about perfecting man’s nature by bringing it to some end. Under the new mythology of autonomous mechanism, man springs forth fully formed from the womb of nature, in need of nothing but safety and fuel to keep his machine going. Since man is born perfect, but unfortunately enslaved in society, modern politics strives to attain as much as possible for its citizens this original Edenic state of total autonomy. As a colleague put it, “Democracy is just the story of people trying to get as far away from each other as possible.”

In light of this analysis, it is clear that modernity, for all its vaunted idealism and its supposed autonomy from history or tradition, is built on hidden theocratic foundations; it merely proposes a new mythology in place of an old one. In Thaddeus Kozinski’s words:

It is not that modern liberal democracy has successfully desacralized politics, but rather has changed the locus of sacralization from cosmic order, divine law, and the Church, to the human person, the sacred freedom of individuals to choose their own sacred allegiances.^[28]

Catholics believe a story: the story about man’s original justice and original sin. The first moderns too believe a story: a new narrative of original justice, this time without original sin. In fact, the sin, in many cases, is precisely the entrance into society. Society itself becomes man’s original sin, the act that separates man from a mythical primeval state of innocence and integrity. For Catholics, man can be saved from his enslavement to sin, but only in the next life, and only if he follows the rule of divine and natural law. Modern politics too has a salvation narrative, but it is this-worldly: man can find “salvation” in the free satisfaction of all his (non-predatory) desires in the democratic state. Modern politics tries to guarantee its citizens as large a share of Original Autonomy as circumstances allow, with the ultimate goal of freeing men as entirely as possible.

In this new mythological account, democracy becomes an indispensible tool for the modern religion. All other forms of government in some way deprive individuals of autonomy, by privileging one class over another, or cleaving to accidental historical arrangements. This is why the first moderns worked hard to eradicate all obstacles to the ascent of democratic forms of government. In the French Revolution, for example, the monarchy, aristocracy, guilds, monasteries, in short all the traditional threads of the fabric of society were rent to make way for the novus ordo.

But the paradox of modern liberty is that man is not deified: he feels himself subsumed into a Leviathan. Since his own autonomous choice is his only claim to self-worth, he is faced with a paradox: either consent to association and lose autonomy, or refuse to consent to anything. As Manent argues:

The dilemma of modern liberty—the dilemma of modern liberty as experienced by the modern individual—could then be roughly formulated in the following way: Either I enter into a community, association, membership, and I transform myself into a part of a whole and lose my liberty, or I do not enter . . . and I do not exercise my freedom. In brief, this is the dilemma of modern liberty: either I am not free, or I am not free.^[29]

Man in modern democracy feels himself swallowed in the unrestrained motion of a majority devoid of a rational end. Government looms as the ambivalent referee of an orgy of blind desires, over a nation “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”^[30]

III. TAMING LEVIATHAN: Logos-oriented Democracy

If subsumed into such an anti-Logos modern religion, democracy cannot be reconciled in any way with the Catholic religion. Nevertheless, once these hidden religious foundations are exposed and repudiated, a Catholic is free to weigh democracy as one legitimate form among many others. The encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII clearly teach the conditions in which democracy is a possible form of government for the modern world.

Leo expressly affirms that democracy is a legitimate form of government: “Again, it is not of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of government, if only the Catholic doctrine be maintained as to the origin and exercise of power.”^[31] Under what conditions, then, would democracy be advantageous? I would argue that democracy is a form uniquely suited to the modern world, as long as it is not pure, and avoids the typical attitudes contrary to Catholic teaching. Leo suggests as much here:

Neither is it blameworthy in itself, in any manner, for the people to have a share, greater or less, in the government: for at certain times, and under certain laws, such participation may not only be of benefit to the citizens, but may even be of obligation.^[32]

To see how this might be so, we must turn to Tocqueville. In the introduction to his Democracy in America, Tocqueville argues convincingly that the tendency toward democracy is “the most continuous, the oldest, and the most permanent fact known in history.”^[33] As civilization increases prosperity,

all processes discovered, all needs that arise, all desires that demand satisfaction bring progress toward universal leveling . . . . When one runs through the pages of our history, one finds so to speak no great events in seven hundred years that have not turned to the profit of equality.^[34]

In light of this “providential fact,”^[35] the duty of those who direct modern society is “to instruct democracy,”^[36] not to oppose it. Unfortunately, because traditional society resisted democratic tendencies, democracy erupted by revolution,^[37] rather than after careful circumspection. I agree with this account, and believe that his trenchant comparison of aristocratic and democratic societies sheds light on several advantages of a democratic polity.

First, democratic society “will be less brilliant, less glorious, less strong, perhaps; but the majority of its citizens will enjoy a more prosperous lot.”^[38] Democracy does not have the glorious potential of aristocracy, but it does improve the lot of the common man.

Second, democracy can enliven the individual citizen by giving him political obligations. In his description of American townships, Tocqueville marvels at the energy of townsmen working for the common good together^[39] while remarking that the citizens of aristocratic countries often feels like a colonist in his own land, “indifferent to the destiny of the place that he inhabits.”^[40]

Nevertheless, while bringing democracy into a Catholic state, several dangers must be avoided. Tocqueville envisions a future society that:

regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to it without trouble; in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine and the love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment.^[41]

These observations point to the first difficulty in implementing democracy: the tendency it has to erode respect for authority. Frequent elections, for example, make people think authority does in fact reside in the general will, and does not make for stability and permanence in the legislative body. But this obstacle is not insurmountable, if it is balanced by a strong affirmation of the nature of authority: if the democratic state is ruled by a strong constitution that affirms authority’s origin in God, if it submits itself to the laws of his Church, provides for God’s public worship, and establishes the natural law as the foundation of all law.^[42] Oaths of office must include similar elements. Under such a system of laws, there need be no difficulty in assigning a large share of self-government to the people. Instructed by their laws and the virtuous examples of their leaders, they will seek to build up the kingdom of God by the exercise of their rights. Also, reverence that in aristocracy is attributed to the aristocrat and his family can be transferred to the offices and assemblies themselves. A House or an Executive authority, through a solid history of illustrious leaders, can still command the sort of reverence proper for a God-given authority.

Another difficulty endemic to democracy, even if it establishes respect for its ruling political authority, is the maintenance of the authority of tradition. Care must be taken that the whims of the people do not destroy the religious and cultural foundations of society. There is a democracy of the dead, whose will must be taken into account in elections. Monuments of culture, traditional practices and lore, must not be allowed to be neglected. Of course, there are democratic ways to protect these things: guilds, cultural societies, churches, all can work to maintain tradition as democracy is implemented. In answer to Molnar’s open question, we must affirm with Leo XIII that no society can remain robust without traditional religious foundations.

CONCLUSION

We have shown how democracy, as it exists within the ideological framework given to it by early modern thinkers, cannot be reconciled with Catholic principles. The classical and Catholic worldview holds that no social fabric can be woven without respecting the divine origin of authority and public profession of the true religion. Disengaged from a mechanistic mythology, democracy can be seen in its true light, as a form offering many benefits not found in more aristocratic regimes. Nevertheless, it is prone to self-will, improvidence, and contempt for authority, which must be combated with strong legal and cultural supports to tradition and religion. In the final analysis, the Leonine perspective on democracy can save modern man from the Leviathan, and help him return to the Logos.

NOTES

^[1] Edmund Waldstein, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” Lecture at the Bratislavske Hanusove Dni, Pistori Palace, Bratislava, 25^th April, 2014, 1.

^[2] Ibid., 3.

^[3] Ibid., 3.

^[4] Ibid., 3.

^[5] Ibid., 4.

^[6] Nichomachean Ethics 1094b, emphasis added.

^[7] Waldstein, 4.

^[8] Ibid., 4.

^[9] Ibid., 5.

^[10] Ibid., 5.

^[11] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Au Milieu des Sollicitudes (1892), 14.

^[12] Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Diuturnum Illud (1881), 7.

^[13] Ibid., 8

^[14] Ibid., 11.

^[15] Ibid., 6.

^[16] Leo XII, Immortale Dei (1885), 6.

^[17] See, for example, Immortale Dei, 32: “A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated.”

^[18] Concerning humanism, it is important to note that it began as a deeply Catholic movement. Its unofficial manifesto, Mirandola’s De Hominis Dignitate could seem an idolization of human will. But for Pico, man’s perfection is still deeply connected with God and grace.

^[19] Waldstein, 7-8.

^[20] For more on Locke, see “Lock’s Doctrine of Toleration: A Contract with Nothingness” on this site.

^[21] Michael Hanby, “The Civic Project of American Christianity,” on First Things, Feb. 2015. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity

^[22] It is also ripe for exploitation. Man is no longer the steward of the nature-garden, but a reaper whose powers give him unrestricted domination over the other machines.

^[23] E.g., “For when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. For that which acts any being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it begin necessary to that which is one body to more one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body…” (John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, ed. Tom Crawford [New York: Dover Publications, 2002], 44.)

^[24] Of course he gives lip service to the natural and divine laws, but just as he invokes these laws he limits them explicitly to practical measures ensuring preservation.

^[25] There is no difficulty in the myth coming to light after its philosophical and political expressions. Some orthodox Biblical scholars explain the composition of the Genesis myth by later Hebrew prophets as a process of self-reflection projected back in history: “Because the human author was contemplating an object designed to reflect creation, and because he had a supernatural gift of insight into this object, he was able to offer an account of creation based on his reflections about Israel’s history—he gazed into Israel’s institutions and history and there saw mankind’s beginnings.”(Jeremy Holmes, Genesis 1-11 and Science, in SCI 402 Reading Packet, 84) We imagine Rousseau did the same for modernity.

^[26] James Kalb, quoted in Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013), 229.

^[27] Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics?: A Defense of the Nation State (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2006), 137.

^[28] Private manuscript

^[29] Manent, 119.

^[30] From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

^[31] Libertas Praestantissimum, 44

^[32] Immortale Dei, 36.

^[33] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.

^[34] Ibid., 5.

^[35] Ibid., 6.

^[36] “To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.” (7)

^[37] “Democracy has therefore been abandoned to its savage instincts; it has grown up like those children who, deprived of paternal care, rear themselves in the streets of our towns and know only society’s vices and miseries.” (7)

^[38] Ibid., 9.

^[39] “The inhabitant applies himself to each of the interests of his country as to his very own. He is glorified in the glory of the nation; in the success that it obtains he believes he recognizes his own work, and he is uplifted by it; he rejoices in the general prosperity from which he profits (90).”

^[40] Ibid., 91.

^[41] Ibid., 9.

^[42] As in the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, so rudely violated of late.

 The following essay rounds out our series on the question of political legitimacy, taking up the question from a somewhat different angle, with the guidance of St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas. —The Editors

The Josias’s ongoing symposium regarding legitimacy has raised several interesting questions about the legitimacy of modern states. One point that has come up repeatedly in the various contributions is whether a Catholic ought to obey an illegitimate government.^[1] In discussing this question, Daniel Lendman has assumed that the illegitimate state is necessarily at variance with the divine will.^[2] For our part, we shall show that, to the contrary, the illegitimate state may be an expression of the divine will as a chastisement sent by God to a sinful people. We suggest, therefore, that the Catholic should consider this point when examining his relationship to an illegitimate government.

Aquinas addresses this very question in his discourse upon the thirteenth chapter of Romans, in which Paul says:

Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience’ sake. For therefore also you pay tribute. For they are the ministers of God, serving unto this purpose.^[3]

Paul is speaking of the pagan Roman emperors and the obligations of the Christians in Rome to those emperors. Paul’s teaching here sits alongside earlier Scriptural teaching regarding rulers^[4], including the words of the Lord in St. John’s Gospel: “Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it were given thee from above. Therefore, he that hath delivered me to thee, hath the greater sin.”^[5]

Aquinas begins by noting that Paul is responding to the belief in the early Church that the freedom granted by Christ included freedom from temporal powers.^[6] Paul responds that every soul is subject to higher powers—that is, temporal rulers^[7]—because those powers are established by God. Aquinas demonstrates this point elegantly:

For whatever is said in common of God and creatures, comes to creatures from God, as in the case of wisdom: all wisdom comes from God (Sir 1:1). But power is said of God and of men: God does not abandon the powers, since he is powerful (Job 35:5). Hence, it follows that all human power is from God . . . . ^[8]

Aquinas next shows that the order of ruler and ruled is implicit in the power God gives to temporal rulers. He argues,

God made all things through his wisdom, for it says in a psalm: in wisdom have you made all (Ps 104:24). But it is the function of wisdom to dispose things in order . . . For if the power of rulers is from God and nothing is from God without order, it follows that the order whereby the lower are subjected to the higher powers is from God.^[9]

This is a crucial point: if a ruler has power from God, then virtue demands that the ruled obey him. “And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.”^[10]

Aquinas explains how the resistors “purchase to themselves damnation.” First, those who resist authority that they should obey incur punishment from God (i.e., eternal damnation), as Dathan and Abiron did when they resisted Moses and Aaron.^[11] Second, those who resist authority also incur punishments imposed by the temporal authorities themselves.^[12] However, Aquinas notes that, “against this is the fact that the apostles and martyrs seem to have resisted rulers and authorities and did not receive damnation from God as a result but rather a reward.”^[13] He resolves the apparent contradiction easily,

The answer is that the Apostle is now speaking of one who resists a lower power as established by God. But the divine order requires that a lower power not be obeyed in opposition to a higher one, as even in human affairs a governor is not obeyed against an emperor, nor a bailiff against a king. And every human power is set under the divine power, so that no human power should be obeyed against God, as it says in Acts: we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).^[14]

Having shown that resistance of the temporal powers brings both eternal and temporal damnation upon the resistor, Aquinas turns to the statement,

For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.^[15]

He connects the first part of this statement with the very purpose for having rulers, which is to create the fear of punishment that is the only thing that governs some individuals.^[16] This part also supports Aquinas’s statement earlier that those who resist authority incur damnation, for, if rulers punish bad conduct and one is punished, then one is acting badly.^[17] The key to avoiding punishment (and obtaining rewards) from a ruler is simply to do what is good.^[18] Aquinas shows, too, that this principle applies to wicked rulers, arguing that wicked rulers are also a terror to bad acts.^[19] He even goes so far as to say that wicked rulers will produce good results for the just, even if the just are oppressed.^[20]

Aquinas turns to the second part: “For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.”^[21] He explains this directly:

This is clear in regard to the proper order of rulers. For they are under the authority of God, the supreme ruler, as his ministers: because as ministers of his kingdom, you did not rule rightly (Wis 6:4). But the ruler and the magistrates work for the same end: like the magistrate of the people, so are his officials (Sir 10:2). Therefore, just as God works for the good of those who do good, so also do rulers, if they perform their office rightly.^[22]

In other words, because God works for the good of those who do good, so too do rulers, who are ministers of God in their rule.

Now, coming to our point, Aquinas says,

Furthermore, even wicked rulers are God’s minister for inflicting punishments according to God’s plan; although this is not their intention: ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury . . . but he does not so intend (Isa 10:5). Behold I will send, and take all the kindreds of the north, says the Lord, and Nabuchodonosor the king of Babylon my servant: and I will bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all the nations that are round about it (Jer 25:9). And also because such wicked rulers sometimes afflict good men, God permitting, who profit thereby; for we know that everything God works for the good with those who love him (Rom 8:28).^[23]

One can understand this argument in the light of the previous point. God works for the good of those who do good, and he may do so through his ministers. Likewise, God punishes those who do wicked things, and he may do this through his ministers, too. However, the ruler need not understand that he is one of God’s ministers. He may think that he is acting for his own ends or according to his own design.

Lendman has argued that “Authority, therefore, is only possessed when one adheres to the eternal law as expressed by the natural law. Violation of the natural law, therefore, shows that one has forsaken one’s source of authority and that, consequently, one has no authority at all.”^[24] We now see that this is not correct: God may give authority to a tyrant in order to punish a sinful nation just as he gave authority to the Assyrians to punish Israel.^[25] God sends punishments not for the sake of punishment, but to spur the people to repentance and reconciliation. Gregory the Great explains, “For we are become at variance with God by sin.  Therefore it is meet that we should be brought back to peace with Him by the scourge, that whereas every being created good turns to pain for us, the mind of the chastened man may be renewed in a humbled state to peace with the Creator.”^[26] In other words, God sends a wicked nation a tyrant so that the nation might repent of its sins and be reconciled to God.^[27]

Furthermore, Lendman suggests strongly that once a government loses legitimacy, its citizens are no longer subject to it, or, at the very least, ought to treat its decrees with contempt. (Which is essentially saying the same thing.) However, when a tyrant has been sent by God as a chastisement, its citizens are still subject to it. We have seen that “the order whereby the lower are subjected to the higher powers”^[28] is implicit in the very power of rulers. Thus, if God has sent a tyrant to chastise a sinful people, the divine order holds that the citizens are subject to the tyrant. Aquinas calls rebellion against this order contrary to virtue.^[29]

One might object at this point, however, that this means that a Catholic is bound to obey a tyrant even to the point of violating the divine law. An Irish citizen might be required, one might say, to acknowledge, one way or another, one of the new same-sex “marriages.” This is not the case. Aquinas, citing the example of the martyrs, reminds us that we must obey God rather than men.^[30] When the tyrant’s decrees are opposed to the divine law, the Catholic obeys God as against the tyrant as one obeys an emperor as against a governor.^[31] But this does not mean that the governor has no authority whatsoever: he simply has less authority than the emperor. Furthermore, Aquinas also reminds us that God works all things, even tyranny, to the benefit of the just.^[32] In particular, Aquinas notes that those who patiently suffer persecution win praise.^[33]

The tyrant as a chastisement sent from God demonstrates clearly the difficulty in linking legitimacy with authority. A tyrant certainly does not pursue the common good and is, therefore, illegitimate. However, a tyrant may well have authority from God because God wills to punish a sinful nation through the tyrant. The Catholic, therefore, should not necessarily assume that the illegitimate government is completely without authority because it no longer pursues the common good.

The Catholic, instead, should consider very seriously the state of his nation and whether it is possible that God has sent the tyrant as a chastisement to the nation. Lendman discusses the United States and the apparently forthcoming legalization of same-sex “marriage”. It is apparent that large numbers of Americans support any number of objectively gravely sinful acts, ranging from abortion to no-fault divorce to same-sex “marriage.” Worse than that, many of these citizens view those acts as fundamental rights, implicit in the United States Constitution. (There are, of course, many serious sins championed by the political right, though those sins are harder to summarize in a word.) Is it beyond belief that God would send such a country a tyrant to spur it to repentance? Of course not.

NOTES

^[1] We accept Aquinas’s definition of a tyrant: a ruler who pursues his own good over the common good. De regno [“DR”], lib. 1, cap. 4, at ¶ 22. (Note that the paragraph numbers given for the De regno are the ones found in the online edition maintained by the Dominican House of Studies.) In our view, illegitimacy and tyranny are the same thing.

^[2] D. Lendman, A Note on the Legitimacy of Governments, The Josias (May 11, 2015).

^[3] Rom. 13:1–6.

^[4] E.g., Prov. 8:15–16; Dan. 2:21; Sir. 10:4.

^[5] Jn. 19:11.

^[6] Super Epistola ad Romanos [“SR”], C.13, L.1, at 1017. (Note that the section numbers given for the Super Epistola ad Romanos are the ones found in the recent Aquinas Institute edition.)

^[7] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1017–18.

^[8] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1021. [Quicquid enim communiter de Deo et creaturis dicitur, a Deo in creaturas derivatur, sicut patet de sapientia, Eccli. I, 1: omnis sapientia a Domino Deo est. Potestas autem de Deo et de hominibus dicitur. Iob c. XXXVI, 5: Deus potestates non abiicit, cum ipse sit potens. Unde consequens est, quod omnis humana potestas sit a Deo.] (When given, the English translation of SR is Father Larcher’s translation, as revised by Matthew Holmes and published by the Aquinas Institute.)

^[9] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1024–25 [Deus omnia per suam sapientiam fecit, secundum illud Ps. CIII, 24: omnia in sapientia fecisti. Est autem proprium sapientiae ordinate omnia disponere . . . Si enim potestas principum, inquantum talis est, a Deo est, et nihil est a Deo sine ordine, consequens est, quod etiam ordo, quo inferiores potestatibus superioribus subiiciunutur, sit a Deo].

^[10] Rom. 13:2.

^[11] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1027.

^[12] Id.

^[13] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1028 [Sed contra hoc videtur esse quod apostoli et martyres principibus et potestatibus restiterunt et ex hoc non damnationem a Deo sed praemium acquisiverunt.”]

^[14] Id. [Sed dicendum est ex quod Apostolus hic loquitur de eo qui resistit potestati inferiori, secundum quod a Deo ordinata. Habet autem hoc divina ordinatio ut potestati inferiori non obediatur contra superiorem, sicut etiam in rebus humanis ut proconsuli non obediatur contra imperatorem, nec balivo contra regem. Et omnis potestas humana sub potestate Dei ordinatur et nulli potestati humanae est contra Deum obediendum, secundum illud Act. V, 29: oportet obedire magis Deo quam hominibus.]

^[15] Rom. 13:3–4.

^[16] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1030.

^[17] Id.

^[18] Rom. 13:3; SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1032–33.

^[19] Id.

^[20] Id.

^[21] Rom. 13:4–5.

^[22] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1034. [Quod quidem manifeste patet, quantum ad debitum ordinem principem. Sunt enim sub regimine Dei, quasi supremi principis, tamquam ministri ordinati. Sap. VI, 3: cum essetis ministri regis illius, et cetera. Ad idem autem tendit minister et dominus. Eccli. X, 2: secundum iudicem populi, sic et ministri eius. Et ideo sicut Deus operatur in bonum his qui bonum agunt, ita et principes si recte ministerium suum impleant.]

^[23] SR, cap. 13, lect.1, at 1034. [Sed et mali principes ministri Dei sunt, secundum ordinationem Dei ad inferendas poenas, licet hoc sit praeter intentum eorum; secundum illud Is. X, 5: assur virga furoris mei, et baculus ipse in manu mea est. Ipse autem non sic arbitrabitur. Et Ier. XXV, 9: assumam universam cognationem Aquilonis, et Nabuchodonosor regem Babylonis servum meum, et adducam eos super terram istam, et super habitatores eius, et cetera. Et quia tales mali principes, interdum, Deo permittente, bonos affligunt, quod in bonum eorum cedit, secundum illud supra VIII, 28: diligentibus Deum, et cetera.] See also DR, lib. 1, cap. 7, at 52.

^[24] Lendman, supra.

^[25] Is. 10:5.

^[26] Moralia in Job, lib. 3, no. 15 [Per culpam quippe Deo discordes exstitimus; dignum ergo est ut ad pacem illius per flagella redeamus; ut cum unaquaeque res bene condita nobis in dolorem vertitur, correcti mens ad auctoris pacem humiliter reformetur.] (The translation given in the text is the John Henry Parker translation.)

^[27] See also Is. 10:20–21.

^[28] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1025.

^[29] Id.

^[30] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1028.

^[31] Id.

^[32] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1034.

^[33] SR, cap. 13, lect. 1, at 1033 [Verificatur hoc etiam de malis principibus, quorum iniustam persecutionem, dum boni patienter sustinent, laudantur. Iac. V, 11: ecce beatificamus eos qui sustinuerunt.]

In the second half of the 20^th century a shift took place in much Catholic social and political thought. Catholic social teaching in the ‘Pian Age’ had called for an integrally Christian society, a restoration of a pre-modern ideal of political community, which saw in political community the ‘likeness and symbol as it were of the Divine Majesty’ (Sapientiae Christianae, 9), a likeness which was itself to be subject to the social kingship of Christ. But then the focus shifted toward the duty of the political power to respect the inalienable dignity of individual persons. As Russell Hittinger has pointed out, the idea of seeing the likeness of God in political authority was practically abandoned, and instead much emphasis was put on the likeness of God in the individual person. In our view this shift was highly imprudent, and its effects have been mostly pernicious. It has led to an exaggerated value being put on individual freedom of conscience, and in many cases to a policy of appeasement toward liberal ideology. The promoters of this new approach to social questions thought that it would aid in the re-evangelization of culture, but most of the evidence suggests that they were wrong. As Christian Roy has argued, a ‘Weberian paradox of the heterogeneity of the spiritual intentions and social effects of religious reform movements’ took place, in which ‘progressive Christian personalism’ ‘unwittingly helped usher in’ a ‘drift towards hedonistic secular individualism.’

This ‘personalist’ shift, as we can call it, is often attributed to Vatican II (or even Centesimus Annus), but it began earlier as a response to the horrors of World War II. Jacques Maritain was a key figure in the early phase of the shift. Having been in favor of authoritarian restorationism early on he came to support a form of modified democratic liberalism. He wanted to find a third way between totalitarianism and individualistic liberalism. He thought he could find it by distinguishing between man as an individual, who is a part of the polity and ordered to it, and man as a person, who transcends political community through his direct relation to God.

Some Thomists saw danger in Maritain’s position. They argued that far from finding a third way between totalitarianism and individualism such a position really adopted their common error of seeing the common good as being opposed to the proper good of individuals. Personalism was thus really reducible to individualism. Moreover, taken to its logical conclusions, the position would yield an absurd and blasphemous notion of human dignity. The most famous of these Thomist critiques was Charles De Koninck’s masterful treatise On the Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists. De Koninck did not explicitly refer to Maritain, but his work was generally taken to be directed against Maritain and Maritain’s followers.

The text that we offer below is from another philosopher working in Quebec, Henri Grenier (Thomistic Philosophy, Vol 3: Moral Philosophy, pp. 363-373), and it offers a critique of personalism remarkably similar to De Koninck’s. It is likely that Grenier influenced De Koninck, since the substance of Grenier’s remark appeared already in a 1938 edition of his manual, that is, one published several years before De Koninck’s book. Like De Koninck, Grenier never gives the names of the ‘personalists,’ but it is even clearer in Grenier’s case than in De Koninck’s that Maritain is the target. Grenier’s summary of the personalist distinction between person and individual in 1091:3° is almost a quotation from Maritain. — The Editors

1090. Statement of the question.

1° The problem of the relations which unite individual persons and families to civil society is of utmost importance, for today there are many theories which do not recognize the natural rights of the individual person and of the family, and which regard the State as omnipotent and as possessing all rights over persons and families.

2° The problem has three aspects, which may be stated as follows:

First, admitting that civil society has a proper end which is a good, we may ask: have the individual person and the family, both of which live in society, proper ends distinct from the end of civil society?

Secondly, if they have proper ends, are these ends directed to the end of civil society, or vice versa?

Thirdly, if the ends of the individual person and of the famliy are directed to the end of civil society, is it their absolutely ultimate end?

3° In the thesis, first, we state that the individual person and the family have, according to the ordinance of nature, their own proper ends, distinct from the end of civil society. Moreover, since the order, i.e., the ordinance, of nature is the ordinance of God Himself, the author of nature, civil society may not disavow them, nor place any obstacle in the way of their attainment.

Secondly, we state the proper ends of the individual person and of the family are directed to the end of civil society, not vice versa. Moreover, since this order or relation of ends obtains in society, it is directly concerned with external acts by which men work for the common good, although indirectly it can be concerned with internal acts, in as much as the latter can regulate external acts.

Thirdly, we assert that the end of civil society is not the absolutely ultimate end to which the ends of the individual person and of the family are directed.

1091. Opinions.— There are various opinions on the relations of the individual person and the family to civil society.

1° All who conceive civil society as an organism, in the strict sense of the term, i.e., as an entity possessing absolute unity, not merely unity of order, do not admit that the individual person and the family have proper ends which are distinct from the end of civil society. For a part of a whole which is an absolute unit, v.g., a hand, which is a part of man, has no operation which is not the operation of the whole, and therefore has no end which is not the end of the whole.

Such was the teaching of Plato, who conceived society as a superior man.

The same conclusion is reached by the Caesarists, with Machiavelli, who proclaim the omnipotence of the State; by the Democrats, with Rousseau, who conceive the general will as the source of all rights, even of private rights; by the Pantheists, with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; and by the Socialists, with Bebel, Wagner, and others.

2° All Pantheists and Naturalists hold that the end of civil society is man’s absolutely ultimate end.

According to the exponents of these opinions, individual men are dependent on the State for everything, because all their rights are derived solely from the concessions of the State.

A summary of these errors is found in the thirty-ninth sentence of the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX: Reipublicae status, utpote omnium jurium origo et fons, jure quodam pollet nullis circumscripto limitibus.

3° Today, some Catholics teach that it is not as a person, i.e., as formally an individual substance of a rational nature, but as an individual, i.e., as multiplied in the same species, that man is subordinate to the end of civil society; for man, they say, is subordinate to the end of civil society, because he is related to civil society as the part to the whole ; but man is not a part of a whole, v.g., of the human species, because of his personality, but because of his individuation by which he is multiplied in the same species.

But this opinion appears untenable, because society is essentially a union of persons, i.e., of intelligible beings. If this were not so, a union of individual horses, or cows, or bears, etc., would be a society.

1092. Statement of the thesis.
      THESIS.— THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON AND THE FAMILY IN CIVIL SOCIETY HAVE, ACCORDING TO THE ORDINANCE OF NATURE, THEIR OWN PROPER ENDS; AND THESE ENDS ARE DIRECTED TO THE END OF CIVIL SOCIETY, BUT NOT UNDER THE ASPECT OF THE ABSOLUTELY ULTIMATE END.

First part.— The individual person and the family have according to the ordinance of nature, their own proper ends.— The parts of a whole which have operations distinct from the operations of the whole have, according to the ordinance of nature, ends which are not the ends of the whole, i.e., have their own proper ends. But the individual person and the family are in civil society as the parts of a whole, and have operations which are not the operations of the whole. Therefore the individual and the family in civil society have, according to the ordinance of nature, their own proper ends.

Major.— Operation is an end in itself, or tends to a proper end. Therefore, when operations are distinct, ends also are distinct.

Minor.— The parts of a whole which has only unity of order have operations which are not the operations of the whole; v.g., a soldier in an army has operations which are not the operations of the whole army.[1] But civil society, of which the individual person and the family are parts, is a whole which has only unity of order: society is a stable union of a plurality of persons in pursuit of a common good. Therefore.

Second part.— The proper ends of the individual person and of the family are directed to the end of civil society.— The individual person and the family are to civil society as the parts to the whole: the individual person and the family are the natural parts from which the whole which is civil society results. But the ends of the parts are directed to the end of the whole. Therefore the proper ends of the individual and of the family are directed to the end of civil society.

The major is evident, for civil society is composed of individual persons and of families.

The minor also is evident: the good of the part, as a part, is necessarily directed the good of the whole.[2]

Third part.— The proper ends of the individual person and of the family are not directed to the end of civil society under the aspect of the absolutely ultimate end.— The end of civil society is the temporal happiness of this life. But the temporal happiness of this life is not man’s absolutely ultimate end. Therefore the end of civil society is not the absolutely ultimate end of the individual person and of the family, i.e., the proper ends of the individual person and of the family are not directed to the end of civil society under the aspect of the absolutely ultimate end.

The major is evident from what has been already said.

Minor.— Man’s absolutely ultimate end is the beatific vision, for which man is supernaturally elevated in accordance with the positive ordinance of God.[3]

1093. Scholia.

1° The civil authority, or the State, as it is called, has no right to refuse recognition to the proper ends determined by nature for the individual person and for the family, nor has it any right to limit them. On the contrary, the civil authority is in duty bound to aid the individual person and the family in the attainment of their proper ends, for these ends, as directed to the common good of society, lead to that temporal happiness which is the end of civil society.

2° The virtue by which the good of the individual person and of the family is directed to the end of civil society is legal justice.

In virtue of legal justice, citizens are mutually dependent on one another in regard to their end. Moderns call this mutual dependence solidarism, which, according to them, is divided into human political, family, and class solidarism.

In dealing with this division, two things must be kept in mind: first, up to the present, humanity is not constituted as a society; secondly, solidarism is not applied univocally to the different kinds of society.

Solidarism, in the strict sense, is found only in civil society, for civil society is the only society whose end is a good which, in the order of nature, is a perfect human good; and therefore only in it is realized, in the strict sense, legal justice by which man is wholly directed to the common good.

In other particular societies, there obtains between the members and the whole a relation only similar to the relation of legal justice, because the good which they pursue is not a perfect good, but rather an imperfect good. Therefore it is only by analogy that solidarism is found in them.

3° Although individual man is destined for civil society, society is for man, and not vice versa,[4] because its proper and immediate end is the temporal happiness of this life, which is the good of man. The temporal happiness of this life is directly the common good of the whole multitude, although, as a consequence, it becomes the good of individual men who appropriate it to themselves.

4° Society, under its formal aspect as a union, may be called the means by which man attains the temporal happiness of this life.[5] Society, however, considered as the union of all the members of the multitude for the pursuit of the common good, is not the means, but the cause by which individual man can attain the temporal happiness of this life: for the united members of the whole multitude are the cause of that happiness which individual men later appropriate to themselves.

5° According to Pius XI,[6] the following are the principal goods or rights with which God, the author of nature, has endowed individual man living in society: the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to whatever is necessary for life; the right to pursue his ultimate end in the manner determined for him by God; the rights of association and of the private ownership and use of property.

The proper ends of the family are the procreation and education of offspring, the mutual aid of the spouses, and the allaying of concupiscence. Hence the family, in accordance with the ordinance of nature, has the right to all things necessary for the attainment of these ends, as are the indissolubility and unity of marriage, its own authority and power of determining the means to attain its ends, without violation, however, of its subordination to civil society.

1094. Personalism.

1° Personalism is the teaching of those who, in order to safeguard the dignity of the human person, hold that the end of man, as a person, is superior to the end of civil society. Hence personalism denies that the proper ends of individual man are, as we have shown, directed to the end of civil society.

2° All Catholic philosophers hold that the supernatural end of the human person is not subordinate to the end of civil society. The problem with which we are concerned at present is the relation between the ends of the individual person and the end of civil society, in the natural order only.

3° Personalism holds that man may be considered either as an individual or as a person.

Man, considered as an individual, is, according to personalism, a part of civil society, and is related to it as the part to the whole.

But man, considered as a person, is superior to civil society, and is not related to it as the part to the whole. Therefore the ends of the individual man, in as much as the individual man is a person, i.e., has the dignity of a person, are not subordinate to the end of civil society.

Hence personalism may be defined: the doctrine of those who hold that the ends of the individual man, in as much as the individual man has the dignity of a person, are not subordinate, in the natural order, to the end of civil society, but vice versa.

4° In refutation of personalism, we may make the following observations.

a) The distinction which the personalists make between the individual and the person is of no value in the present question.

For the individual, considered as distinct from nature, can mean only one of two things: either a singular nature without subsistence; or a subsisting supposit in general,[7] not a supposit subsisting in a rational nature.

If the individual signifies a singular nature without subsistence, it is wrong to say that man, as an individual, is a part of civil society. For society is a stable union of men in the order of operation, and, moreover, operations are proper to the supposit, i.e., to the subsisting being, not to nature without subsistence.

If the individual means a supposit in general, it is again wrong to say that man, as an individual, is a part of civil society, for otherwise, as we have already pointed out, a union of irrational animals would be a society. The individual man is formally a part of civil society in as much as he is endowed with an intellect, i.e., as he is a person.

b) The end of civil society is the greatest of all human goods. Hence the subordination of the individual person to civil society, as the part to the whole, is not at variance with the dignity of the human person, but is a subordination of the human person to the human person’s greatest natural good, i.e., to the temporal happiness of this life.

c) Personalism is a form of individualism, because it makes the common good subordinate to the good of the individual person.

1095. Difficulties offered by personalism.

1° Man is related to civil society as the part to the whole. But man is not a part of a whole as a person, but as an individual: for the principle by which man is multiplied in the same species is not personality, but the principle of individuation. Therefore man is not a part of civil society as a person, but as an individual, i.e., it is as an individual that man is subordinate to society. (So teach the Personalists.)

Major.— As the part to the whole in the order of being, I deny; in the order of operation, I concede.

Minor.— It is not as a person, but as an individual, that man is a part of a whole in the order of being, I concede; in that order of operation which constitutes society, I deny.

Society, as we have seen, is not a union of a plurality in the order of being, but in the order of operation, for society is a union of men for the pursuit of a common good; and, since operation is proper to the supposit, it is formally as a person that man is a part of society, and therefore it is as a person, not as an individual, than man is subordinate to the end of society.

The principle of individuation, i.e., first matter signed by quantity, is the principle by which man is multiplied in a whole, that is to say, in the same species, in the order of being.

2° If the person is immediately destined for God, man as a person is not destined for society. But man is immediately destined for God.[8] Therefore man as a person is not destined for society. (So claim the Personalists).

Major.— If the person is immediately destined for God, is as much as he, as living in society, does not attain God, I concede; in as much as the person is not destined for another creature, as the irrational animal is destined for man, I deny.

Minor.— In as much as he, as living in society, does not attain God, I deny; in as much as he is not destined for another creature, as the irrational animal is destined for man, I concede.

3° If as a person man were destined for ciyil society, all that he is and all that he possesses would be destined for civil society. But all that man is and all that he possesses are not destined for civil society.[9] Therefore man, as a person, is not destined for civil society.

Major.— All that man is and all he possesses would be destined for society if the end of civil society were the absolutely ultimate end of human acts, I concede; if the end of civil society is ultimate only in its own order, in as much as it is the greatest of all human goods, I deny.

Minor.— Because the end of civil society is not the absolutely ultimate end of human acts, I concede; because man, as an individual person, is not destined for civil society, as the part to the whole, I deny.

The absolutely ultimate end of human acts is a divine good, i.e., the beatific vision; and the end of civil society, which is temporal happiness, is the ultimate end of human acts only in the order of human goods. Hence the end of civil society itself must be destined for a divine good. Hence all that man is and all that he possesses are not destined for civil society, but for a higher good.

4° That which has substantial unity is superior to that which has only accidental unity. But the individual person has substantial unity, whereas civil society has only accidental unity, i.e., unity of order. Therefore the individual person is superior to civil society, and is not related to it as the part to the whole.

Major.— As a being, I concede; as a good, I deny.

Minor.— The private good of the individual person is superior to the common good, I deny; is inferior, I concede.

Goodness and being, though identical in reality, are logically distinct, i.e., distinct by a distinction of reason; and, moreover, absolute being in not absolute goodness, whereas absolute, goodness is relative being (n. 533). Therefore the common good of persons united in society is greater than the private good of the individual person.

NOTES

[1] In Ethic. l. I, l. 1, n. 5

[2] I-II, q. 109, a. 3, c.

[3] Cf. In Politic., l. VII, 1. 2.

[4] Divini Redemptoris, n. 29.

[5] Ibidem.

[6] Ibid, n. 28.

[7] Et dico superfluum non solum respectu sui ipsius, quod est supra id quod est necessarium individuo, sed etiam respectu aliorum quorum cura ei incumbit; respectu quorum dicitur necessarium personae, secundum quod persona dignitatem importat.— II-II, q. 32, a. 5, c.

[8] Sola autem natura rationalis creata habet immediatum ordinem ad Deum; quia caetera creaturae non attingunt ad aliquid universale, sed solum ad aliquid particulare, participantes divinam bonitatem vel in essendo tantum, sicut inanimata, vel etiam in vivendo et cognoscendo singularia, sicut plantae et animalia. Natura autem rationalis, inquantum cognoscit universalem boni et entis rationem, habet immediatum ordinem ad universale essendi principium.— II-II, q. 2, a. 3.

[9] I-II, q. 21, a. 4, ad 3.