One hears much today about the Anglo-American conservative tradition, consisting of such nice, liberty-loving men as Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and Joseph Story. There are any number of other names that are enrolled—enshrined, even—among the heroes of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. It is not uncommon to read people waxing very tender about the common law and all the innovations of the common-law courts. Prose poems to limited government, due process, and liberty are thick on the ground. 

At The American Mind, for example, some of the leading lights of the conservative movement have turned to the Anglo-American conservative (legal) tradition to answer Adrian Vermeule’s “common-good conservatism” argument from The Atlantic. Vermeule wishes to jettison originalism in favor of a robust judicial and legislative approach ordered to the common-good. One would have thought that Catholics would acknowledge Vermeule’s approach as just about the only approach on offer. Indeed, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, which might fairly be called the Church’s great approach to modernity, calls for the state to seek the common good and total well-being of its citizens (nos. 74–75). One would be sorely disappointed in that expectation, though. This leads to endless, unedifying recitations of all the old chestnuts about the Anglo-American tradition. 

But the Anglo-American tradition, one surmises from all these interventions, is no older than 1687 or so, except for occasional fragments of earlier times. One might hear about Magna Carta or the Habeas Corpus Act 1679 (31 Car. II c. 2). One might, if one listens closely, hear whispered the names of Bracton or Coke. But for the most part, history begins in 1687. However, to begin the Anglo-American tradition on the cusp of the so-called Glorious Revolution is to do violence to the tradition. One example of this tradition, which leaps off the page and offers a rebuttal to Vermeule, is the long history of common law and the statutory punishment of heresy in England. These laws, which have a surprising source, spanned Catholic and protestant reigns. 

The punishment of heresy is a significant component of the English tradition and part of the Anglo-American tradition. Vermeule’s critics seem, therefore, to be missing a golden opportunity to meet Vermeule on his own turf. He calls for common-good conservatism: a strong president assisted by strong administrative organs and a compliant judiciary ordering the state to the common good in accordance with Catholic doctrine and right reason. A deep understanding of Anglo-American tradition, rooted in the lived laws and customs of England and the United States, demonstrates conclusively that the government already has the sort of power Vermeule seeks—and more. Why not answer Vermeule by reminding him of the English tradition of burning? This common-law tradition, which spanned centuries, made its way into American common law. One need not jettison the jurisprudential achievements of the 1970s and 1980s for the state to have the sort of power Vermeule seeks. To recover the whole Anglo-American tradition, therefore, is to find the perfect answer to Vermeule.

The tradition begins in some sense with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen emperor, who promulgated decrees against heresy. Known by their incipits, Commissi and Inconsutilem (MGH Legum II, ed. Pertz, pp. 288, 327), Frederick’s decrees are part of a tradition of imperial legislation against heretics. For example, Justinian’s Codex begins with a long decree about orthodoxy and heresy (1.1). Frederick’s decrees, however, are marked by their salutary severity, imposing the death sentence upon heretics. This is one of history’s ironies, considering that Innocent IV, at the Council of Lyons, deposed Frederick for, among many complaints about Frederick’s personal conduct and public administration, the crime of heresy. Of course, the laws themselves were not tainted by their association with the infamous Hohenstaufen. Following Frederick’s death, Boniface VIII ratified these constitutions specifically with the decretal Ut inquisitionis negotium (c.18 in Sexto 5, 2). 

As an aside, Frederick II’s value as an integralist model becomes clearer in this context. Indeed, it is necessary to consider Frederick in the same breath as St. Louis IX, recently the subject of Andrew Willard Jones’s (mostly) excellent Before Church and State. Whatever happened later, Boniface’s approbation demonstrates clearly that, when Frederick promulgated Commissi and Inconsutilem, he was acting in a manner congenial to the Roman Church. More than that, he was acting in a manner that the pope felt all rulers in the west should emulate. One can deplore Frederick’s disagreements with Innocent III, Gregory IX, and Innocent IV while still admiring the actions he took that later met with the Church’s approval. Simply pointing to the ultimate dispute between Frederick and Innocent IV is inconsistent with the Church’s actual attitude toward the great Hohenstaufen. 

Frederick’s decrees, of course, were imperial legislation, not applicable in other realms of their own force. However, Bishop William Lyndwood, the eminent English canonist, held that Boniface VIII’s decretal made them part of the common law of the west. In his Provinciale, as Maitland and Pollock have noted, Lyndwood had to answer the question why heretics were burned in England. Lyndwood found the answer in Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s January 1408 constitution Reverendissimae, in the phrase “poenas in jure expressas” of the first chapter, Quod nullus. Expanding upon the phrase, Lyndwood pointed to the decretal Ut inquisitionis negotium and the constitutions Commissi and Inconsutilem. In other words, the punishments found in the law, according to Lyndwood, were the imperial punishments endorsed by Boniface VIII. 

From our vantage point, this is an amazing argument. By means of the canon law, Pope Boniface VIII made Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s constitutions Commissi and Inconsutilem binding in England, so that Archbishop Arundel could simply allude to them in his constitution Reverendissimae. To put it another way, the Pope inserted into English common law the decrees of the Holy Roman Emperor. 

Today, it is a hopeless, thankless task to get anyone to read Pope St. John Paul II’s canons 1311 and 1312, stating the Church’s right to coerce the faithful even in terms of temporalities, much less John Paul’s assertion in his constitution Sacrae disciplinae leges that the 1983 Code, which presumably includes canons 1311 and 1312, presents the true ecclesiology even of the Second Vatican Council. One hears flowery rejections of ecclesiastical coercion, even from people who might otherwise be expected to scan the Code of Canon Law and John Paul’s apostolic constitution promulgating it. One can scarcely imagine the reaction to Lyndwood’s argument that the pope can make foreign law into common law merely by approving it. 

Lest anyone suggest that the good kings of England resisted the encroachments of popish tyranny, it ought to be noted that English statutory law conformed with the European common law established by Boniface VIII. During Richard II’s minority, a statute was adopted in his name authorizing the arrest and imprisonment of heretical preachers (5 Ric. II stat. 2, c. 5). Then, under Henry IV, a very severe statute against the Lollards was introduced (2 Hen. IV c. 15). Many cite Henry IV’s statute as the beginning of the writ de heretico comburendo. However, in his magisterial Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, Maitland argues that Archbishop Arundel had the Lollard priest William Sawtrey burned even before Parliament had actually passed the statute (on the strength of Boniface VIII’s Ut inquisitionis negotium and Frederick’s constitutions). Certainly there is no conflict between the two. 

Then, in 1414, Henry V renewed the severe legislation against the Lollards (2 Hen. V stat. 1, c.7), demanding first an oath from practically everyone engaged in civil administration for the extirpation of Lollardy and for close cooperation with the spiritual authorities in their work against heresy. He also provided for the forfeiture of the lands and property of those convicted of heresy. Blackstone notes that Henry V’s law against the Lollards made that heresy a temporal offense and claimed concurrent jurisdiction with the ecclesiastical courts. This is an interesting observation, which deserves to be repeated: Henry V made heresy a temporal offense. These three statutes (5 Ric. II stat. 2, c. 5, 2 Hen. IV c. 15, and 2 Hen. V stat. 1, c. 7) were renewed by Philip and Mary in 1554 (1 & 2 Phil. & Mar. c. 6). 

The English legislation against heretics was not limited to Catholic monarchs. In 1562, although Elizabeth repealed the prior statutes against heresy (1 Eliz. I c. 1), she reformed the process for the writ de excommunicato capiendo by the statute 5 Eliz. I c. 23. The purpose was not, as one might think, to suppress the state’s cooperation with ecclesiastical authority. Instead, Elizabeth’s statute was framed to ensure the due execution and return of the writ so that the excommunicated could be properly addressed by ecclesiastical authorities. Blackstone reliably informs us that Elizabeth also put the writ de heretico comburendo into execution against Jan Pietersz and Hendrick Terwoort (4 Commentaries *49). It was not until 1677 that Parliament finally abolished the writ de heretico comburendo (29 Car. II c. 9). However, the statute contained a lengthy proviso that the abolition of the writ did not diminish the jurisdiction of “Protestant Arch-Bishops or Bishops or any other Judges of any Ecclesiasticall Courts in cases of Atheisme Blasphemy Heresie or Schisme and other damnable Doctrines and Opinions” to punish offenders. 

One might also note that, while the monarchs of the so-called reformation were eager to roll back the heresy laws of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, they were also eager to punish witchcraft most stringently. Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and James all issued severe laws against witchcraft (e.g., 33 Hen. VIII c. 8; 1 Jac. I c. 12). James in particular made witchcraft a secular felony, punishable with death, echoing Henry V’s statute making heresy a temporal offense. Blackstone notes that heresy and witchcraft had been treated similarly in English law (4 Commentaries *60). However, witchcraft was ultimately removed from the judgment of the ecclesiastical courts. But by the time of George II, the ancient severity of the English law against witchcraft had been relaxed significantly, to the point where the law seemed to hold that only the pretense of witchcraft was punishable and then only with a year’s imprisonment (4 Commentaries *61). 

All of this is interesting as English legal history, to be sure, but one might justly wonder the extent to which it has any bearing on American jurisprudence. There are two answers to that question. First, English legal history served as the omnipresent background for the founding fathers. Coke’s Institutes and Blackstone’s Commentaries were the cornerstone of early American legal education and jurisprudence, and retain, as a consequence, a privileged place in the understanding of the founding fathers’ legal thought. The founding fathers, moreover, were not above borrowing specific concepts from English law. Alexander Hamilton, in describing the Senate as a high court of impeachments in Federalist No. 65, noted frankly that the Constitution’s arrangement for impeachments had been borrowed from England. 

The long history of Christianity and English law—indeed of the extent to which secular courts were obliged to follow ecclesiastical law—was certainly not unknown to the founding fathers. In February 1814, Thomas Jefferson forwarded an extract of his commonplace book to Dr. Thomas Cooper. Jefferson had obtained for Cooper appointment as a professor in the University of Virginia, which he was forced to resign over religious matters. Jefferson’s extract is a long summary treating the question of whether Christianity was part of English common law. After listing numerous authorities in support of the proposition that Christianity was in fact part of the English common law, Jefferson, ever the freethinker, attempts to prove it was never so. But Jefferson never quite manages to batter down the judges, including Sir Matthew Hale’s judgment in Rex v. Taylor, I Ventr. 293, 3 Keb. 607 (1676). In forwarding the extract to Cooper, Jefferson suggested that Cooper might “find the conclusions bolder than the historical facts and principles will warrant.” 

The other answer is this: the English common law is part of the organic law of many states. Often one reads in state law that the English common law as of the fourth year of the reign of James I (1607) is received as part of the law of a state. No doubt this date is connected to the establishment of James Fort, later known as Jamestown, by the Virginia Company in May 1607, after which courts sitting in the United States adopted and developed the common law. While Elizabeth repealed Philip and Mary’s renewal of the older heresy statutes, it is clear that Elizabeth’s common law included the writ de heretico comburendo and the writ de excommunicato capiendo. The former would not be abolished until 1677 and Elizabeth herself reformed the procedure for the latter in 1562. It stands to reason, therefore, that Frederick II’s stringent decrees against heresy, made part of English common law by Pope Boniface VIII, lurked in the body of the common law as it made its way to the New World. 

The founding fathers, most of whom knew their Blackstone as well as anything, would no doubt have read in the fourth volume of Blackstone a brief account of Frederick II, Boniface VIII, and Lyndwood (4 Commentaries *45–46). Indeed, Blackstone traces quickly the history of English heresy law, including Henry VIII’s statutes defining heresy and Elizabeth I’s repeal of the former heresy laws, and comes to the conclusion that the writ de heretico comburendo was left as it was in common law, which is to say available only to the provincial synod (4 Commentaries *46–49). Anyone who consults Blackstone must therefore conclude that at least some of the provisions against heresy were part and parcel of the common law as of the fourth year of James I. 

Originalists, frantic to find an answer to Vermeule, are no doubt rejoicing at this conclusion. The common law adopted by the states, as it was understood by the framers of the Constitution and those who ratified it, included in some sense the stringent heresy laws of Emperor Frederick II, which had been grafted into the common law by Pope Boniface VIII. Subsequent statutory enactments may have broadened or narrowed the scope of the civil authorities in heresy cases, but at no point before 1677 or so (i.e., after English common law became American common law) was the scope abolished. Recall that the First Amendment was not incorporated against the states at ratification, and the Tenth Amendment leaves the states’ powers untouched except where specifically modified by the Constitution. 

The answer to Vermeule becomes clear, does it not? If one accepts  a thick understanding of originalism and the Anglo-American tradition, you see that the power to execute heretics is already part of the constitutional order in this country. Federalism is nothing if not a warrant for the states to pursue heretics—as good originalists, we note that these are heretics as Frederick II and Boniface VIII would have seen them—while the federal government sticks to its knitting. Our great separation of powers means that state-court judges shall issue writs de heretico comburendo and de excommunicato capiendo upon the application of ecclesiastical authorities for governors and sheriffs to execute. If the states have modified this understanding by various enactments—here we should remember that statutes in derogation of the common law are always construed narrowly—that is their choice. Other states may make other choices. 

One takes a step back, breathless, at this moment. The genius of the framers was not merely a system of checks and balances, a finely wrought mechanism for the preservation of liberty. It was also to leave untouched the English-speaking peoples’ tradition of stringent punishments for heresy carried out by civil officials at the behest of the ecclesiastical authorities. A tradition that finds its root in the decision of the Pope who issued the bull Unam sanctam and the bull Ausculta fili to issue a decretal ratifying the ordinances of a Holy Roman Emperor. They built better than they knew. 

I.

A preliminary observation: when someone demands a complete policy proposal, what are they seeking to enthrone? What are they seeking to minorize? Here I am thinking of Michel Foucault’s January 7, 1976 lecture at the Collège de France (collected in the volume “Society Must Be Defended”). It seems patent to me that the declaration that such and such is a science, made always with the intent to disqualify other knowledge, is the same thing as demanding that integralists present complete policy proposals, made with the same intent. That is, the guardians of liberalism seek to disqualify integralist thought by asserting that only ideologies completely concretized with laws and regulations and white papers are serious ideologies. The demand is obviously made in an attempt to tap into the power-structures of the existing regime, which necessarily has laws and regulations and white papers.

One of course can approach the question of laws and regulations in purely technical terms, that is to say, as an exercise in drafting statutes. A person who, being validly baptized, knowingly or intentionally holds a doctrine condemned by the Supreme Pontiff or an ecumenical council commits heresy, a felony. One can even go so far as to draft statutes establishing proof. A certified copy of a judgment from an ecclesiastical tribunal finding that the defendant has committed the canonical delict of heresy shall be sufficient proof that the defendant has committed heresy, a felony. In and of itself, this is not very difficult work. If the demand for an integralist penal law is a demand that integralists engage in the purely technical task of writing statutes that would be adopted in a hypothetical integralist state, this is no demand at all.

Yet no one really conceives of the demand as a demand for technical examples of integralist penal law. Such a demand would be of interest only to lawyers and the answers intelligible for the most part only to lawyers. By and large the individuals demanding such work are not lawyers. The demand is made on a much lower level: who will be punished and for what? Here, we find a new attempt to disqualify integralist thought. However, the question of who will be punished and for what is just about the last question to be asked. Only after the hard work—the very hard work, in fact—has taken place with respect to theoretical questions can we even begin to approach the concrete question.

II.

Recall Professor Pink’s thesis: Dignitatis humanae represents a change in the Church’s policy with respect to coercion, not a change in the Church’s doctrine. Consider in this regard canon 1311 of the 1983 Code, declared by John Paul II to be consistent from top to bottom with the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. For now, if Professor Pink is correct, the Church does not require the assistance of the state in vindicating its “innate and proper right” to coerce the baptized with penal sanctions. This could change, but the announcement of the change would have to come from the Church.

This is perhaps the central question for an integralist penal law. The policy of the Church is not to seek assistance for its coercive activities from the state. Under these circumstances, is it necessary (or appropriate) for an integralist regime to adopt penal law addressing heresy? The integralist state would take on the role of Lisa Simpson, once described by Ned Flanders as “Springfield’s answer to a question nobody asked,” if it adopted penal measures with respect to heresy without a request from the Church. This is to say that the state ought not to assume the role of an officious interloper, acting on behalf of the Church when the Church has not asked for assistance.

We must also acknowledge the limits of the Church’s coercive power: it extends only to the validly baptized. Non-Christians are simply outside the limits of the Church’s power, not least since Thomas’s position on forced baptism prevailed over Scotus’s. To be sure, if the rites of non-Christians somehow imperiled the unity and order of the state—that is to say, the peace of the state—the state would not be powerless to act. And if the rites of non-Christians imperiled the Church, the state, presumably, would not be powerless to act. However, this would not be necessarily a concrete expression of integralist penal law. And the state’s action would be aimed only at restoring the peace of the state, not coercing belief. All of this is entirely consistent with Dignitatis humanae and the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.

Another important question on this point: who has the authority to request the state’s assistance on behalf of the Church? It is understood implicitly that the pope, acting on his own, or an ecumenical council cum Petro et sub Petro, could request the assistance of the state. But could a diocesan bishop? Could intermediate bodies, such as an episcopal conference, request the assistance of the state? This is not merely a question to be answered in the context of penal law, but a question to be answered in the context of all law.

One more question: who has the authority to answer the Church? That is to say, if the Church changes its policy tomorrow and requests the assistance of the state, who shall attend? Much turns on this question, as well.

III.

By the same token, what are the state’s rights? Remember that Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen emperor, adopted stringent legislation against heresy, both in Sicily and the Empire. Remember that Justinian, the great lawgiver, began his Codex with no less stringent laws against heresy. Was this misguided? An overreach by authoritarians—indeed, proto-totalitarians? Perhaps Cardinal Danielou’s assertion that religion is part of the temporal common good provides the key. In Prayer as a Political Problem, he wrote, “Religion is not concerned solely with the future life; it is a constituent element of this life. Because the religious dimension is an essential part of human nature, civil society should recognize it as a constituent element of the common good for which it is itself responsible.” Nevertheless, in acknowledging that the state has the right—because it has the duty to defend the true religion, which constitutes part of the temporal common good—to suppress heresy, we must still consider the nature of that right and its extent. We return also to our fundamental question, in a different way: does the Church’s change in its policy mean that the state’s right is suspended or even abrogated?

Moreover, is there not more to integralism than merely addressing heresy? As noted above, the debate is often joined on this point for purely rhetorical reasons: look at the wicked integralists, who might be stern, even stringent, with protestants. Yet there are areas entirely separate from the content of one’s creed where Catholic teaching could be implemented by the state. Consider the social doctrine of the popes. Consider, for a more recent example, Pope Francis’s ecological teaching. Considering the teaching of Leo XIII and Pius XII, among others, it is clear that the Church does not claim the right to direct minutely the activities of the state on matters such as industrial relations or environmental protection. The state has latitude here to tailor its laws to the common good. Yet would anyone deny that a regime that attempted to implement the Church’s teachings on industrial relations or the environment was profoundly integralist—whether or not it adopted a penal law touching upon heresy?

IV.

In almost every interaction with the law, there is coercion. Worse than coercion, there is persuasion. We see this most obviously in the criminal law: if you commit certain acts, you will be punished with fines or imprisonment (in some cases, even death). We see this also in the juvenile law: if a parent does or fails to do certain acts, he or she will be compelled under a court order to cooperate with the government in receiving services. Violation of the court order could result in jail. If the parent fails to comply long enough, his or her relationship with the child will be terminated. But there are all sorts of other coercions: in zoning law, in environmental regulations, in professional licensing.

More insidious than the coercion backed up with prison or fines or contempt powers (which is to say, prison or fines) is the persuasion that is implicit in tax laws. It is a fact—a fact of long standing, a consequence of central banking—that the government does not actually need income tax for revenue. The Internal Revenue Code in the United States therefore becomes an enormous mechanism of persuasion. If you do certain things, you will receive financial benefits; if you do other things, you will receive financial penalties. Over time, as the deductions and credits add up, you may find yourself adopting views without knowing it.

But we must stop here to ask a question. Why are the coercion and persuasion under liberalism privileged? Is there a stronger moral basis for the rule that you must pay a penalty if you take money out of your 401(k) before age 59 1/2 than a hypothetical rule that you must pay a penalty if you defame the Blessed Virgin Mary? Is there a stronger moral basis for a prohibition of possession of methamphetamine than a hypothetical prohibition of possession of Calvin’s Institutes? You may say in the latter case that methamphetamine destroys lives and communities, which it surely does, but even that betrays a privilege for laws addressing material harms as opposed to laws addressing spiritual harms. There must be some reason for the privilege, then. Could it be that what is is considered immutable (and therefore good)? Could it be that we can see in a concrete (i.e., biological) way material harms but usually cannot see spiritual harms? There are necessarily metaphysical presuppositions to the privilege assiduously afforded to coercion under liberalism. There are probably consequences to such privilege. Here we can turn to the vista of political theology.

V.

“Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). Law is framed as a measure of human acts and its purpose is to lead men to virtue, albeit gradually (ST IaIIae q.96 a.2 co. & ad 2). The resistance to an integralist penal law seems fundamentally to be a denial of these principles; that is, those who resist—or even reject—the concept of an integralist penal law hold, ultimately, that the government ought not to teach by means of the penal law, the government ought not to adopt measures intended to lead men to virtue by punishing the more flagrant vices (cf. ST IaIIae q.96 a.2 co.). Or, once again, we return to the metaphysical presuppositions behind such positions: the bizarre privilege for laws addressing material harms and the steadfast denial of spiritual harms as subjects for redress by the state. Whatever the motivation, the resistance to an integralist penal law represents fundamentally an impoverished notion of government, which reduces the state to little more than a traffic cop or hall monitor.

There are difficulties—serious difficulties—that must be surmounted before engaging in the technical task of writing statutes. For the integralist, the most serious task is addressing the fact that the Church, for the moment, does not seek the assistance of the state for its coercive activities, claimed as its “innate and proper right” even after the Second Vatican Council. However, for the integralist, there is no question that the impoverished liberal sense of government-as-traffic-cop is inadmissible. Indeed, the reason why integralism is being debated so hotly is because the traffic cop has failed in his duties. At the risk of carrying the analogy too far (or the more serious risk of lapsing into preciosity), the only question is, really, how best to sweep up the mess he has left, how best to tend to the wounds caused by the accidents he has caused, and how best to lead the drivers back to sane driving.

In this essay, we will be asking whether there is anything of worth on the intellectual left. We will not be considering more pragmatic disciplines such as economics. Rather we will be focusing on philosophical and expressly political ideas. Some thinkers in the post-fusionist Catholic sphere have pointed to these ideas—typically formulated as some sort of Catholic Marxism—as being a way forward. Others—including the integralist movement—have rejected the worldview lying behind these ideas but have claimed that there are interesting components that can be refashioned.

So far, the discussion of these ideas has not considered that they emerged as a response to and ultimately as a replacement for the liberal ideas that arose during the Enlightenment. The original proponents attempted to incorporate the Romantic critiques that arose against liberal Enlightenment ideas in the 18^th and early 19^th century into the liberal Enlightenment project. By taking this perspective we hope to show that these left-wing ideas are ultimately the flipside of the liberal Enlightenment project that was formulated against classical and Catholic systems of thought. For that reason, they should, at best, be viewed coolly, at worst, with extreme suspicion.

For reasons of space we will stick closely to what appear to be the core ideas. This will allow us to give a full contextual and historical overview of the idea and how it relates to classical and pre-Enlightenment thought.

Alienation, or Marxian Metaphysics

Whether we argue that liberalism began to emerge with Hobbes or Locke or even Bacon, we can say that it was originally formulated as a mechanistic and dispassionate intervention in politics and culture. These ideas were, from the beginning, a response to the passions of religion as manifest in the Wars of Religion. The first generation of liberals were not antinomian revolutionaries so much as they were nervous administrators—social and political managers preaching tolerance in the hope of avoiding civil war.

But it soon became clear that Man was not made for management. The Romantic thinkers brought the question of passion and affirmative personal freedom back on the stage. Whether this was in the immature fantasies of Goethe’s young Werther or in the sophisticated political mythology of Rousseau’s Man-in-the-state-of-nature, the message was clear: notional freedom coupled with drab political management was not enough; Man was built for love, transgression, self-actualisation and the Enlightenment project must recognise that.

Accusations soon followed: It was thought that the liberal Enlightenment project, with its dull bourgeois rationalism, crushed Man in his project to be free. In throwing off the shackles of religion, the Romantics argued, post-Enlightenment Man had signed himself up to the slave ship of dreary rationality. Man, they claimed, was alienated by liberal bourgeois society.

‘Alienation’, or ‘Entfremdung’ in the original German, is an unusual term. At the time when the Romantics, especially Hegel, were discussing it, there were three general meanings. One was a legal meaning which denoted the selling of a man’s rights over his own property. Another was a social term meaning the estrangement of a man from his peers. The final medico-psychiatric meaning – connected to the previous usage—was the loss of a man’s capacity for reason and his falling into insanity (Geyer et al 1976, p5). Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century it was not uncommon for psychiatrists to be referred to, especially in France, as ‘alienists.’

The original Hegelian use of the term was most closely associated with the medico-psychiatric meaning. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel discusses “the Alienated Soul” or, in his terminology, “the Unhappy Consciousness” as “the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being” (Hegel 1807, B. IV, (b))[1]). Hegel describes a consciousness that looks upon itself as an object – that judges itself and deems itself unworthy. In modern pop psychological language, Hegel seems to be discussing something like self-hatred. Hegel takes the alienated consciousness to task saying that this self-judgement rests on a contradiction: if the consciousness is judging itself, this is equivalent to a judge judging his own judgement. Infinite regress follows. This is overcome for Hegel when the alienated consciousness recognises itself as its own judge and in doing so overcomes the contradiction and becomes unified.

Note that Hegel does not project the alienation onto the external world. This, for him, would merely be a cop-out—a manifestation of blaming the world for problems that the Spirit or psyche has not sufficiently overcome. Later on, Hegel will warn against this projection of the alienated consciousness outward:

The heartthrob for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and to do so by casting out of its life the perversion which it really is, and by straining to regard and to express that perversion as something else. The universal ordinance and law it, therefore, now speaks of as an utter distortion of the law of its heart and of its happiness, a perversion invented by fanatical priests, by riotous, revelling despots and their minions, who seek to indemnify themselves for their own degradation by degrading and oppressing in their turn—a distortion practised to the nameless misery of deluded mankind. (Hegel 1807, AA. V, B, (b)—my emphasis.)

Of course, some of Hegel’s followers decided to do just that. The most prominent was Ludwig Feuerbach who used Hegel’s dialectical apparatus—built to accommodate a fusion of post-Enlightenment rational deism and a defence of Christian morality—against religion. In his The Essence of Christianity, published in 1844, Feuerbach argued that religion was a product of alienation. Man thought that he was worshipping God, Feuerbach argued, but really this was just a projection of his own consciousness. Feuerbach could not be clearer:

The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man; the knowledge of God is the self-knowledge of man. Man’s notion of himself is his notion of God, just as his notion of God is his notion of himself—the two are identical. What is God to man, that is man’s own spirit, man’s own soul; what is man’s spirit, soul, and heart—that is his God. God is the manifestation of man’s inner nature, his expressed self; religion is the solemn unveiling of man’s hidden treasures, the avowal of his innermost thoughts, the open confession of the secrets of his love. (Feuerbach 1844, I, §2.)

From here it was not long before Feuerbach and his followers were denouncing—just as Hegel warned they would—the “perversions invented by fanatical priests.” But that was not enough. The French Revolution, in its attempt to fuse liberal Enlightenment Reason and Romanticism, was content with directing its ire against the priests and the kings, but in 19^th century Europe it was becoming clear that a new ruling class was ascendant: the bourgeoisie. So, it was inevitable—especially after the revolutions of 1848—that the notion of alienation would be pushed further than Feuerbach had attempted.

Feuerbach’s account was purely negative. It counselled that Man should throw off the shackles of religion and worship at the altar of himself. Perhaps that would require murdering a few priests, but it did not require upending the social order: it could not be used to justify the 1848 revolutionaries. Marx would soon make the point that Feuerbach’s thesis was ahistorical and it “does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society” (Marx 1845). Here the critique moves up the ladder, from the relation between the individual and the Church, to the relation between the individual and society as mediated by the Church.

Now a new avenue for social criticism is opened. We have swung all the way back from the medico-psychiatric meaning of ‘alienation’ to the social. Social alienation was, until now, largely seen as the product of a defective individual consciousness. But Marx would turn that around: it was not the alienated man who felt his alienation like a weight on his shoulders that was the problem; it was the society itself.

Marx conceived of alienation in bourgeois society as being tied up with the production process under capitalism. The key passage is as follows:

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever-cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity— and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (Marx 1844, I, IV.)

The solution to this is obvious: to change the relations of production in such a way as to ensure that Man sees the objects of his production as objects of his production. We have come a long way from Hegel. Whatever one thinks of Hegel’s Panglossian post-Enlightenment liberal Protestantism, at least he was dealing with an issue that was straightforward: the psychological problem of self-alienation. Hegel was playing philosopher as psychologist and encouraging his readers to reflect on themselves until they occupied a place of coherence and mental comfort. It is not hard to see how Hegel expects the Alienated Soul to get from A to B.

With Feuerbach this becomes rather dubious. He seems to be suggesting that the problem is the priest. His solution would then be to throw off the shackles of religion. If the notion that less religion would lead to less personal alienation appeared dubious in the first half of the 19^th century, today it appears absurd – the very opposite of the truth. One need not even cite statistical studies[2] showing much less alienation amongst the religious, but just reflect on the fact that modern sociology as it emerged in the work of Durkheim was premised on the idea that secularisation led to alienation or ‘anomie’[3]. Still, on his own terms we can at least take Feuerbach’s argument seriously: if it really is the priest that is the cause of personal alienation—presumably through the spreading of some nefarious morality—then it is clear how the removal of the priest will remove the source of alienation.

Few have commented on it, but from a common sense point-of-view Marx’s thesis seems very strange indeed. It seems to imply that self-alienation—effectively a psychological problem—will disappear if Man gets greater consciousness of the fact that the goods he is producing in a factory and then buys at the market are actually the goods he produced. How does this work exactly? Would the same effect be achieved if Man is sat down and made to watch hours of film about the production and distribution systems of a modern, decentralised economy? It is hard to see why the latter should not work in the Marxian frame of reference. Marx’s theory sounds impressive when pitched at a high theoretical level, but when closely examined it seems a little silly.

How does it relate to Catholic thought? Well, first it should now be clear that it arises out of a system that is totally at odds with Catholic thought. It starts with the well-meaning liberal Protestantism of a Hegel that encourages Man to overcome his alienation through rational self-reflection—not unlike contemporary psychotherapy—and then counsels a combination of post-Enlightenment deism and stripped down Christian morality as a principle on which to organise an effectively liberal society[4]. It then mutates into belligerent atheism with Feuerbach who is quick to blame the Church for psychological distress—a very common underbelly of post-Enlightenment rationalism. Finally, it turns into a critique of the production process in capitalism and religion is tossed aside as the ‘opium of the masses.’ At best, this final development is a form of naïve Pelagianism; at worst, it is the sort of ideology that led to everything from the Spanish Red Terror to the violent suppression of the Church in the Soviet Union. Lying within every Marxist is an angry Feuerbachian—and this especially so when the seizing of private property fails to ameliorate psychological distress.

In Catholic thought, alienation is simply a product of a disordered Will that is not sufficiently aligned with God and the natural law. “Our heart is restless,” St Augustine writes of his former alienation, “until it finds its rest in Thee.” Alienation is the product of Sin. Even abstracting from the deep theological components of this account, it lines up remarkably well with common sense. A person likely feels alienation because he is living poorly. He is devoting himself to various false gods and not recognising the truth of the real God. His desires are clamorous and disordered because he will not submit his Will to the natural law. Thus, for integralists and promoters of Catholic thought it is obvious how mass alienation should be overcome: by ordering our societies to the natural law. The better aligned societies are with the natural law, the less people will experience alienation, because by being ordered by the natural law, man is being ordered in accordance with his own nature. It is a simple, straightforward account and one that lines up remarkably well with the statistical studies that post-Durkheimian sociology would have us believe. It is also—last time this author checked—the official position of the Catholic Church.

Even if some Catholic Marxists accept this broad account, they might argue that a more streamlined version of Marx can be helpful in achieving precisely that. It is to this that we now turn.

Commodity Fetishism, or Marxian Anthropology

One line of defence of Marxist thought is to say that the concept of alienation was a product of the ‘young Marx’s’ thinking which was superseded in his later mature works—most notably Capital. The idea here is that Marx in his ‘Hegelian phase’—as a young man concerned with personal feelings of alienation—got caught up in questions that would later become irrelevant. On this account, Marx’s later work represents an ‘epistemic break’ from his earlier work; Marx moves from the vague realm of metaphysics into the precise world of science.

The most notable proponent of this argument was Louis Althusser. In his seminal 1965 collection of essays For Marx he writes:

[I]f we are prepared to stand back a little from Marx’s discovery so that we can see that he founded a new scientific discipline and that this emergence itself was analogous to all the great scientific discoveries of history, we must also agree that no great discovery has ever been made with out bringing to light a new object or a new domain, without a new horizon of meaning appearing, a new land in which the old images and myths have been abolished—but at the same time the inventor of this new world must of absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves, he must have learnt and practised them, and by criticizing them formed a taste for and learnt the art of manipulating abstract forms in general, without which familiarity he could never have conceived new ones with which to think the new object. (Althusser 1965, p85.)

Althusser dismisses the young Marx as naïve man caught in the trappings of outmoded philosophical idealism—and contrasts him with the mature Marx the scientist and objective theory of History and Communism. If we accept this interpretation, the theory of alienation slips into the background—an embarrassing product of an immature and underdeveloped mind.

Despite the fact that Althusser dismisses the idea of ‘commodity fetishism’ as a product of the pre-scientific Marx and replaces it with his own theory of ideological apparatuses (Althusser 1970), some claim that the notion of commodity fetishism is a viable anthropological theory that can be deployed by Catholics in defence of the natural law. This is supported by the fact that, although the notion of alienation is dropped in his mature work, Marx nevertheless discusses commodity fetishism. In his Capital he explains it as such:

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities (Marx 1870, p165).

Here we see more echoes of Feuerbach. But only by analogy. Marx is no longer discussing the psychological or metaphysical phenomenon of alienation. Instead he is highlighting the fact that the highly abstract social relations that capitalism gives rise to lead to a mystification of the production process and hence of the nature of society. In turn, this gives rise to an ideology, a false consciousness, that tricks Man in capitalist society to think that his lot is a natural one and not the product of political forces that can be altered. This is not metaphysics, but anthropology.

But is it good anthropology? Again, Marx’s theory sounds good from a high theoretical level but when we start to think it through it becomes a little muddy. And again, the questions that we raised about alienation rise to the surface, albeit in different form. If Man is told clearly the actual relations of production, will he instantly recognise them as unjust and rebel against the system? Certainly, if Marxists are told what Marx thinks to be the relations of production they will come to this conclusion—there is plenty of historical evidence in favour of that proposition—but it does not follow that everyone comes to this same conclusion. Many have studied Marx’s work and concluded that the capitalist relations of production are, if not ideal, at least a best approximation of how to organise a functional society. Others have concluded that these relations are deeply flawed, but that this does not mean the whole system need be overthrown – rather they should be ameliorated by the State. The point is that, even with Marx’s critique laid out, it is not obvious that one accepts it as true as one might a mathematical demonstration. It has, embedded within it, more than a few value judgements – not just on the utility of capitalism but also on the prudence of revolutionary social change.

From this perspective, Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism is not neutral anthropology. Rather it is a statement that we are only likely to accept if we accept Marx’s broader vision—that is—if we ourselves are socialists or communists. It is also slightly dubious. Take the former Soviet Union as an example—whether the Soviet system was a true socialist economy or not, it was certainly not capitalist. Relations of production in the Soviet Union were extremely opaque— ‘plans’ were handed down by the Gosplan without much explanation. Most people, it would be fair to say, experienced the arbitrariness of Actually Existing Socialism as utterly mystifying—especially when a triple order of toilet paper arrived but no soup. Does it therefore follow that the centrally planned economic system, in the manner it produced and distributed commodities, provided ideological cover for the system? This seems unlikely. In fact, it was the opaqueness and dysfunction of the system that led citizens to look across the West jealously at the societies of abundance. If anything, the opaqueness and dysfunction generated cynicism and opposition to the system.

Yet, if Marx’s account is right, why does commodity fetishism ‘work’ in the relatively functional capitalist economies, but not in the dysfunctional centrally planned economies? After all, the same mechanism of opaqueness of production relations exists in both. Yet they generate different responses. Under capitalism, most of the time, most people accept the system as relatively natural. Yet under Really Existing Socialism people had a lingering sense that the system was dysfunctional and performed poorly in comparison with the Western capitalist systems. The more we think about it the stranger and less convincing Marx’s account is, even on its own terms. Again, it sounds good when stated theoretically—but when applied it becomes vague and strange.

What about its relation to Catholic thought? Certainly, Catholic thought is sympathetic to the idea that people should have more immediate control over their lives, including in their economic relations. It states this in its principal of subsidiarity. But it certainly does not call for the overthrow of markets or capitalism. Rather its response to this problem has been one of corporatism; of the organisation of society into empowered corporate entities that gain some modicum of control over blind market forces.

As with Catholic thought’s description of alienation as arising from Sin, this comes across as much more in line with common sense. It is not hard to see how the Catholic policymaker gets from A to B. Without the ‘corporations,’ the capitalist system is bewildering and punitive. But after they are introduced it is tamed to the needs of the community. This is much more specific than Marx’s vague notion that an imprecisely defined ‘communism’ will overcome the opaqueness of the system—and it makes no grandiose claims that the opaqueness of the system is fooling people into not joining the Church and becoming virtuous. Indeed, the idea that people are not joining the Church because of the opacity of economic relations comes across as so ridiculous as to be funny— but it is functionally equivalent to what Marxists are claiming when they claim that the only reason that the masses do not join the Marxist revolution is due to the opacity of economic relations.

Finally, we will turn to the post-Marxist left. Although no Catholic thinkers are counselling that we embrace the postmodern theories of desire and identity, there may be something interesting there that some have missed.

Desire and Pleasure, or Post-Marxist Politics

Defining the post-Marxist left is not altogether easy. It encompasses everything from identity politics to the sexual revolution. It encompasses thinkers as broad as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. In what follows we will stick with two key thinkers, Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze, as these best articulated the goals and methods of their politics. This is not to dismiss other thinkers. Lacanian neo-Marxists, for example, have drawn on Lacan’s theory of alienation as being superior to Hegel’s and integrated it into a post-Althusserian Marxism that reintegrates something resembling metaphysical critiques[5]. These are interesting, albeit flawed, from a Catholic perspective for the same reason that Marx’s original alienation theory is flawed. But Foucault and Deleuze articulate the politics that we see on the left today in the most concise manner.

Foucault and Deleuze, in their respective ways, shift the focus away from the production process as such and onto what they think to be a repressive society that suppresses the best tendencies—the true desires—of the individual. We are back, therefore, to the pre-Hegelian Romantics. It does not take long for them to find behind the curtain the oppressive figure of the priest. We are back, once more, to Feuerbach.

Foucault and Deleuze view society as a collection of institutions that repress individuals and force them to conform. Foucault is more inclined to examine institutions that are overtly punitive—the school, the hospital, the prison; while Deleuze is more inclined to examine institutions that shape the culture—most notably, psychotherapeutic intervention. But both recognise that the real repressive tool is morality. They argue that morality did not disappear after the Enlightenment destroyed religion but, rather, snuck in through the backdoor into social science and psychology and deployed via social and political institutions.

Foucault is quite explicit about this return to morality and ethics in his review of Deleuze’s book Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Felix Guattari:

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular ‘readership’: being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living) (Deleuze & Guattari 1972, pxiii).  

Here we get the gist of the whole project. The revolution is not so much about changing society as of changing oneself. True, the institutions that are not allowing oneself to self-actualise must be destroyed —and in that sense society must be changed—but the focus is on oneself, on lifestyle. Post-Marxist leftism is a lifestyle leftism. In this it is much closer to religion than the old Marxist framework. This is because it is much more about cultivating a sort of anti-morality; a rejection of all moralities and the following of the raw, unstructured instinct.

It is not surprising then that these thinkers eventually find at the root of the contemporary pseudo-scientific morality the Christian – and indeed, Catholic – morality of old. They set their work up as an opposition to this. Foucault jokes about this in his introduction: “Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life (ibid).” In his later work Foucault became obsessed with the old Jesuitical ethical manuals, especially those that dealt with the confessional—which he saw as a prototype of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic repression. He also found this type of subjectivity—which he defines as the problem that creates alienated social beings—to have been invented by St Augustine (Harcourt 2019).

Foucault and Deleuze are, in more ways than one, completely correct. They are not so much a repudiation of the Catholic tradition as an attempt to turn it on its head. For that reason, they are much closer to the Catholic thought tradition than is Marx. They understand that the key question is a moral one—to what extent society is organised in line with the natural law. But for them, the natural law is oppressive and the source of misery, whereas for Catholics it is liberationist and the source of contentment. Where St Augustine tells of his decadent lifestyle, the misery it brought him, and his finding of peace in God, Foucault and Deleuze tell us that peace in God is an illusion and that St Augustine would be much better off pursuing his carnal desires.

How they come to this conclusion is mystifying. Neither seemed like a happy man. Foucault died from AIDs and Deleuze from suicide. For all the talk of self-actualisation in their work, it seems that the lady doth protest too much and the writing is really flowing from a deep unhappiness and personal alienation. One suspects that their politics does not really have the goal of flourishing but instead of self-destruction. They are the theorists of decadence and death because they are decadent and death-oriented. Since no one succeeded in talking them out of this, they tried to convince others to follow them—and called on the destruction of Western Christian society. The story of the post-Marxist left is the story of the snake in the garden.

Yet for all that, integralists have much to learn from these thinkers. Since they are dealing with the same problem as integralists—namely, the moral regulation of the Good Society—their tactics and critiques only need to be flipped over to be useful. Where they implore transgression, integralists simply implore moral restraint and regulation. Where they implore the pursuit of instinctual satisfaction, integralists warn of the dangers of such libertinism and catalogue its effects. Where they call for post-1968 libertarian ‘liberation’, integralists point out that the only true freedom is freedom from one’s whims and desires. The key project for integralists when it comes to leftist thought should not be trying to repurpose Marx’s dubious concepts, but rather turning the post-Marxist left on its head.

Bibliography

Althusser, L. (1965). For Marx. Allen Lane.

Althusser, L. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press.

Badious, A. (1982). Theory of the Subject. Continuum.

Chen, Y. & VanderWeele, T. (2018). ‘Associations of Religious Upbringing With Subsequent Health and Well-Being From Adolescence to Young Adulthood: An Outcome-Wide Analysis.’ American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 187, Issue 11, November 2018, Pages 2355–2364.

Clarke, V. (2019). ‘Jordan Peterson: Shepard of the Easily Freudened.’ American Affairs Journal.

Deleuze, G. & Guatarri, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Durkheim, E. (1897). Suicide: A Sociological Study. Snowball Publishing.

Feuerbach, L. (1844). The Essence of Christianity. Marxists.org.

Geyer, R. F. (1976). Theories of Alienation: Critical Perspectives In Philosophy And The Social Sciences. Springer Books.

Harcourt, B. E. (2019). ‘Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh. How the Fourth and Final Volume of The History of Sexuality Completes Foucault’s Critique of Modern Western Societies.’ Columbia Public Law Research Papers. No. 14-647.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1807). The Phenomenology of Mind. Marxists.org.

Marx, K. (1844). Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Marxists.org.

Marx, K. (1845). Theses on Feuerbach. Marxists.org.

Marx, K. (1870). Capital Volume I. Penguin Press.

[1] Interestingly, this important sentence, taken from JB Baillie’s 1910 edition of the Phenomenology, is left out of the popular 1977 AV Miller translation. Yet in his introduction Miller discusses Hegel’s concept of alienation nine times. A strange discrepancy, as he obviously finds the category very important to Hegel’s thought.

[2]See, for example: (Chen & VanderWeele 2018).

[3]See: (Durkheim 1897).

[4] The Hegelian prescription bubbles up constantly in our society. Recently it has found expression in the popular figure of Jordan Peterson. See, Clarke (2019).

[5] In brief, this neo-Marxism posits that alienation is overcome simply by taking part in the revolution. See: (Badiou 1982). A cruel critic would say that the neo-Marxists have moved from Hegelian psychotherapeutic intervention to post-Lacanian group therapeutic intervention—and such a cruel critic would see those criticisms confirmed if they ever went to the embarrassing self-help spectacle that is a post-1968 radical leftist meeting.

Adapted from ch. 1 of The Architecture of Law: Rebuilding Law in the Classical Tradition (Notre Dame Press 2018). Part 1 can be found here.

THE DEFINITION OF LAW AS A DIALECTIC AMONG REASON, COMMAND, AND CUSTOM

Harold Berman once described three modes of jurisprudence: positivist (will of lawgiver), natural law (expression of moral principles as understood by reason), and historicist (law as a development of custom).²⁶ For Berman, all three are necessary elements of law, as all three are intrinsic to all being. He explains:

Will, reason, memory—these are three interlocking qualities, St. Augustine wrote, in the mind of the triune God, who implanted them in the human psyche when He made man and woman in His own image and likeness. Like the persons of the Trinity itself, St. Augustine wrote, the three are inseparable and yet distinct. He identified will (voluntas) with purpose and choice, reason (intelligentia) with knowledge and understanding, and memory (memoria) with being—that is, the experience of time. . . . Their applicability to law is particularly striking, for law is indeed a product of will, reason, and memory—of politics, morality, and history—all three.²⁷

Three of the schools identified by Philip Soper²⁸ can be understood as disproportionately emphasizing one of these three modes. Classical positivism embraces commands to the exclusion of the other two. Modern positivism reintroduces the historically situated (custom) Rule of Recognition of a particular legal system to restore normativity to positivism, but excludes reasoning from universal principles. Finally, the “new” natural law school relies almost exclusively on abstract rationality (or, in the vocabulary of John Finnis, practical reason) to the displacement of the other two modes. Classical natural law jurisprudence advocates the integration of all three elements of jurisprudence—universal principles understood by reason, commands of the legislator, and developing historical customs—into a harmonious, although dialectical, definition of law. The three components, though part of a unified system, have been considered distinct parts of the legal order. As Berman has observed, medieval jurists not only divided law by jurisdiction and subject but also among reason, custom, and command.²⁹ Advocates of new natural law jurisprudence, reacting to both forms of positivism, often reduce it to universal moral principles accessible by reason. For example, Lloyd L. Weinreb defines the point of natural law jurisprudence: “The task of natural law is to identify, in a form acceptable to the modern mind, some aspect of human existence that validates moral principles themselves as part of the description of reality.”³⁰

In contrast to this more abstract new natural law, the classical definition of law, best formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, combines all three elements. Aquinas defines law as “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.”³¹ The first element, “ordinance of reason for the common good,” incorporates within the concept of law universal principles of reason concerning the common ends of human nature. Second, “made” and “promulgated” refer to an act of the will—a command of a specific authority whose command binds as a rule and measure. Finally, laws are made by one who “has care of the community.” Lawmaking must be historically situated within a developing community and not be a mere abstraction of reason or disembodied commands. Classical natural law jurisprudence considers all three elements as necessary components of law. In this introduction to natural law, I will merely attempt to sketch their terms.

Ordinance of Reason: Reasoning from Nature

Aquinas’s definition of law begins by clarifying that anything which does not possess the qualities enumerated in his definition is not in fact a law—“nothing is [law] other than that which . . .”³² There are definitional criteria, beyond the volition of the lawgiver, necessary to make an utterance or command a law. Although the ultimate answer is more complex, a primary reply to Hart’s question of what distinguishes the command of a gunman from a law³³ is that a law must be an ordinance of reason (ordinatio rationis).³⁴ Law is a product of reason. The primary criteria for something to be a law is that it must be “of reason” or reasonable. The great medieval jurist Gratian notes this requirement of law when he says that law “ratione consistat,”³⁵ which can be translated “consists in reason” or “stands with or agrees with reason.” In the same section, Gratian points out that reason designates (with a connotation of entrusting) the law (legem ratio commendat), and that if law consists in reason, then it will be all that may have already stood (or agreed) by reason (si ratione lex constat lex erit omne iam, quod ratione constiterit).³⁶ The use of the perfect subjunctive (constiterit) in this last phrase is interesting. It expresses the temporal potentiality of law. Law arises after truths may have been constituted in reason. The grammatical mood of the verb constiterit acknowledges the uncertainty of success in this first step—“may have stood by reason.” There is no certainty of complete success in deriving law from truths known from reason. This uncertainty underlines one of the tensions of natural law jurisprudence: objective truths of reality are accessible to human reason, but we may fail to access them fully.

This relationship between law and reason is clearly distinguished from positivism, which accepts as law anything that meets the currently reigning procedural requirements for making a law. For the natural law system, such is not sufficient; to be a law, the rule and measure must agree with or stand in the faculty of reason, not merely the will.

As Aquinas’s and Gratian’s definitions highlight, law is first an ordinance formulated by the rational power. Yet, as Gratian indicates, the rationality of human law flows from prelegal truths known by reason, with which law must agree. Classical philosophy distinguished different types of reasoning—the speculative and practical intellect. As the Thomist Henri Grenier explains, the two types of intellect are not two different powers but one single power distinguished by the two different types of ends to which the power can be directed.³⁷ According to Grenier, “The speculative intellect is the name given to the intellect as it knows truth for the sake of the knowledge of truth. The practical intellect is the name given to the intellect as it directs knowledge to work, i.e., it directs its knowledge to some practical end.”³⁸ The speculative intellect is directed at knowledge of things as they are. It seeks to know the truth of things for what they are. The practical intellect is directed to action. The former seeks to know what something is and the latter seeks to know what someone should do. Law is a practical discipline. Its end is action. A law is at its core a rule directing one to act. Yet, jurisprudence is rooted in both the speculative and practical intellect because one must first know things for what they are before one can know how to act. As Grenier explains, the practical intellect, although aimed at knowing the right action to attain an end, presupposes the speculative intellect has come to know the end to which the practical intellect tends:

An act of the practical intellect presupposes an act of the will: v.g. an act of the intellect concerning means presupposes the act of willing an end. An act of the speculative intellect does not presuppose an act of the will: v.g. an act of intellect concerning an end. Since an end is proposed to the will by the speculative intellect, and since an end is the first principle of action, the speculative intellect is called the first rule of all action. Thus we understand how everything practical is radicated, i.e., has its foundation in the speculative.³⁹

Law directs action, and therefore in order to know how to make good law, we must understand to what end it directs human action. We must know what is the nature and end of human action. The classical natural law tradition refuses to accept the segregation of such practical enquiry from speculative knowledge about universals. Cicero (whose influence on the natural law tradition is significant) explains how speculative knowledge is essential for knowing how to live: “He who is to live in accordance with nature must base his principles upon the system and government of the entire world. Nor again can anyone judge truly of things good and evil, save by a knowledge of the whole plan of nature and also of the life of the gods, and of the answer to the question whether the nature of man is or is not in harmony with that of the universe.”⁴⁰ The breadth of speculative knowledge essential to living well is not only natural but even touches knowledge of things divine. We will return to the question of whether speculative knowledge of not only natural things but also supernatural things is necessary to perfect practical reason. From Cicero’s quotation, we can see that for him knowledge of things divine was essential.

Putting aside this issue of the necessity of knowledge of things divine, we can establish for now that at least some speculative knowledge is essential to natural law jurisprudence. As philosopher Ralph McInerny indicates, some forms of intellectual activity require the engagement of both speculative and practical knowledge.⁴¹ When one is making a law, one is engaging the practical intellect—what law in this particular set of circumstances conforms action to the good? Yet, to engage in this reasoning, the lawmaker must know what is truly good. Analogically, a housebuilder uses the practical intellect in knowing how to build a house, but his intellect must know what it means to be a house. He must understand the universal “house” before he can know how to build this house.

Alasdair MacIntyre explains that two interrelated questions must be asked in any craft, including the craft of philosophy (and I would add law): What is good and best for me within the context and limitations in which I find myself? and What is good and best per se?⁴² The answers to these questions are inherently interdependent. For the natural law tradition of Aquinas, and for the Augustinian and Aristotelian strands upon which it drew, “there is then no form of philosophical inquiry . . . which is not practical in its implications, just as there is no practical enquiry which is not philosophical [i.e., speculative] in its presuppositions.”⁴³

Modern philosophy forces a cleavage between speculative and practical knowledge, because they are seen as incompatible. The theories of Descartes, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke choose the speculative. Knowledge about ourselves or society comes from speculative contemplation of a mythical disembodied self or a mythical state of nature. The other extreme, represented by Edmund Burke, disparages speculative knowledge and contends that politics and law must be purely practical.⁴⁴ Burke maintains, “Whereas theory rejects error, prejudice, or superstition, the statesman puts them to use.”⁴⁵ It is the myopic focus of modern conceptual jurisprudence on practical knowledge that lies at the heart of Aaron Rappaport’s critique of how it has obscured the big questions that must be addressed to make jurisprudence meaningful and useful.⁴⁶ John Finnis is a good example. He presents his concept of law as practical knowledge, and although he believes there is a sound speculative foundation for it, that speculative knowledge is not essential to his presentation of practical reason. Speculative knowledge, for Finnis, is literally an appendix rather than a foundation. This separation of speculative and practical intellect is a break with classical, and particularly Aristotelian, thought.⁴⁷

As the Thomist Charles De Koninck explains, “Political science and prudence are practical in that they direct towards an end in conformity with right reason. But that presupposes that we know in some way the nature of the thing to direct and of the end; which is to say that the rectitude of practical rule presupposes the rectification of the speculative intellect.”⁴⁸ The speculative must come first. We must know what the goal is, and then law, practical knowledge, can tell us how to attain it. De Koninck further compares speculative and practical knowledge and shows the dependence of the latter on the former: “In speculative knowledge the intellect is measured by the object, and in speculative wisdom we are principally concerned with things better than ourselves. . . . In practical knowledge, insofar as it is practical, the intellect is itself measure.”⁴⁹

A simple example can illustrate this primacy of the speculative. If I am lost and stop to ask for directions, I cannot simply ask, “Which way should I turn?” The person I ask cannot answer this question. If he just formulates a practical rule “turn left” without knowing my ultimate end, the practical rule is of no value. If he happens to choose the direction that will take me to my goal, it is only accidentally a good rule. To formulate a rule for my action, the end must be known. The proper question to ask in this situation is this: “I am trying to reach place X, which way should I turn?” The speculative knowledge, where I am going, must come before the practical question.

But the relationship is in fact more complex. Not only is practical knowledge dependent upon speculative knowledge, but we come to know the universal nature of things through our knowledge of particulars. We come to understand the universal truths of the speculative intellect in the context of making practical decisions in contingent situations. Speculative truths are learned through encounters with particulars. This conclusion is a corollary of the general principle that sense knowledge is the material cause of intellectual knowledge.⁵⁰ Aquinas, relying on Aristotle, argues that classical jurisprudence understood the principles of natural law to be general rules not made by human reason but rather discovered through reflecting on human nature in a process that is both inductive and deductive. These principles of natural law must be known both for their own sake (because they define the good of human existence) and for the sake of directing human lawmaking. Human-made positive laws, on the other hand, are formulated by human reason to add greater specificity to the general principles of natural law to direct people to specific action in particular circumstances and to help them to know the principles of natural law that they should see in particular laws. We can see in this simplified description of the natural legal order  the interconnectedness of speculative and practical knowledge.

It is time to make explicit what has been implied thus far in the consideration of the role of reason in natural law jurisprudence. A law is not just any ordinance. It is an ordinance of reason, by which is meant a particular type of reasoning from nature. This concept is at the heart of the importance of speculative knowledge to natural law jurisprudence. An ordinance of reason is a rule that is consonant with the way things truly are. In short, legal rules are rationally discovered from considering the nature of things.

To introduce the term “nature” raises a host of issues. As Finnis remarks, as far back as the Stoics this term has possessed a variety of meanings: “Being scholastics, interested in establishing a technical vocabulary, the Stoics were aware that natura was a word with a variety of meanings and shifting references.”⁵¹ Confusion over the meaning of the claim that rules of action can be discovered from rightly understanding nature has led to a widespread rejection of classical natural law reasoning as a fallacy. Since the Enlightenment, this ancient epistemological approach has been dismissed as the “naturalist fallacy.” The simplified version of the argument is that it is not possible to demonstrate from what something is what it ought to do, or one cannot derive an “ought” statement from an “is” statement.

MacIntyre explains that the key to recognizing the legitimacy of classical reasoning from nature is that classical authors clearly understood that the word “nature” had two related meanings. MacIntyre explains that for Aristotle, ethics is the science of the transition of “man-as-he-happens-to-be” to “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature.”⁵² Those who decry natural law reasoning as fallacious would be correct if it merely argued that man-as-he-happens-to-be at a moment in history tells us what man-ought-to-be. This would be an unsupported mere rationalization of whatever man-happens-to-be at any point in time. It would provide no universally valid rules of action other than justifying the ever changing status quo. In contrast, for Aristotelian and hence natural law jurisprudence, one critically considers what man-happens-to-be in light of the potential for what man-could-be if he perfected the elements of what makes him what he happens to be. Aristotle’s central concept of potency and act is at the heart of MacIntyre’s insight. We consider man-as-he-happens-to-be in order to discover the potencies for what man-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Likewise, by considering water as it happens to be we can discover that it has the potency to become steam under the right conditions. When those grounded in the naturalist fallacy argument encounter the term “man-as-he-happens-to-be,” they understand it only to encompass current acts. Yet, for Aristotelians the term also includes the unrealized potentialities within what man-happens-to-be. Man-as-he-happens-to-be encompasses both what man is in act at the moment plus all the potencies for perfection contained within man. Identification of natural law precepts involves, at its heart, identifying these potentialities contained within man-as-he-happens-to-be and then specifying rules directing action toward actualizing these potencies.

The closer one comes to attaining the state of man-as-he-ought-to-be the closer one comes not only to goodness or perfection but to the fullness of being. The more good or perfect something is, the more real it is or the more being it possesses.⁵³ Many modern authors who have an aversion to understanding rules in light of human nature are really arguing against basing laws on man-as-he-happens-to-be in act rather than the position of classical natural lawyers that it should be based on man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature as evidenced in the potencies for perfection. The transition from the former to the latter involves an interconnected examination in light of reason and experience of (1) man-as-he-happens-to-be, (2) the precepts of the natural law (or “rational ethics”), and (3) man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature.⁵⁴ Rather than deriving the precepts from man-as-he-happens-to-be as conclusions from premises, there is a more nuanced dialectic among all three perspectives. Their relationship involves a movement from man-as-he-happens-to-be to man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature by means of the principles of natural law.⁵⁵ But it is only through the process of attempting this movement from one to the other that we discover those principles of natural law. The process is not a simple movement of one to the other through the third. It is dialectical. The Christian synthesis expands (in a paradoxical way that simplifies rather than complicates matters) the notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature to include not only a natural component but a supernatural component, and also an expanding notion of rules of rational ethics that includes precepts of divine law.⁵⁶

Jean Porter similarly highlights the tension between facts about things as we find them and their underlying order and intelligibility in natural law jurisprudence. Nature as we find it must be understood in terms of its preordained intelligibility. She explains that natural law reasoning involves rational evaluations of natural facts in light of the intelligibility of nature. She begins by distinguishing between

nature seen as the ordered totality of all creatures, and nature seen as the intrinsic characteristics of a given kind of creature. It can also refer to the human capacity for rational judgment, which gives rise to moral norms, or to God’s will as revealed in Scripture, since the divine will certainly exists prior to all human enactments and provides their ultimate norm. At the same time, while this interpretation of the natural can be extended widely, it does not encompass every possible sense in which nature can be understood. In order to be incorporated into the concept of the natural law, a given idea of nature has to carry connotations of order and intelligibility. Nature in the sense of sheer facticity is not incorporated into the scholastic concept of the natural law, because nature taken in this sense cannot offer a basis for understanding the regularities of the non-human or social world.⁵⁷

Reasoning from nature involves rational consideration of the facts as we find them throughout history. The facts of human experience of living in society and living with laws are the matter necessary for speculative reflection on the underlying order and purpose of human existence that imperfectly shows itself through these facts. If we can define it by a negative, reasoning from nature is not merely accepting facts about human experience as we find them. It is about discerning the underlying intelligibility hidden beneath often contradictory facts.

Aristotle likewise mentions two competing understandings of nature as either the matter of something or its substantial form: “Some identify the nature or substance of a natural object with that immediate constituent of it which taken by itself is without arrangement, e.g., the wood is the ‘nature’ of the bed, and the bronze the ‘nature’ of the statue. . . . Another account is that ‘nature’ is the shape or form which is specified in the definition of the thing.”⁵⁸ He concludes that the “form indeed is ‘nature’ rather than the matter; for a thing is more properly said to be what it is when it has attained to fulfilment than when it exists potentially.”⁵⁹ The form of something contains the definition of that which constitutes its fulfillment. Thus, another way to define nature is “the end or ‘that for the sake of which’” of a thing.⁶⁰ Even in saying that the form is the proper meaning of nature, Aristotle argues that we need knowledge of both particular matter and the universal form to know something, whether in the discipline of medicine, physics, housebuilding, or law. He concludes:

But if on the other hand art imitates nature, and it is the part of the same discipline to know the form and the matter up to a point (e.g., the doctor has a knowledge of health and also of bile and phlegm, in which health is realized, and the builder both of the form of the house and of the matter, namely that it is bricks and beams, and so forth): if this is so, it would be the part of physics also to know nature in both its senses.⁶¹

Yet, although the end of something is properly its nature, the end “belongs to the same department of knowledge as the means.”⁶² As we have seen throughout this discussion, Aristotle also argues that practical knowledge of the means is related to speculative knowledge of the end, or “that for the sake of which.” Law is about human actions. The matter of the jurisprudential reasoning is actual human actions; jurisprudence requires the discovery of the forms that transcend individual human acts.

Thus, returning to the alleged naturalist fallacy, as MacIntyre points out, the question of what something “is” and what it “ought” to do are not distinct questions but rather the same question. What I ought to do is a function of what I am. As MacIntyre notes: “So ‘such and such is the good of all human beings by nature’ is always a factual judgment, which when recognized as true by someone moves that person toward that good. Evaluative judgments are a species of factual judgments concerning the final and formal causes of activity of members of a particular species.”⁶³ Elsewhere, MacIntyre argues that evaluative and factual judgments are commonly encountered together. The claim of those who decry of the “naturalist fallacy” is itself a fallacy, for the rule that an “ought” judgment cannot be derived from an “is” statement is not universally true. For example, MacIntyre observes when we state that this is a watch, we can and do conclude that it ought to display the correct time, because the reason we identify it as being a watch is that it is a being that ought to keep time. This conclusion is true even if we find as a fact that it has been keeping incorrect time. Notwithstanding this fact, it ought to be keeping accurate time. The more accurate time it keeps, the more perfect a watch it will be.⁶⁴ Likewise, if we know that a person is a firefighter, we regularly conclude that he ought to fight fires. The ought conclusion flows from the function or purpose identified in the predicate of each sentence (i.e., is a fireman).⁶⁵

At the heart of classical natural law jurisprudence’s understanding of law as an ordinance of reason is this claim that rules of action (“ought” conclusions) can be known from speculative knowledge about the nature (or end or “that for the sake of which”) of things. By rationally considering what human beings do we can discover what they can do, their potencies for perfection. Rules can then be formulated directing human action toward these potencies for perfections. It is in this sense that we can say that an ordinance of reason is a rule derived from nature. This claim is at the heart of the fundamental break of the so-called new natural law school of jurisprudence, which abandons this leg of the three-part classical understanding of law as historically and communally situated commands that agree with ordinances of reason derived from the natural end of human nature. For classical authors, all law must be rooted in the metaphysical realities of human nature, properly understood. Porter explains this cleavage with classical jurisprudence by means of a compelling example:

There is a more fundamental difference between the “new natural law” of Grisez and Finnis and the scholastic conception of the natural law that cannot be brought out simply by a comparison of relevant texts on the natural law and reason. That is, Grisez and Finnis share in the modern view that nature, understood in terms of whatever is pre- or non-rational, stands in contrast to reason. This is implied by their insistence that moral norms must be derived from reason alone: that is, from pure rational intuitions that are in no way dependent on empirical or metaphysical claims about the world. They insist on this point because they are persuaded by Hume’s argument that moral claims cannot be derived from factual premises but, as a result, they are forced to deny the moral relevance of all those aspects of our humanity that we share with other animals. Even the traditional Catholic prohibition of the use of contraceptives is interpreted by them as a sin against life, which represents the same stance of will as is present in murder, rather than as a violation of the natural processes of sexuality. No scholastic would interpret reason in such a way as to drive a wedge between the pre-rational aspects of our nature and rationality.⁶⁶

Law as Command: Promulgated by One Who Has Care of a Community

As we have seen from Aquinas, law may not be made by just anyone but only “by him who has care of the community” (ab eo qui curam communitatis habet).⁶⁷ It is not someone merely in authority or in possession of power. The rule maker must have care of the community. Note that this formulation is not regime-type specific. It does not require the law be made by a king, or a legislative body, or the people at large. The test of legitimacy (that which binds) is that the lawgiver has care of the relevant community. There must be a relationship of entrustment and responsibility between the community and the legitimate lawgiver. The order of reason must not just exist in the mind of the lawgiver but must be externalized; it must become word; it must be publicly spoken or “promulgated” (promulgata). Although born of reason, law becomes an act of the will, not just a product of speculation. Reason gives rise to the act of promulgation.

Although we are critical of legal positivism’s claim that human law should be understood solely or primarily as a volitional act, that criticism does not mean that positivists are wrong in understanding lawmaking to involve an act of the will. The enacting of human law involves a free human choice, albeit a choice that is still constrained by ordinances of reason. That we must drive on the right as opposed to the left side of the road is not determined by human nature or an ordinance of reason. A lawmaker must make a choice between left and right. Higher law would preclude a choice requiring random changes in driving direction, as that would unduly endanger human life. Yet, within the constraints imposed by higher law, the choice of left or right is reserved to the election of the lawmaker. Law is an ordinance of reason, yet it is more than pure intellectual speculation. It involves willed human choice.

Law is a product of both reason and will. Errors occur when either one or the other is overemphasized. As Brian Tierney has demonstrated in his discussion of Villey’s theory of Aquinas on natural law, Aquinas maintains a distinction between law as describing things the way they are and ought to be and law as a set of precepts.⁶⁸ Law is both a system that explains things as they are and a system of precepts directing action. Yet, after Aquinas, the volitional sense of law as precept seems to dominate later natural law thinkers’ understanding of all kinds of law, to the exclusion of the first. This emphasis on the volitional aspect predates and in some senses prepares the way for Austin. Francisco Suárez, although still clearly a natural law jurist in the Thomistic tradition, tends to emphasize law as “binding precepts, promulgated to rational creatures only, who are directed to a morally good life.”⁶⁹ As the centuries have gone by, this second concept of law, law as willed precepts, and not the former, law as that which is and ought to be, has come to dominate. Therefore, contemporary defenses of natural law may err either by overemphasizing the intellectual component of natural law jurisprudence or by focusing on natural law as a list of commanded precepts. The two aspects are indispensable and related for Aquinas. Law is not merely an ordinance of reason. To be law, it must be promulgated by a real person in time. Law, in the first sense of the state of affairs that exists and that ought to exist, produces precepts. Reason is necessary to produce the precepts. It is in this sense that human laws (as precepts) are derived from the natural law principles, which in turn are derived from the proper ends contained in the exemplar, idea, and type of all laws, the eternal law. The greatness of the power to make human laws is nothing other than a participation in the authority of God himself. This participation involves moving from the purely intellectual—knowing the nature of things and therefore what they ought to do—to an act of the will, the promulgation of a precept. Austin is correct that laws are commands of one with the authority to utter them. Yet, natural law jurisprudence qualifies this claim by limiting the scope of those commands to commands consonant with reason and human nature.

Although law is more than precepts, Suárez is correct that law is a system of binding precepts that direct human, that is, rational, action. The incorporation of the idea that natural law is a set of rules or precepts into natural law jurisprudence is one of the contributions of Stoicism to the tradition. Although it is certainly true that the classical natural law tradition is rooted in Aristotle’s distinction between natural justice and conventional justice, Aristotle does not discuss natural justice as a system of laws containing precepts. The Stoics later add to the more general understanding of Aristotle a definite law-like quality to their understanding of natural law. The Stoics develop Aristotle’s notions of natural justice or a natural order into laws that create duties on us.⁷⁰ By the time of Aquinas, the natural and eternal laws are not seen as analogous to law or merely law-like. His argument sets out to prove that they clearly satisfy all the criteria of a real law. To do so each of them must contain real rules or precepts that have been promulgated.⁷¹ Natural law is an ordinance of divine reason and contains precepts promulgated by God.

In so doing, Aquinas distinguishes two aspects of the concept of legal precept. Law is both a rule (regula) and a measure (mensura).⁷² These two terms indicate that to be a law a thing must both direct an action toward an end and must serve as a basis for evaluating a completed action. A rule directs or restricts action by binding or requiring actions to conform to a standard. Aquinas notes that one Latin word for law, lex, legis, is derived from ligare (“to bind”).⁷³ Law binds specific acts to their proper ends. As a rule, a law has a dual function of proscribing and prescribing actions that hinder or further, respectively, the end of human nature. As a measure, law serves as a way of evaluating or measuring acts to see to what extent they conform to the rule. Did a chosen action bind the actor to a proper end, or was the act unhinged from human perfection? The measure is not simply a binary evaluation (it complies or not) but determines how far along the line formed by the directing rule an action lies. Precepts involve both prospective and retrospective evaluation. In this dual function, we can again see Aquinas’s understanding of law both normatively directing action (a rule) and descriptively telling us about the state of affairs (a measure).

However, not all precepts are of the same species. All laws are precepts, but not all precepts are of the same level of generality. Consideration of laws must therefore take account of whether the particular ordinance of reason is a general or a specific rule. Both types of laws can bind to varying degrees. Both aim at the same end but with lesser or greater specificity. If one asks for directions, one may receive a general or a specific rule of action: “Head north” or “turn left on a particular street, right on another.” Both types of rule are necessary due to the variety of contingent circumstances in which people find themselves. Rules that are drafted in more general language encompass more contingent circumstances and thus apply to more people. The more particular and concrete the rule, the more limited circumstances to which it will apply. The complexity emerges once we understand that every human act is a means to some end; the act is oriented either toward the end, or goods, of human nature, or it is directed away from this end. It is in this context that we can introduce the concept of intrinsically evil acts.

For this introductory consideration, we can state in general that an action is good if it directs the actor toward a perfection or end of human nature, and evil if it directs toward its opposite. In this sense, we consider objectively the relation of the act to its end and not the subjective awareness of the actor of this relation. For example, if a person is walking north objectively, the relation between his act, walking, and its end, the north, exists irrespective of whether or not the person subjectively knows or wants to walk north. A person who is in fact walking north but erroneously believes he is walking south is objectively walking north.⁷⁴ Yet, all human acts cannot simply be categorized as good or evil. Some acts are indispensable for the attainment of the end of human existence and are therefore called “intrinsically good.” Others are incapable of being oriented to the end of human existence regardless of circumstances and are designated as “intrinsically evil.”⁷⁵ A third category of acts comprise those that in and of themselves are indifferent toward the end; they can be related either to the end of human nature or its opposite.⁷⁶ An act that in and of itself is incapable of having a transcendental relationship of harmony with the end of human nature is intrinsically evil. Thus, a rule of a general nature can be formulated that applies objectively to all beings who share this common nature or end. Such a rule would be a general principle of natural law that universally directs them to that end. Disregarding the subjective knowledge and hence culpability of an actor, one who engages in an intrinsically evil act is objectively not oriented to his proper end and hence objectively acting contrary to the universally binding precept of natural law. The person’s culpability or responsibility for so doing is another matter. He may be inculpably ignorant of this fact.

Many human acts fall into the third category. They are by their very nature capable either of being oriented toward one’s end or toward its contrary. For example, if a person must travel from Dallas to Chicago, we can say that his end is Chicago. The simple act of boarding a plane is not intrinsically oriented toward or opposed to this end. If the airplane is traveling to Chicago, then the act of boarding the plane is oriented to the end, but if it is flying to Mexico City, then the act of boarding the plane is not oriented to the end. Acts of this third category may become good or evil acts not by any intrinsic quality of the act. Once the owner of a plane decides that a particular flight is flying to Chicago, then the act of boarding the plane becomes oriented to the end of the person wanting to go to Chicago, not by the act of boarding the plane itself but by the extrinsic choice of the owner. Acts oriented to an end of human nature not by virtue of the act but by the willed choice of someone can be called extrinsically good, and acts oriented to the opposite of an end of human nature by virtue of a determination are extrinsically evil.⁷⁷ For example, stopping one’s car when encountering a light that is red in color is not in and of itself good or evil. Once a legitimate authority has determined that in order to protect human life from unnecessary danger that a red light means a car should stop, then doing so becomes oriented to the end of the preservation of life and hence extrinsically good.

Rules that state what actions are intrinsically good or evil are therefore of the general type, because they apply to all human beings in all circumstances. Rules that change the nature of an otherwise neutral act to good or evil are specific rules because they apply only to the circumstances enumerated in the rule in which the otherwise neutral act will be good or evil. The determination of the owner of the airplane to fly to Chicago applies only to the particular time a particular flight is departing, not to all flights and all passengers in general.

Rules of law can thus be distinguished as either general or specific. General rules are universal in application. They direct human nature not by the choice of any human lawgiver, but by the intrinsic nature of the act and its intrinsic compatibility, or not, with universal human nature. Specific rules are more limited in scope. They apply extrinsic criteria, chosen by the applicable legislator, to otherwise neutral acts (vis-à-vis the end of human nature), and the fact of the rule itself is what establishes a transcendental relation between the act and the end of human nature. The two types of rules are distinct, yet not unrelated. Specific rules are limited to those that conform to general rules. Thus, an intrinsically evil act cannot be made good by a specific rule. General rules limit and define the scope of specific rules.

Legal positivism in all of its various forms emphasizes law as a collection of individual rules. For the pure positivists, such as Austin, law is composed of whatever particular collection of rules the sovereign declares. More nuanced positivists such as Hart surround this core concept with procedures, such as Hart’s own concept of the Rule of Recognition. Yet even for Hart, a legal system is composed of those rules from the internal point of view that one in the system would recognize as law. Rules are detached from reason. Although more moderate positivists such as Hart and Raz might advise that a legal system would be a better system if its rules were formulated and promulgated in a rational manner, the quality of reasonableness is not a necessary condition for the rules to be recognized as law. They might be poorly crafted rules, but they are law nonetheless. Classical natural law jurisprudence accepts that law is composed of rules, but those rules promulgated by the will of a lawgiver must be consonant with the precepts of natural law that are known to human reason.

Custom and Mores

Historicism understands law merely as the product of particular communities’ societal evolution. Laws develop out of the lived experience of cultures. In a certain sense, historicism is a form of collective positivism. Positivism relies upon the will of a particular person or persons at a point in time. The law is whatever the sovereign decrees. Historicism sees law as an undirected and unconstrained social phenomenon arising out of the collective will of a community that reveals itself over time. Despite rejecting historicism’s exclusive reliance on a historically unfolding collective will as the only source of law, natural law jurisprudence does recognize a role for historically developing societal practices. As Aquinas’s definition makes clear, law is more than an abstract ordinance of reason; it is a rule promulgated by a particular lawgiver, one who has care of the community, for the purpose of the common good of that particular community. Law encompasses both general principles of reason applicable to all communities and particular laws made for historically situated communities.

Human nature is not disembodied. It is encountered in historically situated contexts. Leo Strauss explains that at the heart of the emergence of philosophy is the recognition of the distinction between natural and conventional, between natural and ancestral.⁷⁸ Likewise Aristotle recognizes that justice can be divided into general or natural justice and political or conventional justice.⁷⁹ Something natural is that which it is simply by virtue of its own being; whereas something conventional is what it is due to the convention of human society. Although this distinction seems clear at first, the complexity lies in the fact that the natural and conventional are intermingled. The natural is not simply known naturally. It is hidden within the conventional. The ancestral conventions contain principles incorporated from nature and practices established merely by the community. Philosophy is the quest to disentangle them and to find the distinction. The quest ultimately leads to questions about the first things and the nature of man as perfect or imperfect.⁸⁰ One task that natural law jurisprudence assigns to human lawmakers is to distinguish, within the ancestral conventions of a community, those consonant with nature and those opposed to it. To separate the natural from the conventional and the good customs from the evil ones, we require principles, rules against which to measure historically situated customs. The precepts of the natural law provide these principles against which the customs of a people must be measured. Historicism is correct in seeing that laws have evolved through historical circumstances. Yet, it attains this insight at the cost of losing sight of the natural that is intertwined within this process.

Further confusion arises in contemporary jurisprudence when jurists such as Hart confuse morality with mores, or the customs of a people. The contemporary notion of morality differs dramatically from our ancient and medieval ancestors’ understanding of the subject. The word “morality” as used to mean a compartmentalized set of nonlegal norms (primarily negative) governing personal behavior did not even exist in the vocabulary of classical or medieval philosophers.⁸¹ The concept of a distinct body of nonlegal rules directing individual action as a science or discipline distinct from law or politics was alien to classical and medieval writers. Ethics was an integral part of politics for Aristotle.⁸² One of the most important, and least noted, achievements of Porter’s work on law and morality is to remind us that our grouping of natural law and morality on one side and human laws on the other is alien to classical and medieval philosophy and jurisprudence, including that of Aristotle and Aquinas.⁸³ Morality is inseparable from law, not in the sense that law embodies moral rules but that moral rules embody law. “Morality,” as I use the term here, includes the determination of natural law precepts by individuals applying them to their personal actions, as distinguished from determinations of natural law made by authorities (either personal or political superiors), and applicable to multiple members of a community.⁸⁴ Morality is distinct from human law, but merely as a different species of the same genus, not as belonging to a different genus or normative system.

The root of the confusion over law and morality can be seen in Hart’s introduction of the subjectivist idea of understanding law as the concept that most people in the community or legal officials have of law.⁸⁵ Finnis adopts this concept approach to law.⁸⁶ Hart sees both law and morality as the concepts a society has of these terms. He refers to “morality of a social group”⁸⁷ rather than morality as such. For Hart, morality is virtually synonymous with the tradition or customs of a society. He struggles to distinguish law and morality from the custom of a man taking his hat off indoors.⁸⁸ He argues that morality does not have to conform to reason.⁸⁹ Morality can be whatever a people consider as morality as long as it contains certain characteristics; there can be such a thing as a barbarous morality for Hart.⁹⁰

In contrast, classical philosophy anchors both morality and humanmade law in the same source, the eternal law that is known through the natural law. Grenier defines morality as “the transcendental relation of a free act to its object as in conformity or disconformity with the rules of morals, i.e., with right reason and the eternal law.”⁹¹ Morality is therefore not distinct from law but rather ultimately derived from the eternal law. Yet, morality involves a particular type of conformity. It is the conformity of a free act. A bee that produces honey conforms to the eternal law in a different, unfree way. A free act is one in which the intellect knows and the will choses the act in conformity with the eternal law. Therefore, as Grenier states, the “proximate rule of morality is right reason, and its supreme rule is the eternal law.”⁹² The proximate rule of both morality and law is therefore natural law (or right reason), but the remote rule is eternal law. Yet, this conformity is known and willed in three distinct ways, corresponding to the classical three-part division of morality, based upon the person establishing the conformity of acts to right reason and the eternal law—individuals (monastics, or ethics), domestic superiors (morality of the family), and legal authorities (politics, or the morality of civil society).⁹³ Rather than attempting to divide “law” and “morality” as Hart sought to do,⁹⁴ classical philosophy and hence jurisprudence understood that human beings are whole beings who live not only as individuals but within domestic and political communities. Their freely chosen actions are directed to their proper end ultimately by the eternal law and proximately by their own determinations (ethics), their personal superiors (domestic commands), and political authorities (civil laws). To separate morality from law is to separate morality from its origin.

The development of human law unfolds in the context of historical communities—families, social groups, and political communities—all making determinations of natural law precepts. Human lawmaking is a part of this integrated system of developing rules of ethics (or monastics), customs, and human laws.

The classical natural law tradition requires a dialectical interaction of three components. Law must be an ordinance of reason that results from reflection upon the natural ends of human nature. The conclusions of reason must be embodied in actual rules promulgated following a willed choice of one who has care of a community. Finally, the specific laws of a community must be devised and revised in light of the developing and evolving practices of that community.

26.            Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 556.

27.            Harold J. Berman, “An Ecumenical Christian Jurisprudence,” in The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics, and Nature, vol. 1, ed. John Witte, Jr., and John S. Alexander (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 756– 57.

28.            Soper identifies four schools of jurisprudence: classical natural law, classical positivism, modern positivism, and modern natural law. See Philip Soper, “In Defense of Classical Natural Law in Legal Theory,” 205– 6.

29.            Berman, Law and Revolution, 529.

30.            Lloyd L. Weinreb, “The Moral Point of View,” in Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality: Contemporary Essays, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 202.

31.            St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), I-II, q. 90, a. 4 (unless otherwise noted all translations of the Summa Theologica are from this edition).

32.            Ibid., I-II, q. 90, a. 4 (my translation).

33.            Hart, Concept of Law, 6– 7.

34.            Summa Theologica I-II, q. 90, a. 4.

35.            Gratian, Concordia Discordantium Canonum, in Corpus Iuris Can onici (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959); electronic reproduction, vols.

1– 2 (New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2007), D.1, C.5 (hereafter cited as Decretum), http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd _6029936_001/pages/ldpd_6029936_001_00000059.html.

36.            Ibid.

37.            See, Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 2, Philosophy of Nature, trans. Rev. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown, PEI: St. Dunstan’s University Press, 1950), 220– 21.

38.            Ibid.

39.            See ibid.

40.            Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, 2nd ed., trans. H. Rackham (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 293.

41.            Ralph McInerny, St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 61. See also Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 14, a. 16, and St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), bk. 6, lect. 2 (discussing the relationship between speculative and practical intellect).

42.            See Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition: Being Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 62.

43.            Ibid., 128.

44.            See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953), 309– 12.

45.            Ibid., 311.

46.            See Aaron J. Rappaport, “On the Conceptual Confusions of Jurisprudence,” Washington University Jurisprudence Review 7, no. 1 (2014): 77– 106.

47.            Strauss, Natural Right and History, 312.

48.            Charles De Koninck, “On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists and The Principle of the New Order,” The Aquinas Review 4 (1997): II: “Negation of the Primacy of the Speculative,” http://ldataworks.com /aqr/V4_BC_text.html#BC_h003.

49.            Ibid.

50.            See Summa Theologica I, q. 84, a. 6 (citing Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1, and Posterior Analytics 2.15).

51.            John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 375.

52.            Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 52. Some quotations herein are from the second and some from the third edition. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to the second edition.

53.            On the convertibility of the concepts of being and goodness John L. Hill, After the Natural Law: How the Classical Worldview Supports Our Modern Moral and Political Values (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2016), 59– 60.

54.            MacIntyre, After Virtue, 53.

55.            Ibid.

56.            Ibid.

57.            Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 77.

58.            Aristotle, Physics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 2.1.

59.            Ibid.

60.            Ibid., 2.2.

61.            Ibid.

62.            Ibid.

63.            MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 134.

64.            Edward Feser provides another excellent example that demonstrates the logical connection between being and goodness: “It is of the essence or nature of a Euclidian triangle to be a closed plane figure with three straight lines, and anything with this essence must have a number of properties, such as having angles that add up to 180 degrees. These are objective facts that we discover rather than invent; certainly it is notoriously difficult to make the opposite opinion at all plausible. Nevertheless, there are obviously triangles that fail to live up to this definition. A triangle drawn hastily on the cracked plastic seat of a moving bus might fail to be completely closed, or to have perfectly straight sides, and thus its angles will add up to something other than 180 degrees. Even a triangle drawn slowly and carefully on paper with an art pen and a ruler will contain subtle flaws. Still, the latter will far more closely approximate the essence of triangularity than the former will. It will accordingly be a better triangle than the former. Indeed, we would naturally describe the latter as a good triangle and the former as a bad triangle”; Edward Feser, Neo-Scholastic Essays (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 298– 99.

65.            See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 57– 59.

66. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, 93. Notes to Pages 22–33.

67.    Summa Theologica I-II, q. 90, a. 4.

68.    Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natu ral Law, and Church Law, 1150—1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 23– 24.

69.    Pauline C. Westerman, The Disintegration of Natural Law Theory:

Aquinas to Finnis (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 82.

70.    See Hill, After the Natural Law, 53.

71.    See Summa Theologica I-II, q. 93 and 94.

72.    Ibid., I-II, q. 90, a. 1.

73.    Ibid.

74.    For a more complete discussion of the distinction between objective and subjective morality, see Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 4, Moral Philosophy, trans. Rev. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown, PEI: St. Dunstan’s University, 1950), 76– 79.

75.    Ibid., 82– 86.

76.    Ibid., 78.

77.    See ibid., 82– 86.

78.    Strauss, Natural Right and History, 81– 91.

79.    See chapter 7 in The Architecture of Law: Rebuilding Law in the Classical Tradition.

80.    See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 81– 91.

81.    MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 28, 191.

82.    Ibid., 191.

83.    See Jean Porter, Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 278– 79.

84.    See chapters 6 and 7 in The Architecture of Law: Rebuilding Law in the Classical Tradition.

85.    See Jonathan Crowe, “Clarifying the Natural Law Thesis,” Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 37 (2012): 161.

86.    See Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, chap. 1.

87.    Hart, Concept of Law, 169.

88.    Ibid., 9, 44, 84, 121, 122.

89.    Ibid., 177.

90.    Ibid.

91.    Grenier, Moral Philosophy, 77.

92.    Ibid., 89.

93.    See ibid., 10– 11.

94.    See Hart, Concept of Law.

Bibliography

• The Gospel according to St. Mark, chapter 16
• The Gospel according to St. John, chapters 20-21
• The Gospel according to St. Luke, chapter 3:23-38
• The Apocalypse of St. John, chapter 21
• Genesis, chapters 27-45
• The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (all of it)
• The First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 15
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIIa qq.53-56
• Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi

Music:

Heinrich Ingaz Franz von Biber, Missa Salisburgensis, performed by Vaclav Luks with Collegium 1704

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Übersetzt von Johannes Moravitz

Die folgenden 37 Thesen geben einen allgemeinen Überblick über die aristotelisch-thomistische Darstellung vom Guten, wie sie in Interpretationen von Thomisten der Laval-Schule, wie etwa Charles De Koninck, Duane Berquist und Marcus Berquist zu finden ist. Eine Druckversion ist hier zu finden. Eine englische hier und eine spanische hier.

Teil I: Das Gute im Allgemeinen und das Menschliche Gut[1]

1. Das Gute ist, was alle wollen.

Das Wort „gut“ scheint zumindest zwei verschiedene Bedeutungen zu haben. Fragte man einen kleinen Buben, nennen wir ihn Thomas, was gut sei, so könnte er Folgendes antworten: „Eis ist gut, Pizza ist gut, fernsehen ist gut, Fußball ist gut, Urlaub ist gut.“ Ein anderer Bub, nennen wir ihn Eustachius, vielleicht ein Musterkind, könnte hingegen antworten: „Den Eltern zu folgen“, oder „die Regeln nicht zu brechen“, oder sogar „Gott zu gehorchen“. Es scheint einen großen Unterschied zwischen diesen beiden Wahrnehmungen des Guten zu geben. Tatsächlich aber sind beide nicht so unterschiedlich.

Beginnen wir mit Thomas., der dem Guten eine einfachere Bedeutung zu geben scheint. Was haben Eis, Pizza, fernsehen, Videospiele, Urlaub, Sport, etc. gemeinsam? Es sind alles Dinge, die Thomas will. Das ist zugleich die erste Definition des Guten, die uns Aristoteles gibt: Das Gute ist, was alle wollen oder begehren.

2. Das Gute ist gewollt, weil es gut ist.

Da das Gute definiert wird durch das Wollen oder das Begehren, könnte man meinen, dass das Begehren etwas gut macht. Dies klingt zunächst sehr plausibel: es scheint so, als wenn jemand etwas möchte, dies für ihn dann gut wäre. Möchte ein gewisser Soundso in Los Angeles leben, dann scheint es für ihn gut zu sein, dort zu leben. Dies wird auch durch den enigmatischen Charakter, wie von der Freud’schen Psychoanalyse beschrieben, angedeutet: Das Begehren scheint eine unlogische Kraft zu sein, die sich ohne vorherigen Grund an ein Objekt bindet. In David Foster Wallaces Roman „Infinite Jest“ bringt dies eine amerikanische handelnde Person gut zur Geltung: „Was, wenn du einfach nur liebst? Ohne dich zu entscheiden? Du tust es einfach.“ (S. 108) Wäre dies wahr, dann wäre die Definition des Guten eine Definition einer Wirkung von ihrer Ursache.  Und wäre dies wahr, so hätte sich der arme Eustachius, das Musterkind, geirrt – niemand anders, und kein Regelwerk könnten ihm sagen, was gut für ihn sei. Vielmehr sollte er lernen, auf sein Begehren zu hören und sich von der paternalistischen Unterdrückung befreien.

Nun gibt es aber auch Gründe daran zu zweifeln, dass es das Wollen ist, das etwas gut macht. Haben wir nicht alle bereits die Erfahrung gemacht, etwas zu wollen, von dem wir nachher zugaben, dass es nicht gut gewesen ist? Ich wollte noch dieses eine letzte Bier auf der Feier, gebe aber später zu, dass es nicht gut für mich war. Ich wollte mit 160 km/h die kurvenreiche Straße hinunterfahren, gebe aber später, im Krankenhausbett, zu, dass es nicht gut für mich war. Wenn etwas zu wollen dies gut machen würde, dann hätte mein Wollen des letzten Bieres dieses für mich gut gemacht.

In „Lectures on Ethics“ zieht Duane Berquist viele Beispiele an Grundbegehren und deren Objekte heran, und zeigt in jedem Fall auf, dass das Objekt nicht gut ist, weil es begehrt wird, sondern begehrt wird, weil es gut ist. Hunger ist das Verlangen nach Essen, aber essen ist nicht gut, weil es Hunger gibt. Im Gegenteil, Hunger gibt es, weil Nahrung gut ist und notwendig, um die eigene Substanz zu erhalten. Dasselbe gilt für das Trinken. Wasser ist nicht gut, weil Tiere durstig sind, sondern Tiere werden durstig, weil Wasser gut für sie ist. Die Natur hat ihnen den Durst eingegossen, um sicherzustellen, dass sie dieses Gut erlangen. Es scheint nicht das bloße Begehren zu sein, dass die sexuelle Vereinigung gut macht, sondern diese scheint eher deswegen begehrt zu sein, weil sie in sich gut ist und notwendig zur Erhaltung einer ganzen Art von Wesen. Und schließlich, selbst in unserer eigenen Erfahrung von Vergnügen scheint es das Gute des Vergnügens zu sein, das unser Begehren verursacht – wir sagen ja, davon „angezogen“ zu sein. Diese Liste könnte ins Unendliche geführt werden: Wissen, Freundschaft, Kunst, etc. Selbst Geld ist nicht gut, weil Menschen es wollen; sie wollen es, weil es so nützlich ist, um Dinge zu kaufen.

Jedoch stoßen wir weiterhin auf Schwierigkeiten mit der Idee, dass das Gute begehrt wird, weil es gut ist. Denn was gut ist, wird nur allzu häufig nicht gewollt. Wenn das Gute die Ursache des Begehrens ist, wie kommt es dann, dass Menschen oft nicht wollen, was gut ist? Wenn es für Thomas gut ist, in die Schule zu gehen, warum will dann Thomas nicht in die Schule gehen? Wenn es für ihn gut ist, sein Gemüse zu essen, warum will er es dann nicht essen? Wie kann die Ursache bestehen, ohne dass die Wirkung erfolgt?

Oder, wenn das Gute die Ursache des Begehrens ist, dann scheint es, dass das Gegenteil des Guten, das Schlechte, die Ursache für Abneigung sein müsse. Viele Menschen begehren jedoch, was schlecht für sie ist, wie wir anhand der Beispiele des „letzten Bieres“ und der 160 km/h Fahrt gesehen haben.

Diesen Einwänden kann jedoch begegnet werden. Bevor ich ein Gut begehre, muss ich es in irgendeiner Weise kennen. Hätte Thomas nie Süßigkeiten gekostet, so hätte er sie nie begehrt. Hätte Romeo Julia nie gesehen, so hätte er sie nie begehrt. Hätte Sokrates Weisheit nicht bis zu einem gewissen Grad verstanden, so hätte er sie nie begehrt. Das Gut ist daher nur als ein bekanntes Gut begehrenswert und ist daher so lange machtlos, Begehren zu verursachen, solange es unbekannt ist.

Und das Schlechte wird nicht begehrt, weil es schlecht ist, sondern vielmehr, weil es in irgendeiner Art und Weise gut ist oder zu sein scheint. Ich trank das letzte Bier nicht, weil ich mir all die schlechten Dinge, die mir deswegen zustoßen könnten, sondern das gute Vergnügen, das ich zu erlangen glaubte, vor Augen hielt. Zeitweise erscheint das Schlechte als das Gute, und wird mit diesem verwechselt. Wenn daher jemand „irrtümlich“ giftige Pilze isst, so tut er dies, weil er meint die guten Pilze zu essen, die ihnen so sehr ähneln.

3. Das Gute ist die Finalursache

Das Gute als „was alle wollen“ zu definieren ist daher keine Definition einer Wirkung von ihrer Ursache her, sondern genau das Gegenteil: eine Definition einer Ursache durch ihre Wirkung. Das Gute ist eine Ursache. Es ist die Finalursache, das Ziel oder der Zweck. Aristoteles unterscheidet bekannterweise zwischen vier verschiedenen Ursachen: die Materie, aus der etwas gemacht ist; die Form, die diese Materie hat; die handelnde Person, die der Materie ihre Form gibt und das Ziel, wozu die handelnde Person der Materie ihre Form gibt. So ist eine Statue von Napoleon etwa aus Bronze gemacht, in der Form eines korsisch-französischen Tyrannen, von einem Bildhauer, um den Tyrannen zu ehren. Die Finalursache ist zuletzt realisiert, muss aber in der Absicht zuerst vorhanden sein. Sie ist die Ursache der anderen Ursachen, denn die Form ist der Materie zwar durch die handelnde Person gegeben, die handelnde Person kann aber nicht handeln, es sei denn, sie hat einen Grund, um zu handeln.

4. Das Bessere ist nicht besser, weil es mehr gewollt wird.

Wenn etwas nicht gut ist, bloß weil es gewollt wird, dann ist etwas auch nicht besser, bloß weil es mehr gewollt wird. Wenn Sokrates meint, die besten Güter seien die Güter der Seele, die Athener hingegen, die Güter des Körpers und des äußeren Besitzes, so lässt sich dieser Streit nicht lösen, indem gesagt wird: „Für Sokrates sind Tugend und Weisheit besser, denn sie sind, was er will; für die Athener sind Vergnügen und Wohlstand besser, denn sie sind, was sie wollen.“ In Wahrheit sind Tugend und Weisheit besser. Die Athener bevorzugen Vergnügen und Wohlstand nur aus Ignoranz heraus – sie kennen Tugend und Weisheit nicht gut genug, um zu sehen, wie gut sie sind.

5. Das Ganze ist besser als ein Teil.

Ein ganzer Sessel ist besser als ein Teil eines Sessels. Ein ganzes Auto ist besser als ein Teil eines Autos. Ein ganzer Garten ist besser als eine Blume.

6. Das Ziel ist besser als das, was wegen des Zieles ist.

Gesundheit und Medizin sind beide gut, doch Medizin gibt es um der Gesundheit willen und Gesundheit ist besser als Medizin. Studium ist gut und Wissen ist gut, doch das Studium gibt es um des Wissens willen (es sei denn, jemand studiert bloß, um „die Zeit totzuschlagen“) und Wissen ist besser als das Studium.

7. Ein Gut ist nicht besser, weil es notwendiger ist.

Was ist besser: zu atmen oder Fußball zu spielen? Atmen ist offensichtlich notwendiger, dies jedoch, um anderes tun zu können. Thomas atmet, damit er Fußball spielen kann und nicht umgekehrt. Viele Ökonomen behaupten, dass in einem freien Tauschhandel jede Partei glauben muss, durch den Deal besser auszusteigen. Menschen aber sind nicht so töricht. Eine Witwe, die ihren Ehering verkauft, um Essen zu kaufen, ist sich völlig bewusst, dass der Ring besser ist als das Essen. Gleichzeitig versteht sie, dass Essen notwendiger ist. Weit davon entfernt, zu glauben, dass sie durch den „freien“ Tauschhandel besser ausgestiegen ist, ist sie vielmehr traurig, dass grausame Notwendigkeit sie gezwungen hat, das bessere für das schlechtere zu tauschen.

8. Ehrbare Güter sind besser als nützliche und angenehme Güter.[2]

Unsere Erkenntnis beginnt mit Wahrnehmung: mit dem, was wir sehen, fühlen, schmecken, riechen und hören. Und so sind die Bedürfnisse oder Begehren, die wir zuerst wahrnehmen, sinnliche Begehren. Diese Begehren verlangen nach sinnlichen Vergnügen. Thomas, der kleine Bub aus dem ersten Abschnitt, gibt zuerst Beispiele von Gütern dieser Art: Eis und Pizza, die die Sinne des Geschmacks und Geruches erfreuen; fernsehen, was die Sinne des Sehens als auch den innerlichen Sinn des Vorstellens erfreut; und so weiter. Diese Güter werden „angenehme Güter“ genannt.

Unsere Idee vom Guten beginnt mit den angenehmen Gütern, aber dann erweitern wir sie auf Dinge, die nützlich sind, um angenehme Güter zu erlangen. Diese Dinge nennen wir „nützliche Güter“. Weil Thomas Eis möchte, will er Dinge, die nützlich sind, um dieses Eis zu erlangen, wie etwa Geld oder Eiswagen. Es ist aber offensichtlich, dass er Eis mehr mag als diese Dinge, die nützlich sind, um das Eis zu erlangen. Er will auch Eis kaufen, aber Eis kauft man, um Eis zu essen. Also ist Eis besser als die Dinge und Unternehmungen, die das Eis zum Zweck haben.

Unsere Erkenntnis beginnt mit der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, danach entwickeln wir vernünftige, intellektuelle Erkenntnis. Und diese Erkenntnis führt uns zu einem Verständnis von Grundgütern, wie die Erhaltung unseres Lebens und der Gesundheit, und dann weiter zu höheren Gütern wie Freundschaft, Weisheit, Gerechtigkeit, und diesen Dingen. Diese Güter werden „ehrbare Güter“ (bona honesta) genannt, weil sie Ehre verdienen. Ehrbare Güter sind besser als angenehme Güter. Ein Mann, der die Freundschaft oder Gerechtigkeit dem Vergnügen opfert, wird zurecht ein „Schwein“ genannt, da Vergnügen ein Gut der Sinne ist, die wir mit Tieren gemeinsam haben, während ehrbare Güter Güter einer vernünftigen Natur sind. Ein ehrbares Gut wird gewollt, nicht um anderes zu erlangen, nicht einmal Vergnügen, sondern es wird um seiner selbst willen gewollt.

Selbstverständlich kann ein und dasselbe Ding in verschiedenen dieser Möglichkeiten gut sein. Steak ist ein angenehmes Gut, aber auch nützlich, um Leben zu erhalten. Tatsächlich scheinen alle sinnlichen Vergnügen von Natur aus mit Handlungen verbunden zu sein, die zu niederen und allgemeineren Gütern führen, wie die Erhaltung und Fortpflanzung des Lebens. Ein Freund kann auf verschiedene Art und Weise nützlich sein, seine Anwesenheit angenehm, und er um seiner selbst willen geliebt werden. Die drei Arten von Gütern werden unterschieden je nach dem primären Grund, sie zu wollen: nützliche Güter werden primär wegen ihrer Nützlichkeit, um andere Güter zu erlangen, gewollt, angenehme Güter wegen des Vergnügens, und ehrbare Güter schlicht weil sie in sich gut und wünschenswert sind.

9. Ein ehrbares Gut ist besser als die Freude es zu erlangen.

Die Teilung des Guten in nützlich, angenehm und ehrbar wird zunächst angewandt, um zwischen verschiedenen Dingen, die aus verschiedenen Gründen gewollt werden, zu unterscheiden. Wie uns der hl. Thomas zeigt, werden jedoch ähnliche Unterscheidungen bei der Erlangung und Erhaltung fast jeden Guts getroffen. Fast immer gibt es die Schritte, die unternommen werden, um das Gut zu erlangen (dem Nützlichen entsprechend), das Gut selbst (dem Ehrbaren entsprechend), und das Ruhen oder sich Erfreuen am Gut (dem Angenehmen entsprechend). Im Fall vom Eis begehrenden Thomas können wir etwas zwischen dem Kauf von Eis, dem Eis selbst, und dem Vergnügen beim Essen von Eis unterscheiden.

Ähnliches können wir im Fall der ehrbaren Güter sehen. Es gibt die Schritte, um ein ehrbares Gut zu erreichen (nützlich), das ehrbare Gut selbst (ehrbar), und ein Ruhen und sich Erfreuen am ehrbaren Gut. Bei den höheren ehrbaren Gütern ist diese Freude kein sinnliches Vergnügen, sondern vielmehr eine intellektuelle oder geistige Freude, analog zum Vergnügen. So können wir etwa zwischen dem Lernen einer Wahrheit, der Wahrheit selbst, und dem sich erfreuen an der Wahrheit unterscheiden. Oder wir können auch zwischen den Schritten, sich mit jemanden zu befreunden, dem Freund selbst, und der Freude am Freund unterscheiden. Freude an einem ehrbaren Gut kann selbst ein ehrbares Gut sein, aber das Gute, woran man sich freut, ist besser als die Freude. Die Freude darüber, eine Wahrheit zu erlangen, ist ein ehrbares Gut, aber es ist natürlich, die Wahrheit selbst mehr zu lieben als die Freude daran. Die Freude an einem Freund ist ein ehrbares Gut, aber man muss den Freund selbst mehr lieben, als die Freude, sein Freund zu sein. Ein Zeichen davon ist, dass ein guter Freund will, was für seinen Freund am besten ist, selbst wenn dies bedeuten könnte, von ihm getrennt zu sein und sich daher nicht mehr im selben Maße an der Freundschaft erfreuen kann.

10. Ein ehrbares Gut ist besser als die Tätigkeit, durch die jenes besessen oder genossen wird.

Kehren zum Beispiel von Thomas und seinem Eis zurück. Wir haben zwischen dem Kauf von Eis, dem Eis selbst und dem Vergnügen daran, es zu verspeisen, unterschieden. Von ihnen können wir aber auch die Tätigkeit des Essens unterscheiden, und dieses ist ebenfalls ein Gut. Wir haben also vier Güter: der Kauf von Eis, das Eis selbst, Thomas das Eis essend und sein Vergnügen am Verspeisen von Eis.

Hier finden wir wieder eine Analogie zu den ehrbaren Gütern. Wir haben die Schritte, um das Gut zu erreichen, das Gut selbst, die Tätigkeit des Besitzens oder Genießens des Gutes und die Freude an dieser Tätigkeit: eine Wahrheit erlangen, die Wahrheit selbst, die Tätigkeit des Wissens der Wahrheit, die daraus fließende Freude; einen Freund kennenlernen, der Freund selbst, die Tätigkeit, mit ihm befreundet zu sein, die daraus fließende Freude.

Die Tätigkeit des Besitzens des Gutes ist besser als die daraus folgende Freude – die Kenntnis der Wahrheit ist besser als die aus der Kenntnis folgende Freude, der Akt der Freundschaft ist besser als die daraus folgende Freude. Aber das Gut selbst ist besser als die Tätigkeit des Besitzens – die Wahrheit selbst ist besser als die Kenntnis von ihr, der Freund ist besser als meine Freundschaft mit ihm. Das Gut selbst ist das Primäre – es ist letztlich das, was die Tätigkeit es zu erlangen so begehrenswert macht. Weil die Wahrheit gut ist, möchte sie der Philosoph erlangen. Weil eine Person gut ist, möchte eine andere mit ihr befreundet sein.

11. Alles begehrt Teilnahme am Ewigen und Göttlichen.

Wie wir gesehen haben (8), ist die erste Art des Begehrens, das wir erfahren, jenes, welches aus der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung kommt, das Begehren nach sinnlichen Gütern. Dann aber gelangen wir zur intellektuellen Erkenntnis, und daraus ergibt sich das Begehren nach Gütern, die wir durch die Vernunft erkannt haben. Dieses Konzept des Begehrens kann aber noch erweitert werden. Wir können auch bei Pflanzen, die keine sinnliche Wahrnehmung haben, und selbst bei unbelebten Dingen eine gewisse Tendenz beobachten, auf die sich dieses Konzept ausweiten lässt. Es lässt sich sogar argumentieren, dass alles, das auf irgendeine Weise handelt, etwas haben muss, das analog zum Begehren eines Gutes ist. Denn Handeln ist grundsätzlich unverständlich ohne den Bezug auf ein Ziel, da die Finalursache die Ursache aller Ursachen ist. In der Physik zeigt Aristoteles auf, dass natürliche Dinge Dinge sind, die ein inneres Prinzip der Bewegung haben, und dass diese Bewegung auf ein Ziel gerichtet ist. Selbst unbelebte Dinge scheinen zumindest eine Tendenz zu haben, in Existenz zu verbleiben und Vernichtung zu widerstehen. Bei Pflanzen ist dies noch offensichtlicher. Pflanzen nehmen Wasser und Licht auf, um zu wachsen und weiterhin zu existieren. In Platos Symposium (207d) erklärt Diotima den Instinkt der Fortpflanzung dahingehend, dass sich die sterbliche Natur so gut wie möglich bemüht, ewig und unsterblich zu sein. Aristoteles wiederholt diese Erklärung in De Anima (415a-b), indem er argumentiert, dass alles, das natürliche Dinge der Natürlichkeit wegen tut, dies tut, um am Ewigen und Göttlichen teilzuhaben und daher Fortpflanzung die natürlichste aller Handlungen sei. Fortpflanzung verleiht keine individuelle Unsterblichkeit, aber sie verleiht einer bestimmt Art von Dingen Unsterblichkeit.

12. Alles begehrt seine eigene Vollkommenheit.

Natürliche Dinge wünschen nicht bloß, weiter zu existieren, sondern sie wünschen, ihre Natur zu vervollständigen und vervollkommnen. Ein Samenkorn strebt danach, in eine vollständige Pflanze aufzugehen, ein Tier in ein erwachsenes Tier. Die Natur eines Dinges ist ein Prinzip, das es zwingt, sich selbst zu vervollkommnen. Thomas will erwachsen werden, er will seine Fähigkeiten entwickeln, seine Möglichkeiten aktualisieren und realisieren. Im Laufe des Älterwerdens will Thomas nicht bloß seine eigene individuelle Natur vervollkommnen, sondern auch seinen Freunden und Kindern helfen, die ihre zu vervollkommnen. Und er wird den Gemeinschaften, von denen er ein Teil ist – seine Fußballmannschaft, sein Geschäft, seine Heimat – helfen wollen, die ihre zu vervollkommnen. Vielleicht möchte er sogar seinen Teil dazu beitragen, das menschliche Geschlecht zu vervollkommnen.

13. Menschliche Tätigkeit ist immer um des letzten Zieles des menschlichen Lebens willen.

Es gibt eine Menge an Gütern, die ein kleiner Bub wie Thomas will. Jedes dieser Güter ist für ihn begehrenswert weil sie in irgendeiner Art und Weise (oder zumindest scheint es so) zu seiner Vervollkommnung und Vollkommenheit beitragen oder die Vollkommenheit einer Gemeinschaft, deren Teil er ist).  Sein Begehren nach diesen hat daher seine Ursache in seinem Begehren nach völliger Vollkommenheit – und nur weil er völlige Vollkommenheit begehrt, begehrt er diese überhaupt. Wie der hl. Thomas zeigt (Summa theologiæ Ia-IIae, q 1, a1.), begehrt er daher immer, wenn er ein Gut begehrt, das nicht völlige Vollkommenheit aufweist,  dieses um der völligen Vollkommenheit willen. Völlige Vollkommenheit ist das letzte Ziel von Thomas Leben und alle anderen Ziele sind im Vergleich zu diesem nur Mittel. Das bedeutet nicht, dass Thomas genau weiß, was das letzte Ziel ist, oder was notwendig ist, um es zu erreichen. Es bedeutet bloß, dass um etwas zu wählen, er dieses als gut betrachten muss, und das wiederum bedeutet, dass er dieses als etwas betrachten muss, das zu Bedeutung und Ziel in seinem Leben führt.

14. Das Gesetz ist eine Hilfe das Ziel zu erreichen.

Eustachius, das Musterkind aus dem ersten Absatz, identifiziert „gut“ mit dem Gehorchen von Autorität, dem Befolgen von Regeln, etc. Wir können jetzt erkennen, wie diese Vorstellung vom Guten im Zusammenhang mit Thomas Vorstellung vom Guten als „Dinge, die er will“ steht. Ein kleines Kind weiß nicht genau, was sein letztes Ziel ist, und kann daher sehr leicht über die Mittel, die dazu führen, getäuscht werden. Seine Eltern werden ihn daher befehligen, bestimmte Dinge zu tun, die ihm helfen, das Gute zu erreichen. Die Regeln, die seine Eltern aufstellen, sind also Mittel, um zu erreichen, was er wirklich will. Zu tun, was ihm seine Eltern sagen, ist daher selbst eine wertvolle Wahl, gut in einem sekundären Sinn. Ähnliches gilt für die Gesetze der menschlichen Gesellschaft, die eine Hilfe sind, ihre Vollkommenheit zu erreichen, und das Gesetz Gottes, das Er der gesamten Schöpfung eingegossen hat, damit sie ihr Ziel erreicht.

Eustachius Vorstellung lässt sich also auf jene von Thomas zurückführen. Keiner von beiden hat allerdings eine genaue Vorstellung vom Guten. Thomas identifiziert das Gute mit jenen ihm am bekanntesten Gütern, auch wenn sie nicht die wichtigsten sind, um das finale Ziel zu erreichen. Eustachius hingegen identifiziert das Gute mit bestimmten Mitteln, um jenes Gut zu erreichen, das ihm seine Eltern gegeben haben.

15. Das intrinsische finale Ziel eines Dinges ist, seine ihm eigentümliche Handlung gut durchzuführen.

Wenn ein Ding seine Natur voll entwickelt hat, ist es fähig, eine Handlung durchzuführen, die nur es allein durchführen kann, oder zumindest besser als andere Dinge. In der Diskussion um die ihm eigentümliche Handlung eines Dinges bespricht Aristoteles zuerst die Handlungen von bestimmten menschlichen Aktivitäten (Nikomachische Ethik 1,6 1097b24-30), da diese uns am bekanntesten sind. Die ihm eigentümliche Handlung eines Kochs ist es zu kochen, die eines Dachdeckers Dächer zu errichten, die eines Lehrers zu lehren. Und in all diesen Fällen ist der Zweck und das Ziel der Aktivität seine ihm eigentümliche Handlung. Warum müssen wir kochen? Um zu kochen. Kochen ist der Zweck des Kochs. Und wir haben Dachdecker, um Dächer zu errichten und Lehrer um des Lehrens willen.

Dasselbe kann man im Fall von menschlichen Werkzeugen beobachten. Die ihm eigentümliche Handlung des Korkenziehers ist es Korken zu ziehen, und dies ist somit Ziel und Zweck des Korkenziehers. Die ihr eigentümliche Handlung eines Messers ist es zu schneiden, und somit ist schneiden der Zweck eines Messers.

Auch gilt dasselbe für die verschiedenen Körperteile. Die ihm eigentümliche Handlung des Auges ist es zu sehen, und somit ist sehen der Zweck des Auges. Die ihm eigentümliche Handlung des Herzens ist es Blut zu pumpen und dies ist somit das Ziel des Herzens.

Wir können daher verallgemeinern und sagen, dass, wann auch immer ein Ding eine Handlung durchführt, die nur es durchführen kann oder zumindest besser als andere Dinge, dann ist diese Handlung die ihm eigentümliche Handlung. Wir müssen dies jedoch weiter qualifizieren, da man zwischen dem intrinsischen Gut und dem Objekt dieser Handlung unterscheiden kann. Das erste ist das intrinsische Gut eines Dinges; das zweite ist sein extrinsisches Gut. Das intrinsische Gut eines Kochs ist es zu kochen, das extrinsische Gut eines Kochs ist hingegen Nahrung.

Eine weitere Qualifizierung ist liegt darin, dass das Ziel eines Dinges ist, seine eigentümliche Handlung gut zu erfüllen. Der Zweck eines Messers ist nicht bloß zu schneiden, sondern gut zu schneiden. Um seine ihm eigentümliche Handlung gut durchzuführen, benötigt ein Ding eine bestimmte Qualität oder Qualitäten, die klassisch „Tugenden“ genannt werden (Das Wort virtus („Kraft/Tugend“) hat mittlerweile eine sehr enge, moralistische Bedeutung erlangt, ursprünglich war diese jedoch weiter gefasst – man denke etwa an die „Tugend“ von Kräutern). Die Tugend eines Messers ist Schärfe, da die Schärfe eben jene Qualität ist, die das Messer ermöglicht, gut zu schneiden. Wir können also sagen, dass das intrinsische Gut eines Dinges, welches eine ihm eigentümliche Handlung innehat, ist, seine ihm eigentümliche Handlung in Übereinstimmung mit seiner ihm eigentümlichen Tugend durchführt.

16. Das intrinsische finale Ziel des menschlichen Lebens ist die der menschlichen Tugend entsprechende vernunftgeleitete Handlung.

Was ist die dem Menschen eigentümliche Handlung? Es wäre seltsam, hätten Köche, Dachdecker und Lehrer alle ihre ihnen eigentümliche Handlung, und der Mensch als Mensch hätte aber keine. Aristoteles argumentiert (Nikomachische Ethik 1,6), dass die dem Menschen eigentümliche Handlung weder das bloße Wachsen und die Selbstversorgung, was er mit den Pflanzen teilt, noch das sinnliche Leben, welches er mit den Tieren teilt, sein kann, sondern das Leben der Vernunft sein muss. Das Leben der Vernunft hat jedoch zwei Arten der Handlung inne: Die Handlung der Vernunft selbst – wie etwa wissen, verstehen und urteilen – und die vernunftgeleiteten Handlungen der anderen Seelenteile – die vernünftigen Handlungen des Willens und die Handlungen der Emotionen, geleitet und gemäßigt durch die Vernunft. Diese alle können „Handlung der Vernunft“ genannt werden. Das intrinsische finale Ziel des menschlichen Lebens ist daher die vernunftgeleitete Handlung in Übereinstimmung mit jenen Qualitäten, die ermöglichen, diese Handlung gut auszuführen, nämlich die intellektuellen und moralischen Tugenden.

17. Objektive Glückseligkeit ist besser als subjektive Glückseligkeit.

Das intrinsische Gut des menschlichen Leben ist die vernunftgeleitete Handlung in Übereinstimmung mit der menschlichen Tugend. Und so wäre das extrinsische Gut des menschlichen Lebens das Objekt dieser Handlung. Das Objekt dieser Handlung muss selbst etwas Gutes sein. Und es wird es ein ehrbares Gut sein, kein bloßes angenehmes oder nützliches Gut. Wir haben jedoch weiter oben (10) gesehen, dass ein ehrbares Gut besser ist als die Handlung, durch die man es erlangt. Das extrinsische Gut des menschlichen Lebens muss also besser sein als das intrinsische Gut.

Am Beginn der Nikomachischen Ethik verleiht Aristoteles dem Ziel des menschlichen Lebens jenen Namen, den die meisten Menschen ihrer verwirrten Auffassung vollendeter Vollkommenheit geben: die Glückseligkeit (εὐδαιμονία). Wir haben weiter oben (9-10) gesehen, dass die Handlung, durch die man ein ehrbares Gut erlangt, besser ist als die Freude es zu erlangen, und dass das Gut selbst besser ist als beide. All diese Dinge sind so sehr aufeinander bezogen, dass sie alle Glückseligkeit genannt werden können. In thomistischer Tradition wird das intrinsische Gut (seine eigene Handlung gut durchgeführt) eines Menschen subjektive Glückseligkeit genannt, während das Objekt der Handlung, sein extrinsisches Gut, objektive Glückseligkeit genannt wird. Wir können jetzt sehen, dass genau gesprochen, das finale Ziel des Menschen objektive Glückseligkeit ist, und nicht das subjektive Erlangen dieses Zieles oder die Freude des Erlangens. Was aber ist das Objekt der dem Menschen eigentümliche Handlung? Was ist objektive Glückseligkeit?

TEIL II: DAS HÖCHSTE GUT[3]

18. Gott ist unendliche Vollkommenheit und das unendlich Gute.

Gott ist der Eine, der Ist. Er besitzt die Fülle des Seins, in der vollständigen Einfachheit seines Wesens. „Ich bin, der ich bin“ (Ex 3,14). Es gibt keinen Mangel in Gott. Es gibt in Ihm keine Trennung, keine Dehnung, keine Begrenzung. Er ist ein unendlicher Ozean der Vollkommenheit, und er besitzt all dies auf einmal im ewigen Moment seines ewigen Lebens. Es gibt kein unrealisiertes Potential in Gott; Er ist actus purus („reiner Akt“). Und somit ist Er unendlich und vollkommen gut. In der unaussprechlichen Glückseligkeit des trinitarischen Lebens ist Gottes unendliche Vollkommenheit bekannt, ausgedrückt, geliebt und gegeben unter den drei Personen, die selbst jeweils der eine Gott sind.

19. Gott teilt seine Güte mit den Dingen, die er schafft.

Auf Seine Güte mit unendlicher Liebe schauend, will Gott diese teilen. Denn, wie der Hl. Thomas sagt (SCG I,75), „die Dinge, wie wir um ihrer selbst willen lieben wollen wir […] so viel wie möglich vervielfachen.“ Da aber das Wesen des Göttlichen absolut einfach und eines ist, kann es nicht in sich selbst vergrößert und vervielfacht werden. Die einzige Möglichkeit, durch die das göttliche Wesen vervielfacht werden kann, ist durch Ähnlichkeit, durch eine Abbildung, die immer das Original unterschreitet. Das Gute der Kreaturen ist Teilnahme am Guten Gottes, teilhafte Beteiligung durch Ähnlichkeit am Guten Gottes.

20. Das Gute der Geschöpfe findet sich mehr in ihrem Schöpfer als in ihnen.

Da die Vollkommenheit der Geschöpfe bloße Ähnlichkeit der göttlichen Vollkommenheit ist durch Teilnahme an Seiner Güte, liegt ihre Vollkommenheit viel mehr in Ihm als ihnen selbst. Die Vollkommenheiten, die getrennt in der Vielheit der geschaffenen Dinge liegen, existieren in einer geeinten und vollkommeneren Weise in Gott, der sie geschaffen hat.

21. Das größte geschaffene Gut ist die Ordnung der gesamten Schöpfung.

Jedes Geschöpf spiegelt einen unterschiedlichen Aspekt des göttlichen Guten wieder, da niemand die Gesamtheit des göttlichen Guten darzustellen vermag. Die Einheit Gottes aber gehört zur Beschreibung des unendlichen Guten. Wie der heilige Thomas lehrt: „Einheit gehört zur Idee des Guten […] so wie alle Dinge das Gute begehren, begehren sie auch Einheit; ohne diese würden sie aufhören zu existieren. Denn etwas existiert solange als es eins ist.“ (Ia q 103, a3) Deswegen, weil die Schöpfung Ähnlichkeit des Guten ist, das wesentlich eins ist, folgt, dass die Vielheit der Geschöpfe in einer Weise zusammengebracht werden muss, um so die göttliche Einheit nachzuahmen. Die Einheit, die zur Vielheit der Geschöpfe gehört, ist die Einheit der Ordnung, die Harmonie, die sie alle miteinander verbindet. Der hl. Thomas beweist dies anhand des Schöpfungsberichts im Buch Genesis: „Das Gut der Ordnung von verschiedenen Dingen ist besser als eines dieser geordneten Dinge allein genommen: denn es ist formgebend in Bezug auf diese einzeln, wie die Vollkommenheit des Ganzen in Bezug auf die Teile […] Folglich heißt es (Gen 1,31): Gott sah alles an, was er gemacht hatte, und es war sehr gut, nachdem von jedem Einzelnen gesagt wurde, dass es gut sei. Denn jedes ist in seiner Natur gut, aber alle zusammen sind sehr gut, nach dem Bericht über die Ordnung des Universums, welche die äußerste und edelste Vollkommenheit in den Dingen ist. (II,45)

22. Die Geschöpfe tun alles, was sie tun, aus Liebe zu Gott.

Da die Vollkommenheit der geschaffenen Dinge mehr in Gott als in ihnen selbst liegt, ist Gott für sie begehrenswerter als sie sich selbst. Wie der hl. Thomas sagt: „Gut zu sein gehört in erster Linie zu Gott. Denn ein Ding ist gut je nach seiner Erwünschtheit. Nun sucht alles seine eigene Vollkommenheit; und die Vollkommenheit und Form einer Wirkung besteht in einer gewissen Ähnlichkeit zum Handelnden, da dieser sie ähnlich macht; und somit ist der Handelnde selbst begehrenswert und hat die Natur des Guten inne.“ (Ia, q6, a1, c) Ein weiteres Mal: „Alle Dinge begehren, indem sie ihre eigene Vollkommenheit begehren, Gott selbst, insofern die Vollkommenheiten aller Dinge so viele Ähnlichkeiten des göttlichen Wesens sind.“ (Ebd. Ad 2) Pflanzen wachsen, Vögel singen, Geparden laufen – sie alle suchen ihre eigene Vollkommenheit zu erreichen, dennoch ist es viel mehr Gott, den sie suchen als sich selbst. Wir können nun den Grund für die oben genannte These (11) sehen, dass alle Dinge Teilnahme am Ewigen und Göttlichen begehren; sie tun dies, weil sie ihren ewigen und göttlichen Schöpfer begehren.

23. Geschöpfe lieben Gott natürlicherweise mehr als sich selbst.

Der hl. Thomas vergleicht die natürliche Liebe der geschaffenen Dinge zu Gott mit dem eines Teils zum Ganzen (Ia q60, a5). Geschöpfe sind nicht Teil ihres Schöpfers (wir sind schließlich keine Pantheisten), und trotzdem sind sie auf ihren Schöpfer zugeordnet wie Teile zum Ganzen. Die Vollkommenheit, die sie inne haben, ist Teilnahme, partielle Beteiligung, an Seiner Vollkommenheit. Deswegen lieben alle Geschöpfe Gott natürlicherweise mehr als sich selbst.

24. Nur Personen können unmittelbar Gott in Ihm selbst lieben.

Pflanzen, Vögel und Löwen haben explizite Kenntnis von Gott. Die Pflanzen werden durch eine höhere Ursache angetrieben, ihre eigene Vollkommenheit zu entwickeln – ihre Liebe wird nicht durch ihr eigenes Wissen ausgelöst. Die Tiere werden durch die Natur bewegt, aber auch sie werden durch das Wissen um eine sinnliche Ähnlichkeit bewegt. Nur rationale und intellektuelle Geschöpfe (also Personen) haben die Fähigkeit, Gott als Gott zu erkennen, und daher eine Liebe zu Ihm in Ihm zu erzielen. Es gibt jedoch zwei Arten der Erkenntnis von Gott: eine natürliche Erkenntnis, die Gott mittelbar als Ursache der Geschöpfe erkennt, und eine übernatürliche Erkenntnis, die Gott unmittelbar erkennt. Und somit gibt es zwei Arten der ausgelösten Liebe zu Gott: eine natürliche, hervorgerufene Liebe und eine übernatürliche Liebe. Die übernatürliche Liebe zu Gott ist ein Geschenk der Gnade, die die natürliche Liebe zur Vollkommenheit führt.

25. Gott ist die objektive Glückseligkeit aller Personen.

Die Sehnsucht eines jeden, der dazu fähig ist, den Schöpfer zu erkennen, kann nicht durch irgendein Geschöpf befriedigt werden. Alles Begehrenswerte in einem Geschöpf ist die Ähnlichkeit zum Schöpfer, aber kein Geschöpf hat die unendliche Vollkommenheit des Schöpfers inne. Gott alleine macht zufrieden. Er ist die objektive Glückseligkeit (vgl. 17).

26. Sünde tritt ein, wenn ein geringeres Gut Gott vorgezogen wird.[4]

Wie wir gesehen haben, steckt die natürliche Liebe zu Gott in allen Dingen, die aber nicht durch explizite Kenntnis von Ihm ausgelöst wird, sondern die Neigung zur göttlichen Vollkommenheit in allen natürlichen Dingen ist. Diese Art der Liebe scheitert nicht. In Personen gibt es auch eine höhere Art der Liebe, die der Erkenntnis folgt. Aber während Gott natürlicherweise den Geschöpfen liebenswürdiger ist als sie sich selbst, ist er ihnen nicht erkennbarer. Geschöpfe erkennen zuerst andere Dinge, und dann Gott. Das gilt selbst für die Engel. Abseits der Gnade erkennen sie ihre eigene Natur unmittelbar, Gott aber nur mittelbar als Ursache ihrer Naturen. Somit können sie die Vollkommenheit ihrer eigenen Natur Gott vorziehen, und das ist die Sünde der gefallenen Engel. Menschen können in derselben Weise sündigen, aber auch auf andere Weise. Da menschliche Personen zuerst durch ihre Sinne erkennen, und dann vernünftige Erkenntnis von sinnlicher abstrahieren, können sie dazu geführt werden, sinnliche Güter (wie etwa Eis) den höheren Gütern vernünftiger Natur vorzuziehen. Es gibt nichts Sündiges an den niederen Gütern, solange sie nicht höheren Gütern vorgezogen werden; Sünde tritt dann ein, wenn diese mehr als höhere Güter geliebt werden, oder in einer Weise, die nicht mit der Liebe zu Gott über allen Dingen vereinbar ist. Eine Sünde ist eine Todsünde, wenn ein niederes Gut in einer Weise gewählt wird, die mit der Liebe zu Gott als das finale Ziel des Lebens nicht vereinbar ist; sie ist lässlich, wenn es in einer Weise gewählt wird, die (um Fr. Joseph Bolin zu zitieren), „die nicht ganz zur Liebe zu Gott passt, dennoch mit ihr vereinbar ist – das finale Ziel bleibt Gott, aber man hängt zu sehr an etwas, das ein Mittel zu Gott darstellt.“ („Commandments and Counsels“ – http://www.pathsoflove.com/blog/2009/01/commandments-and-counsels/).

Teil III: Gemeingüter[5]  

27. Ein Gemeingut unterscheidet sich vom Privatgut darin, dass es geteilt nicht verringert wird.

Die ersten uns bekannten Güter sind die sinnlichen Güter, wie Eis. Und diese Güter verlieren an Wert, wenn sie geteilt werden. Wenn Eustachius Thomas einen Teil von seinem Eis gibt, so hat nun Thomas den Teil, den Eustachius nicht mehr hat. Eustachius kann diesen Teil, den er hergab, nicht mehr genießen. Dem hl. Thomas und Charles De Koninck folgend, nennt Marcus Berquist diese Güter private Güter, da sie nur zu einer Person, unter Ausschluss der anderen, gehören. Ein Privatgut ist hingeordnet auf den, dessen Gut es ist. In der Liebe eines Privatgutes wird eigentlich die Person geliebt, für die das Gut beabsichtigt ist. Aristoteles spricht davon (Nikomachische Ethik, VIII, 2 1155b30), dass es ja lächerlich wäre, dem Wein selbst wohlzuwollen, man will den Wein höchstens wohl erhalten, um ihn selbst zu haben. Dies ist so, weil Wein ein Privatgut ist.

Ein Gemeingut  ist auf der anderen Seite ein Gut, dass es geteilt nicht verringert wird. Wenn Thomas Eustachius einen Witz erzählt, dann hört er nicht auf, den Witz selbst zu genießen – tatsächlich kann sich sein Vergnügen durch das Teilen noch vergrößern.

28. Gemeingüter sind besser als Privatgüter.

Ein Witz ist nur ein angenehmes Gut; echte Gemeingüter sind ehrbare Güter. Güter wie Wahrheit, Gerechtigkeit und Friede sind Gemeingüter im vollen Sinn. Sie verringern sich nicht, wenn sie geteilt werden. Darüber hinaus sind sie nicht auf uns hingeordnet; wir sind auf sie hingeordnet. Man begehrt Gerechtigkeit und Friede voranzubringen, um ihrer selbst willen. Gemeingüter sind besser als Privatgüter. Es ist ehrenhaft, ein Gut für einen Menschen zu erlangen, aber es ist besser und göttlicher, ein Gut zu erlangen, welches viele teilen können (vgl. Nikomachische Ethik 1094b). Das Gemeinwohl ist nicht besser als bloße Summe der Privatgüter vieler Individuen. Auch ist es kein Gut ihrer Gemeinschaft als scheinbar individuelles Gut, vielmehr ist ein wahres Gemeingut ein Gut für jede der teilhabenden Personen – ein Gut, auf das sie hingeordnet sind. Das kann nicht stark genug betont werden: Das Gemeingut ist ein persönliches Gut. Die Unterordnung von Personen unter dieses Gut ist daher kein Versklaven dieser. Sie werden nicht auf das Gut eines anderen hingeordnet (das Gut „der Nation“ oder „der Menschheit“, abstrakt betrachtet), sondern vielmehr auf ihr eigenes Gut, aber ein Gut, das sie nur zusammen innerhalb der Gemeinschaft haben können. Das Gemeinwohl ist eine universale Ursache in der Ordnung der finalen Kausalität. Die Tatsache, dass es seine Kausalität auf mehr Auswirkungen erweitert als ein Privatgut, zeigt wie viel besser es ist.

29. Je mehr sich Personen entwickeln, desto mehr ordnen sie sich auf universale Gemeingüter hin.

Als kleiner Bub hat Thomas nur wenig Kenntnis von Gemeingütern. Die ersten Güter, von denen er spricht, sind Privatgüter wie Eis. Mit der Zeit lernt er jedoch Güter zu lieben, an denen seine ganze Familie teilhaben kann, ohne diese zu verringern: Der Friede und die Freuden des Familienlebens. Und er beginnt zu verstehen, dass er eine Verantwortung gegenüber diesen Gütern hat und bestraft werden kann, wenn er sie verletzt (was aber nicht bedeutet, dass er ein Musterkind wie Eustachius werden muss).

Thomas beginnt an Aktivitäten wie Schach, Fußball und Theaterstücken teilzunehmen, Aktivitäten, die ihn befähigen, andere Gemeingüter mit seinen Freunden zu teilen. Später beginnt Thomas zu sehen, dass sein ganzes Leben mit anderen in einer politischen Gemeinschaft verbunden ist, in der große Gemeingüter wie Gerechtigkeit realisiert werden können, in der Menschen einander Rechenschaft über ihre Taten ablegen (siehe Roger Scruton über Verantwortlichkeit und meine Antwort darauf) und eine staatliche Autorität sie befehligt.

30. Die Familie ist eine unvollkommene Gesellschaft, die einige Gemeingüter erlangen kann.[6]

In einem gewissen Sinn ist die Familie (oder der Haushalt) eine vollkommene Gesellschaft, da sie jeden Aspekt des menschlichen Lebens berührt – mit dem Leitsatz: „Handle mit Vernunft in Übereinstimmung mit den menschlichen Tugenden“. Es gibt verschiedene Gemeingüter, die die Familie erlangen kann: die gemeinsame Feier von Festen, verschiedene Wahrheiten, die Schönheiten der Musik, des Tanzes, u.a. und vor allem die Gelassenheit der Ordnung des eigenen Lebens. Wäre aber eine Familie isoliert, wie es beispielsweise die Lykow Familie in Sibirien war, so würde ihre Entwicklung verkümmern, da alle Kraft auf das Erlangen von Privatgütern, wie Nahrung und Heizmaterial, gerichtet werden müsste. Sie könnte daher an vielen Gemeingütern nicht teilhaben. Eine Familie ist somit in einem anderen Sinn unvollkommen, sie ist auf natürliche Weise auf eine größere Gesellschaft hingeordnet, die sie befähigt, ihre eigenen Gemeingüter besser zu erreichen und an anderen, größeren Gemeingütern teilzuhaben.

31. Vereinigungen sind unvollkommene Gesellschaften, die Gemeingüter erlangen können, die einer bestimmen menschlichen Praxis innewohnen.

Alasdair MacIntyre definiert Praxis als „irgendeine kohärente und komplexe Form einer sozial etablierten kooperativen menschlichen Handlung, durch die der Handlung innewohnende Güter im Zuge des Versuchs, die Standards der Vorzüglichkeit, die dieser Art der Handlung angemessen und teilweise diese bestimmend sind, zu erreichen, realisiert werden, mit dem Ergebnis, dass die menschlichen Kräfte, diese Vorzüglichkeit zu erreichen, und die menschlichen Vorstellungen von den  beteiligten Zielen und Gütern systematisch erweitert werden.“ (After Virtue, S. 187) Schach, Architektur, Geschichte, Malen, Musik, die Erforschung der Physik – all das sind Praktiken im Sinne MacIntyres. (MacIntyre betrachtet auch Politik als eine Praxis, jedoch gibt es, wie Thomas Osborne argumentiert, bedeutende Unterschiede zwischen Politik und anderen Praktiken, da Politik die Praxis einer vollkommenen Gemeinschaft ist). Solche Praktiken zielen auf ihnen innewohnende Güter ab. Damit sind Güter gemeint, die nur erlangt werden können, wenn man an der Praxis teilnimmt. Werden diese Güter erreicht, sind sie für die ganze Gemeinschaft, die an dieser Praxis teilnimmt, gut. Eine Gemeinschaft, die um solch eine Praxis herum errichtet wurde, ist keine vollkommene Gemeinschaft, da sie sich nicht um das Ganze des menschlichen Lebens sorgt, nicht mit dem Leitsatz „handle mit Vernunft in Übereinstimmung mit den menschlichen Tugenden“, sondern nur mit einem bestimmten Teil davon (Ich übergehe hier die Praxis der Politik). Solche Gemeinschaften sind normalerweise nicht in derselben Art wie die Familie gegeben; üblicherweise (wenn auch nicht immer) muss man sie wählen, bevor man Teil davon wird. Ich nenne in einer MacIntyrischen Praxis betätigten Gemeinschaften von Personen „Vereinigungen“.

32. Philosophische Kontemplation ist hingeordnet auf das Erreichen des Gemeinwohls aller Dinge.

Nach Platons und Aristoteles Darstellungen ist die größte natürliche menschliche Handlung die Handlung der philosophischen Kontemplation, durch die Personen die zeitliche Welt zu transzendieren und ewige Wahrheiten zu erlangen vermögen. Diese Handlung ist den MacIntyrischen Praktiken ähnlich, transzendiert jedoch diese, da sie nicht mit den Gemeingütern eines bestimmten Teiles des menschlichen Lebens beschäftigt ist, sondern (zumindest mittelbar) mit Gott selbst, das universale Gemeinwohl aller Dinge, auf Den alle anderen Gemeingüter hingeordnet sind.

33. Ein Gemeinwesen ist eine vollkommene Gesellschaft, beschäftigt mit dem Ganzen des menschlichen Lebens, das die größten natürlichen Gemeingüter erlangen kann.

Das menschliche Leben ist natürlich geordnet. Es ist natürlich für viele Familien eng zusammen zu wohnen, einander im Erreichen der Gemeingüter zu helfen und für ihre Gemeinschaft nach Regeln geordnet zu sein. Aristoteles bezeichnet die Vereinigung von wenigen Familien als ein Dorf (κώμη), argumentiert aber, dass solch kleine Gemeinschaft noch nicht ausreichend wäre, alle Gemeingüter, auf die die menschliche Natur hingeordnet ist, zu erlangen (Politik I,2 1252b 15-27). Daher ist es für viele Dörfer natürlich, zusammenzukommen um eine Stadt (πόλις) zu gründen, eine vollkommene oder perfekte Gesellschaft, die nicht von einer größeren Gesellschaft abhängt, um seine Ziele zu erreichen. Solche vollkommenen Gesellschaften (die wir „Gemeinwesen“ oder „Staatenbünde“ nennen können) nehmen zu verschiedenen Zeiten und an verschiedenen Orten viele Formen an, aber immer wird eine Art der Herrschaft miteinbezogen, die diese auf das Gemeinwohl hinordnet. Wie Coëmgenus in einem Beitrag für den Josias sagt: „Selbst wenn es keinen Staat gibt, werden die Menschen regiert (z.B. durch Stammesbräuche). In großen, komplexen Gesellschaften findet das Gemeinwesen einen formalen Ausdruck (niedergeschriebene Gesetze, gesalbte Könige, formale Wahlen, etc.). Im liberalen Westen, nimmt es die Form einer Vereinigung von Institutionen an, die wir einen „Staat“ nennen. Nicht alle Menschen leben in einem Staat, aber jede (vollkommene) menschliche Gemeinschaft ist per definitionem ein Gemeinwesen.“ Gemeinwesen ermöglichen Familien, lokalen Gemeinschaften („Dörfer“) und Vereinigungen aufzublühen, indem sie viele Gemeingüter realisieren. Sie erlauben aber auch die Erlangung größerer Gemeingüter.

Die Verwirrung stiftende Vielfalt der Formen, die Gemeinwesen annehmen können, macht es manchmal schwer zwischen einem Gemeinwesen und einem Dorf, einer vollkommenen und einer unvollkommenen Gesellschaft zu unterscheiden. Wie kann man nun erkennen, ob eine Gemeinschaft fähig ist, alle Ziele der menschlichen Gesellschaft zu erreichen? Auf Thomas Osborne eingehend, habe ich argumentiert, dass ein Zeichen für diese Unterscheidung Folgendes sein kann: eine vollkommene Gesellschaft hat die Autorität, zwingende Gesetze, durch das Schwert vollstreckbar, zu schaffen. Selbst dann kann es aber schwer sein, sie zu unterscheiden. So war beispielsweise die westliche Christenheit vor dem Aufkommen der „souveränen“  Territorialstaaten der frühen Neuzeit ein sehr komplexes System sich überlappender Autoritäten: Grafschaften, Herzogtümer, Königreiche und das Reich – alle die Autorität, das Schwert zu benutzen, beanspruchend.

Gegenwärtige Nationalstaaten stellen ein Problem einer anderen Art dar. Während sie in vieler Hinsicht wie vollkommene Gesellschaften funktionieren, so haben sie doch die Schwierigkeit, die Autorität, das Schwert zu benutzen, zu rechtfertigen. Sie alle haben mehr oder weniger eine liberale politische Ideologie adaptiert, die festhält, dass der Staat nicht auf das Gemeinwohl, sondern die Privatgüter von Individuen hingeordnet sein soll. Ein Zeichen dafür ist die Abschaffung der Todesstrafe im Großteil des gegenwärtigen Westens.[7] Dies ist zwar eine logische Folge seiner politischen Prinzipien, dennoch stellt sich die Frage, in welchem Ausmaß westliche Nationalstaaten überhaupt vollkommene Gesellschaften, fähig das grundlegende Gemeinwohl des politischen Lebens zu erreichen, sein können.

34. Das grundlegende intrinsische Gemeinwohl eines Gemeinwesens ist der Friede.[8]

Was ist es, dass einer vollkommenen Gemeinschaft das Recht gibt, ihre Gesetze mit dem Schwert durchzusetzen? Die Autorität zu töten ist eine scheinbar göttliche Macht, denn Gott alleine ist der Herr von Tod und Leben. „Sie [die staatliche Gewalt] steht im Dienst Gottes und verlangt, dass du das Gute tust. Wenn du aber Böses tust, fürchte dich! Denn nicht ohne Grund trägt sie das Schwert. Sie steht im Dienst Gottes und vollstreckt das Urteil an dem, der Böses tut.“ (Röm 13,4). Die Autorität des Gemeinwesens stammt von Gott, denn sie stammt vom Gemeinwohl. Das grundlegende intrinsische Gemeinwohl eines Gemeinwesens ist die Einheit der Ordnung, der Friede. Dieser Friede hängt von der Unterscheidung der verschiedenen Familien, Dörfer und Vereinigungen im Gemeinwesen ab. Er besteht teilweise im gemeinsamen Genuss der Gemeingüter dieser Gemeinschaften. Er besteht auch teilweise in bürgerlicher Freundschaft und in der Tätigkeit des Regierens. Aber dieser Friede selbst ist ein größeres Gut als alle dieser Teilgüter (abgesehen von der philosophischen Kontemplation Gottes als erste Ursache), weil dieser Friede eine Teilhabe an der Ordnung der gesamten Schöpfung ist, die, wie wir weiter oben gesehen haben (21), die größte geschaffene Teilhabe am göttlichen Guten ist. Dieses Gut ist daher für jede Person ein größeres als seine Privatgüter. Es ist ein Gut, auf das sie sich hinordnen können, für das sie ihr Leben in der Schlacht hingeben können. Wenn sie dieses Gut verletzen, dann bekämpfen sie das Gute ihres eigenen Lebens, und diejenige Autorität, die sich um dieses Gut sorgt, kann sie rechtmäßig töten.

Trotzdem ist das Gemeinwohl des Staates nicht das größte Gemeinwohl auf das Personen hingeordnet sein können. Wie wir weiter oben gesehen haben (25), sind Personen durch Erkenntnis und Liebe auf Gott als das höchste Gemeinwohl aller Dinge hingeordnet, ein Gut, das das intrinsische Gut eines irdischen Gemeinwesens unendlich übertrifft.

35. Das grundlegende intrinsische Gemeinwohl des Gottesstaates ist die durch Gnade wiederhergestellte und erhöhte Ordnung der ganzen Schöpfung.

Personen sind dazu bestimmt Gott nicht bloß durch natürliche philosophische Kontemplation zu erreichen, sondern durch die durch Gnade geschenkte übernatürliche Schau Seines Wesens. Sie sind dazu bestimmt, diese Schau auf ewig in der „Himmlischen Stadt“ zu genießen, die nichts anderes als das Ganze der wiederhergestellten Schöpfung ist. Das extrinsische Gemeinwohl dieser Stadt wird Gott selbst, von allen Engeln und Heiligen gesehen, sein, aber ihr intrinsisches Gemeinwohl ist die Ordnung der ganzen Schöpfung, die größte Ähnlichkeit des göttlichen Guten, sogar noch größer gemacht durch ihre Einsetzung von Personen, die wie Er geworden sind, indem sie Sein Wesen sehen: „Wir wissen, dass wir ihm ähnlich sein werden, wenn er offenbar wird; denn wir werden ihn sehen, wie er ist.“ (1 Joh 3,2). Der Gottesstaat ist jedoch bereits vor der Wiederkunft des Herrn in einer verborgenen und teilweisen Art hier auf Erden in der streitenden Kirche anwesend. In diesem irdischen Leben haben wir noch nicht die Schau des göttlichen Wesens, aber wir erkennen Gott durch die theologischen Tugenden des Glaubens, und wir lieben Ihn mit derselben Liebe, die wir im Himmel haben werden.

36. Das Gemeinwohl der zeitlichen Gesellschaft ist dem des Gottesstaates untergeordnet.

Bis zur Wiederkunft des Herrn besteht die Kirche, die unmittelbar auf das Gemeinwohl der Himmlischen Stadt hingeordnet ist, neben den zeitlichen Gemeinwesen, die wiederum unmittelbar auf das zeitliche Gemeinwohl hingeordnet sind. Das zeitliche Gemeinwohl ist jedoch Teilhabe an der Schöpfungsordnung selbst und kann daher die daran Teilhabenden um des ewigen Gemeinwohl willens entlassen. Das zeitliche Gemeinwohl ist daher dem ewigen Gemeinwohl untergeordnet, und somit die zeitlichen Herrscher der Hierarchie der Kirche (Siehe „Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy“ ).

37. Die theologische Tugend der Liebe setzt uns in die richtige Beziehung zum Gemeinwohl des Gottesstaates.

Das Notwendigste, um irgendein Gemeingut zu erlangen, ist die Liebe zu diesem Gut. Um Gott als das Gemeinwohl des Gottesstaates zu lieben, ist es am notwendigsten, die theologische Tugend der Liebe zu besitzen. Ich schließe mit einem Text des hl. Thomas, der diese These darlegt. Er ist zwar länger, dennoch zitiere ich ihn ganz, da er gewissermaßen eine Gesamtdarstellung des Gemeinwohls gibt:

Daher sagt der Philosoph im 8. Buch der Politik, dass ein guter Politiker das Gute des Staates lieben muss.

Wenn aber der Mensch, sofern ihm Zutritt zum Guten eines, an dem er teilhaben darf, gewährt wird, ein Bürger dieses Staates wird, kommen ihm die Tugenden zu, um zu tun, was dem Bürger zusteht und um das Gute des Staates zu lieben. Ähnlich ist es, wenn der Mensch durch die göttliche Gnade zur Teilhabe an der himmlischen Glückseligkeit zugelassen wird, die in der Schau und im Genuss Gottes besteht; er wird gewissermaßen Bürger und Gefährte jener seligen Gemeinschaft, die das himmlische Jerusalem genannt wird, wie es in Eph. 2,19 heißt: „Ihr seid Mitbürger der Heiligen und Hausgenossen Gottes.“

Daher komme dem Menschen – auf diese Weise den himmlischen Dingen zugehörend – gewisse umsonst gegebene Tugenden zu; diese sind die eingegossenen Tugenden. Zu deren geschuldeter Tätigkeit wird die Liebe zum gemeinsamen Guten, die das göttliche Gute und der Gegenstand der Glückseligkeit ist, in der ganzen Gemeinschaft vorausgesetzt.

Das Gute eines Staates zu lieben betrifft jedoch ein Zweifaches: einerseits, damit man es besitzt und andererseits, damit man es bewahrt.

Das Gute eines Staates zu lieben, damit man es festhält und besitzt, bildet aber noch nicht das die Gemeinschaft betreffende Gute, weil auf diese Weise auch ein Tyrann das Gute des Staates liebt, sofern er von ihm beherrscht wird. Das heißt, dass er sich selbst mehr liebt als den Staat, denn er begehrt sich selbst als dieses Gute, nicht den Staat. Das Gute des Staates jedoch zu lieben, um es zu bewahren und zu verteidigen, dies meint wahrhaft, den Staat zu lieben. Das die Gemeinschaft betreffende Gute ist nämlich nur dann verwirklicht, wenn diejenigen, die das Gute des Staates bewahren und erweitern sollen, sich dafür in Lebensgefahr begeben und das eigene Gute zurückstellen.

Das Gute, an dem die Seligen schon teilhaben, so zu lieben, dass man daran festhält und es besitzt, bewirkt noch nicht, dass der Mensch sich angesichts der ewigen Glückseligkeit gut verhält, denn auch die Schlechten begehren dieses Gute. Dieses Gute aber um seiner selbst willen zu lieben, so dass es bewahrt, verbreitet und nichts dagegen getan wird, das bewirkt, dass der Mensch sich gut verhält angesichts jener Gemeinschaft der Seligen. Das ist die heilige Liebe [caritas] , die Gott um seiner selbst willen und die Nächsten, die zur Glückseligkeit befähigt sind, wie sich selbst liebt.“ (De Virtutibus, 2.2 c.; Übersetzung von Winfried Rohr)

[1] Teil I folgt im Wesentlichen Duane Berquists „Lectures on Ethics“ (https://archive.org/details/duaneberquistonethics).

^[2]Für die Abschnitte 8-9 siehe Sebastian Walshe, The Primacy of the Common Good as the Root of Personal Dignity in the Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, and Michael Waldstein, „Dietrich von Hildebrand and St. Thomas Aquinas on Goodness and Happiness.“ (https://de.scribd.com/document/234217445/The-Primacy-of-the-Common-Good-as-the-Root-of-Personal-Dignity-in-the-Doctrine-of-St-Thomas-Aquinas) (https://de.scribd.com/document/50609890/Waldstein-Michael-Dietrich-von-Hildebrand-and-St-Thomas-Aquinas-on-Goodness-and-Happiness).

[3] Zu Teil II siehe P. Edmund Waldstein, „Qui Posuit Fines Tuos Pacem“ (https://de.scribd.com/document/31549176/On-Peace-as-the-Final-Cause-of-the-Universe) sowie ders. „Thomism, Happiness, and Selfishness“ (https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/thomism-happiness-and-selfishness/). 

[4] Siehe Charles De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, 42-45.

[5] Teil III basiert zu einem großen Teil auf Marcus Berquists „Common Good and Private Good“ (https://de.scribd.com/doc/61181449/Marcus-Berquist-Common-Good-and-Private-Good) und Charles De Konincks „On the Primacy of the Common Good” (https://emmilco.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/de-koninck-common-good.pdf).  

[6] Siehe Beatrice Freccia, „Beyon ‘The Supply of Daily Needs‘: Understanding Aristotle’s Account of The Relationship of the Household to the State,” Teil I hier (https://thejosias.net/2015/02/10/understanding-aristotles-account-of-the-relationship-of-the-household-to-the-state/), Teil II hier (https://thejosias.net/2015/02/11/understanding-aristotles-account-of-the-relationship-of-the-household-to-the-state-part-ii/).

[7] Für einen thomistischen Bericht über die Todesstrafe siehe Steven Long, „, Goods‘ Without Normative Order to the Good Life, Happiness, or God: The New Natural Law Theory and the Nostrum of Incommensurability.“ (https://thomistica.net/news/2011/9/18/goods-without-normative-order-to-the-good-life-happiness-or.html)

[8] Siehe hierzu meine Blog-Einträge „What ist the Primary Intrinsic Common Good of Political (or Imperial) Community?” (https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/what-is-the-primary-intrinsic-common-good-of-political-or-imperial-community/) und „Accountability and Paternalism, Imbalance of Power and Civil Friendship“ (https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/accountability-and-paternalism-imbalance-of-power-and-civil-friendship/).

Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892) was one of the most important figures in the formation of modern Catholic Social teaching. A convert from Anglicanism, Manning was enthroned as the second Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, fifteen years after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England. In 1875 he was made a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. Manning had a life-long interest in political economy, and his intervention in the London dock-strike of 1889 was one of his many contributions to the Catholic response to the ‘social question’ of the 19th century.

But another life-long interest of his was the relation of Church and state. He often discussed this question with the politician William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). As young men Manning and Gladstone had been friends, and they continued corresponding for most of their lives—their correspondence fills four volumes. But in their positions the two men grew apart—Gladstone’s shift from Toryism to liberalism occurring at approximately the same time as Manning’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

Gladstone was enraged by the First Vatican Council’s definition of Papal infallibility in 1870. In 1874 he published a polemical pamphlet entitled The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, in which he argued that the Council had laid down ‘principles adverse to the purity and integrity of civil allegiance’. Manning responded with a pamphlet of his own entitled The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, in which he refutes Gladstone by showing that in part Gladstone misunderstands the Roman position, and in part is simply wrong about the nature of the Church.

In the second chapter of his pamphlet Manning lays out the Catholic position on the relation of the spiritual and temporal powers. While there are a few disputable points—Manning accepts the positions of Bellarmine and Suarez on the origin of civil society and the indirect nature of the pope’s temporal authority (both possible but disputable positions)—the chapter is on the whole a good summary of ‘integralism’. The whole of the chapter is reproduced below.

The relations of the Catholic Church to the Civil Powers have been fixed immutably from the beginning, because they arise out of the Divine constitution of the Church and of the Civil Society of the natural order.

I. Inasmuch as the natural and civil society existed before the foundation of the Christian Church, we will begin with it; and here my concessions, or rather my assertions, will, I hope, satisfy all but Cæsarists.

1. The civil society of men has God for its Founder. It was created potentially in the creation of man; and from him has been unfolded into actual existence. The human family contains the first principles and laws of authority, obedience, and order. These three conditions of society are of Divine origin; and they are the constructive laws of all civil or political society.

2. To the Civil Society of mankind supreme authority is given immediately by God; for a society does not signify mere number, but number organised by the laws and principles which its Divine Founder implanted in the human family. Sovereignty, therefore, is given by God immediately to human society; and mediately, or mediante societate, to the person or persons to whom society may commit its custody and its exercise. When once the supreme power or sovereignty has been committed by any society to a king, or to consuls, or to a council, as the case may be—for God has given no special form of Civil Government—though it be not held by those who receive it by any Divine right, as against the society which gave it, nevertheless it has both a Divine sanction and a Divine authority. For instance, it has the power of life and death. God alone could give to man this power over man. God gave it to man for self-defence. It passes to society at large, which likewise has the right of self-defence. It is committed by society to its chief executive. But, inasmuch as the supreme power is still given by God to the Civil Ruler, even though it be mediately, it has a Divine sanction; and so long as the Civil Ruler does not deviate from the end of his existence, the society has no power to revoke its act. For example: the Civil Ruler is for the defence of the people; but if he should make war upon the people, the right of self-defence would justify resistance. I am not now engaged in saying when or how; but the right is undeniable. Manslaughter is not murder, if it be in self-defence; wars of defence are lawful; and just resistance to an unjust prince is not rebellion. All this is founded upon the Divine sanctions of the civil and political society of man, even in the order of nature. It has, then, God for its Founder, for its Legislator, and by His divine Providence for its supreme Ruler.

3. The laws of such society are the laws of nature. It is bound by the natural morality written on the conscience and on the heart. The ethics which govern men become politics in the government of states. Politics are but the collective morals of society. The Civil Ruler or Sovereign is bound by the laws: the subject within the sphere of these laws owes to him a civil allegiance. The Civil Ruler may bind all subjects by an oath of allegiance. He may call on all to bear arms for the safety of the State.

4. The State has for its end, not only the safety of person and property, but, in its fullest sense, the temporal happiness of man. Within the sphere of natural morality, and in order to its end, the State is supreme: and its power is from God. This is the meaning of St. Paul’s words:—

‘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 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 doeth evil. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake.’[1]

The State, then, is a perfect society, supreme within its own sphere, and in order to its own end: but as that end is not the highest end of man, so the State is not the highest society among men; nor is it, beyond its own sphere and end, supreme. I have drawn this out in greater fulness to show that the Church is in the highest degree conservative of all the natural authority of rulers, and of the natural allegiance of subjects. It is mere shallowness to say that between the Civil authority, as Divinely founded in nature, and the spiritual authority of the Church there can be opposition.

Now, as to the Divine institution of the Civil Society of the world and of its independence in all things of the natural order, what I have already said is enough. The laws of the order of nature are from God. So long as a father exercises his domestic authority according to the law of God, no other authority can intervene to control or to hinder his government. So likewise of the Prince or Sovereign power, be it lodged in one or in many. There is no authority upon earth which can depose a just sovereign or release such subjects from their obedience.[2]

II. There is, however, another society, the end of which is the eternal happiness of mankind. This also has God for its Founder, and that immediately; and it has received from God its form and constitution, and its rulers receive their authority immediately,[3] with a special Divine sanction and authority, from God.

Two things follow at once from this:—

1. That the society which has for its end the eternal happiness of man is of an order higher than the society which aims only at the natural happiness of man.
2. That as the temporal and the eternal happiness of man are both ordered by Divine laws, these two societies are, of necessity, in essential conformity and harmony with each other. Collision between them can only be if either deviates from its respective laws.

The natural society of man aims directly at the temporal happiness of its subjects, but indirectly it aims also at their eternal happiness: the supernatural society aims directly at their eternal happiness, and indirectly at their temporal happiness, but always in so far only as their temporal happiness is conducive to their eternal end.

From this, again, two other corollaries follow:

1. That the higher or supernatural society is supreme because it has no other society above it or beyond it, with an end higher than its own.
2. That the office of the supernatural society is to aid, direct, and perfect the natural society; that its action upon it is always in ædificationem non in destructionem, inasmuch as it is governed by the same Divine Lawgiver, and it is directed to an end which includes and ensures the end of the natural society also.

To put this briefly. The State has for its end the temporal happiness of its subjects; the Church has for its end their eternal happiness. In aiming directly at temporal happiness, the State aims also indirectly at the eternal; for these things are promoted by the same laws. In aiming at eternal happiness, the Church also indirectly aims at the temporal happiness of men.

III. The Divine Founder of the Christian Church said: ‘To thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.’[4] And again: ‘All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach all nations,’ . . . ‘teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’[5]

If these two commissions do not confer upon the Christian Church a supreme doctrinal authority, and a supreme judicial office, in respect to the moral law, over all nations, and over all persons, both governors and governed, I know not what words could suffice to do so.

That authority and that office are directive and preceptive, so long as Princes and their laws are in conformity with the Christian law; and judicial, ratione peccati, by reason of sin, whensoever they deviate from it.

If any man deny this, he would thereby affirm that Princes have no superior upon earth: which is the doctrine of the heathen Caesarism.

But no man will say that Princes have no superior. It is unmeaning to say that they have no superior but the law of God: for that is to play with words. A law is no superior without an authority to judge and to apply it.

To say that God is the sole Lawgiver of Princes is a doctrine unknown, not only to the Catholic Church, but to the Constitution of England. When we say, as our old Jurists do, Non Rex facit legem, but Lex facit Regem, we mean that there is a will above the King; and that will is the Civil Society, which judges if and when the King deviates from the law. But this doctrine, unless it be tempered by vigorous restraint, is chronic revolution. What adequate restraint is there but in a Divine authority higher than the natural society of man?

The Supreme Judicial Power of the Church has no jurisdiction over those that are not Christian; and the entire weight of its authority, if it were applied at all to such a state, would be applied to confirm the natural rights of sovereignty and to enforce the natural duty of allegiance: and that, upon the principle that the supernatural power of the Church is for edification, not for destruction; that is, to build up and to perfect the order of nature, not to pull down a stone in the symmetry of the natural society of man. St. Thomas says:

‘Power and authority are established by human right; the distinction between the faithful and those who do not believe is established by Divine right. But the Divine right, which comes by grace, does not destroy the human right, which is in the order of nature.’[6]

Let us suppose that the Sovereign Power of a heathen people were to make laws contrary to the law of God, would the Church intervene to depose such a sovereign? Certainly not, on the principle laid down by the Apostle, ‘What have I to do to judge those that are without?’[7]

Such a people is both individually and socially outside the Divine jurisdiction of the Church. The Church has therefore, in this respect, no commission to discharge towards it except to convert it to Christianity.

But if it be the office of the Church to teach subjects to obey even Heathen Rulers, as the Apostle did, how much more, in the case of Christian Princes and their laws, is it the office of the Church to confirm, consecrate, and enforce by the sanctions of religion and of conscience, of doctrine and of discipline, the whole code of natural and political morality, and all laws that are made in conformity with the same.

If Christian Princes and their laws deviate from the law of God, the Church has authority from God to judge of that deviation, and by all its powers to enforce the correction of that departure from justice. I do not see how any man who believes in the Revelation of Christianity can dispute this assertion: and to such alone I am at present speaking.

Mr. Gladstone has quoted a passage from an ‘Essay on Caesarism and Ultramontanism,’ in which I have claimed for the Church a supremacy in spiritual things over the State, and have made this statement:—

‘Any power which is independent and can alone fix the limits of its own jurisdiction, and can thereby fix the limits of all other jurisdictions, is, ipso facto, supreme. But the Church of Jesus Christ, within the sphere of revelation—of faith and morals—is all this, or is nothing or worse than nothing, an imposture and an usurpation; that is, it is Christ or Antichrist.’[8]

It is hardly loyal to take the conclusion of a syllogism without the premises. In the very page before this quotation I had said:—

‘In any question as to the competence of the two powers, either there must be some judge to decide what does and what does not fall within their respective spheres, or they are delivered over to perpetual doubt and to perpetual conflict. But who can define what is or is not within the jurisdiction of the Church in faith and morals, except a judge who knows what the sphere of faith and morals contains, and how far it extends? And surely it is not enough that such a judge should guess or opine, or pronounce upon doubtful evidence, or with an uncertain knowledge. Such a sentence would be, not an end of contention, but a beginning and a renewal of strife.

‘It is clear that the Civil Power cannot define how far the circumference of faith and morals extends. If it could, it would be invested with one of the supernatural endowments of the Church. To do this it must know the whole deposit of explicit and implicit faith; or, in other words, it must be the guardian of the Christian revelation. Now, no Christian, nor any man of sound mind, claims this for the Civil Power. . . . . If, then, the Civil Power be not competent to decide the limits of the Spiritual Power, and if the Spiritual Power can define with a Divine certainty its own limits, it is evidently supreme. Or, in other words, the Spiritual Power knows with Divine certainty the limits of its own jurisdiction; and it knows therefore the limits and the competence of the Civil Power. It is thereby in matters of religion and conscience supreme.’[9]

If the Church cannot fix the limits of its jurisdiction, then either nobody can or the State must. But the State cannot unless it claim to be the depository and expositor of the Christian Revelation. Therefore it is the Church or nobody. This last supposition leads to chaos. Now if this be rejected, the Church alone can: and if the Church can fix the limits of its own jurisdiction, it can fix the limits of all other jurisdiction; at least, so far as to warn it off its own domain. But this was my conclusion; and though I have seen it held up to odium, I have not yet seen it answered.

But the Church being the highest society, and independent of all others, is supreme over them, in so far as the eternal happiness of men is involved.

From this, again, two consequences follow:—

1. First, that in all things which are purely temporal, and lie extra finem Ecclesiæ, outside of the end of the Church, it neither claims nor has jurisdiction.
2. Secondly, that in all things which promote, or hinder, the eternal happiness of men, the Church has a power to judge and to enforce.

IV. Such propositions are no sooner enunciated than we are met by a tumult of voices, such as those of Janus, Quirinus—and I lament to detect the tones of a voice, hitherto heard in behalf of the authority of Christianity and of the Christian Church,—affirming that the Church of Rome and its Pontiffs claim supreme temporal[10] power, and that direct, over all Temporal Princes and things; to be used at their discretion even to the deposing of Kings, to the absolution of subjects from allegiance, to the employment of force, imprisonment, torture, and death.

If such be the state of our highest minds, we cannot regret that this discussion has been forced upon us. It has come not by our act. It has arisen in its time appointed. It will for awhile raise alarm and suspicion; it will kindle animosity and encourage bigotry: but it will manifest the truth with a wider light than England has seen for three hundred years. I will therefore freely and frankly enter upon this debate; and, in order to be clear, I will treat the subject under the following propositions:—

1. The authority of Princes and the allegiance of subjects in the Civil State of nature is of Divine ordinance; and therefore, so long as Princes and their laws are in conformity to the law of God, the Church has no power or jurisdiction against them, nor over them.
2. If Princes and their laws deviate from the law of God, the Church has authority from God to judge of that deviation, and to oblige to its correction.
3. The authority which the Church has from God for this end is not temporal, but spiritual.
4. This spiritual authority is not direct in its incidence on temporal things, but only indirect: that is to say, it directly promotes its own spiritual end; it indirectly condemns and declares not binding on the conscience such temporal laws as deviate from the law of God, and therefore impede or render impossible the attainment of the eternal happiness of man.
5. This spiritual authority is inherent in the Divine constitution and commission of the Church; but its exercise in the world depends on certain moral and material conditions, by which alone its exercise is rendered either possible or just.

I have affirmed that the relations of the Catholic Church to the Civil Powers are fixed primarily by the Divine constitution of the Church and of the Civil Society of men. But it is also true that these relations have been declared by the Church in acts and decrees which are of infallible authority. Such, for instance, is the Bull of Boniface VIII., Unam Sanctam. As this has become the text and centre of the whole controversy at this moment, we will fully treat of it. This Bull, then, was beyond all doubt an act ex cathedra. It was also confirmed by Leo X. in the Fifth Lateran Œcumenical Council. Whatever definition, therefore, is to be found in this Bull is to be received as of faith. Let it be noted that the Unam Sanctam does not depend upon the Vatican Council for its infallible authority. It was from the date of its publication an infallible act, obliging all Catholics to receive it with interior assent. Doctrines identical with those of the Unam Sanctam had been declared in two Œcumenical Councils—namely, in the Fourth Lateran in 1215, and the First of Lyons in 1245.[11] On this ground, therefore, I have affirmed that the relations of the Spiritual and Civil Powers were immutably fixed before the Vatican Council met, and that they have been in no way changed by it.

V. We will now examine, (1) the complete text of the Unam Sanctam; (2) the interpretations of its assailants and its defenders; (3) the interpretation which is of obligation on all Catholics.

1. The Bull was published by Boniface VIII., in 1302, during the contest with Philip le Bel of France.

Before the Bull was published, the Regalists or partisans of the King declared that the Pope had claimed, as Mr. Gladstone also supposes, to be supreme over the King, both in spiritual and in temporal things. The Chancellor Flotte made this assertion in the year 1301, at Paris, in the Church of Notre Dame. The cardinals sent by Boniface declared that the Pope made no such claim; that he claimed no temporal, but only a spiritual power.[12] Nevertheless this prejudice, once created, before the publication of the Unam Sanctum, ensured its being misinterpreted when it was issued. Boniface, by the Bull Ausculta Fili, had promptly exposed this misinterpretation. But the prejudice was already established.[13]

I will now give the whole text of the Bull, before commenting upon it. It runs as follows:

‘We are bound to believe and to hold, by the obligation of faith, one Holy Church, Catholic and also Apostolic; and this (Church) we firmly believe and in simplicity confess: out of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins. As the Bridegroom declares in the Canticles, “One is my dove, my perfect one, she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her:”[14] who represents the one mystical Body, the Head of which is Christ; and the Head of Christ is God. In which (the one Church) there is one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.[15] For in the time of the Flood the ark of Noe was one, prefiguring the one Church, which was finished in one cubit,[16] and had one governor and ruler, that is Noe; outside of which we read that all things subsisting upon earth were destroyed. This also we venerate as one, as the Lord says in the Prophet, “Deliver, O God, my soul from the sword: my only one from the hand of the dog.”[17]

‘For He prayed for the soul, that is, for Himself; for the Head together with the Body: by which Body He designated the one only Church, because of the unity of the Bridegroom, of the Faith, of the Sacraments, and of the charity of the Church. This is that coat of the Lord without seam,[18] which was not rent but went by lot. Therefore of that one and only Church there is one body and one Head, not two heads as of a monster: namely, Christ and Christ’s Vicar, Peter and Peter’s successor; for the Lord Himself said to Peter, “Feed my sheep.”[19] Mine, He says, generally; and not, in particular, these or those: by which He is known to have committed all to him. If, therefore, Greeks or others say that they were not committed to Peter and his successors, they must necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ, for the Lord said (in the Gospel) by John, that there is “One fold, and one only shepherd.”[20] By the words of the Gospel we are instructed that in this his (that is, Peter’s) power there are two swords, the spiritual and the temporal. For when the Apostles say, “Behold, here are two swords,”[21] that is, in the Church, the Lord did not say, “It is too much,” but “it is enough.” Assuredly, he who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter, gives ill heed to the word of the Lord, saying, “Put up again thy sword into its place.”[22] Both, therefore, the spiritual sword and the material sword are in the power of the Church. But the latter (the material sword) is to be wielded on behalf of the Church; the former (the spiritual) is to be wielded by the Church: the one by the hand of the priest; the other by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the suggestion and sufferance of the priest. The one sword ought to be subject to the other, and the temporal authority ought to be subject to the spiritual power. For whereas the Apostle says, “There is no power but from God; and those that are, are ordained of God;”[23] they would not be ordained (or ordered) if one sword were not subject to the other, and as the inferior directed by the other to the highest end. For, according to the blessed Dionysius, it is the law of the Divine order that the lowest should be guided to the highest by those that are intermediate. Therefore, according to the order of the universe, all things are not in equal and immediate subordination; but the lowest things are set in order by things intermediate, and things inferior by things superior. We ought, therefore, as clearly to confess that the spiritual power, both in dignity and excellence, exceeds any earthly power, in proportion as spiritual things are better than things temporal. This we see clearly from the giving, and blessing, and sanctifying of tithes, from the reception of the power itself, and from the government of the same things. For, as the truth bears witness, the spiritual power has to instruct, and judge the earthly power, if it be not good; and thus the prophecy of Jeremias is verified of the Church and the ecclesiastical power: “Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations and over kingdoms,” &c.[24] If, therefore, the earthly power deviates (from its end), it will be judged by the spiritual; but if a lesser spiritual power trangresses, it will be judged by its superior: but if the supreme (deviates), it can be judged, not by man, but by God alone, according to the words of the Apostle: “The spiritual man judges all things; he himself is judged by no one.”[25] This authority, though given to man and exercised through man, is not human, but rather Divine—given by the Divine voice to Peter, and confirmed to him and his successors in Him whom Peter confessed, the Rock, for the Lord said to Peter: “Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.”[26]

‘Whosoever therefore resists this power that is so ordered by God, resists the ordinance of God,[27] unless, as Manichæus did, he feign to himself two principles, which we condemn as false and heretical; for, as Moses witnesses, “God created heaven and earth not in the beginnings, but in the beginning.”[28] Moreover, we declare, affirm, define, and pronounce it to be necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’

2. We will next take the interpretations. They may be put into three classes:—

(1) First, of those who assailed it at the time.

The theologians and doctors of the school at Paris had always taught by a constant tradition that the Popes possessed a spiritual and indirect power over temporal things. John Gerson may be taken as the representative of them all. He says the ecclesiastical power does not possess the dominion and the rights of earthly and of heavenly empire, so that it may dispose at will of the goods of the clergy, and much less of the laity; though it must be conceded that it has in these thing an authority (dominium) to rule, to direct, to regulate, and to ordain.[29] Such was the doctrine of Almain, Alliacus, John of Paris, and of the old Sorbonne. It was also the doctrine of the theologians of the Council of Constance; who are always quoted as opponents of the Infallibility of the Pope, because they held that, though the See of Rome could not err, he that sat in it might err. They likewise held the deposing power, which alone is enough to show how little the definition of the Infallibility has to do with the deposition of Kings.

When the Unam Sanctam was published, Egidius Romanus, the Archbishop of Bourges, wrote against it [editorial note: subsequent research has shown that Egidius actually wrote in favour of the bull], being deceived into a belief that Boniface claimed a direct temporal power over the King of France, over and above that power which had always been admitted in France according to the Bull Novit of Innocent III—viz. an indirect spiritual power in temporal matters when involving sin.[30] The same course was taken by other French writers.

Boniface had already declared in a Consistory in 1302 that he had never assumed any jurisdiction which belonged to the King; but that he had declared the King to be, like any other Christian, subject to him only in regard to sin.[31]

(2) Secondly, the Regalists once more assailed the Unam Sanctam in the reign of Louis XIV.

Bianchi says that there is not to be found a writer in France, before Calvin, who denied this indirect spiritual power; that the denial was introduced by the Huguenots about the year 1626; that the Sorbonne began to adhere to it, and reduced it to a formula in 1662.[32] Bossuet endeavours to fasten on the Unam Sanctam the old Regalist interpretation, and affirms that it was withdrawn by Clement V.: which statement is contrary to the fact. Clement V., on the contrary, interprets the Bull in the true sense, as Boniface had done, declaring that Boniface did not thereby subject the King, or the Kingdom of France, in any greater degree to the authority of the Pontiff than they had been before, that is, according to the Bull of Innocent III. Novit, and the doctrines of the old Sorbonne.[33]

The history of the Four Gallican Articles, and of the writers who defended them, is too well known to need repetition.

(3) We come, lastly, to those who have assailed it at this time.

It is not a little wearisome to read the same old stories over again; and to be told as ‘scientific history’ that Boniface VIII. claimed to have received both swords as his own, to be held in his own hand, and wielded by him in direct temporal jurisdiction over temporal princes. We have all this raked up again in Janus. From Janus it goes to newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. Anybody can interpret a Pope’s Bull. There is no need of a knowledge of contemporary facts, or of the terminology of the Civil or Canon Law, or of Pontifical Acts, or of the technical meaning of words. A dictionary, and a stout heart to attack the Popes, is enough. Such men would have us believe, against all the Popes, that they have claimed temporal power, properly so called, over temporal Princes.

VI. I will, therefore, now give what may be affirmed to be the true and legitimate interpretation of the Unam Sanctam.

It cannot be better stated than in the words of Dr. Döllinger.[34] He writes thus:—

‘Boniface opened the council, at which there were present from France four archbishops, thirty-five bishops, and six abbots, in November 1302. One consequence of this council appears to have been the celebrated decretal Unam Sanctum, which was made public on the 18th of November, and which contains an exposition of the relations between the spiritual and temporal powers. In the Church, it says, there are two powers, a temporal and spiritual, and as far as they are both in the Church, they have both the same end: the temporal power, the inferior, is subject to the spiritual, the higher and more noble; the former must be guided and directed by the latter, as the body is by the soul; it receives from the spiritual its consecration and its direction to its highest object, and must therefore, should it ever depart from its destined path, be corrected by the spiritual power. It is a truth of faith that all men, even kings, are subject to the Pope; if, therefore, they should be guilty of grievous sins, in peace or in war, or in the government of their kingdoms, and the treatment of their subjects, and should thus lose sight of the object to which the power of a Christian Prince should be directed, and should give public scandal to the people, the Pope can admonish them, since in regard to sin they are subject to the spiritual power; he can correct them; and, if necessity should require it, compel them by censures to remove such scandals. For if they were not subject to the censures of the Church, whenever they might sin in the exercise of the power entrusted to them, it would follow that as kings they were out of the Church; that the two powers would be totally distinct from each other; and that they were descended from distinct and even opposed principles, which would be an error approaching to the heresy of the Manichees. It was therefore the indirect power of the Church over the temporal power of kings which the Pope defended in these Bulls; and he had designedly extracted the strongest passages of them from the writings of two French theologians, St. Bernard and Hugo of St. Victor.’

The interpretation given here by Dr. Döllinger is undoubtedly correct. All Catholics are bound to assent to the doctrines here declared; for though they are not here defined, yet they are certainly true. The only definition, properly so called, in the Bull is contained in the last sentence.

Now, upon the doctrines declared by the Bull it is to be observed:—

1. That it does not say that the two swords were given by our Lord to the Church; but that the two swords are in potestate Ecclesiæ, ‘in the power of the Church.’
2. That it at once goes on to distinguish, ‘Both (swords) are in the power of the Church, the spiritual, that is, and the material. But this (the material) is to be used for the Church; that (the spiritual) is to be used by the Church. This, indeed (by the hand) of the Priest; that, by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the bidding and sufferance of the Priest.’
3. That though both swords are in the Church, they are held in different hands, and to be used by the subordination of the one to the other. Oportet autem gladium esse sub gladio: the one sword must be subordinate to the other, the lower to the higher.
4. That Boniface VIII., in this very Bull Unam Sanctum, expressly declares that the power given to Peter was the ‘Suprema Spiritualis potestas,’ not the Temporal, or a mixed power, but purely Spiritual, which may judge all Powers, but self is judged of God alone.

Now, on the principles already laid down, there ought to be no difficulty in rightly and clearly understanding this doctrine.

• 1. For first the Material Sword is as old as human society. It was not given by grace, nor held by grace, which is a heresy condemned in Wiclif by the Council of Constance; but it belongs to the Civil Ruler in the order of nature, as St. Paul, speaking of the heathen empire, says: ‘He beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God to execute wrath.’

Nothing but want of care or thought could have led men to forget this, which is a truth and fact of the natural order.

When any prince by baptism became Christian, he became subject to the law of God and to the Church as its expositor. He became subject, not only as a man, but as a prince; not only in the duties of his private life, but in the duties of his public life also. But this did not deprive him of the civil sword, nor of any of the rights of the natural order.[35] Oportet autem gladium esse sub gladio. The Bull declares that the Material Sword which he brought with him when he was baptized ought to be subject to the Spiritual Sword. But it nowhere says that the Material Sword was given to the Church, or that the Church gave it to the Imperial Ruler. It is in the Church, because he that bears it is in the Church. It is the office of the Church to consecrate it, and (instituere) to instruct it. But it belongs essentially to the natural order, though it is to be exercised according to the supernatural order of faith.

• 2. When it is said that both Swords are ‘in the power of the Church,’ it means that the Church in a Christian world includes the natural order in its unity. The conception of the Church included the whole complex Christian Society, made up of both powers, united in a complete visible unity.

Mr. Bryce, in his excellent work on the Holy Roman Empire, says:—

‘Thus the Holy Roman Church, and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the same thing in two aspects; and Catholicism, the principle of the universal Christian Society, is also Romanism: that is, rests upon Rome as the origin and type of universality, manifesting itself in a mystic dualism which corresponds to the two natures of its Founder. As Divine and eternal, its head is the Pope, to whom all souls have been entrusted; as human and temporal, the Emperor, commissioned to rule men’s bodies and acts.’[36]

Mr. Bryce has here clearly seen the concrete unity of the Christian world; but he has missed the order which creates that unity. His description is what Boniface VIII. calls ‘a monster with two heads.’ Mr. Bryce quotes this saying in a note. If he had mastered the spiritual element as he has mastered the political, Mr. Bryce’s book would have ranked very high among great authors.

Mr. Freeman, in an article on Mr. Bryce’s book, is nearer to the true conception. He writes as follows:

‘The theory of the Mediaeval Empire is that of an universal Christian Monarchy. The Roman Empire and the Catholic Church are two aspects of one Society.’ . . . ‘At the head of this Society, in its temporal character as an Empire, stands the temporal chief of Christendom, the Roman Caesar; at its head, in its spiritual character as a Church, stands the spiritual chief of Christendom, the Roman Pontiff. Cæsar and Pontiff alike rule by Divine right.’[37]

Now here are two things to be noted. First, that the Emperor holds an office of human creation; the Pontiff an office of Divine creation. Secondly, that the office of Divine creation is for a higher end than the office which is of human origin. The former is for the eternal, the latter for the earthly happiness of man.

But, as I have said before, the office of Divine creation, ordained to guide men to an eternal end, is higher than the office of human origin, directed to an earthly and temporal end; and in this the perfect unity and subordination of the whole is constituted and preserved.

Nevertheless, both Mr. Bryce and Mr. Freeman bring out clearly what Boniface means when he says that the two swords are in Ecclesia, in the Church, and in potestate Ecclesiæ, in the power of the Church.

To this I may add the following passage from the late Cardinal Tarquini, who states the whole subject with great precision:—

‘The Civil Society of Catholics is distinguished from others by this—that it consists of the same assemblage of men as the Church of Christ, that is, the Catholic Church, consists of: so that it in no way constitutes a real body diverse and separate from the Church; but both (societies) together have the character of a twofold federative association and obligation inhering in the same multitude of men, whereby the Civil Society under the government of the Civil Magistrate exerts its powers to secure the temporal happiness of men, and, under the government of the Church, to secure eternal life; and in such wise that eternal life be acknowledged to be the last and supreme end to which temporal happiness and the whole temporal life is subordinate; because if any man do not acknowledge this, he neither belongs to the Catholic Church, nor may call himself Catholic. Such, then, is the true notion of the Civil Society of Catholics. It is a society of men who so pursue the happiness of this life as thereby to show that it ought to be subordinate to the attainment of eternal happiness, which they believe can be attained alone under the direction of the Catholic Church.’[38]

We have here the full and genuine doctrine of the Unam Sanctam—the one body, the two swords, the subordination of the material to the spiritual sword, the indirect power of the spiritual over the temporal whensoever it deviates from the eternal end.

Dr. Döllinger’s interpretation, then, is strictly correct—namely, ‘It was therefore,’ he says, ‘the indirect power of the Church over the temporal power of Kings which the Pope defended in these Bulls;’ but that power of the Pope is itself Spiritual.

VII. From this doctrine Cardinal Tarquini draws the following conclusions:—

• 1. In things temporal, and in respect to the temporal end (of Government), the Church has no power in Civil society.

The proof of this proposition is that all things merely temporal are (præter finem Ecclesiæ) beside, or outside of, the end of the Church. It is a general rule that no society has power in those things which are out of its own proper end.

• 2. In whatsoever things, whether essentially or by accident, the spiritual end, that is, the end of the Church, is necessarily involved, in those things, though they be temporal, the Church may by right exert its power, and the Civil State ought to yield.[39]

In these two propositions we have the full explanation of the indirect spiritual power of the Church. I give it in Cardinal Tarquini’s words:—

‘Directly the care of temporal happiness alone belongs to the State, but indirectly the office also of protecting morals and religion; so, however, that this be done dependently on the Church, forasmuch as the Church is a society to which the care of religion and morals is directly committed.

‘That which in the Civil Society is indirect and dependent, is direct and independent in the Church; and, on the other hand, the end which is proper and direct to the Civil State, that is, temporal happiness, falls only indirectly, or so far as the spiritual end requires, under the power of the Church.

‘The result of all this is—

‘1. That the Civil Society, even though every member of it be Catholic, is not subject to the Church, but plainly independent in temporal things which regard its temporal end.

‘2. That the language of the Fathers, which seems to affirm[40] an absolute independence of the Civil State, is to be brought within this limit.’

VIII. I will now give a summary of this matter in the words of Suarez, and also his comment on the terminology used by Canonists and theologians on this subject.

He says that the opinion which gives to the Pontiff direct temporal power over all the world is false.

Next, he sets aside the opinion that the Pontiff has this direct temporal power over the Church.

He then gives as the true opinion that which has been affirmed—namely, that the Pontiff has not direct temporal power, except in those States of which he is Temporal Prince; but that he has a spiritual power indirectly over temporal things, in so far as they affect the salvation of men or involve sin.[41]

One chief cause of the confusion of Regalists and our non-Catholic adversaries has been the uncertain use of language, and the want of a fixed terminology until a certain date.

The word Temporal was used in two senses. It was used to signify the power of Civil Rulers in the order of nature. And in this sense the Church has never claimed it for its head. It was used also to signify the spiritual power of the Pontiff when incident indirectly upon temporal things. The spiritual power, then, had a temporal effect, and took, so to speak, its colour and name from that use, remaining always spiritual as before.

For instance, we speak of ‘the Colonial power’ of the Crown, meaning the Imperial power applied to the government of the Colonies; in like manner the Spiritual power of the Pope, applied indirectly to temporal things, was (improprie) improperly called Temporal, and this usus loquendi gave rise to much misinterpretation.

What I have here stated was the judgment of Bellarmine, who, in his answer to Barclay, writes as follows:—

‘Barclay says that there are two opinions among Catholics (on the power of the Pontiff). The one, which most Canonists follow, affirms that in the Supreme Pontiff, as Vicar of Christ, both powers, Spiritual and Temporal, exist : the other, which is the common opinion of Theologians, affirms that the power of the Supreme Pontiff, as Vicar of Christ, is strictly spiritual in itself ; but that, nevertheless, he may, by the same, dispose temporal things so that they be ordered for spiritual ends.’[42]

Barclay argued that the power of the Pope in temporal things was a free and open opinion among Catholics: Bellarmine, in replying, says:—

‘That this power is in the Pope is not opinion but certitude among Catholics, though there be many discussions as to what and of what quality the power is: that is to say, whether it be properly and in itself of a temporal kind, or whether it be not rather spiritual, but by a certain necessary consequence, and in order to spiritual ends, it dispose of temporal things.’[43]

Bellarmine states his own opinion in these words:

‘Temporal Princes, when they come to the family of Christ, lose neither their princely power nor jurisdiction; but they become subject to him whom Christ has set over His family, to be governed and directed by him in those things which lead to eternal life.’[44]

Now, from these passages it would appear that in Bellarmine’s judgment the opinions of the Canonists and the Theologians practically came to one and the same thing, though their language was different. By Temporal Power some earlier Canonists may perhaps have intended a power temporal in itself; but the later Canonists did not intend more than a Spiritual power over temporal things: which the Theologians also asserted. But this use of the word temporal seemed to imply that the quality of the power was not spiritual, as the Theologians asserted. This ambiguity is the source of the misunderstandings which we daily read in attacks upon the Catholic Church. I can the more readily believe the good faith of those who so misconceive it, because I can remember that I was misled by the same mistake for many years. For instance, the Canonists affirm that the whole world is the territory of the Pontiff (Territorium Pontificis). But they do so in answering the objection, that where the Pontiff acts spiritually in the territory of any temporal Prince, he is invading the territory of another. The meaning is evident: namely, that the Pontiff has universal jurisdiction over the whole world. But this does not say that his jurisdiction is temporal. It affirms only that it runs into all the world. It merely affirms that it is universal: and the same writers assert that in itself it is only Spiritual.[45]

We have been told that Bellarmine’s book was put upon the Index. But, after a judicial examination, it was removed by order of the Holy See, and its perfect soundness acknowledged.

Suarez lays down precisely the same doctrine as Bellarmine. He says:

‘Those authors who teach absolutely that the Pope has Supreme Power, and that temporal, in the whole world, mean this, “that the Pontiff, in virtue of his Spiritual Power and jurisdiction, is superior to Kings and temporal Princes, so as to direct them in the use of their temporal Power in order to Spiritual ends.”’

He then goes on:—

‘For though they sometimes speak indistinctly, and without sufficient clearness, or even (improprie) incorrectly—because the power of the Pope is not temporal but spiritual, which contains under itself things temporal, and is exercised about them indirectly, that is, for the sake of Spiritual things—nevertheless they often make this sense clear, and lay down their distinctions either expressly or virtually; for they affirm that the Pontiff can do some things indirectly, but deny that he can do them directly.[46]

But if the Pope had temporal power properly so called, he could do all things directly. This negative proves that the power of which they spoke was only Spiritual.

Suarez further says:—

‘Subjection is of two kinds—direct and indirect. Subjection is called direct when it is within the end and limits of the same power: it is called indirect when it springs from direction to a higher end, which belongs to a higher and more excellent power. The proper Civil Power in itself is directly ordained for the fitting state and temporal happiness of the human commonwealth in time of this present life; and therefore the power itself is called temporal. The Civil Power, therefore, is then called supreme in its own order when within the same, and in respect to its end, the ultimate resolution (of power) is made within its own sphere.’ . . . . ‘The chief ruler is, then, subordinate to no superior in order to the same end of Civil Government. But, as temporal and civil happiness are related to that which is spiritual and eternal, it may happen that the matter of Civil Government must be otherwise ordered and directed, in order to spiritual welfare, than the Civil policy alone seems to require. And then, though the temporal Prince and his power do not directly depend in their acts upon any other power in the same (i.e. the temporal) order, which also regards the same end only, nevertheless it may happen that it needs to be directed, helped, and corrected in the matter of its government by a superior power, which governs men in order to a more excellent and eternal end; and then this dependence is called indirect, because that higher power is not exercised in respect to temporal things (per se) of its own nature, nor for its own sake, but indirectly, and for another end.’[47]

It will be seen here:—

1. That the superior power cannot be temporal, or its jurisdiction would be direct.
2. That, if temporal, it would not be of a higher, but of the same order.
3. That, therefore, the claim of indirect power is an express exclusion of temporal power, properly so called, from the spiritual supremacy of the Head of the Church.

Suarez states, but rejects, the opinion of certain early Canonists and Jurists who taught that the power of the Pontiff over any temporal thing was also temporal in itself. He then states and proves that this indirect power is Spiritual only. After speaking of the power of the Keys, he says:—

‘In no other place did Christ imply that He gave to Peter or to the Church temporal dominion, or a proper and direct royalty; nor does Ecclesiastical tradition show this, but rather the reverse.’[48]

With these authorities before us, there can be little difficulty in explaining the texts usually quoted by adversaries, who desire to fasten on the Unam Sanctum and upon the Catholic Church a claim to temporal power, that is, temporal in its root and in itself.

The passages usually quoted from Pope Nicholas, St. Bernard, St. Thomas, Alvarez, Hugo of St. Victor, St. Bonaventura, Durandus, and others, are fully discussed and proved by Bellarmine to affirm no more than Spiritual power; and that indirectly over temporal matters, when they involve the Spiritual end of the Church.[49]

IX. I hope sufficiently to prove hereafter what I asserted—namely, that though a supreme spiritual authority be inherent in the Divine constitution and commission of the Church, its exercise in the world depends on certain moral and material conditions, by which alone its exercise is rendered possible or just. This shall be shown by treating the subjects raised by the ‘Expostulation;’[50] namely, the deposing power, and the use of political force or penal legislation in matters of religion. I hope, and I believe, that I am able to show that the moral condition of the Christian world made justifiable in other ages that which would be unjustifiable in this; and that the attempt to raise prejudice, suspicion, and hostility against the Catholic Church at this day and in England by these topics, is an act essentially unjust; from which a real science of history ought to have preserved Mr. Gladstone. I must repeat here again that between the Vatican Council and these subjects there is no more relation than between jurisprudence and the equinox. Some fifteen Councils of the Church, of which two are General, have indeed recognised and acted upon the supremacy of the Spiritual authority of the Church over temporal things; but the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff is one thing, his supreme judicial authority is another. And the Definition of Infallibility by the Vatican Council has in no way, by so much as a jot or tittle, changed or affected that which was infallibly fixed and declared before. But, as I will go on to show, even infallible laws cease to apply when the subject matter is wanting, and the necessary moral conditions are passed away.

I must acknowledge, therefore, that the following words fill me with surprise. Speaking of Dr. Doyle and others, he says :—

‘Answers in abundance were obtained, tending to show that the doctrines of deposition and persecution, of keeping no faith with heretics, and of universal dominion, were obsolete beyond revival.’[51]

This passage implicitly affirms what I hope explicitly to prove. How can laws become obsolete, but by the cessation of the moral conditions which require or justify their exercise? How can laws, the exercise of which is required by the permanent presence of the same moral conditions which called them into existence, become obsolete? I pass over the ‘no faith with heretics,’ which is an example of the injustice which pervades the Pamphlet. I should have thought it impossible for Mr. Gladstone not to know the true meaning of this controversial distortion: but I am willing to believe that he did not know it; for if he had, it would have been impossible for such as he is to write it.

The moral principles on which the exercise of supreme powers and rights was justifiable in the age of Boniface VIII. exist no longer in the nineteenth century in England. Let no one cynically pretend that this is to give up or to explain away. I read the other day these words:

‘The Pope has sent forth his prohibitions and his anathemas to the world, and the world has disregarded them. The faithful receive them with conventional respect, and then hasten to assure their Protestant friends that Papal edicts can make no possible difference in the conduct of any human being.’[52]

Nothing can be less true. The first principles of morals forbid the exercise of the supreme judicial power of the Church on such a civil order as that of England. When it was de facto subject to the Church, England had by its own free will accepted the laws of Christendom. It can never be again subject to such laws except on the same condition—namely, by its own free will. Till then the highest laws of morality render the exercises of such Pontifical acts in England impossible.

Mr. Gladstone has called on Pius IX. to repudiate such powers.[53] But Pius IX. cannot repudiate powers which his predecessors justly exercised, without implying that their actions were unjust. He need not repudiate them for himself, for the exercise of them is impossible, and, if physically possible, would be morally impossible, as repugnant to all equity, and, under correction, I will say to natural justice. The infallible witness for justice, and equity, and charity among men, cannot violate these laws which unerringly govern his office.

X. The command of our Lord to the Apostles: ‘Go ye into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature: he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be condemned’[54]—clearly invests the Church with authority to baptise every creature. But the exercise of this right was suspended upon a moral condition. It conveyed no right to baptise any man against his will; nor without an act of faith on his part. But an act of faith is a spontaneous and voluntary act of submission, both of intellect and will, to the truth, and to the teacher who delivers it. The absolute and universal authority therefore of the Church to baptise depends upon the free and voluntary act of those who believe, and, through their own spontaneous submission, are willing to be baptised.

The Church so regards the moral conditions on which its acts depend, that as a rule it will not even suffer an infant to be baptised unless at least one of the parents consents.

In like manner the power of absolution, which has no limit of time or of subject, can be exercised only upon those who are willing. Confession and contrition, both voluntary acts of the penitent, are absolutely necessary to the exercise of the power of the Keys.

This principle will solve many questions in respect to the Spiritual authority of the Church over the Civil State.

First, it shows that, until a Christian world and Christian Rulers existed, there was no subject for the exercise of this spiritual authority of judgment and correction. Those who amuse themselves by asking why St. Peter did not depose Nero, will do well to find out whether people are laughing with them or at them. Such questions are useful. They compendiously show that the questioner does not understand the first principles of his subject. If he will find out why St. Peter neither baptised nor absolved Nero, he will have found out why he did not depose him. Until a Christian world existed there was no apta materia for the supreme judicial power of the Church in temporal things. Therefore St. Paul laid down as a rule of law that he had nothing to do in judging those that were without the unity of the Church.

But when a Christian world came into existence, the Civil society of man became subject to the Spiritual direction of the Church. So long, however, as individuals only subjected themselves, one by one, to its authority, the conditions necessary for the exercise of its office were not fully present. The Church guided men, one by one, to their eternal end; but as yet the collective society of nations was not subject to its guidance. It is only when nations and kingdoms become socially subject to the supreme doctrinal and judicial authority of the Church that the conditions of its exercise are verified. When the senate and people of the Roman Empire were only half Christian, the Church still refrained from acts which would have affected the whole body of the State. When the whole had become Christian, the whole became subject to the Divine Law, of which the Roman Pontiff was the supreme expositor and executive.

It would be endless to state examples in detail. I will take, therefore, only one in which the indirect spiritual power of the Church over the temporal State is abundantly shown. Take, for instance, the whole subject of Christian Matrimony: the introduction of the Christian law of the unity and indissolubility and sacramental character of marriage; the tables of consanguinity and of affinity; the jurisdiction of the Church over matrimonial cases. This action of the Pontifical law upon the Imperial law, and the gradual conformity of the Empire to the Church, exhibits in a clear and complete way what is the power claimed by the Church over the temporal laws of Princes.

The Council of Trent reserves matrimonial causes to the Ecclesiastical Tribunals; and in the Syllabus the proposition is condemned that they belong to the Civil jurisdiction.[55]

In like manner, in prohibiting duels, the Council declares temporal penalties against not only the principals, but those also who are guilty of permitting them.[56]

In like manner, again, the Christian law of faith and morals passed into the public law of Christendom. Then arose the Christian jurisprudence, in which the Roman Pontiff was recognised as the supreme Judge of Princes and of People, with a twofold coercion: spiritual by his own authority, and temporal by the secular arm. These two acted as one. Excommunication and deposition were so united in the jurisprudence of Christendom, that he who pronounced the sentence of excommunication pronounced also the sentence of deposition; as before the repeal of our Test Acts, if a member of the Church of England became Catholic, or even Nonconformist, he was ipso facto incapable of sitting in Parliament or holding office of State. And by the first of William III. the heir to the Crown, if he become Catholic, or marry a Catholic, ipso facto forfeits the succession. Nothing is more certain upon the face of history, and no one has proved more abundantly than Dr. Döllinger, that in every case of deposition, as of Philip le Bel, Henry IV. of Germany, Frederic II., and the like, the sentence of the Electors, Princes, States, and people, and the public opinion and voice of nations, had already pronounced sentence of rejection upon those tyrants before the Pontiffs pronounced the sentence of excommunication and deposition. It was only by the faith and free will of nations that they became socially subject to this jurisprudence; it was by their free will that it was maintained in vigour; and it was in conformity with their free will that it was exercised by the Pontiffs. Their free sentence preceded the Pontifical sentence. It was at their prayer, and in their behalf, that it was pronounced. The moral condition of spontaneous acceptance, and the material conditions of execution, were alike present, rendering these supreme Pontifical acts legitimate, right, lawful, wise, and salutary.

XI. And here I shall be met with the answer: ‘You justify, then, the deposition of princes, and therefore you hold that the Pope may depose Queen Victoria.’ Such, I am sorry to say, is the argument of the ‘Expostulation;’ for if it be not, why was it implied? I altogether deny the argument, or inference, or call it what you will. I affirm that the deposition of Henry IV. and Frederic II. of Germany were legitimate, right, and lawful; and I affirm that a deposition of Queen Victoria would not be legitimate, nor right, nor lawful, because the moral conditions which were present to justify the deposition of the Emperors of Germany are absent in the case of Queen Victoria; and therefore such an act could not be done.

This is not a mere personal opinion of my own, or even a mere opinion of theologians. What I have affirmed has been declared by the authority of Pius VI. In a letter from the Congregation of Cardinals of the College of Propaganda, by order of His Holiness Pius VI., addressed to the Roman Catholic Archbishops of Ireland, dated Rome, June 23, 1791, we read as follows:—

‘In this controversy a most accurate discrimination should be made between the genuine rights of the Apostolical See and those that are imputed to it by innovators of this age for the purpose of calumniating. The See of Rome never taught that faith is not to be kept with the heterodox—that an oath to kings separated from Catholic communion can be violated—that it is lawful for the Bishops of Rome to invade their temporal rights and dominions. We, too, consider an attempt or design against the life of kings and princes, even under the pretext of religion, as a horrid and detestable crime.’

I may add that this passage was not unknown to Dr. Döllinger, who quotes it at p. 51 in his work on ‘The Church and the Churches.’

But lest any one should reply that this was said when Catholics were under penal laws, and with a View to blinding the English Government, I will add that no one has more frankly and forcibly expressed this than Pius IX., in the very text of which Mr. Gladstone has quoted a part. The Holy Father, on July 20, 1871, thus addressed a Literary Society in Rome:—

‘In the variety of subjects which will present themselves to you, one appears to me of great importance at this time; and that is, to defeat the endeavours which are now directed to falsify the idea of the Infallibility of the Pope. Among all other errors, that is malicious above all which would attribute (to the Infallibility of the Pope) the right of deposing sovereigns, and of absolving people from the obligation of allegiance.

‘This right, without doubt, has been exercised by the Supreme Pontiffs from time to time in extreme cases, but it has nothing to do with the Pontifical Infallibility; neither does it flow from the Infallibility, but from the authority of the Pontiff.

‘Moreover, the exercise of this right in those ages of faith which respected in the Pope that which he is, that is to say, the Supreme Judge of Christendom, and recognised the benefit of his tribunal in the great contentions of peoples and of sovereigns, was freely extended (by aid, as was just, of public jurisprudence, and the common consent of nations) to the gravest interests of States and of their rulers.’

So far Mr. Gladstone quoted from what was before him. Unfortunately, he appears not to have known what followed. Pius IX. went on to say:—

‘But altogether different are the conditions of the present time from the conditions (of those ages); and malice alone can confound things so diverse, that is to say, the infallible judgment in respect to truths of Divine Revelation with the right which the Popes exercised in virtue of their authority when the common good demanded it. They know better than we, and everybody can discern the reason why such an absurd confusion of ideas is stirred up at this time, and why hypothetical cases are paraded of which no man thinks. It is because every pretext, even the most frivolous and furthest from the truth, is eagerly caught at, provided it be of a kind to give us annoyance, and to excite civil rulers against the Church.

‘Some would have me interpret and explain even more fully the Definition of the Council.

‘I will not do it. It is clear in itself, and has no need of other comments and explanations. Whosoever reads that Decree with a dispassionate mind has its true sense easily and obviously before him.’[57]

Now, the Holy Father in these words has abundantly shown two things: first, that they who connect Infallibility with the Deposing Power are talking of what they do not understand; and, secondly, that the moral conditions which justified and demanded the deposition of tyrannical Princes, when the mediæval world was both Christian and Catholic, have absolutely ceased to exist, now that the world has ceased to be Catholic, and has ceased to be even Christian. It has withdrawn itself socially as a whole, and in the public life of nations, from the unity and the jurisdiction of the Christian Church.

In this it differs altogether from the mediæval world. And it differs also from the ancient world. For, the ancient World had never yet believed the faith; the modern world has believed, but fallen from its faith. The ancient world was without the unity of the Christian Church de facto et de jure. The modern world is without de facto; and this has changed all the moral conditions of the subject. The Church never, indeed, loses its jurisdiction in radice over the baptised, because the character of baptism is indelible; but unless the moral conditions justifying its exercise be present, it never puts it forth. As Mr. Gladstone has cited the example of Queen Elizabeth, implying that he sees no difference between Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, I will add that Queen Elizabeth was baptised a Catholic; that she was crowned as a Catholic; that she received Holy Communion in the High Mass of her consecration as a Catholic; that she was both de jure and de facto a subject of the Catholic Church; that the majority of the people of England were still Catholic. What one of all these conditions is present in the case which I refuse to put in parallel? The English Monarchy has been withdrawn for three centuries from the Catholic Church; the English people are wholly separate; the Legislation of England has effaced every trace of the jurisprudence which rendered the Pontifical acts of St. Gregory VII. and Innocent IV. legitimate, just, and right. The public laws of England explicitly reject and exclude the first principles of that ancient Christian and Catholic jurisprudence. Not only is every moral condition which could justify such an act absent, but every moral condition which would render such an act unjustifiable, as it would seem to me, is present.[58] This is a treatment of history which is not scientific, but shallow; and a dangerous use of inflammatory rhetoric, when every calm dictate of prudence and of justice ought to forbid its indulgence. ‘The historic spirit,’[59] commended in the ‘Expostulation,’ would have led to such a treatment of this question as Mr. Freeman wisely recommends.

‘The cause of all this diversity and controversy—a diversity and controversy most fatal to historic truth—is to be traced to the unhappy mistake of looking at the men of the twelfth century with the eyes of the nineteenth; and still more of hoping to extract something from the events of the twelfth century to do service in the controversies of the nineteenth.’[60]

XII. For the same reasons I deplore the haste, I must say the passion, which carried away so large a mind to affirm or to imply that the Church at this day would, if she could, use torture, and force and coercion, in matters of religious belief. I am well aware that men of a mind and calibre as far removed from Mr. Gladstone as almost to constitute a different species, have at times endeavoured to raise suspicion and animosity against Catholics, by affirming that if they became the majority in this country—a danger certainly not proximate—they would use their power to compel men to conform to the Catholic faith. In the year 1830 the Catholics of Belgium were in a vast majority, but they did not use their political power to constrain the faith or conscience of any man. The ‘Four Liberties’ of Belgium were the work of Catholics. This is the most recent example of what Catholics would do if they were in possession of power. But there is one more ancient and more homely for us Englishmen. It is found at a date when the old traditions of the Catholic Church were still vigorous in the minds of men. It will therefore show that in this at least we owe nothing to modern progress, nor to the indifference of Liberalism. If the modern spirit had any share in producing the Constitution in Belgium, it certainly had no share in producing the Constitution of Maryland. Lord Baltimore, who had been Secretary of State under James I., in 1633, emigrated to the American Plantations, where, through Lord Strafford’s influence, he had obtained a grant of land. He was accompanied by men of all minds, who agreed chiefly in the one desire to leave behind them the miserable religious conflicts which then tormented England. They named their new country Maryland, and there they settled. The oath of the Governor was in these terms: ‘I will not, by myself or any other, directly or indirectly, molest any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, for or in respect of religion.’ Lord Baltimore invited the Puritans of Massachusetts, who, like himself, had renounced their country for conscience’ sake, to come into Maryland. In 1649, when active persecution had sprung up again in England, the Council of Maryland, on the 21st of April, passed this Statute: ‘And whereas the forcing of the conscience in matters of religion hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequence in the Commonwealth where it has been practised, and for the more quiet and peaceable government of the Province, and the better to preserve mutual love and amity among the inhabitants, no person within the Province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall be anyways troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof.’[61] The Episcopalians and Protestants fled from Virginia into Maryland. Such was the Commonwealth founded by a Catholic upon the broad moral law I have here laid down—that faith is an act of the will, and that to force men to profess what they do not believe is contrary to the law of God, and that to generate faith by force is morally impossible. It was by conviction of the reason and by persuasion of the will that the world-wide unity of faith and communion were slowly built up among the nations. When once shattered, nothing but conviction and persuasion can restore it. Lord Baltimore was surrounded by a multitude scattered by the great wreck of the Tudor persecutions. He knew that God alone could build them up again into unity; but that the equity of charity might enable them to protect and to help each other, and to promote the common weal.

I cannot refrain from continuing the history. The Puritan Commonwealth in England brought on a Puritan revolution in Maryland. They acknowledged Cromwell, and disfranchised the whole Catholic population. ‘Liberty of conscience’ was declared, but to the exclusion of ‘Popery, Prelacy, and licentiousness of opinion.’ Penal laws came of course. Quakers in Massachusetts, for the first offence, lost one ear; for the second, the other; for the third, had their tongue seared with a red-hot iron. Women were whipped, and men were hanged, for religion. If Catholics were in power to-morrow in England, not a penal law would be proposed, nor the shadow of constraint be put upon the faith of any man. We would that all men fully believed the truth; but a forced faith is a hypocrisy hateful to God and man. If Catholics were in power to-morrow, not only would there be no penal laws of constraint, but no penal laws of privation. If the Ionian Islands had elected, some years ago, to attach themselves to the Sovereignty of Pius IX., the status of the Greek Church separate from Catholic Unity would have been tolerated and respected. Their Churches, their public worship, their Clergy, and their religious rites would have been left free as before. They were found in possession, which was confirmed by the tradition of centuries; they had acquired Civil rights, which enter into the laws of political justice, and as such would have been protected from all molestation.[62]

I have drawn this out, because a question absolutely chimerical has been raised to disturb the confidence of the English people in their Catholic fellow-countrymen. And I have given the reason and the principle upon which, if the Catholics were to-morrow the ‘Imperial race’ in these Kingdoms, they would not use political power to molest the divided and hereditary religious state of our people. We should not shut one of their Churches, or Colleges, or Schools. They would have the same liberties we enjoy as a minority. I hope the Nonconformists of England are prepared to say the same. As we are in days when some are ‘invited,’ and some are ‘expected,’ and some are ‘required’ to speak out, I will ask my fellow-countrymen of all religious kinds to be as frank as I am.

XIII. I have now given, I hope, sufficient evidence to prove the assertion made in the second letter quoted at the outset of these pages; namely:—

‘That the relations of the Catholic Church to the Civil Powers have been fixed immutably from the beginning, because they arise out of the Divine constitution of the Church and of the civil society of the natural order.’

And we have also seen how far from the truth are the confident assertions put forward lately, that the Church ascribes to its head Supreme Temporal as well as Supreme Spiritual Power.[63]

Further, we have seen with what strange want of reflection and of depth the Pontifical acts of the old Catholic world are transferred per saltum to a world which has ceased, in its public life and laws, to be Catholic, I may almost say, to be even Christian.

Finally, I have shown, I hope, what are the relations of the Church to the Civil Powers of the world; and I have given evidence to prove that those relations have been fixed from the beginning by reason of the Divine constitution of the Church, and have been declared by Councils, not only before the Council of the Vatican, but before the Council of Trent; and, therefore, that to charge upon the Vatican Council a change in these relations is not only an assertion without proof, but an assertion contrary to historical fact.

[1] Romans xiii. 1-5.

[2] ‘Etiam nocentium potestas non est nisi a Deo.’—St. Augustine, De Natura Boni contra Manich. cap. xxxii.

[3] Suarez, Defensio Fidei, lib. iii. cap. ii. sect. 5, 15, 16.

[4] St. Matthew xvi. 19.

[5] Ibid. xxviii. 18, 19.

[6] St. Thomas, 2da 2dæ, quæst. x. art. 10.

[7] 1 Cor. v. 12.

[8] Cæsarism and Ultramontanism, p. 36.

[9] Cæsarism and Ultramontanism, pp. 34, 35.

[10] Expostulation, p. 27.

[11] Bellarmin. De Potest. Papæ, in præf. p. 844, Cologne, 1617.

[12] Döllinger’s Church History, vol. iv. p. 90.

[13] Ibid. p. 91.

[14] Cant. vi. 8.

[15] Ephesians iv. 5.

[16] Genesis vi. 16.

[17] Psalm xxi. 21.

[18] St. John xix. 23, 24.

[19] St. John xxi. 17.

[20] St. John x. 16.

[21] St. Luke xxii. 38.

[22] St. Matthew xxvi. 52.

[23] Romans xiii. 1.

[24] Jeremiah i. 10.

[25] 1 Corinthians ii. 15.

[26] St. Matthew xvi. 19.

[27] Romans xiii. 2.

[28] Genesis i. 1.

[29] Joann. Gerson, De Potest. Eccles. Consid. xii. Bianchi, Della Potestà et della Politia della Chiesa, tom. i. lib. i. cap. xi.

[30] Bianchi, lib. i. cap. x.

[31] Döllinger’s History of the Church, vol. iv. p. 91.

[32] Lib. i. cap. xiii.

[33] In the Appendix A will be found in full the Text of the three Pontifical Acts, Novit, Unam Sanctam, Meruit.

[34] Hist. iv. p. 91.

[35] Bianchi, lib. i. cap. iv.

[36] The Holy Roman Empire, p. 106. (Macmillan, 1871.)

[37] Freeman’s Historical Essays, pp. 136-137. (Macmillan, 1872.)

[38] Tarquini, Juris Eccl. Publici Institutiones, p. 56. (Rome, 1873.)

[39] Tarquini, Juris Eccl. Publici Institutiones, p. 57.

[40] Tarquini, Juris Eccl. Publici Institutiones, p. 55 and note.

[41] Suarez, De Legibus, lib. iii. c. vi.

[42] Bellarmine, De Potestate Summi Pontificis, cap. i. p. 848A, Cologne, 1617.

[43] Ibid. cap. iii. p. 852A.

[44] Ibid. cap. iii. p. 858A.

[45] Tarquini, p. 46.

[46] Suarez, Defensio Fidei Catholicæ, tom. xxiv. lib. iii. c. xxii. 2^nd ed. Paris, 1869.

[47] Suarez, Defensio Fidei, &c. lib. iii. cap. v. sect. 2.

[48] Suarez, Defensio Fidei, &c. lib. iii. cap. v. sect. 14.

[49] This may be seen in his Controversia de Summo Pontifice, cap. v.; and in Bianchi’s work, Della Potestà, tom. i. p. 91, lib. i. ch. x. xi.

[50] Expostulation, p. 26.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Times, Wednesday, December 30, 1874, in leading article on the Pope.

[53] Expostulation, p. 26.

[54] St. Mark xvi. 15, 16.

[55] Sess. xxiv. De Ref. can. xii.

[56] Sess. xxv. cap. xix.

[57] Discorsi di Pio Nono, July 20, 1871, p. 203, Rome, 1872.

[58] Appendix B.

[59] Expostulation, p. 14.

[60] Freeman’s Historical Essays, ‘St. Thomas of Canterbury and his Biographers,’ p. 80.

[61] Bancroft’s History of the United States, vol. i. pp. 233, 235, 255, &c.

[62] Our older writers, such as Bellarmine and Suarez, when treating of this subject, had before their eyes a generation of men who all had been in the unity of the faith. Their separation therefore was formal and wilful. Their separation from the unity of the Church did not release the conscience from its jurisdiction. But if Bellarmine and Suarez were living at this day, they would have to treat of a question differing in all its moral conditions. What I have here laid down is founded upon the principles they taught, applied to our times. Cardinal Tarquini, in treating the same matter, has dealt with it as it has been treated here.—Juris Eccl. Publ. Institutiones, p. 78.

[63] Expostulation, &c. p. 27.

One hears a good dose of defeatism recently expressed by Catholics who, though serious about their faith, are pessimistic about the practicability or desirability of seeking the integralist ideal in the current political climate.[1] The confessional State is deemed too lofty a goal to be worth seeking in the present circumstances. Accordingly, such Catholics (or non-Catholics, as the case may be) may read a simple statement about the relationship of temporal and spiritual power, and their reaction will be very similar to the reaction of two well-known commentators on twitter: “The prospects for integralism politically are almost too fantastical to make contemplating them a good use of time.” and “Can Catholic integralists come up with a successful modern example of their theories at work?” But such a defeatism involves a dual error originating in liberalism: it effectively banishes both grace and nature from the public sphere.

1.  The False Despair of Politics and Perfection

The defeatist challenge, by dismissing as idealistic and fantastical any notion of political ideals, radically narrows the scope of political action. But this is a mistake. Consider Glaucon’s similar challenge to Socrates, when the latter sketched a picture of the ideal State, in the Republic. “It seems to me, Socrates, that if one allows you to go on talking about things of this sort, you’ll forget altogether to deal with the subject you earlier pushed to one side in favour of these other ones: namely, the possibility of the realization of these political arrangements of ours, and exactly how their realization would be possible.” (Republic, 471c). Socrates responds that the ideal which he has proposed is a paradigm, something which stands as a model and a goal for what is realizable in practice. (472c). “Well then, do you think a painter is any less good a painter if he paints a paradigm of what the most beautiful human being would be like, and manages to render every detail in his painting accordingly, but isn’t able to demonstrate the possibility of such a man’s coming into existence?” (472d). Accordingly, says Socrates, “Then don’t make me have to prove that the sorts of things we’ve been describing would be realizable in practice, in every detail. If we’re able to show how a city might be governed in a way that comes closest to our description, that should be enough for you to declare that we’ve discovered how the things you yourself are prescribing are possible. Won’t you be content to achieve this much?” (473b).

Socrates here warns Glaucon against a kind of despair: Although perhaps one cannot see how the paradigm might practically be realized in every detail, one nonetheless is not free to despair of seeking that ideal, trying to approximate it in whatever way one can. This would seem to be rather common sense, especially for Christians who believe that mankind is fallen, and yet whom Christ commanded to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48). To despair of such perfection, simply because we cannot see how one can be perfect, is to despair of salvation itself and to cast aside the necessary exemplar of what we should strive for. It would be to despair of all virtue, to despair even of God’s grace, which is the supreme unlikelihood, from the standpoint of fallen man. Is it any different in the case of integralism?

2.  The Liberal Separation of Nature and Grace from the Sphere of Politics

Their mistake then is not simply a political mistake. Indeed, integralism is not itself first and foremost a theory about the relationship of political powers, civil and ecclesiastical, although it has much to say on that score. The doctrine of the relationship between temporal and spiritual power is one consequence of something much more fundamental, which, when seen clearly, is not so easily disregarded as something incidental to the Catholic faith as such. On the contrary, it is essential to the Catholic religion that grace perfects and builds upon nature; and conversely, nature needs and desires grace, especially on account of its fallenness. For the human good is twofold: temporal and eternal, and the former subordinate to and perfected by the latter. This is a universal truth; there is no part of human life that is exempt from it, nor any part of human life that is exempt from the effects of the Fall.

The defeatism which one commonly finds in neo-conservative Catholic circles buys into the liberal separation, not only of Church and State, but also of private and public life, and applies this dichotomy to the practice of religion itself: Religion is a private affair irrelevant to public life. Accordingly, such a defeatist Catholic may recognize the truth that grace perfects nature, but only (in effect) as long as it is qualified by “in the private sphere.” But once the topic shifts to matters of a public nature, a veil descends over the eyes, and grace seems to disappear from the scene altogether—perhaps because nature itself has also disappeared from the public scene.

This is both a theological and a philosophical error. Theologically, Catholics are obliged to recognize the effects of the Fall in every area of human life. Indeed, not only human life, but the whole world groans and travails, until it should be set free by God’s grace from the tyranny of corruption. (Romans 8:20-22). Contrary to many caricatures, integralist politics does not propose some sort of utopia of perfect heaven-on-earth, “immanentizing the eschaton”; rather, it is predicated precisely on the reality of sin, which has corrupted the whole of creation without any discrimination between private and public. Consequently, the whole of creation is in need of that “spiritual adoption” which God grants by His grace. This is of course most true of humanity. Nature can no longer suffice: “Thus, brethren, nature has no longer any claim upon us, that we should live a life of nature. If you live a life of nature, you are marked out for death; if you mortify the ways of nature through the power of the Spirit, you will have life.” (Romans 8:12-13).

But the refusal to see the relevance of grace in all spheres of existence, including the political, may also rest upon a philosophical error about the nature of politics itself. Liberalism and its efficient bureaucracies have forced men to adopt a certain mindset, which assumes that political reality, or the reality of human institutions, is an imposition upon nature, for the mere mastery of it—or for the mere master of other human beings and institutions—rather than a perfection of nature itself. Liberalism has changed the very meaning of politics. When Aristotle asserted that “man is by nature a political animal” (Politics, I.2, 1253a), he was explicitly uttering a truth about human nature. For liberalism, politics is a machine that is placed in dualistic opposition to nature, in order to beat it into submission and force its powers into artificial equilibrium. Accordingly, under this conception nature might desire grace, but only in the measure that the bureaucratic machine allows—which is in private—because nature itself only flourishes in the individualistic measure that the political machine allows. A classical understanding—which is also the Church’s understanding—rejects this conception of nature and politics, and asserts on the contrary that human nature is to be perfected by political life inasmuch as men are thereby directed to the common good. The nature that desires grace is accordingly not merely a private nature, but also a political nature.

3.  Family, Village, and City: The Ideal and Practical Politics Revisited

The neo-conservative, right-wing liberal will now ask: “Well then, explain to me how an integralist is to go about practically implementing the integralist ideal in the public sphere? After all it is useless to discuss politics without making concrete proposals.” True enough. However, recalling Socrates’ response to Glaucon, the integralist ideal is precisely that: an ideal. But this does not permit us to therefore relegate the ideal to some abstract realm that is for the time being irrelevant to practice. In the Platonic sense, an ideal is always relevant, even as it is not attainable in every detail; for it is unattainable in many details if not all of them, and it is the ethical agent’s responsibility to seek that ideal to the best of his abilities, in whatever capacity he finds himself. The ideal is something sought, not something given up because of its lofty ideality. So how does an integralist go about seeking his ideal?

Let us first attempt to let go of this artificial separation of private and public domains. They are not so apart as one might think. Aristotle taught of many “layers” of a city, all pertaining to political life, and some of which we might today consider “private.” Each of these orders of the polis has its own proper goods, and accordingly its own prudence and its own arts which as such are not political; yet they each participate in political prudence insofar as they are governed by it and ultimately ordered to it. (Politics, I.1). Within the city, not only do we distinguish individuals of rational nature, but families, villages, and the city itself. (Politics, I.2.) Each of these domains has its parts and members.

The individual has reason, will, sensation, and appetite. Individual prudence consists in placing these parts and their activities in the right order, so as to direct them all in proportionate measure to the good of the whole person, which is discerned by intellect.

Something analogous applies also at the level of the family or household, within which the daily needs of human life are fulfilled. In a family there are different parts – father, mother, son, daughter, etc. – the regulation of which is done according to the very same principles as that of the individual: the subordinate parts are ruled by the more authoritative part, and directed by it to the good of the whole family. Not only the passions of each individual, but also their intellects, are ruled by the domestic prudence of the head of the household, who is most responsible for discerning the good of the family and the means to attain it.

There are already, within this single distinction between the individual and the family, many layers of part-to-whole relationships, and many layers of subordination of lesser and greater goods—proper goods of the parts and common goods of the wholes. An individual is a complex being; a family, likewise, is a complex social unity, as small as it may be compared to society at large. Its complexity is constituted not only by the multiplicity of its parts, but also by the multiplicity of its goods, which pertain to the parts or the whole in various ways. The function of the highest or most authoritative part—intellect in the case of the individual, and the father (and his intellect!) in the case of a household—is to discern the nature of the good of the whole, and order all the subordinate parts and their proper goods according to that good.

But this does not stop with the family; the ideal continues to apply, as one transitions from the family into the village, and from the village into the city. The village is the immediate community of friends and extended family, wherein personal relationships and the first degrees of economic life flourish, and the more ongoing non-daily needs of life are fulfilled. The village also has its parts, beyond those that make up the family. The village has its bakers, butchers, farmers, doctors, etc., who all cooperate in order to secure, once again, the good of the whole community as such. Each part has its proper good, but the good of the whole is secured by the ordering of those proper goods in the right away, as discerned by whoever has care of the community. Once again, he who has care of the community is responsible for discerning the nature of the common good as such, and directing all other goods accordingly.

Finally, the city is the widest range of community life identified by Aristotle (although we in the modern age might further distinguish nations and international empires). The city has its own concerns, which once again involve the more proper concerns of villages and families, but within a greater order to a good that is common to them all. It is in the context of the city that the arts and sciences flourish, and that not only the necessities but also the pleasantries of life are supplied. The city depends on the villages and families in order to maintain its closeness to nature – hence it should not interfere with their proper functions, but recognize their distinction and diversity. Yet the ruler of the city has the responsibility to order these proper functions in the right way, directing them to the common good of the city.

The image of politics that is portrayed here is quite different from what modern citizens of American liberal democracy are accustomed to: it is a politics of the common good, that penetrates straight down from the State to the individual, through the village and the family, encompassing the enormous diversity of their proper goods and functions, inasmuch as they all pertain to the common good. Never is political prudence irrelevant, and never is the common good out of view. (This is not to say that all other kinds of prudence and art—including the prudence and the arts pertaining to the family and the village—reduce to politics; they are formally distinct from it, yet it governs them.) What this means is that every individual, within his proper limits, participates in political prudence—not in a democratic way, e.g. by voting, crafting policy, being a “politician,” etc.—but by doing precisely what pertains to his particular station in life, in a way that contributes to the common good. Non-political prudence, such as individual and domestic prudence and the arts they govern, are political by participation. The cultivation of individual virtue is hardly irrelevant to politics. The regulation of the family is likewise a political act by participation. The cultivation of a farm and the sharing of one’s goods with the local community is a political act, again by participation: for the baker and the butcher have much to contribute to the common good, within the limits of their particular stations. The office of the lawyer and the judge are likewise political offices. None of these things is relegated to any “private” sphere in which it can absolutely hide away from political concerns, because none of them is absolutely separate from the common good. Granted, different occupations may have more or less proximity to the common good as an end; but the very act of determining the measure in which they contribute to it according to their proximity to it is a political determination. Every office in society participates in this highest function of enabling the citizens to enjoy the common good in community.

Nor is this picture “idealistic” in the pejorative sense meant by its critics. Although it looks to an ideal, it is in fact far more realistic in its outlook than the liberal theories of the enlightenment. Rather than proposing that a good society may easily be constructed via mechanistic procedures, this view understands that truly good societies are rare indeed. Nonetheless, though the ideal may never be perfectly realized given our fallen nature, this view understands that through virtue it is achievable, even if imperfectly. For a Christian society, the prospects are even better, for nature will be healed and elevated by grace.

4. Living in a Catholic Way and the Twofold Ends of Gelasian Dyarchy

But the common good is twofold: temporal and eternal. Therefore integralism as a political ideal applies not only on the large scale of the city or the nation-state, in the crafting of policies and the direction of millions of citizens; rather, integralism applies also to the cultivation of individual virtue, the raising of families, the farming of land, the building of communities, the life of the village, the works of mercy, the cooperation amongst various stations in life, the interactions of people on all levels of social reality—and above all, the public act of worship. Integralism promotes the cultivation, not only of natural virtue in all these spheres, but also of supernatural virtue; not only of friendship, but also of charity; not only of natural religion, but the Catholic religion. In the measure that one seeks to inculcate natural and supernatural virtue in oneself and in those under one’s care; or seeks to enable and share in the communal act of worship; or seeks to evangelize a society; or protests publicly against sins and heresies which offend against “the business of the peace and the faith”;—in these measures, one embraces the integralist ideal. One does neither more nor less than this, in seeking for the restoration of a Catholic State.

It may be difficult to reach that stage when the Catholic Church will finally be given public recognition as the leading religious institution within the modern State. Such a recognition may well be the climax of the integralist “project,” but it is hardly everything that pertains to integralism. Yet neither should it be ignored for this reason; on the contrary, it should be all the more promoted and hoped for, precisely because it is simply of-a-piece with every other aim which any Catholic ought to seek in the political sphere. It is essentially the same ideal as that which is realized by allowing the faith to reign supreme within men’s hearts, within the family, within the parish, etc. Integralism is nothing more nor less than living in a Catholic way, as a member of both Church and State, whether as individual, father, lawyer, doctor, priest, president, king, or all together.

To the pessimist who doubts the practicability of the integralist ideal, we therefore respond: Everywhere that integralism is practiced, it is successful. For the practice of integralism is none other than the acceptance of God’s grace, as given through the sacraments and the mediation of His Church; and grace is always salvific. One need only look wherever the faith is authentically being practiced, wherever there are saints and holy men and women, wherever there are communities who live and worship together, wherever there is true virtue, wherever virtue is rewarded and sin is punished: that is integralism. If you despair of a Catholic society, you should despair of those cases too, where your despair is clearly unwarranted. If you despair of a Catholic society, you should despair of evangelization and conversion; you should despair of the salvation of men; you should despair of being perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. On the contrary, integralism (which is none other than Catholicism in practice) exhorts you to know and accept God’s grace wherever it is offered—and where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20)—and work for the restoration of grace to the entire race of your brethren, for all of whom, without exception, God became man. In the meantime, reject the establishment of liberalism, which seeks to uncrown Him who is our King; reject this as you reject sin itself. For who are we to exempt ourselves from His Reign?

[1] See, e.g., here.

This is the second part of a three-part series. Part one is available here, and part three here.

3. Vatican II and revolution in the official theology of baptism

Vatican II may not have introduced any new teaching about baptism in its formal magisterium. But even so, the Council event is deeply associated with a revolution in baptism’s official theology.

Aspects of this revolution were already occurring before the Council, in some cases with roots going back to the nineteenth century. The Council event still deepened or confirmed these theological changes. Other aspects of the revolution involved official liturgical changes brought about thanks to the Council. These liturgical changes were not in general directly called for by any document of the Council. But they were introduced by Paul VI in the name of applying the Council, and opposition to them is characteristically treated in official circles as opposition to the Council.

So we can with some justification talk of Vatican II as lying at the centre of a revolution in the official theology of baptism. This revolution in official theology is extensive, has had a very great impact on everyday Catholic belief and practice, and seems in almost every respect deeply problematic, as overtly inconsistent with or at least involving a compromising silence about what has long been the clear magisterial teaching of the Church.

•    The Dominion of the Devil

The first and most important change has to do with how the Church now presents the Fall and original sin, and what the Church is doing when through baptism she releases us from the guilt of original sin.

The Church’s historical teaching is clear. The Fall has delivered the world, in so far as it is fallen, to the devil as its prince. The guilt of original sin involves, therefore, subjection to the dominion of the devil. This is vividly stated by the Council of Florence in its decree for the Copts. Faith in Christ, and baptism, in freeing us from original sin, free us from subjection to the devil:

[The Council] firmly believes, professes and preaches that never was anyone, conceived by a man and a woman, liberated from the devil’s dominion except by faith in our lord Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and humanity, who was conceived without sin, was born and died.[1]

And

With regard to children, since the danger of death is often present and the only remedy available to them is the sacrament of baptism by which they are snatched away from the dominion of the devil and adopted as children of God, it admonishes that sacred baptism is not to be deferred for forty or eighty days or any other period of time in accordance with the usage of some people, but it should be conferred as soon as it conveniently can; and if there is imminent danger of death, the child should be baptised straightaway without any delay, even by a lay man or a woman in the form of the church, if there is no priest, as is contained more fully in the decree on the Armenians.[2]

This equation of original sin with subjection to the dominion of the devil has long been reflected and taught in the liturgy of baptism, in the rites of both Rome and Constantinople. In the traditional Roman baptismal liturgy, we find a sequence of exorcisms that directly represent baptism’s role as releasing us from the devil’s possession. Thus:

Go forth from him (her), unclean spirit, and give place to the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.

And again

I exorcise thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father + and of the Son, + and of the Holy + Spirit, that thou goest out and depart from this servant of God, N. For He commands thee, accursed one, Who walked upon the sea, and stretched out His right hand to Peter about to sink. Therefore, accursed devil, acknowledge thy sentence, and give honour to the living and true God: give honour to Jesus Christ His Son, and to the Holy Spirit; and depart from this servant of God, N. because God and our Lord Jesus Christ have vouchsafed to call him (her) to His holy grace and benediction and to the font of Baptism.

And again

And this sign of the holy Cross, which we make upon his (her) forehead, do thou, accursed devil, never dare to violate.

And finally

I exorcise thee, every unclean spirit, in the name of God the Father + Almighty, in the name of Jesus + Christ, His Son, our Lord and Judge, and in the power of the Holy + Spirit, that thou depart from this creature of God N, which our Lord hath deigned to call unto His holy temple, that it may be made the temple of the living God, and that the Holy Spirit may dwell therein.

That baptism constitutes our liberation by Christ from the dominion of the devil is not generally denied outright in official documents of the post-conciliar Church. Indeed, the 1992 Catechism refers to the doctrine in at least two places. In § 1237 it links the doctrine to the practice of baptismal exorcism:

Since baptism signifies liberation from sin and from its instigator the devil, one or more exorcisms are pronounced over the candidate.

And in § 1250 the Catechism characterises baptism as a liberation from ‘the power of darkness’:

Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called.

Now the magisterial teaching is that baptism is not only a sign of our deliverance from the dominion of the devil, but necessary to its effecting. Until the child is actually baptised the child still remains, with fallen humanity, under the devil’s dominion. The traditional exorcisms present this exactly, calling on the devil to depart now, with the child’s baptism.

But there is another theology of the matter, one which treats the baptism as a sign of a deliverance from diabolic dominion that, thanks to Christ’s coming, has in effect already happened—a liberation that the child does not have to wait until actual baptism to enjoy. And this theology is left open in new rite of baptism introduced by Paul VI in 1970. Granted, the new rite still speaks of release from original sin as effected by baptism. But original sin is no longer liturgically presented as implying continued subjection to the devil. The former multiple and very unambiguous exorcisms are all removed, to be replaced by a single new prayer, which reads:

Almighty and ever-living God, you sent your only Son into the world to cast out the power of Satan, spirit of evil, to rescue man from the kingdom of darkness, and bring him into the splendour of your kingdom of light. We pray for this child: set him (her) free from original sin, make him (her) a temple of your glory, and send your Holy Spirit to dwell with him (her). We ask this through Christ our Lord.

The difference is obvious. The new prayer is simply a prayer that God release the child from original sin. It is no longer explicitly commanding the devil to depart the child and abandon his dominion of it now. In fact the devil’s departure is not commanded at all. Which is why the new rite’s so-called ‘exorcism’ is not really a genuine formula of exorcism. The destruction of the power of the devil is associated in the prayer not with the devil’s departure from the child only at the moment of its baptism, but rather with Christ’s coming into the world. Any clear statement that even after the coming of Christ until actually baptised the child remains under the dominion of the devil, a devil whose departure has then to be explicitly commanded, has been removed.

This change is associated with a wider one. The traditional forms of blessing for liturgical use of natural elements such as water and oil also involve exorcism. Within a fallen world, natural elements require release from the dominion of the devil before they can be appropriated and used by the Church as holy water or holy oil. Take this exorcism that initiates the blessing of the oil of the sick in the traditional liturgy for the Chrism Mass:

I exorcise thee, thou most unclean spirit, and every incursion of Satan, and every phantasm: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: do thou depart from this oil, so that it may become a spiritual unguent for strengthening the temple of the living God; so that the Holy Spirit may dwell therein, by the name of God the Father almighty, and by the name of his well-beloved Son our Lord Jesus Christ, who will come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire.

These exorcisms have similarly been quite comprehensively removed from the new Roman liturgy. The message is clear. Blessings need only give thanks to God for a world that is good. There is no need of exorcism to remove a persisting diabolic dominion over a world that though by nature good is also fallen.

The traditional Roman liturgy with its formulae of exorcism for baptism and for blessings is now seen by many modern theologians as problematic and as having required reform just because, unlike the new, its forms for baptism and blessing really do contain genuine exorcisms of the devil—commands addressed to the devil that he depart from an unbaptised child or from natural elements.[3]

Baptism is not now generally explained to Catholics as release from diabolic dominion. That idea of baptism may have been taught by the Council of Florence, and it may still lurk in those just cited Catechism paragraphs. But it plays no role in the Church’s current pastoral life. That the fallen world and the unconverted within it are still subject to the devil is simply not part of the Church’s current official theology. It is a conception of the world that many contemporary Catholics would find alien and even shocking – and which has been carefully removed, very consistently and very thoroughly, from the contemporary liturgy. Diabolic dominion over a fallen world is not now presented in the Church’s liturgy, is not pastorally communicated in parish homiletics, and—as we are about to see—does not inform the current policy of the Church. The issue is not (yet) the reality of the devil or of original sin, none of which generally denied.[4] It has instead to do with what the existence of the devil and original sin all imply for the Church’s relation to an unconverted world.

If the fallen world—the world of the unconverted and unbaptised—really does lie under the dominion of the devil, then the consequence is clear. The Church cannot really live at peace with the world until it is converted. The Church can no more live at peace with the unconverted world than she can live at peace with the devil. Central to the Church’s relation to the unconverted world must be a commitment to spiritual confrontation, where the only way out of the ensuing spiritual conflict is the world’s conversion.

And this is Christ’s own message, who presents his mission as centrally involving conflict between a converted and an unconverted world—between the world of the baptised and the world of the unbaptised—with the mission to baptise as both crystallisation of this conflict, and the only means to victory in it.

I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division[.] Luke 12: 49-51

Baptism then is not a source of harmony and solidarity with the as yet unconverted world, but precisely in so far as the world is not yet converted, a source of spiritual conflict with it.

But what instead if the dominion of the devil has already, thanks to the coming of Christ, been effectively removed, so that at some eschatological level, even the unconverted world—the world of the unbaptised—is already released from the devil’s power? Perhaps through the coming of Christ the world, though fallen, is already marked, even prior to baptism and incorporation within the visible Church, by a Christianity that, to use the Rahnerian expression, is ‘anonymous’. Even the unconverted world is somehow already released from diabolic dominion and, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, already committed to the supernatural end. Then the relation of the Church even to the unconverted world need not be one of conflict. Even prior to the world’s conversion the Church’s primary relation to the world can already be one of dialogic harmony.

The traditional liturgy of exorcism, in baptisms and in blessings, stands in contradiction to this benign conception of the situation of the unconverted world. It presents the unconverted world as still in the possession of Christ’s and humanity’s deadly enemy. Without the world’s baptism and its conversion, there can be no articles of peace—no stable dialogic harmony. But a benign conception of the unconverted world and of the Church’s relation to it is plainly now dominant in official theology, and the traditional liturgy’s unwelcome contradiction has been comprehensively suppressed. The duty to convert the world is constantly subordinated to the pursuit of harmony with it. This subordination of conversion to dialogic harmony is a central feature of post-conciliar official theology.

The issue does not of course affect only baptism but generalises from it. For though baptism initiates a life of grace that detaches us from the devil, that grace can be lost through mortal sin. To prevent such loss and then as remedy for its occurrence, we need the other sacraments, and not the eucharist alone, but that condition, once grace has been lost, of the eucharist’s worthy reception, without which communion threatens to bring with it not liberation but a confirming of spiritual death and diabolic dominion—the sacrament of penance. And the needed combination of these sacraments is largely lacking not just among the unbaptised but in many communities of the baptised. Eucharist and penance are lacking in the Protestant world. But in effect penance is also lacking among many modern Catholics, who regularly take communion without ever going to confession—something with alarming implications, according to traditional magisterial teaching, for the internal life of increasingly large parts of the Church. For communion without confession is liable to drive us further from the life of grace, and so even further under the dominion of the devil, and there are important effects of this detachment very apparent in the life of the contemporary Church, as we shall see.

• Baptism, the Conversion of the State, and the Church as Coercive Potestas

If the fallen world is under the devil’s dominion, and is in inevitable spiritual conflict with the Church until it is converted, then to remove the conflict no part of the world can be excluded from that conversion.

The Church’s magisterium has long taught that the need for conversion includes the state. Even if individuals are Christian privately, that does not guarantee the health of the political community. For we do not pursue the communal good simply as private individuals, but as members of a community, through public institutions – and spiritual sickness can arise as much in public life as in private.[5]

Now the state is divinely established just as is the Church, though each in a different way. While the authority of the Church is based on a law of the New Covenant that is supernatural and revealed, state authority is based on natural law. But just as much as the Church the state is a form of community and authority that is divinely instituted so that humanity may flourish. This means that it is fundamental to Catholic teaching that harmony between Church and state must be possible, at least in principle. How could God not provide for harmony between two authorities each of which he has ordained and instituted?

But if the Church can only co-exist harmoniously with a nature that has been removed from the devil’s dominion through baptism and conversion, that must be true in particular for communal authority in its natural form—the state. For the state too, like the rest of nature, is affected by the Fall. This allows for no political neutral space. The state too must be rescued from the dominion of the devil, and brought into the Church, so that it publicly commits itself to Christ. Otherwise, if unconverted, the state will degrade from the proper order of nature. So the Church has clearly taught, not least through the magisterium of the nineteenth century popes. These popes taught, with clarity and, we are now beginning to see, with foresight too, that the conversion of private individuals is not enough. Unless the state itself is converted, and recognizes Christ politically and publicly, thanks to the Fall natural law as it concerns the public good and public justice will cease to be clearly recognized and applied:

[W]here religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost[.] Pius IX Quanta Cura § 4.

And

Therefore the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil thing for any state where Christianity does not hold the place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very end is lost sight of, for which, under God’s providence, human society has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature. But when men’s minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at. Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura § 8.

That degradation of the political community will guarantee not only the moral ruin of the state, but its enmity to the gospel, tied as the life of the gospel is to observance of the natural law—a law of which the devil is an unrelenting enemy.

The Church’s involvement in spiritual warfare within a temporal order that is fallen is also fundamental to the nature of the Church herself, and has long determined magisterial teaching about that nature. The Church has been given by Christ himself the authority to protect the supreme good of religion. But locked as she is in a spiritual conflict within a fallen world, the Church is under attack both from without and also from within—from her own sinful and often recalcitrant members. So she must be able to protect the good of her community from those attacks. She must be able to discourage wrongdoing by her members that threatens the spiritual good of the Christian community she serves. And she must also be able to prevent spiritually damaging intrusions into that community by opponents from without. So the Church, just as much as the state, must be a potestas or coercive authority. Just as the state must be able to use law to protect the political community, so the Church must be able to use law to protect the ecclesial community. The Church has been given by Christ the sovereign authority to make laws and to enforce those laws within her jurisdiction by legitimate threats of punishment that to be effective must include temporal as well as spiritual sanctions.

Subjection to the Church’s jurisdiction, the magisterium teaches and as the 1983 Code of Canon Law continues to claim, comes with baptism. So at Trent, as we have already seen, and elsewhere, the magisterium has clearly taught that baptism subjects the baptised to a coercive jurisdiction, that of the Church, with obligations to fidelity on the baptised that may be enforced—where breach of those obligations is genuinely culpable, and where enforcement really is necessary to protect the religious good of the Church’s community. Because the state itself needs to be converted, baptismal obligations can take political and public as well as private form. Officials of a state that is publicly Christian can be bound by their baptism to exercise their office so as to support the mission of the Church. In particular the officials of a publicly Christian state can be bound to assist the Church in the exercise of her jurisdiction, as canon 2198 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law still insisted.[6] Baptism obligates the rulers of a Christian state to act as body to the Church’s soul—to form a single Christian community where, in religious matters, the state helps as secular arm (brachium saeculare) to enforce the law of the Church.

This theory of the Church as potestas for the good of religion and of the need for a soul-body union of Church and state is a long-standing part of the Church’s magisterium. At its heart is teaching that baptism has a juridical character fundamental to the nature of the Church herself. It is baptism that provides the Church as potestas with her coercive jurisdiction, and then obligates officials of a publicly Christian state to support that jurisdiction when called on by the Church to do so. Baptism then is the basis for the legitimacy of a soul-body union of the Church with that of the state, where in matters of religion the state may act as agent or secular arm of the Church as potestas for the good of religion.

Vatican II was careful not to contradict this teaching. According to the official relationes that interpreted Dignitatis Humanae to the council fathers at Vatican II, the declaration does not in any way deny the Church’s status as potestas for religion, and addresses only the authority of the state when detached from any union with the Church, and so acting only as on its own authority as potestas for the civil order.[7] The 1983 Code of Canon Law also still clearly presents the Church as a potestas. The Code clearly asserts that the Church has a jurisdiction over the baptised, with the authority to enforce that jurisdiction with threats of temporal as well as spiritual punishment.[8]

Nevertheless the idea of the Church as a potestas is decreasingly taken seriously in official theology. In practice a model prevails of the Church as, in effect, a voluntary society, and with this comes a conception of canonical obligations as really no more than membership rules. All that culpable breach of them really merits is not some genuine form of punishment, but simple loss of membership. With this comes a view of Church-state separation not as a regrettable evil, as Leo XIII viewed it, but as a positive good.

Consider Joseph Ratzinger, who when writing as a cardinal, defended both the idea of the Church as a voluntary society whose authority is purely moral, and the desirability of Church-state separation. Not only is the entry of unbaptised adults into the Church treated by him an entirely voluntary matter—which was always taught—but continued fidelity in the baptised is treated by him as entirely voluntary too, which Trent formally denied. Morever, the use of civil penalties by a Christian state to enforce ecclesial law is condemned by Ratzinger—despite the fact that such use was called for by General Councils such as Lateran IV and Trent:

This community in its turn, the Church, understands itself as a final moral authority which however depends on voluntary adherence and is entitled only to spiritual but not to civil penalties, precisely because it does not have the status the state has of being accepted by all as something given in advance…This is not in any way to dispute the fact that this balance has often enough been disturbed, that in the middle ages and in the early modern period things often reached the point of Church and state in fact blending into one another in a way that falsified the faith’s claim to truth and turned it into a compulsion so that it became a caricature of what was really intended...With this the fundamental task of the Church’s political stance, as I understand it, has been defined; its aim must be to maintain this balance of a dual system as the foundation of freedom. Hence the Church must make claims and demands on public law and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere. Hence it must also take care on the other hand that Church and state remain separated and that belonging to the Church clearly retains its voluntary character. [9]

Contrast here the magisterial teaching of Leo XIII, who condemned ‘the fatal theory of the need of separation between Church and State’ in Libertas (at §18). Leo XIII clearly taught also that the church was not a voluntary society with mere membership rules, but, just as much as the state, is a societas perfecta – a sovereign potestas or coercive law-giver:

Others oppose not the existence of the Church, nor indeed could they; yet they despoil her of the nature and rights of a perfect society, and maintain that it does not belong to her to legislate, to judge, or to punish, but only to exhort, to advise, and to rule her subjects in accordance with their own consent and will. By such opinion they pervert the nature of this divine society, and attenuate and narrow its authority, its office of teacher, and its whole efficiency; and at the same time they aggrandize the power of the civil government to such extent as to subject the Church of God to the empire and sway of the State, like any voluntary association of citizens. To refute completely such teaching, the arguments often used by the defenders of Christianity, and set forth by us, especially in the encyclical letter Immortale Dei, (§12) [where the Church is taught to be a genuine potestas] are of great avail; for by those arguments it is proved that, by a divine provision, all the rights which essentially belong to a society that is legitimate, supreme, and perfect in all its parts exist in the Church. Libertas § 40.

Modern official theology assumes that the state should be religiously neutral because it also assumes that this public neutrality will be entirely consistent with harmony between Church and state. We see the general model of dialogic harmony with the unconverted world applied to an unconverted state in particular.

The idea that Church and state can live in harmony without the state’s conversion was influentially supported even before Vatican II by Jacques Maritain. It was central to the new political theology that Maritain was developing in the decades before the council, especially in Man and the State. On juridical questions Maritain was a more orthodox Catholic than Ratzinger. Unlike Ratzinger he did not attack as outright error the magisterium’s teaching that Church herself is a potestas entitled under appropriate circumstances to use the state as her coercive agent. Instead Maritain adopted a subtler view. By contrast to Ratzinger, Maritain admitted that such use by the Church of the state, far from ‘falsifying the faith’s claim to truth’ as Ratzinger supposed, had in its time—the middle ages—been fully legitimate. But then Maritain made a crucial claim. Thanks to a supposed progress of the gospel, and human spiritual advancement, it was no longer a condition of harmony between Church and state that the state should be publicly Christian. Maritain allowed that previously, under the more spiritually primitive conditions of the past, in what he termed the sacral age of medieval Europe, it had been necessary for the good of religion for the state to convert, and for the political community to be a community of the baptised. Harmony between Church and state did once require a soul-body union of them that was then entirely legitimate, just as Leo XIII had taught. But we now lived in what Maritain termed a secular age. And in this new secular age, supposedly thanks to a progress of the gospel, the Church could now live in harmony with the state without requiring the state’s conversion into a Christian state. Harmony could obtain without a shared religion, simply within a shared framework of natural law. In Maritainian political theology, under conditions of modernity the political community can now somehow escape the dominion of the devil without needing to be converted.[10]

The Church’s ever-increasing conflict with secular states suggests, alas, that such escape may not be available – and that the secular age may not constitute spiritual advance at all. The issue, let me emphasize, is not whether a soul-body union of Church and state is now realisable. Clearly under modern conditions there is simply no prospect of such a union. The issue, rather, is what we must expect from a state that is no longer publicly committed to the truth of Christianity in its laws and policies. What the nineteenth century popes taught us to expect in such a case is clearly what we are now getting—not harmony with the Church, but deepening spiritual conflict, and a conflict moreover that, just as those popes predicted, is rooted in the state’s denial of natural law, especially as it concerns marriage and the right to life.

[1] Council of Florence Session 11, Bull of union with the Copts, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils eds Tanner and Alberigo, volume 1, p 575.

[2] Florence p 576.

[3] For further discussion of post-conciliar theological opposition to such exorcisms see an important recent article by Michael Uwe Lang “Theologies of blessing: origins and characteristics of De benedictionibus (1984)” Antiphon 15.1 (2011) pp 27-46, especially at pp 35-6. Lang is rightly critical of this opposition:

The act of blessing [in the reformed post-conciliar liturgy] consists above all in the recognition and proclamation of the goodness of created things and of the loving care of their Creator. The apotropaic aspect of blessing, that is, to protect against the influences of evil and of the Evil One, is largely absent. Lessi-Ariosto considers this aspect of blessings a remainder of a pessimistic worldview that does not take into account the goodness of God’s creation, but it could be asked whether such a position does not underestimate the consequences of original sin. The theological rationale for this claims to be biblical, but would appear to be oblivious of the fact that Christ himself, in the Gospel of John, speaks of “the prince of this world” (Jn 12:31, 14:30, 16:11)…Daniel Van Slyke has noted that “any view that discounts the influence of evil in favor of an insistence on the goodness of creation can be accused of an optimism that verges on naïveté.” It would seem to be—and I suggest this here for the purpose of further exploration—that the relegation of apotropaic blessings has less to do with biblical ressourcement than with modern theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx OP (1914-2009) and Karl Rahner SJ (1904-1984), who considered the whole created world already endowed with or permeated by divine grace. Their notion of “sacramentality” is extended to the whole of creation, and so the specific nature of the sacraments is lost: the sacraments and, by consequence, the sacramentals are mere manifestations that make explicit what already takes place.’  pp44-5.

I obviously share Lang’s view.

[4] The reality of the devil or of original sin may not be openly denied at least within the English church. But official theologies can be highly local. The official theology of the Flemish church is more radical. One Flemish priest, a retired academic of the Catholic University of Leuven, at a baptism in Leuven where this writer was godparent would not use even the New Rite ‘exorcism’, as supposedly theological erroneous and outmoded – and nor, I was assured, would other Flemish clergy.

[5] For more on the nature and role of the state, and the consequent need for the state’s conversion. see my  “In Defence of Catholic integralism” online on Public Discourse here: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/08/39362/

[6] ‘Offences against the law of the Church alone, are, of their nature, within the cognisance of the ecclesiastical authority alone, which, when it judges it necessary or opportune, can claim the help of the secular arm.’  1917 Code of Canon Law, canon 2198.

[7] See this relatio of September 1965, issued to the Council fathers just before the final vote:

For the schema rests on the traditional doctrine between a double order of human life, that is sacred and profane, civil and religious. In modern times Leo XIII has wonderfully expounded and developed this doctrine, teaching more clearly than ever before that there are two societies, and so two legal orders, and two coercive authorities (potestates), each divinely constituted but in a different way, that is by natural law and by the positive law of Christ. As the nature of religious liberty rests on this distinction of orders, so the distinction provides a means to preserving it against the confusions which history has frequently produced’. Vatican II Acta Synodalia 4.1 p 193.

And at the same time, emphasizing that coercion on the authority of the Church in the order of religion to enforce her jurisdiction is not being addressed by the declaration:

‘There this question of religious liberty, since it has to do with the civil order, is to be distinguished from other questions which are of a theological order. The first of these is of the nature and extent of that evangelical liberty by which Christ has liberated us (Galatians 5,1); the other has to do with relations between freedom and authority within the Church herself.’ Vatican II, Acta Synodalia 4.1 p 185.

[8] See especially: “The Church has the innate and proper right to coerce (coercere) offending members of the Christian faithful (christifideles) with punitive sanctions (poenalibus sanctionibus).” Canon 1311 (christifideles being defined in canon 204 as the baptised).

Sanctions can extend to temporal penalties: “The law can establish other expiatory penalties which deprive a member of the Christian faithful of some spiritual or temporal good and which are consistent with the supernatural purpose of the Church.” Canon 1312

[9] “Theology and the Church’s Political Stance” in Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (NY: Crossroad, 1988) pp 161-63 (my emphases).

[10] For more detailed discussion of Maritain see my “Jacques Maritain and the problem of Church and state,” The Thomist vol 79, 2015, pp 1-42.