For a lot of students of Western history, the “church and state” query might sound to be ancient history. For some Catholics, nevertheless, its status is as energetic because it has been in a century.
One among the best Catholic minds of our time (and certainly one of my former professors), Russell Hittinger, gave a speech on Oct. 6 that defines the terms of the talk today. On the gathering, sponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology on the Catholic University of America, Dr. Hittinger offered a strong message for Catholics today: Christ led to a separation, fairly than integration, of the spiritual and political.
“The term separation, fairly than integral, is a first-order term,” Dr. Hittinger said. “If as a substitute integrality is made a primary premise, one is nearly guaranteed to make mistakes. We first need to grasp what it means to be set apart. Only then can we understand what’s or just isn’t integral.”
Integralism is a rejection of liberalism and particularly its separation of politics from religion.
The family of terms across the word “integral” matters due to the claims of some for a unity of political and spiritual authority, a recent instantiation of a centuries-old argument called “integralism.” Integralism, for those latest to the conversation, is an interpretation of Catholic teaching that advocates for the direct subordination of political authority to the church. It has taken many forms over the centuries, including many with robust neo-scholastic theologies of grace. Much of probably the most recent instantiation of the integralist argument has been condensed in the web site The Josias, which offers this three-sentence summary of the concept:
Catholic Integralism is a practice of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the tip of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, nevertheless, man has each a temporal and an everlasting end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his everlasting end, the temporal power should be subordinated to the spiritual power.
As is evident, integralism is a rejection of liberalism and particularly its separation of politics from religion. Thinkers from many strands of Catholicism, nevertheless, criticize this aspect of liberalism. In other words, it just isn’t enough simply to reject integralism as illiberal, as too lots of its critics do.
Thankfully, Dr. Hittinger offered no such low cost shots. For Dr. Hittinger, the issue with integralism is fundamentally Christological. Christ doesn’t offer humans order and justice, temporal progress or prosperity. He offers humans fairly a share in a kingdom not of this world. And this kingdom can only be had by supernatural faith, a faith within the Incarnation and within the Resurrection, which thus passes through the Passion and the Mysterium Crucis.
The church has a divine origin and a divine end. It exists not through natural means but through grace.
There’s a disconnect between the products that the temporal authority offers and that offered by the church. Indeed, just as salvation is supernatural, so too the church is supernatural. Dr. Hittinger again:
It’s difficult not to consider the Church as the very best region of a single society—perhaps as a world one for the progressives, and sometimes a national one for conservatives. That is comprehensible, but flawed. The Church here below is about aside, separated, sanctified—as Thomas insisted, what’s holy is all the time separated (Summa Theologica II-II 81.8). Due to this fact the word integral just isn’t fit to do the work of describing the Kingdom vis-a-vis the temporal powers. To try and accomplish that puts us into trouble even before we start.
In other words, the church just isn’t simply one worldly institution amongst others. It’s qualitatively different from them. It has a divine origin and a divine end. It exists not through natural means but through grace. In other words, it’s a sacrament.
Yes, the Christian community as ecclesia has institutional features. But to cut back it to a coercive power with responsibility for religion is to miss the dominion promised by God. This is an element of the peril of integralism, a danger going back to medieval Augustinianism: to treat the church as a jurisdictional authority of the identical sort as political authority, in order to relate it to that authority. For then one has already conceded the terms of the talk to totalizing visions of politics, as if nothing transcended politics.
When the sense of this distinction is lost, then Christianity tends to degenerate into civil religion, or the instrumentalization of the religion for political purposes.
Paganism redux?
Dr. Hittinger has been criticized for being an “indifferentist,” meaning indifferent to the fate of faith. This charge lacks merit, but it surely matters since it identifies certainly one of the first fears of leading integralists. As Dr. Hittinger argues, nevertheless, the nice threat to Christianity just isn’t indifference, but resurgent paganism. And integralism is prone to fostering it.
“Paganism” looks like a dramatic term, but it surely amounts to treating the religious and political as commensurate terms: Without the Christian sense of transcendence, religion and politics turn out to be intermingled. When St. Augustine criticizes Christians in The City of God, Dr. Hittinger notes, he primarily does so on the grounds that they conceive of the Christian God as one whose primary function is to guard town. Such political functionalism is paganism.
St. Thomas Aquinas offers a strong account of how Christianity opposes paganism, but additionally why paganism stays a recurring possibility. In his neglected De Regno, Aquinas argues that Christianity’s primary political effect is twofold: the excellence between the temporal and spiritual, and the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal.
That is a significant development from pre-Christian dispensations. Yet in most times and places, the spiritual and temporal haven’t been seen as distinct. They’ve been mixed together indiscriminately, which de facto typically means the spiritual serves the temporal. What’s missing from such regimes just isn’t only a correct understanding of the transcendent, but a correct practice of distinguishing it from and valorizing it in regards to the temporal. When the sense of this distinction is lost, then Christianity tends to degenerate into civil religion, or the instrumentalization of the religion for political purposes. And as Christianity fades, that “faith” can take many forms.
The church/state query is all the time complicated by the mutability and contingency of political life and its forms.
The excellence between the temporal and spiritual just isn’t only conceptual, but requires a historical achievement to exist in practice. And that achievement is all the time partial and reversible. Thus the nice danger to Christianity just isn’t indifference to religion; the danger lies in a reversal of its transcendence, resulting in the collapse of the spiritual back into the temporal—and pretensions of politics to achieve toward the everlasting.
When Henri de Lubac, S.J., for instance, looked around an increasingly de-Christianized Europe through the Second World War, he didn’t see apathy toward religion. Slightly, he saw a profusion of ersatz “substitute” religions, including Nazism, looking for to fill the spiritual void. Father De Lubac’s later arguments against trends in post-conciliar theology that offered the church as a servant to temporal progress were motivated by a priority about Christianity being subordinated to and replaced by just such religions.
The church/state query is all the time complicated by the mutability and contingency of political life and its forms. As Dr. Hittinger notes, a part of the danger of paganism is to forget that political regimes come and go, as he notes with Pope Leo XIII: “Unlike the Church founded by Christ, and marriage (each of which have divinely insculpted and glued form and ends), political order has no fixed form. God the writer of nature doesn’t guarantee the perpetuity of a selected political form.”
The problem of contingency also runs into that of mortality. And this results in certainly one of Dr. Hittinger’s strongest claims: “pagan integralism flows partly from the natural human desire for immortality run amok after sin.” Further, “the very best practical expression of the will for immortality is to take part in political life,” he said.
Politics, in spite of everything, “outlasts the person, the family and the tribe.” Persons are willing to die for his or her country, and lots of “will grieve the lack of their political society greater than even the lack of their very own lives. Political life is due to this fact the very best practical expression of achieving immortality that we accomplish ‘by ourselves.’”
Integralism, in other words, feeds the will for immortality in a temporal reality. In treating the church as an establishment in competition with political authority, it not only exposes the church to alliances with ephemeral constellations of power. It also encourages the idea that religion just isn’t transcendent but a component of politics. But when religion just isn’t viewed as transcendent, then human longings and desires get redirected in dangerously pathological ways.
Integralism’s challenge to liberalism
The specter of ersatz religions is as pervasive for liberalism as for integralism, in fact, if no more. For that reason, the time has long passed for deeper self-reflection on the a part of integralism’s liberal critics.
Modernity was once defined by its self-conscious novelty, but now it is best understood as a definite kind of dissatisfaction. In his sensible book on Spinoza and Tocqueville, The Democratic Soul, Aaron Herold details certainly one of the best fears of critics of democracy: that it flattens souls, at best dampens ambition to do great things, and at worst forces those ambitions into dangerous back channels. Those dangers are all of the more present when democracy is built on an try and restrict the ambit of faith, as is so on display within the proto-liberal theory of Hobbes and Spinoza, amongst others.
Any regime that refuses to countenance the transcendence of Christian faith will ultimately seek to dragoon it for temporal ends.
In Tocqueville’s account, Christianity responds to a deep desire for immortality in humans. This desire shows itself in a paradoxical way: the will to affirm oneself through self-sacrifice. Democracy, Tocqueville argues, seeks to coach one’s give attention to self-affirmation without self-sacrifice. Or, higher, it trains self-sacrifice on self-affirmation; as an example, the American employee who devotes all of his time and energy to his work. But this just isn’t a satisfactory arrangement, and Tocqueville thinks the will for immortality will break out in violent, bizarre ways. Indeed, the spasms of religiosity will grow stranger the greater the space from traditional religion.
No matter whether one buys into Tocqueville’s argument, there is no such thing as a query that liberal democracy comes at a value. Any regime that refuses to countenance the transcendence of Christian faith will ultimately seek to dragoon it for temporal ends.
Ultimately one is left with paradox. The church is on the planet but not of it. Salvation is social but personal. One must die to the world to achieve everlasting life.
As de Lubac writes in Paradoxes of Faith, the church/state query could be simpler if we could resolve it in favor of a selected institutional configuration. That is the proposal of integralism, of liberalism, and of so many -isms that treat this query as an issue of competing jurisdictions. But such a resolution would even be dangerously flawed.
The dominion just isn’t of this world, and its completion is a matter of eschatology, not politics. Christian faith results in paradox because its tensions can’t be resolved in history by humans, but only at the tip of history by its Lord. Thus de Lubac writes: “Only what’s rooted resides. But taking root truly will often make you seem detached.”