"Two There Are"

“DUO SUNT," SAID POPE GELASIUS I in a letter to Emperor Anastasius, "quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur."* "Two there are by which this world is ruled." Pope Gelasius I merely reformulates what is the teaching of our Lord, and which is part of reality, of what is, in the political world for those who bask in the benefit of Revelation. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar, and to God the things that are God’s." (Matt. 22:21) Since Christ came into this world, the Christian knows that there are two public songs, and not just one, in the world.

The Catholic accepts the duo sunt as part of what is in the political world. There is therefore in the Catholic mind, both Church and State, and a natural and necessary separation of Church and State. But this separation of Church and State does not imply subordination of Church to State. Quite the contrary, though coordinate powers each with its proper sphere, in matters of faith and of morals, the Church is superior, for the State is here incompetent. In Christianity, the State is de-divinized, the Church is de-politicized. The State is not in possession of spiritual power. The Church is generally not in possession of earthly power. These powers are to work together for the common good. Duo sunt.

Both Church and State have public voices; both sing a song. The Catholic, both a citizen and a member of Christ’s faithful, hears both songs and both voices, for he or she knows there are two. But like St. Thomas More’s last words as he approached the scaffold and imminent death, the Catholic is “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” One song, one voice in particular, the voice of God, the vox Domini Iesus Christi, holds him in absolutely thrall. He hears the song of his Master, whose yoke is easy, whose burden is light, and he hears to song of Caesar, and of the two songs he recognizes the voice of the Lord as the most lasting, the most beautiful, the most true. (Matt. 11:30)

When push comes to shove—and there is progressively more shoving and less pushing as the Western democracies in their recreation of society in man's own image jettison their Christian capital as if but flotsam or jetsam—the Catholic will say with St. Peter, "We must obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29). The Catholic insists there are two voices, but also that there is one more beautiful and lasting than the other—for he hears them both and is able to distinguish them and he knows which is more beautiful—duo sunt.

Pope St. Gelasius I, Charlemagne, and Pope St. Gregory I
From a 9th Century Sacramentary of Charles the Bald

Like the singing Jewish captive by the rivers of Babylon, the Catholic would rather his right hand wither, and his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, rather than forget the words to his song, the song of the sounds of heavenly Zion, duo sunt. (Cf. Ps. 137 (136):5-6) Duo sunt, duo sunt, duo sunt is the leitmotif of his song, a political and religious song which is not monophonic, but diaphonic. His political song has two voices which, if there is to be proper order, must try to sing in harmony.

Modernly, the Catholic is pressed hard between two groups that command center stage, and which have in their hands either power or violence (and there is but a thin line between the two). These two groups cry not duo sunt, but unus est. These are the secularists and the Islamists, and they seem to divide the world between them.

For secularists, the State is all there is; there is no spiritual power. In their zeal for power, the dogmatic secularists cry out like the high priests did to Pontius Pilate: “We have no king but Caesar.” (John 19:15) The modern secular State is the Hobbesian “mortal God,” and there is no immortal God which competes for obeisance, for secularism subscribes to the Nietzschean view that the immortal God—the God of Jacob, Isaac, and Joseph—is dead. For them, Gott is tot.** Since for the modern secular State God is dead and sings no more, it, and it alone, is the final reality: unus est. It calls itself liberal, but it is not, since it can only hear one voice: its own.

The secularist knows no reality outside of what he makes for himself. Man is one dimensional, and he answers neither to God nor to any fixed nature. For the secularist, there is no such thing as an objective reality, one pre-existing him, one founded on nature or nature’s God, one which must be given public voice. But against the voice of the secularist who exclaims unus est, the Church insists in both the reality of the natural law and in the truth of the Gospels. Nature and Nature’s God. Duo sunt.

The secularist does not like this, and he is a proud spirit who does not endure to be mocked. As James V. Schall states in his book The Sum Total of Human Happiness, there is, in the modern world, a real hatred to those who sing the song of duo sunt. There is, he says, "a real hatred of man as he is pictured in natural law and in the Gospels."*** Anyone who insists on this picture of man is likewise hated, is a persona non grata. And so it is in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II adverts to these singers of duo sunt, those "convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it," and he recognizes that they "are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view." (No. 46) In the face of the secularist state, we are unreliable citizens because we believe in an objective reality, because we believe in duo sunt. Christians are not to be included in the public secularist choir which sings songs only of unus est, as it worships not God but only itself.

In the main, secularists like to think themselves liberal, but they are intolerantly liberal. They are tolerant of all intolerance but their own, to which intolerance they are blind. And that intolerance is aimed at particular ferocity at those who insist on an objective reality outside of that which we make for ourselves. This includes those who insist—the way Catholics must do if they are think like a Catholic—of the truth of duo sunt.

To be sure, the liberals being effete do not like blood. But though they wince at drawing blood, they are not shy at wielding power, much less moral suasion. The problem they confront, as James Schall puts it is "how to silence Socrates without the nasty business of killing him, and how to tame the teachings of Christ without putting Him on the Cross."† Their schemes to do this are legion, including ridicule, public banishment, the closing of the public square to them, and—increasingly—legal burdens and legal constraints. There are ominous signs of worse things to come.

Why this foreboding? "The claim that certain actions are wrong," Schall observes, "is implicitly a threat to the [modern] state, which is designed to prevent strife and which is neutral to all values except to intolerance . . . . In this sense, the theory is already in place that makes Christians enemies of the state. We simply await its enforcement, either by converting or coercing Christians to live according to secular norms or by marginalizing or eliminating those who insist in calling wrong what the state guarantees as 'right.'"†† What Schall sees coming is secular dhimmitude. Unless things change, there will be a time where, like Christ, we will be "handed over" to the secular authorities. So, at least, the trajectory appears to be going.

Resurgent Islam falls into the same trap as secularism, but from another angle. For Islam, the Ummah—the Islamic “nation/church” for lack of a better word—is all there is. Islam is composed of “three ds,” din, dunya, and dawla—religion, social life, and state; there is nothing outside of it. In traditional Islam, there is no division of church and state. Islam is comprehensive. In Islam, like in the modern secular state, unus est.

Both the secularist State and resurgent, traditional Islam seem therefore to have divided the world between. One wants to be victorious through military power and advanced technology. The other wants to become victorious (since they do not yet hold the reins of power) like their alleged prophet Muhammad purportedly said in one hadith, "through terror."†††

Both secularist and Islamist refuse the Christo-Gelasian truth of duo sunt. In rejecting the duo sunt, and in accepting the unus est as the only reality, each has succumbed to its particular temptation.

The secularists have fallen prey to the temptation “you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:5) It is the temptation of Satan which, as Milton put it in his Paradise Lost, was enshrined in the political motto "evil be thou my good."‡

The Islamist—as heir to Muhammad’s clumsy fall to the temptation of the kingdoms of this world that Christ nimbly side stepped—has succumbed to the temptation to rule all the kingdoms of this world in the name of Allah. The Muslim historian at-Tabari relates the instance of Muhammad summoning his tribesmen the Quraysh to accept his message that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. It is this message, Muhammad argues, "through which the Arabs will submit to them and they will rule over the non-Arabs," that is all other nations.‡‡ Rejected in Mecca by his tribesmen the Quraysh, Muhammad was offered political power by the non-Jewish tribes of Medina. Muhammad took what Christ rejected as something offered by the voice of Satan. Muhammad wanted the kingdoms of this world. And Islam has been burdened by the falsehood of unus est ever since, and probably ever shall be, despite the valiant efforts of Muslim reformers whose work of the last two generations appears to have unraveled in the so-called "Arab Spring."

To the secularists, Catholics are the enemy of the state. To political Islam, Catholics are the enemy of God. Like Christ, our Lord, we are “despised and rejected by men,” Isaiah 53:3, Islamists on one side and secularists on the other. This ought not to surprise us. "And you shall be hated by all men for my name’s sake." Matt. 10:22. “Remember the word I spoke to you, 'No slave is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you." They will persecute us because we insist in the truth: Duo sunt.

To the pompous and bombastic voice of the secular State—Caesar divinized, divus Caesar—the Catholic, like Ulysses responding to the voice of the Sirens beckoning him unto shipwreck on the rocky shores of the three small islands of the Sirenum Scopuli, will either put wax in his ears or will tie himself to the mast of Peter's barque so as to reject the siren songs of unus est which lead to the tyranny of relativism, and hold fast to the truth that will spare him shipwreck, the truth of duo sunt.

To the triumphalistic and irrational entreaty of the radical Muslim’s da'wah, like Orpheus and his Argonauts, who faced the same temptation as Ulysses in another time and place, the Catholic will take out his psalter and, like Pope Benedict XVI did in Regensburg, sing the hymns of duo sunt so loudly as drown out the opposing voices of the Muslims who sing the false songs of unus est. They sing of a tyrannous God who is not Father, who did not become one of us, and indeed could not become one of us, and so is a God of a different kind entirely. And while thy sing simplex, they slaughter or oppress their adversaries--such as the Chaldean Catholics in Iraq and Iran, the Copts in Egypt, the Christians in Nigeria or Sudan--who sing duplex believing (since they only hear one voice) they have warrant for it. Muslim nations, we were recently reminded by the 2012 World Watch List report by Open Doors, made up nine out of the top ten countries where Christians face the "most severe" persecution.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre ends his splendid book After Virtue by noting that we are not waiting for a secular, relativistic and ultimately meaningless Godot, but rather for a new St. Benedict. But in this respect MacIntyre has got it wrong, or, more accurately, only partly right. What Catholics and indeed all Christians—who confront both dogmatic secularism on one side and dogmatic Islamists on the other—need is not only a new St. Benedict, but also a new Charlemagne.

We need both a St. Benedict and a Charlemagne. Why?

Because we know the political song has two voices. Because political reality is not unus est, but duo sunt.

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*Duo sunt quippe, imperator auguste, quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et regalis potestas, in quibus tanto gravius pondus est sacerdotum quanto etiam pro ipsis regibus hominum in divino reddituri sunt examine rationem. nosti etenim, fili clementissime, quoniam licet praesedeas humano generi dignitate, rerum tamen praesulibus divinarum devotus colla summittis atque ab eis causas tuae salutis expetis hincque sumendis caelestibus sacramentis eisque, ut competit, disponendis, subdi to debere cognoscis religionis ordine potius quam praeesse, itaque inter haec illorum to pendere iudicio, non illos ad tuam velle redigi voluntatem. si enim quantum ad ordinem publicae pertinet disciplinae, cognoscentes imperium tibi superna dispositione conlatum legibus tuis ipsi quoque parent religionis antistites, ne vel in rebus mundanis exclusae ... videantur obviare sententiae, quo, oro te, decet affectu eis et convenit oboedire qui praerogandis venerabilibus sunt attributi mysteriis? ... et si cunctis generaliter sacerdotibus recte divina tractantibus fidelium convenit corda submitti, quanto potius sedis illius praesuli consensus est adhibendus quem cunctis sacerdotibus et divinitas summa voluit praeminere et subsequens ecclesiae generalis iugiter pietas celebravit? ... rogo, inquam, ut me in hac vita potius audias deprecantem, quam, quod absit, in divino iudicio sentias accusantem.
**The statement "Gott is tot," God is dead, first appears in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) in sections 108, 125, and 343. It also appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra).
***James V. Schall, S.J., The Sum Total of Human Happiness (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2006), 39.
†Schall, 40.
††Schall, 45.
†††Sahih Bukhari, 4.52.220.
‡"So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost. / Evil, be thou my good." Paradise Lost, IV, ll. 108-110.
‡‡The History of al-Tabari, Volume VI (Muhammad at Mecca) (New York: State University of New York,1988) (W. Montgomery Watt, trans.), 95.

Avoiding Secularist Minimalism: Jacques Maritain, Part 2

IT IS A MISTAKE in Steven A. Long's view for one committed to the natural law to advocate in the manner of Jacques Maritain a merely practical agreement based upon human rights in the political realm. It may, Long concedes, be a "quasi-starting point provided by providence," but it can hardly be an adequate foundation for civil society, political discussion, and law as a whole. Contrary to modern human rights theory which is unintelligible to itself, the natural law in its totality can provide the foundation requisite to provide an intelligible and reasonable moral and political discourse. The notion of natural law is accessible to Christians of confessions other than Catholic, non-Christians, even, in a significant though incomplete way, to non-theists. But it remains to be said that the natural law of necessity must have a metaphysical basis, a theoretical or speculative basis, and one which, at end, includes the notion of the God of philosophy, "God as First Cause, Final End and extrinsic Common Good of the universe of finite beings." Long, 260 n. 4. Since the natural law is, by definition participation in the eternal law, to remove the reference of the eternal law spells the eventual death knell to the natural law. One cannot lop the head off the theory and expect the body to survive.

The real starting point for any discussion must be God as he is known in nature. God, as First Cause, Final End, and Provident Creator of our human nature. These are truths that are known by reason, they are naturally-known verities, graspable by reason unaided by faith.*

[I]t is the natural philosophy and metaphysics of theism--or at least the judgments upon which these are based--that play the role that Maritain erroneously gave to purely practical cooperation over lists of unordered rights. Such natural philosophy and metaphysics, condition the exercise of practical reason and essential to St. Thomas's doctrine of natural law, provide a basis for common understanding and cooperation. By contrast atheism and agnosticism, which are simple and demonstrable errors, by their nature provide nothing to the common good.

Long, 151. Common life, then, is predicated upon the praeambula fidei, the preambles of faith. In law, those preambles are the natural law. Without it, common life is a mockery. The secularist, who wishes to ostracize God from the chambers of the legislature, the courts of justice, and the public schools, has an odium theologicum or perhaps an odium antitheologicum against the believer. This explains the fervor with which public displays of faith, even the most innocent, are rabidly excised with the force and power of law.

[T]he secularist wishes that religious believers did not exist, and wishes to order public life as though they did not--sometimes by achieving such nonexistence as an effect of policy. The secularist will not be polluted by any mere practical tolerance or effort to reach de facto peaceful accord with his religious neighbors.

Long, 153. The secularist, we should not forget, is a mini-Nero, ready at once, should he have the power, to consign us to the lions or to the flames. He is always pollice verso, with a thumb turned down. At the extreme, we see the believer in a state of servitude or the victim of injustice or even genocide. Normally, however, we see a softer but equally virulent strain, one which has the goal of excluding, by rule, custom, or ridicule, any expression of Christian value. If it were up to the secularist, Christ would no longer be welcome in the Halls of Congress, and he is very close to having accomplished his goal.

Long concludes his analysis of the Maritanian program with the following:

• Purely practical agreement based upon some list of human rights is an unworkable proposition since rights alone, which are derivative concepts, do not provide for any ordering or definitional schema. These schema must come from whence human rights derive, which is the natural law. It is the natural law, therefore, and not human rights detached from the natural law that is the common language of believers and unbelievers alike in civil society, politics, and law. It allows a point of "analogical reference and convergence" between them.
  
• This requires an acceptance of the "speculative foundation, principles, and content of the natural law," which, naturally, spill over into moral and political life and ultimately into law. These are accessible and intelligible to unassisted natural reason. There must be a civil recovery of the natural law, in particular the recovery of those speculative truths upon which it is founded, namely "the praeambula fidei regarding the existence and nature of God as First Cause and Provident Creator," and also "moral teachings rooted in natural teleology." These are philosophical truths, not truths of the Faith or of any confession.
• To accommodate for man as he is in the concrete, there must be some advertence to, if not outright acceptance of, the revealed realities of original and actual sin and man's calling to a life of grace and the beatific vision of God.
  

This sort of program avoids the secularist minimalism which is an unfortunate by-product of the Maritainian modus vivendi. Natural law, and the natura pura upon which it is based, is not a recipe for secularism, but an antidote to it.

For from secularism, the ontological density of nature and its proximate teleology is essential to the overcoming of secularism; essential to the very capacity of the Christian to engage with, and in, the world, and to articulate the intelligibility of revelation to a world in which revelation is often taken to be the fruit of irrational arbitrium decisively alienating man from his own nature.

Long, 155.

How is this to be done? How do we bell the cat? It requires a philosophical conversion, an "epistemological re-turn," one that will require "setting aside the antirealist premises of modernity and postmodernity."

The foundations of Christendom have been destroyed. Now the preambles to that foundation are in shambles. More than the Church has been razed. The very earthen foundations have been disemboweled. What is left is something akin to a bomb crater. The preambles must be filled in with a realist philosophy, a metaphysics that is open to realities beyond the material, namely one that is open to God as First Cause, as Last End, and as Provident Creator of the universe in which we have our home, a universe which includes us, beings with a particular, specific nature, whose end is this First Cause, Last End, and Provident Creator, et hoc dicimus Deum.
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*Indeed such a view is de fide: "Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." Vatican Council I, Dei Filius No. 2: DS 3004; cf. 3026; Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum No. 6. See also Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 36.

Avoiding Secularist Minimalism: Introduction

IN THE AREA OF NATURE AND GRACE, the Catholic must walk a via media, midway between the extremes of fideism, where all is grace, and a sort of naturalism, where all is nature. Luther is an example of one who erred by overemphasizing grace at the expense of nature. Pelagius is an example of one who erred by overemphasizing nature at the expense of grace. In the relationship between grace and nature we must adopt that wonderful axiom that seems to be at the heart of the Catholic system: when it comes to truths, it is not either/or, it is always both/and. Faith and Reason. God and Man. Freedom and Law. Nature and Grace.

It seems apparent then that our theology and our philosophy must be appropriately balanced. Theology--which deals with grace--must allow for nature: it cannot so guard jealously the totality of man so as to leave nothing of man for philosophy but dregs. Philosophy--which deals with nature--must allow for grace: it cannot regard nature as having no ordering to God as First Cause, as Final End, as Providential guide. In earlier posts, we saw how two of the most prestigious members of la nouvelle théologie, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, overemphasized grace and ended up deprecating or minimizing nature to the point that it was nothing but a lifeless stump, a dry twig, hardly something that a philosopher could use to find a proportionate end. Nature had to be released from the capture by grace through the application of a classical Thomist theological model.

Picasso's "Charnel House" (1945)

Once nature is given its due by theology, however, we run into the question of how is reason, apart from faith or in cooperation with faith, to work with nature? Some philosophical systems, it seems, are unable to affirm the reality of nature, to determine its proximate natural end, to find in it guidance and meaning. A foundational metaphysical error will stymie any effort at developing a philosophical construct based upon nature. A Humean, for example, would find no ends, no oughts in nature, so what a Humean takes from nature will be nothing other than a series of interesting but ultimately unmeaning facts. Someone in the analytic tradition, we saw in a prior posting, does not have the philosophical tools, the philosophical method, to get anything substantive out of nature. As Steven A. Long summarizes it in his book Natura Pura, we are "checking Christian theology into the Graveyard Motel," a Charnel House, if we rely upon the enlightenment philosophies which overemphasize individualism (at the expense of the universal) and reject philosophical realism. These are not the starting points for understanding nature, whether these be "the immolation of the adequatio intellectus ad rem in Cartesian rationalism, Kantian a priorism, Humean skepticism, or Hegelian dialectics--as though these constituted the natural starting point for human knowledge." Long, 142. Additionally, we have another concern. We want to make sure that once nature is released from those who are jealous of grace, we do not fall into the opposite camp. We do not want to end up with an overweening nature that essentially diminishes, if not altogether quenches, the importance of grace. It is this particular problem we will address in the next series of blog postings. What we shall see is that we have to recover a realistic philosophy. Here, like Thomistic theology helped save nature from grace, a Thomistic philosophy may help save grace from nature.

Steven A. Long summarizes the concept of nature that we want preserved:

[T]he doctrine of natura pura is the double doctrine (1) that even here and now, in the concrete order, there is impressed upon each human person a natural order to the proximate, proportionate, natural end from which the species of man is derived, which is distinct from the final and supernatural end and (2) that this ordering could have been created outside of sanctifying grace and without the further ordering of man to supernatural beatific vision (the famed hypothesis of Cajetan [which we saw was the hypothesis of St. Thomas himself], although, from the beginning, the actual concrete order has been first one of man created in grace, and then subsequently fallen from grace, and restored and elevated in grace.

Long, 142-43. Long's greatest concern (and it ought to be the concern of every Christian) is to assure that nature is not captured by a "secularist minimalism," a danger which is very real given the philosophical presuppositions that confront us since the Enlightenment and its philosophies which can be unable to grasp, or can be positively hostile to, a notion of nature, especially a theonomic notion of nature, a notion of grace, and a notion of nature and grace.

Long defines "secularist minimalism" as follows:

Secularist minimalism is the privatization of revelation through a denial of its contribution to public life, law, culture, and the life of the mind--as though it were of a purely private import. It is particularly the denial that the Church's authoritative interpretation of the moral law, preaching, and witness to the life of supernatural faith, hope, and charity, and of all the virtues, can in any sense serve as a norm for public life.

Long, 143. Secularist minimalism might be said to be a form of social Pelagianism.

Long approaches this concern through the prism of three thinkers: Jacques Maritain, Jean Porter, and David Schindler, Jr. Jacques Maritain is chosen as representative of 20th century Thomism. Maritain advocated a notion of a "minimal purely practical consensus" in the order of nature which Long finds incompatible, or at least in undesirable tension with, Maritain's own espousal of Thomist principles. Jean Porter is chosen as a type of modern theologian who has sought to balance classical scholastic analysis with modern thought. David Schindler, Jr. is chosen as representative of the "Communio Circle."* Long sees in all three thinkers a characteristic or quality which affects their thought. These authors, and of course many who have learned from them or who hold the same presuppositions, "tend[] toward overstating the consaguinity of the theses of natura pura and of secularist minimalism in public life."

In practical terms, what this means is that Maritain, Porter, and Schindler would give short shrift to grace and revelation in public life. Gratia and the revelata, grace and revelation--and by implication the Ecclesia, the Church, especially in her role of authoritative interpreter of the natural law--end up having no real role.

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*By "Communio Circle," Long refers to part of an international theological movement generally guided by the ideas espoused in the journal entitled Communio: International Catholic Review. The journal Communio was founded in the 1970s through the efforts of Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper, Louis Bouyer, and others associated with la nouvelle théologie. The journal Communio was offered as an orthodox antidote to its theological rival, the journal Concilium, which--under that mantra "spirit of Vatican II," which seems to be a blanket excuse for, or an exoneration of, all manner of intellectual and theological sins--had by then ventured into heterodoxy. Concilium, a journal founded in 1965, was founded by Johann Baptist Metz, Anton van den Boogaard, Paul Brand, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Hans Küng. It seems that la nouvelle théologie ended up in a rift with advocates of Communio on one side and advocates of Concilium on the other.

Brownson on Natural Law: The Church as Custodian and the State

THE CHURCH IS THE CUSTODIAN OF THE NATURAL LAW, and so it has a divinely appointed role in helping form, or undergird the secular law. The secular law, though it has its own area of competence, must in all regards be subordinate to the Natural Law. The notion of two separate and independent spheres of activity--one secular, the other sacred--is simply false. There is no bifurcation of the law in moral man and political man, though in the immoral political man there may be. The notion of pure separation of Church and State is, from a Catholic viewpoint, unacceptable. It presents a recipe for a schizophrenic polity, working at odds, much like the body politic with its corpus callosum severed, and so the left hemisphere of the brain is unable to communicate to the right hemisphere of the brain. Such a man, like such a body politic, operates under serious disadvantage or disorder.

A political philosophy of pure secularism, being practically atheist, is sinful and constitutes a state of rebellion against God. Likewise, the modern legal notion that human law need not be subordinate to, or validly deferent to, the natural law is a false, in fact evil, legal philosophy. The notion that positive laws can have authority or validity independent of, or even in conflict with, the content of the natural law is a false doctrine. The modern politician and legislator, not unlike the emperor of old, must acknowledge the teaching Church, the ecclesia docens, that is the priesthood. "For the Emperor," St. Ambrose wrote in his sermon against Auxentius, "is within the Church, not above it." Imperator enim intra ecclesiam non supra ecclesiam est. (Sermo contra Auxentium de basilicis tradendis, No. 36). The politician, the legislator, the judge, the governor or president--replace emperor with any civil or political office you wish--is within the Church, not above her, and, even if outside her, certainly has not right to act against her. Lift up your gates, you rulers and all peoples, and let the King of Glory into the halls where your laws are made and the courts where they are enforced. Anything else is bound to lead to injustice and to tyranny.

Lift up your gates,
O ye princes, and be ye lifted up,
O eternal gates: and the King of Glory shall enter in
Who is the King of Glory?
The Lord of hosts, he is the King of Glory.

Psalm 23 (24): 9-10.

This is Brownson's message in this excerpt taken from his writings.

"The priesthood, as Catholicity teaches, is the sole depository, guardian, and interpreter of the law of God, and therefore represents for us the sole and absolute legislature, not, of course, by virtue of the humanity of its members, but by divine constitution, appointment, and assistance. The authority of the priesthood, then, extends to the whole of practical life, and that practical life is moral, therefore good, only inasmuch as it is submissive or obedient to the law as they promulgate and declare it. There is, then, and can be, no order of life, individual or social, that has or can have any autonomy in the face of the Church, or that is or can be pronounced morally good, save in so far as subject to her and informed by obedience to her as representative of the authority of God as universal, absolute legislator. This, if we understand the author [Gioberti], is what his own dialectics require us to assert. Secular culture, then, in order to be moral, in order to have any right to be, must be the product of sacerdotal culture, receive its law and its informing spirit from the Divinely authorized priesthood, and be in all things dependent on it, and subject to it. Hence, the schism we spoke of in the beginning is not to be healed by a union of secular culture with the sacerdotal, but by the absolute subjection of the former to the latter, because the former, in so far as it does not proceed from the latter and depend on it, proceeds from human activity, not subject to the law of God, and therefore is not moral."

[From Brownson's Works, "Vincenzo Gioberti" (H. F. Brownson: Detroit, 1898), Vol. 2, p. 128.]

The New Social Contract

IN HIS BOOK, NATURAL LAW IN JUDAISM, David Novak, a Jewish scholar and ordained Rabbi who teaches at the University of Toronto, addresses the issue of the "democratic conversation" that must occur in the "secular space" of the "secular polity." Such a "secular polity" is the only manner in which a country of such plural religious traditions as ours can function. With such lack of religious homogeneity, there are some decided advantages that come with such a secular polity, which "brackets all cosmic questions" in the area of social relations, and, in Christ's words, renders to Caesar those things that are Caesar's and to God those things that are God's. (Matthew 22:21.)

However, Novak distinguishes a secular polity from a secularist polity, which is where the United States appears to find itself currently. A secularist polity is one based upon secularism. Secularism is an ideology that arrogates to itself ultimate meaning, (e.g., National Socialism) or attempts to repress it altogether (e.g., Communism). When secularism captures the "secular space," the secular society is thus absolutized, is made the "primary locus of one's association." (In religious terms, the secular society is idolized.)

The believer--whether he be Jew, Muslim, or Christian--does not, indeed, cannot, absolutize the secular polity. He does not see in the secular polity any absolute value. He will view it under the auspices of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis). For this reason the homo religiosus, the religious man, places greater significance in the association he has with his specific religious community, the source of the traditions which give his life meaning and join him to God. In a secularist polity, however, where the civil life is absolutized and God is removed from the public square, the "democratic conversation" becomes one from which religious communities are barred unless a member "speak[s] as if he or she were an atheist." For a member of a traditional religious community, this is simply too high a price to pay. (Using religious terms, it would be to lose his soul.) This is essentially where religious believers find themselves today in the secularist politics in the United States.

In Novak's view, the exclusion of believers from the "democratic conversation" arises from a "questionable assumption." That "questionable assumption" is that "democracy itself must be both one's society and one's community." The exclusion of religious believers from the "democractic conversation" also is based upon an "erroneous notion" that "democracy must create its own culture," rather than draw from the wisdom of more fundamental or "primary" cultures, of which the communities that rely on revealed truth are significant. The secularist effort at creating a culture has not been successful; the culture it promotes is (in Clifford Geertz's words which Novak uses) "thin." Modern culture is insipid, banal, lukewarm, vapid; a "mass culture" with no depth, conducive only to mediocrity. It is also highly impoverishing, and ultimately undignifying, since by definition it excludes any notion of a personal God and any notion of an eternal destiny for man. Ortega y Gasset, Gabriel Marcel, Georges Bernanos, T. S. Eliot, are just some of many who have addressed the problem with a secularist world without God.

Novak insists that room must be made for the religious believer in the "democratic conversation." This conversation must include the notion of the "natural law," even though that natural law may be based upon a religious predicate, i.e., the existence of God the Creator and his Revelation. It is patent that the "elaborate fiction" of the social contract, and of "human rights" without any basis in God are based upon "circular" arguments, ultimately falsehoods. One cannot ground human social relations upon a "fiction." Men never have come out from a "state of nature" or "original position" one by one--without history, without homes, without culture--and entered into a social contract. To build a civil polity upon such base has been folly.

A social contract, however, can be envisioned between communities. Although society may not be formed by a social contract between individuals, it may plausibly be "founded when members of various communities have come together in order to live in justice and peace." But that secular polity ought to be limited, finite. As Novak explains:

That society is best worked out when demands for totality are not placed upon it, but when the members of the respective communities can affirm the finite value of the social arrangement they have contracted, and are always allowed to affirm the homeland from which they come and to which they must ever return.

(p. 23)

The limited scope of the "secular space" allows the believer to "postpone discussions of their ontological/theistic/cosmic concerns when dealing with moral issues that arise in secular space." He can do so without denial of his God. But this concession demands a similar limitation on the part of the secularist:

[A]dherents of traditions thought to be nonreligious [must] postpone discussion of their non-ontological/atheistic/acosmic concerns here too. . . . For many liberals, this will mean that they can no longer insist that these cosmic concerns, which turn out to be the concerns of most natural law advocates, most of whom are religious, be denied ab initio as the price of admission to the democratic conversation. They will have to admit that these concerns could be valid. They will have to admit that these concerns are not insane illusions. And they will have to admit that these concerns are probably better satisifed by historical religions of revelation rather than by modern ideologies that construct for themselves historical metanarratives. And that would be the case whether or not any liberal cares to recognize such concerns in his or her own life, and whether or not he or she attempts to satisfy them through these religions accordingly. Moreover, they will have to be aware of the fact that all too often, when these concerns are repressed, various modern ideologies, which despise both revelation and reason, rush in to violently fill the aching vacuum.

In terms of political disccusion, liberal adherents of human rights in the modern world will have to admit the possibility at least that these cosmic concerns of those who are usually thought to be conservatives, the most immediate being the concern with natural law, could intend an external relaity and not just be hypothetical. Liberalism will, then, have to admit the possibility that human rights might lead into natural law. And since natural law thinking today is almost always being done by adherents of religions of revelation, that will include admission of the possibility of the religious background of natural law as well. But none of these requirements, I think, should be regarded by liberals as excessive, let alone outrageous, inasmuch as none of them is a requirement for conversion of any kind.

(p. 24-25)

These sorts of concessions would open up the public life to authentic human values, and would redound to the common good. It would be like opening up a window to let in air into a political process which very obviously suffocates believers. It calls for an aggiornamento by the secularist state to the values of religion and tradition. True, it might mean that the State would have less to do with re-casting marriage to satisfy the claims of an unreasonable constiuency. It might mean that the State will have less of a role, and the parents and Churches more of a role, in educating children. It may mean that the State will have less to do with funding Art. It may mean that the State would have to leave off its promotion of contraception, abortion, embryonic stem cell research. It may mean that that other "legal fiction," that supposed constitutional "wall of separation" between Church and State, will, like the Berlin wall, have to be torn down. It may mean that the Federal Government will have to begin dismantling its prodigious bureaucracy, and start implementing the principal of subsidiarity. It may mean that the believer will be freed from his secularist government's soft chains of tyranny. It may mean that religious life will flourish, and that we will become more virtuous, and less addicted to vice.

I won't hold my breath for liberals to make these kinds of concessions any time soon.