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THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:
LEO XIII AND THE MODERN QUEST FOR FRATERNITY
Dissertation
Submitted to
The College of Arts and Sciences of the
UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Theology
By
Jason A. Heron
UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON
Dayton, OH
December, 2016
THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:
LEO XIII AND THE MODERN QUEST FOR FRATERNITY
Name: Heron, Jason Andrew
APPROVED BY:
________________________________________
Kelly Johnson, Ph.D.
Committee Chair
________________________________________
Jana M. Bennett, Ph.D.
Faculty Reader
________________________________________
Michael Carter, Ph.D.
Faculty Reader
________________________________________
William L. Portier, Ph.D.
Faculty Reader
________________________________________
F. Russell Hittinger, Ph.D.
Outside Faculty Reader
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ABSTRACT
THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:
LEO XIII AND THE MODERN QUEST FOR FRATERNITY
Name: Heron, Jason Andrew
University of Dayton
Advisor: Dr. Kelly Johnson
This dissertation examines the social magisterium of Pope Leo XIII as it is
developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the nationalizing process of
the liberal Italian state. The thesis of the dissertation is that Leo XIII provides Catholic
social teaching with a proper vision of human relationship as a mode of analogical
participation in the Lord’s goodness. In his own historical context, Leo’s analogical vision of
social relations is developed in tension with the nation-state’s proposal of political
citizenship as the social relation that relativizes every other relation – most especially one’s
ecclesial relation. In our own context, Leo’s analogical vision of social relations stands in
tension with the late-modern proposal of consumerism as the social reality that relativizes
every other relation – including one’s matrimonial, familial, social, and ecclesial relations.
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In dedication to Hannah, Joan,
Margot, Eloise, James, Thomas, Frances, and Lily
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a great deal to my teachers, especially Jana Bennett, Michael Carter, and
William Portier. Professors Russell Hittinger, Thomas Kohler, and Matthew Levering
deserve special mention for their commitment to my scholarly formation and their decisive
influence on my research and my interpretive stance. Without their instruction,
encouragement, and friendship, I would not have been able to complete this project.
Four dear friends, Andrew Courter, Ty Monroe, Alan Mostrom, and Anthony
Roselli, worked closely with me during the writing process, and I am forever in their debt.
My scholarship more broadly has benefitted from conversations, arguments, questions, and
friendship with Matthew Archer, John Badley, Andrew Beauchamp, Joshua Brown,
Benjamin Heidgerken, Andrew Henrick, Colin McGuigan, Sarah Mostrom, Robert Parks,
Mac Sandlin, Katherine Schmidt, Adam Sheridan, and Joshua Wopata. Chris Tangeman was
instrumental in helping me with securing valuable research materials.
My director, Kelly Johnson, deserves the highest praise for her divine patience with
me in both the seminar setting and in the writing process. If I can grow up to be like Kelly,
even other people will consider my life a success.
My wife, mother-in-law, and children deserve special recognition. Each of you
contributed directly to my ability to finish this project in a timely manner, without harming
myself. My heart is full of you, and I dedicate this work to you.
All glory and honor is due to the Most Holy Trinity.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................... iii
DEDICATION................................................................................................................................... iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................ v
INTRODUCTION:
POPE LEO XIII, MODERN CITIZENSHIP, AND ANALOGY .......................................... 1
PART I: CITIZENSHIPS ................................................................................................................36
CHAPTER 1.1 UNIVOCAL AND EQUIVOCAL COMMUNITATES:
THEORIZING CITIZENSHIP AFTER 1789 .......................................................................37
CHAPTER 1.2: ESCHATOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: MAZZINI’S
COMMUNITATES AND THE FAILURE OF ANALOGY ..............................................75
CHAPTER 2 THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:
CITIZENSHIP WITHIN LEO XIII’S SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY .......................... 101
PART II: INSTITUTIONS........................................................................................................... 137
CHAPTER 3 ECCLESIAL MUNERA AND THE
ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS: LEONINE ECCLESIOLOGY
AND THE PROPER CARE OF HUMAN PERSONS ..................................................... 138
CHAPTER 4 THE ORIGINAL COMMUNITAS AND THE ANALOGIA
COMMUNITATIS: LEONINE MATRIMONIAL
THEOLOGY AND LIBERAL PEDAGOGY .................................................................... 182
CHAPTER 5 THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS,
CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY ................................. 229
CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 265
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................... 268
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INTRODUCTION:
POPE LEO XIII, MODERN CITIZENSHIP, AND ANALOGY
Not long ago I watched as two theologians tried to give a theological account of the
beauty they observed in a viral internet video of a thousand Italian musicians playing a single
song in unison. After quipping about contemporary anxieties surrounding the sight of large
crowds of Italians doing things in unison, the theologians set to work to answer what they,
as Catholics, would say to the musicians in response to both the beauty of their performance
and the evident pleasure the musicians took in performing as one. Given that the group was
not a religious one, the theologians shied away from identifying in the performance a species
of Christian unity. But given that the theologians had grave concerns about modern
individualism and consumerism, they also shied away from identifying in the performance
nothing more than a group of isolated individuals who happened to be together in the same
place at the same time. They were concerned that ultimately theology has nothing to say to
the group of musicians aside from a caution about the simultaneous lure of fascism and
individualism.
We have here an enduring problem that occupies a great deal of attention within the
tradition of Catholic social teaching. The problem can be stated theologically and historically
as follows. From a theological perspective, given that the Christian doctrine of humanity’s
creation in the imago Dei contributes to a vision of the unrepeatable, irreducible dignity of
1
each individual human person, and given that Christ has redeemed individual souls, not
some abstract humanity, how do we affirm the value of social relations in a way that does
not utterly subordinate them to the individuality of each person? From an historical
perspective, given that the promotion of the dignity of the human person now takes place in
a social, economic, and political context characterized by methodical individualism, how do
we affirm the value of social relations in a way that does not reduce them to aggregations of
individuals?
In the anxiety of the theologians counseling against fascism and individualism alike,
the problem is simply acknowledged. Catholic theology, knowing what it knows about the
unity of the Church and the dignity of the human person, can offer sage advice to human
animals. But fearing the charge of imperialism, the theologians avoided suggesting they knew
anything about the animals’ supposedly “natural” desire to play music together. Fearing the
charge of triumphalism, they similarly avoided suggesting that the unity the animals were
enjoying is to be found in its purest historical form in the Catholic Church, and that there, it
is foretaste of beatitude. And fearing the possibility of further underwriting the
hypertrophied individualism of late modernity, the theologians were unwilling to chalk it all
up to the preference of these few people who desired to unite, for only the length of a single
rock song, to accomplish a common goal. After the conversation between the two
theologians, I noticed that neither of them had suggested that perhaps a perfectly theological
and perfectly Catholic response would be to simply ask the musicians when it would be
possible to play together again.
This is a strange way to introduce the social magisterium of Pope Leo XIII (18101903; reigned 1878-1903). Leo would have little to say about tightly coordinated musical
performances available on the internet. But Leo has much to say on the underlying question
2
about the individual person’s transcendent dignity and that same individual person’s relations
to others. Moreover, he would have much to say in terms that remain relevant to us. That is,
Leo is not relevant to addressing the question about individual and relation because he has
developed an abstract treatise on the one and the many; or because he has left to us a
systematic articulation of the nature of the ecclesial mark of unity; or because he has
extended the Thomistic teaching that the human animal is possessed of an inclination to life
in society. Rather, Leo is relevant to addressing the question because he is attuned to the
social, political, economic, and historical reality that the transcendent dignity of the human
person is now affirmed in a context concerned less and less with relations and duties and
more and more with preferences and rights.
Leo’s relevance in this regard was first brought to my attention by the Catholic
philosopher, Russell Hittinger. His work on the “social aspects of the imago Dei,” introduced
me to a very specific way of looking at Leo’s magisterium, Catholic social teaching more
broadly, and the historical context of both in the 19th century. In an article on Catholic
social anthropology, Hittinger writes of the new “anthropological and political creed”
exported to the West after the French Revolution of 1789. This creed, summed up in the
revolutionary ideals of liberté, egalité, et fraternité, made a startling promise. On Hittinger’s read
of the history, citizenship was proposed as the form of human relationship that would
reconstitute “the broken relations of nature and history.” There will be much to say about
this phrase below. But for now, I only ask the reader to discern with me in that phrase a
profound hope that is interpretable from at least two perspectives.
What I mean is that from one primarily philosophical perspective we can discern
here the hope that overcoming violence, injustice, suffering, exploitation, domination,
neglect, and the like among humans will not terminate in the complete isolation of
3
individuals, one from another. It is reasonable and good to hope that we can avoid an
anthropology that views relation qua relation as a threat to the self. But from another more
theological perspective, we can discern here the hope that reconstituting the broken relations
of nature and history is in fact a part of the human vocation to participate in a moral order
on which humans are utterly dependent. When we see our desire for unity and our failure to
achieve unity from both perspectives, we are squarely in the realm of Leo’s social
anthropology.
I. Why Leo?
Leo is the first pontiff to address in a systematic way and from the perspective of the
Roman Catholic Church, the great social, economic, and political questions posed by the
modern nation-state. Though Pius VII and Cardinal Consalvi negotiated with Napoleon
Bonaparte a momentous and novel agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and
France with the Concordat of 1801, and though Pius IX made known the modern Catholic
critique of liberalism to risorgimento Italy, it is not until Leo XIII’s magisterium that we see the
Vatican systematically countering an encroaching liberalism while simultaneously trying to
find ways to work within liberal structures in order to defend the liberty of the Church.
Because this is the case, Leo’s long pontificate is one of the most significant in modern
history. From 1878 to 1903, Leo and his staff transformed the Pian polemic of 1864’s Quanta
cura and the Syllabus errorum into a twofold strategy designed to call liberal regimes to
account.
The first part of the strategy was to critique the errors of liberalism. Here, Leo was
most indebted to the thought and posture of Pius IX, whose social polemic was constituted
by a consistent rehearsal and critique of the errors of liberalism. At every opportunity, Leo
decried the social ills wrought by liberalism, most especially as they impacted the lives of
4
individual political subjects, families, intermediate social bodies (economic associations,
unions, the press, schools, and religious orders and confraternities/sodalities), and the
public, legal presence of the Roman Catholic Church. Based in philosophical and moral
error, liberalism as Leo encountered and critiqued it expressed a surprising blend of hubris
and lack of imagination that left the old pope, by the early years of the 20th century, worried
about what was to come for European nations.
The second part of the strategy was to work for the restoration of social and political
confidence in the Roman Catholic Church as the pillar and bulwark of truth that could
contribute to the healing of a society fallen into error. The distinctive Leonine tack here was
to use philosophy to argue for the liberty and autonomy of the Church in all things that
come under her jurisdiction. Following on this insistence on the liberty of the Church was
Leo’s expansive account of the Church’s traditional jurisdiction, which always already and
necessarily comprehends both spiritual and temporal realities. Leo’s ecclesiology was one
that liberal regimes, ultimately, could not countenance.
It followed naturally from the insistence on this expansive jurisdiction that Leo
would consistently claim ecclesial rights and duties in spheres where liberal regimes
supposedly feared to tread: the human conscience and intellect, the human will, the human
family, and non-political human relations or associations. Because of his insistence on the
Church’s rights and duties here over against the liberal regime’s, Leo was engaged for
twenty-five years in jurisdictional debates regarding education, matrimonial law, family rights,
wages, and more generally the legislation of “modern liberties” like freedom of the press, of
speech, of worship, of conscience/opinion, and of association.
Leo’s undergirding assumption is that the Church, on account of her spiritual
mission in history, necessarily possesses a unique authority to care for the human person,
5
who is the preeminent res sacra in temporalibus. That is, the human person is that animal whom
the Lord has created just a little lower than the angels, that animal who is irreducibly spiritual
and corporeal, and so that animal who lives in a history with a spiritual and not solely
material telos. Throughout his pontificate, Leo works with an understanding that he teaches
in a modern world that has reimagined human teloi in only material terms.1 Were this actually
an adequate anthropology, Leo would have no case against the pretensions of the liberal
regime that must envision the human person in solely material terms in order to finally
secure what the civil power had never been able to wrest from the Church: universal
jurisdiction. But because liberal anthropology is founded on a silence regarding human
nature, Leo is able to attack the liberal regime at a fatally weak point in its otherwise
formidable armor.2
It now seems generally accepted among critics of liberalism that we live and work in a world that reimagines
the human person as without teloi at all. Perhaps the better way to say it would be that contemporary sociopolitical discourse presupposes a human person who can imagine infinite teloi based on the caprice of the will.
Put either way, it is not clear that Leo imagines modern socio-political discourse in such terms. The transition
to this later reimagining of the human person was certainly underway in Leo’s time. But his concern was with a
materialism born out of Western, progressive confidence in human reason, science, economic innovation, and
capitalist production. Our post-20th century context is deeply jaded and has replaced this progressive
confidence with a ban on normative anthropological claims. Pope John Paul II called this “negative
anthropology.” Leo did not foresee this, but I suspect he would not be surprised by it.
2 By “liberal anthropology” and “silence,” I mean to follow Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Marc A.
LePain, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), especially his work on the “hidden man,” at 112-55.
There, Manent tells the story of the deliberate destruction of the Aristotelian doctrine of “substance” (the
Carthago delenda of modern philosophy). According to Manent, Hobbes attempts to destroy substance by
homogenizing all human faculties and passions and naming them all species of the one truly human desire for
power. Locke receives this tradition and as “soon as power provides the universal idiom capable of giving an
account of what previously had been interpreted by recourse to the idea of substance, the question of human
substance or essence, of what is proper to man, can be left aside or at least loses something of its urgency and
necessity. We can know nothing but powers, that refer in a certain sense to a je ne sais quoi as their support, in the
case of man to an ‘agent,’ to a ‘substance’ if one wishes, but this substance is inaccessible and unknowable. It
makes no sense to inquire into it” (116). The power we can observe is the human power to cause effects.
Beyond this, we know nothing. And so human “artistic” character “devours” the human “natural” character
such that the human person becomes an effect of the human person. Manent puts it this way: “What was
considered as the human ‘given,’ as that particular man, now appears as an effect produced by man. Or, more
precisely, that particular man understands himself only as a product resulting from the transformation of a
prehuman matter by … by what? By whom? Shall we say yet again by man, when ‘man’ is the result of this
production process or perhaps rather merges with the process itself” (116-17)? When the rules governing the
labor that is man’s production of himself come to be described solely in terms of utility, we see completed all at
once the destruction of substance, the simultaneous-continuous presupposition of it, and the deliberate silence
regarding this presupposition.
1
6
Leo’s social anthropology, rooted in scripture, natural law, and Christian doctrine, is
the animating principle of his entire social doctrine. The Church’s doctrine of and care for
the human person, created in the imago Dei, is the coordinating device that makes Leo’s
strategy a coherent one in his milieu. First, the human person is the site that brings to light
the modern errors and social ills central to Pian jeremiads and Leonine arguments. Second,
the human person is the spiritual and social reality that calls for a support that transcends
what the civil power is able to provide. And third, the human person is the subjective source
and objective end of all the duties and rights possessed by every social sphere: domestic,
civil, economic, political, and ecclesial. In sum, then, the Pian-Leonine criticism of the liberal
regime and defense of ecclesial liberty have for their deepest rationale a conviction that the
Church has been founded by Christ, in history, to bring the rational animal into communion
with her Lord. The providential ordering of that animal’s nature to the goods of flourishing,
family, society, and truth requires that the Church do everything in her power to protect the
human person from any claimant that would denigrate human dignity in any way.
John Courtney Murray’s assessment of Leo’s tactic here is accurate. He writes in a
1953 article on Leo’s conception of the separation of Church and state: “The totalitarian
state can never destroy the Church; but it does destroy men and their freedom. [...] Hence
[Leo’s] emphasis on the ultimate bulwark of the freedom of man and society. This bulwark is
not offered by parchment declarations of the rights of man, however useful they may be. It
consists in the living reality of the freedom of the Church.”3 Murray goes on to describe
Leo’s “rather full articulation” throughout his corpus of the res sacras in temporalibus that
John Courtney Murray, “Leo XIII: Separation of Church and State,” Theological Studies 14, no. 2 (1953): 209. I
am highlighting here an important but less significant feature of Murray’s interest in Leo’s social doctrine.
Murray’s main concern is to differentiate the U.S. vision of disestablishment and separation from the
“Continental” vision criticized by Leo in Immortale Dei, Diuturnum, and most significantly for U.S. Catholics,
Longinqua oceani. Michael J. Schuck has given a convincing criticism of Murray’s selective reading of Leo’s
teaching and of the thought of America’s founding fathers. Cf. “John Courtney Murray’s Problematic
Interpretations of Leo XIII and the American Founders,” The Thomist 55, no. 4 (1991): 595-612.
3
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justify the Church’s care for even what the temporal power would reserve to itself. The chief
res in Murray’s estimation of Leo’s work are: the matrimonial bond, the parental bond, the
parent’s responsibility to educate, the human person’s political obligation, the dignity of
workers, human equality rooted in the image of God, the inherent value of economic life,
the natural and supernatural works of charity and justice, and “the patrimony of ideas which
are the foundation of human society.” These ideas include law, freedom, justice, property,
moral obligation, civic obedience, legitimate rule, etc. “But the chiefly sacred thing in the
temporal order, in Leo’s eyes, is the inner unity, integrity, and peace of man, who is both
Christian and citizen.”4
Murray captures the varied concerns of Leo’s entire body of social doctrine and
notes that the human person, Christian and citizen at once, is “the earthly pivot of the
Leonine doctrine of concordia.”5 This doctrine pervades Leonine thought. Out of concern for
the souls under the Church’s care, Leo teaches in order to foster harmonious relations
between all spheres of society. Though the theologico-political doctrine of the two spheres
has a venerable history in Catholic thought, the Pian-Leonine project demonstrates the
doctrine’s inadequacy in the face of liberalism’s 19th century development. In the Syllabus
errorum, Pius IX implies in sections 65-74 that at least a third sphere - the matrimonialfamilial as a society in its own right - requires the special attention and protection of the
Church over against the de-sacramentalizing and secularizing influence of the liberal regime.
Concordia is thus essential not only for the thriving of the Church in its relations to various
regimes, but for the flourishing of human society imagined in its proliferating variety. Strictly
speaking then, Murray’s understanding of concordia as a doctrine pertaining to the “two
societies” unfairly houses Leonine thought within a reductive obsession with the
4
5
Ibid.
Ibid.
8
Church/state issue. Though no one could suggest that Church/state issues are unimportant
in the 19th century, the prudential creativity and elegance of Leo’s thought on social orders
are not exhausted by imagining concordia in terms of a duality between the civil and spiritual
powers. Rather, concordia refers more fundamentally to the coordination of all of the human
person’s faculties, powers, and accidents - including domestic, social, civic, and ecclesial
relations and bodies - toward beatitude.
Leo believes such a coordination is possible on theological grounds. The
matrimonial-familial unit, society, the political body, and of course the Church all have their
origin in the Divine Wisdom who has furnished human living with such social bonds as are
necessary for the perfection of human nature. The number of social spheres, on Leo’s
reasoning, must proliferate beyond the dyad of Church/state. That the number of spheres
may not proliferate indiscriminately in Leo’s thought is a feature of his stable anthropology.
The human person, being the kind of animal she is, requires a limited number of spheres in
which to flourish socially. Liberalism seeks to reduce the number of spheres to two: the State
and the individual citizen’s will. In a more classical vision of the social order, the number of
spheres might proliferate as follows: 1) autonomous moral agent responsible for acts; 2)
matrimonial unit; 3) family unit; 4) intermediate associational bodies; 5) society at large; 6)
the civic body; and 7) the religious body. The Leonine perspective distills this proliferation
down to three necessary societies, or institutions, each of which exists and acts in history in a
manner that should complement and support the others. The three institutions are the
family, the state, and the Church. These three stand as unique institutions within a
proliferated vision of society on account of their relation to the human will. That is, these
three institutions are not solely dependent on the wills of their members in the way that
other intermediate associations are. One may imagine a variety of associations arising from
9
the voluntary membership of humans. Indeed, one may find it difficult to put a limit on the
number and type of associations that may arise from the human will.6 But these three
primary institutions do not rely solely on the agency of the human will for their existence in
history. Rather, they rely principally on the Divine Will.7
The family, the state, and the Church are each given by the Creator for the
flourishing of his human creation. And because that flourishing is ultimately the return of all
things to the Creator, Leo would consider the origin and end of these three principal
institutions to be identical. Because of this identity of origin and end, disorder among these
institutions is no small matter. Rather such a disorder betrays a fundamental
misunderstanding not only of the natures and relations of the institutions, but also of the
human nature that is both anterior and posterior to those institutions. Thus, in the
development of Catholic social teaching in the modern context, Leo’s teaching is important
in a number of ways. Against the reductive liberal vision of the social order, Leo affirms a
simple and commonsensical vision of the pluriformity of human society. Against the
monism of the liberal regime’s conception of sovereignty rooted in the will of sovereign, Leo
affirms a plurality of hierarchical sovereignties, each with its own proper jurisdiction, duties,
rights, and gifts to offer human persons on their way to beatitude. And against the silence of
I will return to the issue of civil society at the end of the dissertation, when I will have more to say about
social membership based on the will of the member, imagined under the aspect of the consumer.
7 It falls beyond the scope of the project here to elaborate on the participatory relationship of free human wills
and the sovereign Divine Will. Suffice it to say here, however, that I am in no way suggesting that a marriage, a
family, a political community, or a Christian community has nothing to do with the voluntary agency of the
members comprising the community. Rather, I am only suggesting that when it comes to the family, the state,
and the Church, members must acknowledge that they are entering an institution that has preceded them and
that will outlast them. Membership in these institutions without such an acknowledgment makes little to no
sense. Entrance into, contribution to, and benefit from these three institutions differs qualitatively from the
same experiences of membership in teams, businesses, clubs, and other partnerships comprising civil society.
We can verify the uniqueness of this reality by considering what happens to humans who are harmed by or
neglected in these three institutions. Considering the family alone, the profound impact that comes from the
experience of abuse or neglect testifies not only to the social utility of the family, but also to the plain sense that
the family ought to live up to certain expectations. When and where the family fails to do so, lives are damaged.
It is normal to form expectations of associations. But when the Chicago Cubs or Starbucks fail to live up to the
expectations of their members, lives do not unravel.
6
10
liberal anthropology, Leo affirms the rational animal, created in the imago Dei, made for life
in friendship with the Lord, angels, and others. To the extent that we are still living in a
world shaped by the failures of liberalism, Leo thus proves enduringly significant as an
historical commentator and even a contemporary interlocutor.
II. Why citizenship?
My original interest in the category of citizenship was inspired by Leo’s 1880
encyclical, Sapientiae Christianae, on the duties of Christian citizens. As many Catholics have
known in different ways throughout history, the relationship between the duties following
on one’s political and ecclesial memberships can prove difficult to manage. And so, Leo’s
encyclical seemed to me to be a useful place to begin examining his thought with an eye
toward his enduring relevance to the social and political vocations of Catholics. Sapientiae
Christianae, while it examines the duties of a Christian citizen, is principally an argument
regarding the proper relations between the social and political bodies of which the citizen is
a part - especially the ecclesial, political, and domestic relations. The encyclical does not offer
a definition of citizenship, a challenge to the existence of citizenship, or any other theoretical
intervention in the category as a piece of political philosophy. Instead, the encyclical is one
of Leo’s efforts to shape the social and political imaginations of Catholics. That is, within the
notion that Christian citizens are required to negotiate their various duties to the social
bodies of which they a part is a series of questions about the relationship between those
social bodies within a given polity; the life of human persons within the memberships
indexed to those bodies; and the relative utility of those bodies vis-a-vis the many needs of
human flourishing.
As I considered the imbrication of these various bodies, I began to recognize more
clearly what my teacher, Russell Hittinger, has emphasized in his work on papal social
11
teaching. Leo’s estimation of the relationship of these social bodies to each other relies on a
definite ordering that corresponds, not to the preferences of the members or the
contingencies of history, but to a supposed order in creation, available to the rational mind
and given by the Divine Wisdom for the flourishing of both individual persons and the
social whole. This ordering is straightforward enough. Leo teaches that the Church, as the
universal body of Christ, exists “above” all political regimes and social bodies. The marital
union and the family, as the fundamental cells of society, exist “below” all political regimes
and other social bodies. And in between the Church and the domestic sphere, one finds a
variety of political and social relations that constitute the array of memberships that
occasions our continual interest in human officiis, or duties.
The striking thing to me about Leo’s teaching in this regard was that though he treats
this ordering as a gift of the Divine Wisdom, his own historical milieu was the site of intense
contest regarding exactly this ordering. That is, human persons living within Leo’s
harmoniously ordered social spheres did not experience that ordering as harmonious.
Indeed, this historical fact is one of the principal concerns of papal social teaching. What was
Leo doing? How could he look back on the 19th century, of all centuries, and suggest that
the many social bodies comprising the human experience of relationship and moral
obligation are in fact a divinely ordered and harmonious array of complementary spheres?
Why would he?
Kristin Heyer suggests that this aspect of papal social teaching “reflects a Thomistic
understanding of Christians and the political order, based on (considerable) trust in human
reason and on optimism concerning the potential of natural humanity to establish a just and
12
peaceful political order governed by law.”8 Emphasizing the prominent place of natural law
reasoning in Catholic social teaching, Heyer also highlights the central place of the imago Dei
in the Church’s social anthropology, suggesting that this mode of doing social ethics should
be styled, following John Courtney Murray’s typology, as “incarnational humanism.”9 Murray
identifies another mode of doing social ethics, however: “eschatological humanism.”10 This
latter mode is rooted in scripture rather than natural law and emphasizes “the permanence of
sin and the discontinuities between grace and human effort.”11 Heyer suggests this is a more
“Augustinian approach” that “remains suspicious of human reason or of any secular
efforts.”12
By way of reinforcing Heyer’s assessment of these two modes or approaches to
interpreting the Church’s relationship to the world, we can proliferate the descriptors and
practitioners that correspond to the twofold division. First, the Thomistic mode. Within
Catholic social teaching, Heyer identifies this as the pre-conciliar mode of papal social
teaching. The mode is fundamentally conservative and philosophical. It is rooted in a
confidence that the reality of the natural law makes possible a “public” form of discourse
that emphasizes cooperation, analogical relations between differing perspectives and social
spheres, and a “public square” where Church and world may peacefully reason together
about the common good. Nature and grace, in this mode, and so human effort and divine
initiative, are intimately related to one another. And when differences between the two must
Kristin E. Heyer, Prophetic and Public: The Social Witness of U.S. Catholicism, (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 2006), 34-5.
9 Ibid., 38, 29.
10 Cf., ibid., 29.
11 Ibid., 29.
12 Ibid., 38. The reader will note here and below that Heyer and I continue to use the terms Augustinian and
Thomistic. And in our treatment of these modes or tendencies, we do not actually speak of the work of
Augustine and Thomas directly. This is illuminating in its own right. Heyer’s valuable topography of the
Catholic theology’s relationship to society is a topography of styles born out of theological training and
tendencies.
8
13
be overcome, a Thomistic mode points to the participatory nature of the human intellect.
Caricatured negatively, this mode dilutes the distinctive nature of Christian thought and
practice for the sake of a supposed moral minimalism that supposedly facilitates broader
agreement among human communities. Were we to attach names to this perspective, we
would include with the pre-conciliar popes such theologians as J. Brian Hehir, the Himes
brothers, John Courtney Murray, and neo-liberal and neo-conservative Catholics interested
in dialogue with and conversion of state and society.
Second, the Augustinian mode. Within Catholic social teaching, Heyer identifies this
mode with conciliar and post-conciliar papal social teaching. The mode is fundamentally
radical and theological. Rooted in a scriptural approach to the Church’s relationship to “the
times,” this mode takes a prophetic stance that does not necessarily hope for intelligibility or
commensurability across the various lines that separate Church and world. Rather than a
public or political theology, we might identify here a “theological politics” that does not
bother to search for cooperation or analogy. Lacking confidence in the human intellect’s
ability to overcome the will’s corruption, this mode emphasizes more the infinite distance
between human fallenness and divine grace rather than the fundamental dependence of
human nature on that same grace. Caricatured negatively, this mode dilutes the intelligibility
of human inclinations and their goodness, suggesting that human hope should be placed
only in membership within the unique tradition of the Christian community, where persons
learn the liturgical and moral practices necessary for authentic human life. Were we to attach
names to this perspective, we would include with certain strains of post-conciliar papal
teaching such theologians as Paul Hanley Furfey, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Baxter, and the
“post-liberal” school of Protestants and Catholics who are interested in what they have taken
14
Alasdair MacIntyre to mean when he cryptically referred to waiting for “a new and no doubt
very different Benedict.”
Leo, being a committed Thomist, does indeed work in the “incarnational” mode. His
account of society, its errors, and the requisite remedies is, moreover, usually intellectualist
more so than it is voluntarist. One can trace the line, throughout his entire corpus, that
connects intellectual, philosophical error to social upheaval and suffering. A contemporary
critic of neo-Thomism once told me that the neo-Thomists believe that if Catholic theology
could just get the metaphysics right, everything else would fall into place in society. Leo, it
seems to me, does not necessarily believe this. Though one does have a harder time finding
the line that would connect the corruption of the human will to the origin of philosophical
error and the corresponding social upheavals, I believe the line is there in Leo’s magisterium.
One must consult his many encyclicals on prayer, his enduring interest in Francis of Assisi,
and his recommendation of lay membership in the Franciscan Third Order to develop a
well-rounded account of what he thought was necessary for overcoming human suffering
and error. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Leo enjoys a pronounced confidence in
Thomism as a philosophical purifier.
But of all the historical epochs in Christian history, the long 19th century would
seem to cry out for a Christian ethical assessment in the mode of the “eschatological
humanism” of Augustinianism. Furthermore, the presence of an Augustinian mode is
obvious in Leo’s own description of his milieu. He is the modern pope who catalogues in a
pessimistic, Augustinian mode the social consequences of disordered loves. So Leo is no
stranger to the corrupt human will and the infinite gap between the heavenly and earthly
cities. Leo’s knowledge of the Doctor Gratiae was certainly not thorough or direct. He
received what he knew of Augustine through the mediations of his training in a more
15
scholastic mode of theology and philosophy. But in light of Murray’s typology and Heyer’s
interpretation, it is illuminating to note that Leo opens his encyclical, Humanum genus, with a
reflection on Augustine’s two cities and their divergent loves. This encyclical, furthermore, is
a trenchant critique of Freemasonry and its implication in a variety of social issues that Leo
examines throughout his long pontificate. Not least among these issues are the degradations
being suffered by the laboring poor, the social ramifications (especially for women and
children) of divorce, and the freedom of the Catholic Church to exercise its unique ministry
in public. In other words, Leo suffers no shortage of examples that could understandably
lead a Christian ethicist to mute the scriptural themes of the Divine Wisdom, the imago Dei,
and the rational availability of the natural law. Leo’s own catalogue of the “ills” or “errors”
or “tempests” besetting persons and society suggests that the 19th century is the social setting
par excellence - perhaps second only to Augustine’s in the fifth century - for a Christian
ethicist’s emphasis on the vanity of this passing life, the sufferings endured by Christ and his
disciples, and the Lord’s final triumph over evil in the eschaton.
I began to wonder what to do with the fact that we could criticize Leo and the
presuppositions of his social thought in a variety of interesting but potentially confusing
ways. Leo - and indeed the bulk of 19th century social Catholicism - is often criticized for
taking a paternalistic approach to the sufferings of this life. That is, Leo continues the
medieval and early modern approach to the degradations suffered by humans in society in
that he imagines life as a vale of tears through which we (read: the poor) suffer patiently as
we await in hope the coming of our savior, Christ. But this emphasis on the temporary
nature of suffering and its pale fire when it is compared to the glory that will be revealed
seems to correspond tidily to the Augustinian mode of an “eschatological humanism.” That
is, we live in a world corrupted by sin and characterized by a battle between the heavenly
16
city, ordered around love of the Lord, and the earthly city, ordered around love of the self.
Our lot in time is to struggle through this war-torn land, patiently persevering until the end.
When it comes to addressing his flock - and especially the poor among them - Leo’s
Augustinianism is too paternalistic, too pessimistic, too cynical about the enduring reality of
human suffering. It appears to give persons and communities a pass on addressing systemic
injustices.
On the other hand, we may easily criticize Leo for being insufficiently Augustinian.
His dependence on Thomistic conceptions of creation, natural law, and the imago Dei
supposedly prevents him from appreciating the ways in which this world is fundamentally
disordered by sin. When he speaks of the ordered harmony of the social spheres and of the
complementary nature of a human person’s many duties, he seems to consciously neglect his
own historical location, where harmony and complementarity have given way to strife and
division. Wouldn’t it be better if his social magisterium were more explicitly attuned to the
realities of life in this vale of tears?
But then again it seems that a Thomistic, “incarnational” mode would better serve as
an approach to the sufferings of this life. Rather than counseling the poor and suffering to
bear their cross patiently in anticipation of future reward after their miserable sojourn, the
Christian working in an incarnational mode could join with the suffering, incarnating the
love of Christ in time and place, in full, loving recognition of the imago Dei of each person.
Furthermore, the Christian working in this incarnational mode could partner with nonChristians based on their shared understanding that overcoming this suffering via love is a
matter of the deepest justice and a task to be taken seriously by all persons of good will.
Put more formally then, the Thomistic, incarnational mode may seem a more
attractive way of bringing the Gospel to the world when it comes to social issues and the
17
Christian commitment to live out the Lord’s justice in history. And the Augustinian,
eschatological mode may seem a more attractive way of bringing the Gospel to the world
when it comes to political issues and the Christian negotiation of cooperation between the
two cities. But attraction to the reverse of these modes appears to us to be the mistake of
Christendom, or at least the absolutisms of the ancien régime. My project here is, in part, an
effort to overcome some of the difficulties inherent to approaching Catholic social teaching
and Christian political philosophy from within the context Heyer describes so accurately.
Leo works in a mode that does not tidily correspond to the divisions we have set up lately.
A part of the problem is that the Christian response to suffering, commitment to
justice, or cooperative pursuit of the good is not a matter of tweaking the levels of one’s
incarnational or eschatological sensibilities, let alone one’s Augustinian or Thomistic
commitments. It is instead a matter of loving the Lord and the divine image borne by every
neighbor in the midst of immense and complex challenges. If there were such a thing as a
purely incarnational, Thomistic mode of doing Christian social ethics, the task of negotiating
the relationship between one’s ecclesial membership and one’s political citizenship would be
easy to describe. And if there were a way to actually live according to this mode, the task of
carrying out the corresponding duties would be similarly easy. Likewise, if there were such a
thing as a purely eschatological, Augustinian mode. In either case, the historical phenomena
of overlapping social jurisdictions, competing social memberships, conflicting social duties,
and so on would resolve into tidy descriptions of complementarity or contrast, justice or
suffering, cooperation or perseverance, etc. But neither Augustine nor Aquinas offers us
anything so resolvable.13
The best description of Augustine’s unwillingness to finally endorse or totally abandon the earthly city is
Rowan Williams’ important article, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20
(1987): 55-72. Arguing against Hannah Arendt’s accusation that Augustine undermines the “public realm” of
13
18
The first thing to say regarding Leo’s relationship to these two modes is that he
would never have thought to pit Augustinianism against Thomism any more than Aquinas
himself would have thought that he was offering his students an alternative to
Augustinianism. This relatively recent conceit does indeed explain much about our
contemporary milieu. But it also obscures much about Leo’s own method, his understanding
of his own sources, and his historical location.
Considering Leo’s method, it is illuminating to note that Leo relies on Augustine in
order to focus, not solely on the contrast between the two cities, but also on another element
in Augustine’s social and political thought that does not fit conveniently into the description
we have developed of an “Augustinian mode:” the notion that the Church, in reality, forms
human persons who are uniquely suited for leading a deeply political form of life
characterized by virtue, obedience, and devotion to the supreme human good. As I will
discuss further in the conclusion, this is perhaps the most Augustinian aspect of Leo’s
thought, and it conditions the way he envisions Christian citizenship and the nature of the
political as such. By emphasizing this element of Augustine’s thought, Leo suggests that
within the historical context of the battle raging between the two cities, the Church remains
essential for a more authentic human sociality and politics. This is the case not only because
a robust doctrine of creation and the natural law leads us to affirm that humans are political
animals made for cooperation in justice toward the good, but also because a robust doctrine
ancient politics and introduces instead the community organized around caritas, which latter community is
essentially a-political, Williams suggests that Augustine is actually the one who calls the public/political to
account, accusing every regime from Athens to Babylon to Rome of being insufficiently political. Rather than
extracting persons from the pursuit of excellence in the polis in order to insert those persons in an egalitarian,
privatized communion of charity, Williams suggests Augustine is recommending a politics that accounts for our
humility, and even the “awkwardness and provisionality, the endlessly revisable character (morally speaking) of
our social and political relationships [...]” (69). This latter emphasis on the endless revisability of social and
political relations can also serve as a cue to how Aquinas would avoid finally endorsing or totally abandoning
the earthly city. His treatment of political prudence and the historical contingencies of determining the natural
law in a particular way are both suggestive in this direction.
19
of the Lord’s cross leads us to affirm that humans are loving animals made for sacrifice for
the good of our neighbors. Leo’s 1880 encyclical on the duties of Christian citizens is best
interpreted from both of these perspectives, for such an interpretation enables us to
appreciate why the historical, political category of citizenship retains significance for Leo and
for Catholic social teaching after him. Working from both perspectives prevents a
contingency like citizenship from disappearing into irrelevance, which is what would happen
to it if we could catalogue it away as one more feature of an endlessly harmonious creation,
or if we could dismiss it as one more feature of the failed imperialism of the sinful human
will. Instead, citizenship, like all other memberships, including those inaugurated by the
bloody waters of both birth and baptism, is a matter of love. And as Aquinas learned from
Augustine, our loves must be ordered if we are to live in harmony with our created nature
and in a manner befitting a disciple of the Crucified.14
Considering Leo’s historical location, it is always necessary to remember his
proximity to the Holy See’s temporal sovereignty. It was only during the reign of his
immediate predecessor, Pius IX, that an upstart national movement in Italy had deprived the
Holy See of its historical, temporal jurisdiction over the Papal States. This deprivation
resulted in the “Roman Question” - the Italian problem of relating the Holy See’s local
temporal sovereignty and universal spiritual jurisdiction to a geographically bound nation.
After the creation of Italy, was the pope to be an Italian? A Roman? Or something else
entirely? Within the categories necessary for nationalization, it is unclear how to categorize,
accommodate, or manage a social and political entity like the Holy See.
As Williams puts it: “For Augustine, the problem of the life of the two cities is, like every other question
presented to the theologian, inextricably linked with the fundamental issue of what it is to be a creature
animated by desire, whose characteristic marks are lack and hunger, who is made to be this kind of creature by a
central and unforgettable absence, by lack and hunger. On such a basis there is no possibility of building a
theory that would allow final security and ‘finishedness’ to any form of political life. The claims of such a
theory would be, ultimately, anti-political because anti-human: denials of death.” Cf. “Politics and the Soul,” 69.
Leo would have appreciated this estimation of life in the two cities. In the chapters below, I hope to show why.
14
20
This Roman Question is essential for understanding Leo’s relationship to the two
modes we are discussing here. In the first place, and as I will examine more closely in
chapter two, Leo receives from Pius IX’s social magisterium a very specific mandate.
Following on the elimination of the temporal sovereignty and on the pope’s “imprisonment”
in the Vatican, Leo’s task is not to restyle papal sovereignty in spiritual terms now that the
Holy See has finally been relieved of the burden of temporal sovereignty. Rather, Leo’s task is
to argue for the restoration of the temporal sovereignty in the most spiritual terms possible.
To restyle papal sovereignty solely in spiritual terms, as we will see in chapter three below,
would be to play directly into the hands of liberalizing and nationalizing governments
throughout Europe. Indeed, such a restyling would contribute to the construction of a
decidedly un-Augustinian and un-Thomistic political situation in which the Church’s social
role is neither prophetic nor public, neither radical nor reasonable. Instead, the Church’s
social role is relegated to the privacy of the individual believer’s conscience. In Leo’s milieu,
spiritualizing the Church’s authority means depriving the Church of every vestige of social
and political authority.
In light of this situation, it is easier to see why every pope from Pius IX to at least
Pius XI envisions the work of restoring the temporal sovereignty as a reasonable goal. Given
that the history of Church-state relations in Europe provided the modern papacy with no
scriptural, theological, philosophical, or canonical category for speaking of the papacy in
purely spiritual terms, working for the restoration of the Holy See’s temporal sovereignty
was bound to seem like a duty. And given that Italy, and indeed many states throughout
Europe, did not appear to the Holy See to be founded on stable, enduring principles or
structures, the restoration of the temporal sovereignty could appear to be not only beneficial
to the Holy See, but beneficial to social order throughout the continent. Thus, Leo’s is not
21
the social or political context in which the Holy See would speak in a prophetic, sectarian
mode about the fundamental contrast between the Church and the world. A supposedly
“Augustinian mode” would simply reify the separations and exclusions the liberal nations
were trying to effect through legislation and diplomatic policy. Neither is Leo’s the social or
political context in which the Holy See would speak placidly about the fundamental
compatibility of the Church and the world. The effort to separate the Church from society
and politics was not a peaceful, amicable activity. Rather, Leo’s is the social and political
context in which the Holy See seeks to address the historical reality of incompatibility in
light of the Christian confidence that sin and disorder are not willed by the Creator. The
Lord does indeed assume flesh in order to bring fire and a sword to our disordered loves.
But he nevertheless assumes flesh.
In my estimation, citizenship, though it is not the only or the most important topic
of Leo’s social magisterium, serves as an important sign that he thought deeply about the
Gospel’s relationship not only to the human soul, but to human society. Citizenship is one
of those sites where Church and world meet for better and for worse. But Leo approaches
the topic with admirably theological perspicacity. Not even political citizenship, which seems
so forgettably abstract in light of the proximity and gravity of kinship ties, which seems so
pathetically temporary in light of the transcendence and finality of ecclesial ties - not even
this contingent, imperfect relation escapes the attention of the Lord’s provision for our
flourishing. The way I will describe it in this project is that in Leo’s handling of the political
nature of the human animal, we are never allowed to forget that human sociality expresses
something beyond itself – that it participates in an order not of human creation. Christians
are accustomed to speaking in terms of participation like this when it comes to matrimony as
a sacrament of the union enjoyed between Christ and his Body. Similarly, we are accustomed
22
to speaking this way about ecclesial membership as an anticipation of beatitude. But what
would it mean to speak of other forms of human relation as signifying our participation in
the divine economy?
One way of approaching the question could be to consider the contemporary
Canadian political philosopher, Ronald Beiner’s sensible and indeed stirring description of
why we should continue to be interested in citizenship. In the introduction to his collection
of essays on “the problem of political community,” Beiner writes:
It is easy to see why the civic-republican vision of politics is normatively attractive, and why,
having enjoyed a long and illustrious tradition of articulations within the history of political
philosophy, it continues to find defenders today, or at least those reluctant to close the door
on its ideals: citizens motivated by the apprehension of a common good rather than by
merely private interests; civic unity rather than an aggregate of subcommunities at crosspurposes to each other; engaged citizens rather than passive and indifferent ones; citizens
who treat each other as co-citizens rather than as strangers, competitors, or parties to a
contractual arrangement - in short, an ideal of civic friendship played out within a shared
public forum about which all the participants care deeply and genuinely. It is easy to see why
all of this would be desirable as a theoretical ideal. The question is whether it’s a meaningful
option, given the conditions of modern life and the constraints of modern politics. Is it just a
pipe dream?15
The challenge to this theoretical ideal is significant, as it consists of the obvious and
complex pluralism of our social lives. Leo observed this pluralism and its sometimes violent
contradictions in his own day. The challenge then and now is a pragmatic one and not some
theoretical contest between “isms.” Beiner notes how the complex pluralism of our lives is,
practically speaking, a matter of our being embedded in commitments that deprive us of the
“leisure and disinterestedness that a fully committed civic-mindedness would require.”16
Furthermore, these commitments create a wide array of experiences and “life horizons” that
are not easily or evenly situated within broader, “polity-wide interests.” And finally, even if
Ronald Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, (Vancouver,
Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), 6.
16 Ibid.
15
23
we were able to somehow coordinate the variety of social claims on our lives, most of us
lack the expertise necessary for the tasks of politics.
People living in modern circumstances are unlikely to view politics and public deliberation as
the core meaning of their lives, since endless conversation about the public good would
generate not ‘public happiness’ (Hannah Arendt’s phrase) but frustration with ‘too many
meetings’ (Oscar Wilde’s phrase). Instead, we settle for arbitration of sectional interests
delegated to politicians who we assume work for the interests of the constituents who elect
them and the lobbyists who court them rather than genuinely debate a common good.17
In light of these practical considerations, Beiner considers it justifiable to describe
this ideal of the civic-minded citizen as openly utopian. Beiner states that the “utopianism of
the civic-republican ideal is not something for which we should apologize, for political
theory would fall short of its mission if it failed to supply utopian ideals. But it would also
fall short of its mission if it failed to own up to them as utopian.”18 According to Beiner, it is
our job to “salvage a bit of civicness in the context of a political world where the odds tend
to be stacked against citizenship.”19 Beiner’s estimation of the causes that “dilute” citizenship
in the contemporary social imagination of affluent westerners is likely to be different from a
Catholic’s estimation. Beiner’s estimation would most certainly be different from Leo’s. But
consider the hope Beiner voices in his description of the “civic-republican” ideal. Among
other things, it is a hope that human politics will amount to more than the maintenance of
security and personal interest. It is a hope that human politics will facilitate cooperation and
unity and so that politics could become intelligible as a species of friendship.
If there were such a thing as a purely eschatological, Augustinian mode of doing
Christian ethics, we might say from this perspective that Beiner is right to call this hope
utopian, or perhaps even idolatrous. We might also suggest that what he is hoping for is
really nothing more than Christian unity with Christ, and to the extent that he
Ibid., 6-7.
Ibid., 7.
19 Ibid.
17
18
24
misunderstands the true nature of his hope, his vision of citizenship is simply a simulacrum
of baptism. And if there were such a thing as a purely incarnational, Thomistic mode of
doing Christian ethics, we might say from this perspective that Beiner is right to commit
himself to this hope, for it corresponds to a fundamental human inclination to social unity.
We might also suggest that what he is hoping for is something Christians and all persons of
good will should hope for, and so work for in history.
But Beiner’s characterization of citizenship in terms of utopian ideals useful for
political philosophy’s moral tasks is not the only way to account for how social and political
relations might be said to participate in something beyond themselves. Leo, for his part, is
not interested in citizenship because he sees membership in the nation-state as idolatrous or
demonic mimicry of baptism. And he is not interested in citizenship because he sees
membership in the nation-state as an unproblematic determination of human reason’s
natural goodness and power. His interest in citizenship does not fall easily onto an
Augustinian-Thomistic spectrum.
It will be essential for understanding the work below for me to spell out what I have
in mind here and to acknowledge an important debt I owe to Russell Hittinger’s work on a
rather arresting question: can or do social bodies image the Lord in any way analogous to the
manner in which individual human persons are said to image the Lord?20 Hittinger asks this
question because Christian theology and philosophy traditionally describe the human person
as a unique animal, created in the “image and likeness” of the Triune Lord. But in the late
modern context, a certain methodical individualism has made social membership appear to
20 In what follows, I am summarizing Hittinger’s “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago
Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard,
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 39-78.
25
persons either as a voluntary, contractual partnership, or as the domination of external
forces. As Hittinger puts it,
Genesis 1:26 teaches that the individual member of the species is a sacrament [making an
invisible reality visible] [...]. In the visible order of the hexaemeron, it is the individual man,
male and female, who is made unto the image and likeness of God, and thus the individual
member of the species is a locus of sacrality in the visible world. This idea, so familiar to
Jewish and Christian theology, is much contested, even detested, in the secular world of late
modernity. Our culture separates the value of the individual as self-determining from the
individual’s membership in a certain natural species or kind. A “person” is a pure thisness
[...] in his liberty, and is counted as a “member” only by his own choice or consent.21
According to the social imagination flowing from a suspicion of the doctrine of the imago
Dei, “membership without consent” is suspicioned as a sort of “servitude.”22 Thus
Hittinger’s question. We are accustomed to placing social membership in a place subordinate
to the interests and preferences of the individual person. But can we dismiss the dignity of
being a member in favor of aggrandizing the liberty of the human substance? Upon such a
dismissal of human sociality, are we performing an act that could be described using the
language of sin?
Though citizenship is only one relation in the array of possible human memberships,
the connection of Hittinger’s question to citizenship remains important both for a Christian
estimation of politics and for a more adequate grasp of the history of Catholic social
teaching. Is citizenship something of inherent worth, participating in a created order that
makes visible an invisible reality? Is citizenship’s worth in any manner analogous to the
worth of my substantial unity, and my participation in a created order that makes visible the
invisible reality of the Lord’s truth and goodness? If the answer is no, then at best citizenship
and the complex political reality it signifies simply represent one more damned thing I have
21
22
Ibid., 42.
Cf., ibid.
26
to do in this life. At worst, citizenship and politics represent a form of ideology that fosters
delusions that actually stand in the way of my self-realization.
Over against these undesirable alternatives, Hittinger draws out the social ontology at
work in Leo’s anthropology. By “social ontology,” Hittinger refers to a philosophical
account of the nature of “social unities of order.” A “social unity of order” is not a
substantial unity, like a human person, or a horse, or an angel. Neither is it an aggregation of
substantial unities, like a group of human persons in line at a box office or a cafeteria.
Rather, we find a “social unity of order” in a marriage, a family, a college, an orchestra, a
sports team, a theater troupe, or a church. In these unities, “each individual retains his own
identity and operations; yet the social whole is more than the sum of its parts. It counts as a
subject, person, and agent in its own right.”23 Were we to ask what these various bodies have
in common, we could say they all embody the same form. Whether we are speaking of
spouses, infielders and outfielders, winds and strings, in every case we are affirming that the
body’s form is defined by a certain order that makes a common action possible. The end of
this common action is a twofold good: internal and external. That is, social unities of order
accomplish discrete goods in time and place (children, wins, performances), and their
common action itself is a good (procreation, cooperation, harmony).24 Both internal and
external goods are indivisible (hopefully!). One cannot own percentages of these goods. One
cannot consume these goods such that there is not enough for others. And so the more the
individual gives to the common action of the whole, the more the good of the whole
redounds to the individual.
So, we ask again, do “social unities of order” make visible an invisible, divine reality
in a manner analogous to the human substance’s imaging of the Lord? According to
23
24
Ibid., 51.
Cf. Ibid., 51-2.
27
Hittinger’s reading of the theological and philosophical sources informing Catholic social
teaching, the fact that “social unities of order” are formed so as to accomplish common
goods provides us with the answer:
Following Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII and his successors took this Aristotelian rubric of a
social unity of order and grafted it onto Pseudo-Dionysius. Dionysius held that creatures
imitate God in a twofold manner: first insofar as each creature has its own perfection in the
order of substance; second insofar as creatures cause good in others. Thus the famous
dictum: bonum sui diffusivum est, the good is diffusive of itself. The greater the good, the more
it is communicable and shareable.25
Hittinger’s interpretation of this twofold imitation sheds a great deal of light on why
citizenship would matter to Leo and to us. The key verb in the quote is “to imitate.” The
affirmation that human persons are created in the imago Dei is not simply a bare
acknowledgement of human dignity. It is instead an acknowledgement that the human
vocation is imitative. We image the Lord in creation, like the Law, or the Temple, or Christ
himself, in order to represent or manifest in creation the Lord’s truth and goodness.
Hittinger puts it this way:
What exists simply in God is communicated to creatures in a multiform manner. Thus, a
double imitation or portrayal. First, a diversity of created things, each having a good according
to its participated being. Second, a diversity of created things imitating God insofar as they
cause goodness in others - insofar as they bring into existence, through secondary causality,
additional modes of participation among themselves and others. The superabundance of
what exists in God simply is, in creation, most perfectly expressed in a varied manifold.
Charity perfects a social principle embedded in the creation of angels and men: namely, one
loves the good not only as it is possessed and owned, but even more as it is poured forth
and communicated to many. [...] The creature possesses (imperfectly and from afar) a
likeness of image in the order of substantial form (the unity of the soul’s operations), as well
as an additional perfection or similitude insofar as he or she communicates with others in a
social form.26
According to this reading of the imago Dei, citizenship is one among many social
forms in and through which persons live out the human vocation: they communicate and
share with others, not only for pragmatic social and political ends, but in order to bring
25
26
Ibid., 53.
Ibid., 54, 56, emphasis original.
28
about goodness. As Hittinger’s analysis suggests, the first aspect of the imago Dei is
substantial and stable (hopefully!): the human person is always already created in the imago
Dei. But the second aspect of the imago Dei is accidental and contingent: the human person is
engaged in an act of causation, and so she is engaged in something perfectible. As I will
describe it below, in and through their relations with others, human persons both
acknowledge and cultivate the imago Dei.27 Society, comprised of its many relations, is an
array of acts that may cause or corrode goodness. Throughout this project, we are interested
in reading Leo as a critic of modern liberal democracies who engages their undergirding
social and political theories precisely in these terms. Can such regimes contribute to the
human vocation to cause goodness and so cultivate the imago Dei? If they can, we can
describe them in terms of authentic sociality and politics. But if they cannot, then such
sociality and politics as are practiced in them are so insufficient as to be described as
privative. The temptations in such circumstances are banality and violence. Leo confronts
these again and again in his magisterium.
In response, then, to the question of why citizenship should matter as part of a
project on Leo’s social magisterium, I would simply point to this juxtaposition of Beiner and
Hittinger. Beiner is unwilling to abandon the hopes expressed in the civic-republican ideal of
citizenship, for they seem to speak to him of a great human vocation that is only realizable in
concert with others. Hittinger’s analysis of the substantial and social aspects of the imago Dei
is a provocative Catholic response to Beiner’s adamant hope. Citizenship is indeed one of
those res sacras in temporalibus that, if it is to remain expressive of human hope, must be seen
as participating in a goodness that precedes it.
The Cappadocians spoke of this dual aspect of imaging in terms of the human person’s being an “artisan” of
the image. The accidental, active nature of this imaging is critical.
27
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III. Why analogy?
The human person is one of the res sacras in as much as she is an animal ordered to
beatitude. But she is one of the res sacras in temporalibus in as much as the pilgrimage to
beatitude is lived in history. And of course, human historical existence always occurs in a
place and under regimes of authority. These regimes need not be imagined solely in political
terms, however. As I noted above, an array of spheres comprises the context in which
human persons communicate with each other and so cultivate their likeness to the Lord.
Leo’s predominant concern in his social magisterium is to identify and defend the integrity
of the social unities comprising this pluriformity. He is mindful of many different levels and
activities of society. But his attention is trained throughout his pontificate on three principal
bodies in society: the Catholic Church, the state, and the domestic society. As I have
suggested already, the addition of the domestic society is essential, for it extends Leo’s scope
of concern past the question of Church-state relations.
An analogical social anthropology is essential to respecting the simultaneity of two
important realities. First, analogy allows us to appreciate the fundamental similarity of all
social bodies as contexts in which human persons cultivate the imago Dei. Second, analogy
allows us to appreciate the fundamental distinction of all social bodies from each other as
contexts that possess a native integrity resistant to collapse or resolution into each other.
This latter emphasis on distinction and integrity is important, for it expresses the conditions
for the pluriform imaging of the Lord’s one goodness.
As we encounter analogy below then, we will have to be sensitive to the ways in
which it works in both directions. Analogy in Leo’s social thought is just as much about the
relation and distinction of differing social bodies one to another as it is about the relation of
human sociality to the Lord’s goodness. Indeed, the analogical pluriformity of social bodies
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is the given condition in which human sociality can image the Lord’s goodness in creation.
Were we to focus solely on the analogy of social bodies, we would obscure the moral gravity
of Leo’s insistence on social pluriformity as a gift of the Divine Wisdom, given to humans
for their flourishing. Were we to focus solely on the analogy of sociality to the Lord’s
goodness, we would obscure the temporal and material reality of the vocation to image the
Lord.
Leo develops a social teaching that situates the human person within a participatory
and analogical context that is actually adequated to her flourishing as a spiritual and social
animal. Chapter one will begin at 1789 with the Revolution’s effort to make citizenship an
expansive category fitted to both the exclusive logic of the state and the universal nature of
the human person. But Leonine social doctrine aims precisely at this desire. Proliferating
relationality was presupposed by traditional social visions characterizing society prior to the
absolutisms of the 17th century. In order to depart from this former social vision and to
transfer the absolute power of the monarch to liberal state, it was necessary to destroy
proliferating, hierarchized relationality. Historians and social theorists often call this the
flattening out of society in the modern period. Such flattening corresponds to the desire of
nascent nation-states to be absolute and monistic, even as their monarchical forebears were
absolute and monistic.
IV. Plan of the work
Leo XIII’s relevance as the “father of Catholic social teaching” lies in his
development of a social anthropology that exposes liberalism’s failure to achieve one of
modernity’s most important goals: more humane social and political relations among
persons. Whereas liberal nation states in the 19th century promised to finally “restore the
broken relationships of nature and history” by annulling relationships competing with
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citizenship, Leo develops a theological account of how citizenship can thrive only in an
analogical array of other anterior and posterior memberships. This analogical array is the
only sufficient condition of the promised restoration, for the analogy liberates ecclesial,
political, social, and domestic memberships to exist in both the unity and the distinction
necessary for them to exercise their properly human office of imaging the Lord. Leo’s social
magisterium thus provides us with critical resources for overcoming the inadequate social
anthropologies that undermine liberalism’s own best intentions.
The work will be organized as follows:
Part I: Citizenships:
Chapter 1.1 - “Univocal and Equivocal Communitas: Theorizing citizenship
after 1789”
The thesis of this chapter is that the social restoration promised by 1789’s legislative
efforts is undermined by univocal and equivocal, instead of analogical, social anthropology. The
social anthropology undergirding revolutionary accounts of citizenship is inadequate to the
task of linking French citizenship in the new regime to the other memberships that properly
express natural human sociality in history. The result of this inadequacy and failure is a
contradictory concept of citizenship and its relationship to human sociality. The
contradictions express the need for an analogical conception of sociality that would allow
citizenship to exist in unity with and distinction from other social forms.
Chapter 1.2 - “Eschatological Citizenship: Mazzini’s communitates and the
failure of analogy”
The thesis of this chapter is that Mazzini eloquently expresses the liberal hope that
citizenship will restore the broken relations of nature and history by developing an historicalidealist account of the nation’s mediational role in uniting all humans into one family. This
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translation of 1789’s ideals into a later, Italian context is undermined by a univocal account of
citizenship hidden within what appears to be an analogical rendering of human sociality.
Mazzini’s historical idealism eliminates the possibility of an analogical rendering by placing
all being, including the divinity, on the same ontological and historical continuum.
Chapter 2 - “Analogia Communitatis: Citizenship within Leo XIII’s doctrine
of social membership”
The thesis of this chapter is that Leo’s social anthropology rests on an analogical
social anthropology that does not fall into the univocal or equivocal errors exported from 1789.
By situating historical social forms like citizenship in analogical relationship to a social
human nature given at creation, Leo is able to simultaneously distinguish these forms from
each other even while he unites them into a single array we can recognize as natural to the
human. Situating citizenship within the analogical social anthropology in this way
accomplishes at least two things: it recognizes citizenship as constitutive of human
flourishing without asking citizenship to restore the broken relations of nature and history;
and it avoids mistaking citizenship’s incompetence with regard to this restoration as a sign of
citizenship’s artificiality. In this way, Leo frees citizenship to participate in the human
vocation to cause good in society.
Part II: Institutions:
Chapter 3 - “Ecclesial Munera and the Analogia Communitatis: Leonine
ecclesiology and the proper care of human persons”
The thesis of this chapter is that Leo’s ecclesiology is an indictment of the state’s
inability to care for the human person in a mode appropriate to the state’s limited political
vocation. Leo thus identifies enduring theological-political concerns within liberal
democratic regimes, where citizens and social bodies are forced to be free in a very particular
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way if they are to enjoy the care promised to them by the state. By investigating Leo’s
ecclesiology, we are considering his analogical vision of the proper social and political
conditions in which rational animals in history may live together, not simply for mutual
benefit, security, or efficient action, but for both natural and supernatural beatitude.
Chapter 4 - “The Original Communitas and the Analogia Communitatis:
Leonine matrimonial theology and liberal pedagogy”
The thesis of this chapter is that Leo’s matrimonial teaching in the 1880 encyclical,
Arcanum Divinae, offers us an eloquent demonstration of how liberal matrimonial theory
enables a de-socialized and de-politicized formation of citizens. What I will call “liberal
pedagogy” or “liberal matrimonial morality” in this chapter signifies a social anthropology
that competes with the Church’s sacramental theology and tradition of canon law. The
objective of this competition is to make over the image of the domestic sphere into the
image of the state. Leo argues that this makeover is sacrilegious in that it extracts the
domestic from its participation in the analogical social array flowing from the Divine
Wisdom.
Chapter 5 - “The Analogia Communitatis, Catholic Theology, and Social
Anthropology”
The thesis of this chapter is that an analogical social anthropology remains necessary
for a suitable Catholic response to the social and political challenges we face today. I argue
that only via an analogical conception of human sociality will we be able to avoid the
temptations to finalize the political task. Leonine analogy enables Catholic social teaching to
remain incarnationally committed to the enduring task of promoting humane society and
politics. Leonine analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain so committed in light of
the eschatological hope that the broken relations of nature and history will be restored only
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at the end of all things. Indeed, this eschatological hope funds the incarnational commitment
and makes it intelligible in the first place.
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PART I: CITIZENSHIPS
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CHAPTER 1.1
UNIVOCAL AND EQUIVOCAL COMMUNITATES:
THEORIZING CITIZENSHIP AFTER 1789
Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Two of these words have become synonymous with
everything that is right about liberal democracy. In contemporary Western politics, liberty
and equality remain key words in elections, party platforms, reforms, legislative proposals,
and judicial decisions. The ideal of fraternity, however, is usually spoken of indirectly, using
either an inflated rhetoric of unity, or a measured exhortation to tolerate the actions and
commitments of other free and equal persons. Liberty and equality stand out to us as
fundamental human properties because affirming them, protecting them, and promoting
them facilitates the hard work of contending with natural and conventional differences
among persons. But we can discern a question regarding fraternity and its place in the great
triumvirate. What is it doing there? We are not opposed to it. But how is it to be numbered
with liberty and equality? Not so long ago, fraternity possessed a range of meaning which
now seems strange. Though we currently think in individualized terms of the many
differences managed by liberty and equality, the historical development of liberty, equality,
and fraternity begins in a context where the individual had not been as thoroughly atomized
as she is today.
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Consider for example the Romantic Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini and his
criticism of the French Revolution’s ultimate inadequacy as a liberator of persons and
society. He said of the Revolution that
[it] tried to introduce into political matters the liberty, equality, fraternity of men. Its
theory of rights gave the political formula of the individual; it did not go beyond that.
It did not found a new Society; it prepared the old one for liberty and equality. Liberty
- even when it is given to all, and called Equality - cannot found a new Society;
Association alone can do that. Liberty is no more than an element of social life. It
provides the materials: it does not breathe into them the breath of life.1
For Mazzini fraternity is not simply an activity enjoyed by liberated, equal persons. Instead,
for Mazzini, liberty and equality exist for the sake of fraternity. Mazzini suggests that there is
something provisional or preparatory at best, lifeless at worst, about liberty and equality if
they are not inspired by and ordered to fraternity. I will return to Mazzini later. For now, I
note that Mazzini presents the three great ideals as if they work as a mutually augmenting
crescendo, proposing fraternity to the social imagination of a people as the final cause of all
society and politics. Put negatively, Mazzini’s criticism of the Revolution is that it gave
European society a social anthropology with no end in mind, and so, truly, no beginning.
The Revolution pronounced human persons as liberated, but from what and for what? As
equal, but to whom?
But what does this matter? We could very rationally and persuasively interpret the
story of social and political life after 1789, precisely because of this insistence on liberty and
equality, in terms of our progression toward more humane social and political relations.
Mazzini’s criticism of the Revolution and its incarnation of only two of these three beautiful
ideals can seem pointless given the level of liberty and equality we enjoy compared to our
forebears. From a certain perspective, couldn’t we say that fraternity ought to remain an
Mazzini, “Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789,” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, (New York:
E.P. Dutton & Co Inc, 1961), 257, emphasis original.
1
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historical curiosity, somehow a concern of those tasked with dismantling the ancien régime, but
anyhow no longer a concern of ours? Though such a perspective seems perfectly in sync
with the ideals of contemporary democratic liberalism, it may be that we have lost something
important in allowing fraternity to remain obscured behind liberty and equality. Indeed, as
we saw in the introduction, lamenting such a loss would seem to be the animating principle
of Beiner’s insistence that the civic-republican ideal remain a utopian directive for political
theory.
As I mentioned in the introduction, Russell Hittinger has provided us with an
insightful description of the revolutionary hopes attached to the three great ideals of liberty,
equality, and fraternity. Hittinger notes that the revolutionary
creed of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” considered the human person in two ways:
first, as a being of nature, having natural liberties and rights which had been
obscured or broken by the historical social order; second, as a citizen, standing
equally among other citizens before the state. On this model, fraternity was
associated preeminently if not exclusively with citizenship, for as Rousseau among
others had argued, membership in the state reconstitutes the broken relations of nature and
history. Other social memberships claiming their origins in nature, history, or divine
revelation were deemed legitimate only insofar as they were either the private choice
of individuals, or insofar as they were permitted or “conceded” by the state.2
This description of the three ideals is illuminating for a number of reasons. On the
one hand, you have the human person, possessed of a nature that is endowed from the
beginning with a most fundamental property: liberty. Every human substance, according to
nature, is free. But on the other hand, you have human relations, variously affected and
conditioned by the actions of these fundamentally free individuals. Every human substance,
according to nature, is free, but is not alone. Thus a second fundamental property: equality.
But is it meaningful at all to look back on human history and affirm that human persons are
2 Russell Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in
Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2013), 39-78, at 40 (emphasis mine).
39
fundamentally free and equal? As Hittinger notes, it seemed to the proponents of these
revolutionary ideals that history is not the story of human liberty and equality. Rather, history
is the story of the obscuring of these properties, even the breaking of human relations. In
this way of reading society’s history, society itself becomes corrosive of liberty and equality
to the extent that society is the place where I am forced to sacrifice my liberty and my
equality for the goods of the community. Fraternity, or relationship, or sociality, or
community then seems to be the problem that free, equal humans must overcome. The
desire to overcome this history cannot, however, erase the reality of society. Even on the
barest physical level, it is an historical fact that humans live and act in social forms. So the
way to mend this problem - the way to reconstitute “the broken relations of nature and
history” - will inevitably be a social mending. Overcoming the abuses of living in society is
the work of a society. Thus citizenship, Hittinger suggests. It is put forward as the social
context - the relationship - in which free, equal humans may work to overcome the
obscurities and abuses of society’s history.
Citizenship becomes a standard. In the social imagination Hittinger is describing, all
other social forms are measured against it. Whatever social forms promote citizenship and
contribute indirectly to society’s ability to overcome its own degradations are claimed by the
civil power. Whatever social forms may remain neutral or ambiguously related to society’s
self-restoration are housed within the private choice of the persons constituting the forms.
Should the matrimonial unit, the family, a labor union, a club, a political party, a newspaper
staff, a school, a religious order, or especially an entire faith prove resistant to these two
forms of management, deep conflict follows. So, the long 19th century debate about liberty,
equality, and fraternity is obscured if we read it only as the story of historical progress
toward greater legal protection and social recognition of human liberty and equality.
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Hittinger’s description of the three ideals suggests that a larger social feat was taking place:
the identification of the state with the form of human relationship that could finally
humanize society.
The story of this great social feat is one so large and complex, no one has been able
to complete it. Accordingly, I am not promising anything so grand. My interest is in the
Catholic response to the forms of management implied in Hittinger’s assessment of the
social valences of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That response itself is an enormous topic,
but it is always embroiled in two social and historical phenomena: the aftermath of 1789 and
the local incarnations of that aftermath in the rising nation-states of Europe. In this chapter,
I am arguing that the social restoration promised by 1789’s legislative efforts is undermined
by univocal and equivocal, instead of analogical, accounts of citizenship. The social anthropology
undergirding revolutionary accounts of citizenship is inadequate to the task of linking French
citizenship in the new regime to the other memberships that properly express natural human
sociality in history. The result of this inadequacy and failure is a contradictory concept of
citizenship and its relationship to human sociality. The contradictions express the need for
an analogical conception of sociality that would allow citizenship to exist in unity with and
distinction from other social forms.
In chapter 1.1, I contend that the revolutionary debates of 1789 about liberty,
equality, and fraternity make it impossible for the Revolution to develop a coherent vision of
political citizenship and its relationship to human nature. So, rather than the promised
citizenship that would restore the broken relations of nature and history, the Revolution
exports to the rest of Europe a strange hybrid of national and universal memberships that do
not correspond to the sociality of human persons. In order to make this contention, I first
give an analytical account of citizenship within what I am here calling univocal, equivocal, and
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analogical habits of predication. A univocal habit would reify the connection between a
created, given human nature and historically contingent aspects of social relations such as
citizenship. An equivocal habit would disassociate human nature and the contingent, leaving
them both squarely within the realm of convention, separated from any knowledge of a
created, given nature. In light of this analytical work, I will then examine the ambiguous
status of citizenship in the context of the French Revolution’s work on liberty and equality.
The revolutionary lawyers and theorists attempted to both univocate and equivocate when it
came to citizenship, national membership, and human nature. This work will prepare us to
understand the importance of Leo’s analogical habit of predication in his social magisterium.
In chapter 1.2, I show how the romantic patriotism of Giuseppe Mazzini modulates
the ideals of 1789 into an idealist key for the Italian nationalizing movement. My argument is
that Mazzini’s concept of citizenship within an eschatological society provides the Italian
national cause with a provocative criticism of 1789’s univocations and equivocations.
Nevertheless, Mazzini’s is a deeply univocal account of citizenship that ultimately fails as a
critique of 1789. In chapter 1.2, I offer an analytical summary of Mazzini’s masterpiece of
Italian patriotism, The Duties of Man, which is an exquisite account of fraternity’s proper place
as the human reality orienting liberty and equality.
1789 sets the stage for the protracted battle between the Holy See and European
nation states. Mazzini sets the stage for the particular incarnation of that battle on the Italian
peninsula. When put together, these portraits of 1789’s inadequacy and Mazzini’s
rehabilitative efforts provide us with a rich historical, social, philosophical, and theological
context in which to engage Leo’s social magisterium on the topic of citizenship and its
relationship to all other forms of human relationship. From within this context, we can
better appreciate the startling claim that something as limited and variable as citizenship
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could ever restore the broken relations of nature and history. We can also better appreciate
the Catholic effort - embodied in Leo’s social magisterium - to question this claim and to
offer a social anthropology truly adequated to the restorative project.
I. Univocal and Equivocal Communitates
In order to disassociate ourselves from deficient definitions of fraternity, I will work
with the term communitas. By communitas, I refer to the multi-dimensional concept of human
sociality denoted by the Latin. The communitas can be described in terms of a variety of
relationships that are lost with the English terms, fraternity, society, and community. Below, when
I use communitas, I intend to signify both the pluriformity of human relations within which a
single person may find himself, and the act of participating in those relations. For example, I
may enter partnerships with others for a wide array of personal and public purposes; I may
enjoy joint possession or use of many different personal and public goods; I may participate
in the corporate actions of sports teams, universities, protest and advocacy groups, unions,
and the like; I may join many different kinds of fellowships, from business clubs to historical
religions; and of course, my kinship ties proliferate in both directions in time. If social and
political theorists in the 19th century were concerned with defining the liberty, equality, and
fraternal relations proper to such communitates and with delineating the rights and duties
following from these careful definitions, I argue that the most successful efforts to develop
such definitions are rooted in an analogia communitatis. Less successful efforts express the
pitfalls associated with univocal and equivocal habits of predication regarding the character
of human communitates.
What would it mean to call communitas univocal, equivocal, or analogical? Typically, we
employ these three terms in order to characterize habits of predication regarding human and
divine attributes. The classic example is goodness: “The Lord is good. Paul is good.” A
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univocal habit of predication would suggest that the goodnesses of these two statements are
ontologically, and so semantically, identical. I mean the same thing about goodness in both
cases and sentences. So, in a univocal account of goodness, the predicate is a spectrum
concept. The Lord’s goodness may be greater in every way than Paul’s, but they exist on the
same ontological continuum. An equivocal habit of predication, on the other hand, would
suggest that the goodnesses of these two sentences are ontologically, and so semantically,
incommensurable. I mean two totally different, perhaps even contradictory, things about
goodness in both cases and sentences. So, in an equivocal account of goodness, the predicate
cannot be placed in a continual relationship with the two subjects. Rather, there is absolutely
no relationship. But an analogical habit of predication would suggest that despite the real and
profound ontological, and so semantic, incommensurability of the two, a real relation of
participation exists such that Paul’s goodness exists within the Lord’s and is only possible
because of the Lord’s. An analogical habit of predication makes it possible for two dissimilar
things to maintain an essential relationship without becoming greater or lesser examples of
one another (univocity) or becoming totally sundered from one another (equivocity). Indeed,
in the theological mode of speaking analogically about predicates of being, this habit even
joins together the priority of the Lord’s own life and the givenness of being with the real
integrity of our utterly dependent creaturehood. What is given by the Creator is the Creator’s
to give, but in light of the origin and utter gratuity of the gift, our participation in it can truly
be our own. The hierarchical nature of this participatory relationship is fundamental to
maintaining this relationship of non-competition. “Below” and “within” the Creator’s gift do
we live and move and have our being. In the case of goodness, the Lord’s is not simply a
continually greater version of Paul’s. And the Lord’s is not alien to Paul’s. Rather, an
analogical account of goodness is a way of acknowledging that Paul’s goodness exists with a
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real, human integrity, and that real integrity is completely dependent on the Lord’s donation
of goodness to creaturely participants.
In speaking of communitas in this way, I have no intention of referring to the Lord’s
membership within a whole of which the Lord is but one part. Rather, I am suggesting that
communitas - the various social unities of order we inhabit and even the act of inhabiting them
- can be rendered in various ways vis-a-vis its ontological and semantic relationship to a
created, given human nature on the one hand, and to a conventional, historical contingency
of that nature on the other. As we will see below in our treatment of Mazzini, it is tempting
to place the various communitates on a continual spectrum stretching, say, from the family,
through civil society, to the state, and then on to the Church or the human species or
whatever universal communitas you please. But I contend that it is more useful to imagine the
ontological and semantic signification of communitas in terms of its analogical multivalence.
Why? First, communitas is fundamentally related to human sociality. It is a word that expresses
the universal and natural human inclination to social relationship. But second, communitas is
also fundamentally related to the historically conventional realities of particular social
relationships. It is a word that expresses the full complement of our family, social, political,
and religious memberships as they actually exist in time and place. The task, as in the classic
case of goodness, is to determine our habits of predication. In this chapter, we focus
primarily on univocal and equivocal predication, reserving analogical predication for chapter
two.
What would it be like to speak univocally about communitas? A univocal account of
communitas would suggest that a particular, historical form of communitas (or constellation of
forms) is perfectly identical to the communitas we see in the human social inclination. One can
deploy historical language in order to support the univocal habit of predication. That is,
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social and political theory may point backward in human history in order to propose
membership in social form X as original, pristine, natural, and even primal or primordial.
Recovering the primordial form is thus the only authentic way to restore the broken relations
of nature and history. But social and political theory may also point forward in human
history in order to prophesy that form X is truly the ultimate, the destined, the foreordained,
and even the eschatologically complete. Progress toward this future is thus the only authentic
way to perform the restorations. From either “direction,” this univocal habit of predication
collapses any ontological difference between forms, suggesting that all forms are in reality
either derivative of form X, privative iterations of form X, temporary props to form X, or
harmful fetters to form X. Because my interest is in the communitas signified by the political
category, citizenship, we are focused on efforts to make that political form the historical
ultimate, the first and final cause of human communitas. That is, we are focused on efforts to
make citizenship the historical communitas that will call all other communitates to account. From
our perspective in history, this will be the more difficult habit of predication to understand.
From the perspective of our taken-for-granted membership in Western, liberal democracies,
nothing could be stranger than suggesting that political citizenship is actually the perfection
of human communitas. But this univocal equation is in fact an important historical and
theoretical source of the liberal social imagination that has made it possible to take
citizenship for granted at all.
In contrast to a univocal predication of communitas, we could say that an equivocal
predication allows for an indeterminate relationship between particular, historical forms of
communitas - like citizenship - and the communitas expressed by human sociality. Citizenship
would be relatable to the human social inclination solely via the mode of human convention.
Citizenship could then be one among many relational terms connoting a person’s
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participation in groups larger than herself. Its usage would not necessarily illuminate
anything about human sociality other than the datum that humans are the sort of animal that
appears to like to do things in groups. Rather than pointing back to a pristine origin or
forward to an eschaton, we would analyze the historical relationship between citizenship and
a given regime’s contingent concept about human sociality. For example, historical
knowledge of Spartan citizenship would give us knowledge of Sparta, of what Spartans
thought of citizenship, and what Spartans may have thought about citizenship’s participation
in broader concepts of human sociality. We would know what Spartans thought about
themselves, about their laws and institutions, and about human persons and relationships.
We could even develop a Spartan conception of communitas. But we would not, through
inductive examination of Sparta, consider it possible to gain insight into the nature either of
the communitas signified by citizenship, or citizenship’s relationship to a human social
inclination. In other words, if we develop an equivocal habit of predication, knowledge of an
historical regime gives us insight into that regime, but not into the way a particular relation
like citizenship relates to the human inclination to live and act in society. Historically,
Western political theory has certainly proceeded as though precisely this sort of induction
was valuable for learning about the political nature of the human animal. Aristotle’s
inductive approach in the Politics is the preeminent example of this. But it remains to be seen
whether modern habits of predication regarding communitas can serve us in the same way.3
The description of equivocal citizenship and the question of whether or not it is an intelligible description of
modern language usage both sit somewhat uncomfortably here. The cause of our discomfort in
accommodating the notion of equivocal citizenship can be discerned in the gradual modern work of depriving
the political - and so the category citizenship - of its connection to nature and the good life. Hobbes’s De Cive
expresses this effort to sever the political from its connection to nature. Hobbes writes: “Closer observation of
the causes why men seek each other’s company and enjoy associating with each other, will easily reach the
conclusion that it does not happen because by nature it could not be otherwise, but by chance. For if man
naturally loved his fellow man, loved him, I mean, as his fellow man, there is no reason why everyone would
not love everyone equally as equally men; or why every man would rather seek the company of men whose
society is more prestigious and useful to him than to others. By nature, then, we are not looking for friends but
3
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Indeed, this is a lamentable point in our own day. But it gives us insight into why the
equivocal habit is the more easily understood from our perspective in history. The human
act of communitas is currently difficult to imagine as somehow related to citizenship; and it has
become even more difficult to imagine a communitas expressing a natural, universal sociality.4
Though we hear much of the duty and privilege of citizens to participate in the democratic
process, local participation in democracy is situated simultaneously within two social
contexts that seem to relativize citizenship into irrelevance. On the one hand, modern
persons are parts of a breathtaking and complex system of globalizing social and economic
communitates. On the other hand, modern persons are parts of more proximate and voluntary
identity communitates that provide persons with venues of individual expression and moral
formation impossible via the democratic process.5 When we add to the significant
authoritative power of these global and proximate communitates the contradictory conviction
that each human person is by natural right impervious to being defined, disciplined, or
for honour or advantage [commodum] from them.” Cf. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. by Richard
Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), at 22. Hobbes’s cynicism is
given a romantic turn by the Rousseauian portrait of the state of nature, populated by independent individuals.
All cynicism and romance are gone, however, if we consider the equivocal habit in terms of a Positivist account
of history and society, wherein all truly scientific and historical knowledge is nothing more than relative
appreciation of how things worked in past societies. A Positivist never fears equivocation, for insight into causes
and ends is a fool’s errand. How such a perspective would help us to evaluate the relative goodness or
wickedness of different institutions and regimes is a difficult question and one that seems unanswerable if we
habitually equivocate regarding communitas or if we dismiss equivocation for a Positivist, historicist mode of
inquiry.
4This is a fair way to describe the late- or post-modern experience of being a citizen in Western regimes. The
content of the category citizenship is so thin that one’s status as citizen only reveals itself, because it is only
pertinent, in specific, brief, and forgettable moments of active passivity - taxpaying, voting, observing national
actions as somehow related to oneself. But one need not be so cynical about this vacuity. Late- and postmodern visions of cosmopolitanism and globalization also help us to evacuate the content of citizenship
understood in traditionally political terms. Such globalizing, boundary-transgressing visions contribute to
startling cultural creativity and various forms of activism even as they corrode the individual’s sense of
belonging to a piece of ground, a people, and a tradition.
5 Ronald Beiner has described this same phenomenon in terms of “localism” and “globalism,” noting that both
tendencies exist in dialectical relationship with one another and work to “undercut the authority of the state,
and the civic relationship it defines.” From Beiner’s perspective, which differs from my own in certain respects,
these tendencies work together because localism is resurgent whenever identity is threatened, as is the case
when globalism dilutes local differentiation. Beiner suggests nationalism and universal humanism thus always
go together, constantly calling into question liberalism’s ability to create the conditions necessary for a truly
civic life. Cf. Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community,
(Vancouver/Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), at 23.
48
coerced by external authority, it seems that any enduringly meaningful account of communitas
is difficult, if not ultimately pointless. It follows from this difficulty that the only purpose in
examining the category citizenship is to collect the historical and social data that confirm for
us that in our current social form, we have accomplished a final victory over old social
orders, old political regimes, and old hierarchical mediations. While these old forms falsely
promised us a more humane communitas via the mechanisms of docility, virtue, obedience,
and humility, we now apparently know that only individual persons can form humane
communitates. An equivocal account of communitas thus eventually replaces the authoritative
conviction that the human person is a social being and a political animal subject to various
duties with another authoritative conviction: that the human person is a self-constituting
animal by right, and that she possesses this right by virtue of her membership within only
one communitas: humanity. If we cultivate an equivocal habit, the project of restoring the
broken relationships of nature and history is left in an ambiguous state. By equivocating
about the connection between the historically contingent and the universally stable, we have
made all our relations intelligible only as artifacts of individual wills. And underwriting this
voluntaristic artificializing is the simultaneous claim that we have a right to do so by virtue of
a membership that would seem to be prior to the individual will: humanity.
II. 1789 and Citizenship
The story of 1789 and citizenship is, in part, the story of the braiding together of
these univocal and equivocal habits of predication such that after the revolution it became
possible to speak strangely about liberty, equality, and fraternity. Talk of liberty masked grave
abuses of human liberty. Talk of equality obscured the maintenance of drastic inequalities.
And talk of human fraternity started to take on strangely nationalistic and tribal
connotations. How can this abuse of language happen?
49
Any analysis of the relationship between the French Revolution and the desire to
envision citizenship as a restorative agent for the broken relations of nature and history
requires that we recognize the extent to which the Revolution was deliberately structured to
militate against outdated and oppressive social structures.6 According to revolutionary
literature and subsequent historical analysis of the Revolution, the ostensibly irrational
character of these structures expressed itself in elaborate and complex systems of privilege
that rooted political, civil, and social rights, not in a national or universal membership, but in
seemingly arbitrary categories of pedigree and tradition. Given that liberty was denied those
outside power, and that equality was seen as corrosive of a preordained, hierarchical order,
these systems were in fact the broken relations in need of restoration. These systems are
collectively identified as the ancien régime, which is the deliberate object of the Revolution’s
destructive relationship to the past.7
In what follows, I am indebted to the following useful works on the ancien régime and the Revolution: Nicholas
Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), especially 5-84 on Catholicism prior to the restoration; Roger Aubert, et al, The
Church Between Revolution and Restoration, trans. Peter Becker, (New York: Crossroad, 1981), especially 3-84;
G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850, (New York: MacMillan, 1953), especially 11-22; Sidney
Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall, Church and State Through the Centuries, (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press,
1954), especially 234-54; François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1988), especially 3-40 on the ancien régime and 41-210, which is Furet’s magisterial treatment of
the Revolution and its various governments; François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the
French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1989); Lynn Hunt, The French
Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996); Kenneth Scott
Latourette, The Nineteenth Century in Europe: Background and the Roman Catholic Phase, (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1958), especially chapters III-VI; J. F. Maclear, ed., Church and State in the Modern Age: A Documentary
History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), especially 3-34 for the ancien régime throughout Europe and
75-105 for the Revolution; Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, (New York:
Pantheon, 1981); John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969);
Joseph N. Moody, ed., Church and Society: Catholic Social and Political Thought and Movements 1789-1950, (New York:
Arts, Inc., 1953), especially 93-118; John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, (New York:
Macmillan, 1951).
7 Cf. Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, 3: “The French revolutionaries gave a name to what they had
abolished. They christened it the ancien régime. In doing so they were defining not so much what they had
suppressed, but more what they wanted to create - a complete break with the past, which was to be cast into
the shadows of barbarism. [...] Sieyès [...] had already made a sweeping condemnation of that ‘night’, as
opposed to the day which was just dawning.”
6
50
In the ancien régime, an obvious and, according to some theorists of the time, natural
inequality among orders of society was ingredient to healthy communitas. But the central goal
of the Revolution - at least on paper - was to destroy precisely this feature of the old order
and its social vision. A theory of the supposed naturalness of social inequality seemed
obviously implicated in obscuring the true nature of human relations. Revolutionary
conceptions of the rights of citizens had to follow on the dismantling of this defunct order
of inequality. These citizenship rights were developed through ambiguous but fecund debate
that was never satisfactorily resolved. On the one hand, revolutionary social and political
engineering proceeded by the conviction that all humans are by nature equal. But on the
other hand, revolutionary social and political engineering had to account for how actual
equality could be practically established in a world where society continually contends with a
variety of inequalities, tensions, and imbalances.
Thus the Revolution’s central document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
Over against the “ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man” that have
corrupted societies and governments in the ancien régime, the Constituent Assembly set out to
found the “demands of the citizens [...] henceforth upon simple and incontestable
principles.”8 The human person’s rights and duties are not expressible in terms of his status
as a member of domestic, economic, social, or ecclesial communitates. Among the seventeen
rights enumerated in the Declaration, economic, social, and religious relations are notably
muted or absent and so are obscured as relations that may legitimately place one’s citizenship
in relative position to the wide array of one’s other commitments. Gone are relational strata
that comprised the old order. Rather, the human person is imagined by the Constituent
“Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French
Revolution, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), 113.
8
51
Assembly as an animal with a single relation that sufficiently expresses his rights and duties and so his sociality - as a person. This single relation is his political citizenship.
In place of this plurality of communitates and the rights and duties incumbent on a
person as a member of these institutions, the Declaration asserts the only relation necessary
for a society’s flourishing: a fundamental connection between two hierarchically arranged
nodes. At the lower node, the Declaration describes the individual human person who by
nature is a free and equal monad distinguished from his fellows only when the “general
usefulness” requires such a distinction. At the upper node, the Declaration describes the law
and government that are the expressions of the “general will” of these agglomerated
monads. The Declaration then builds a simple legal edifice through which the will of the
monads may be expressed in governing and by which the ostensibly absolute liberty and
equality of the monads may be maintained. Robespierre’s proposal of a new declaration of
rights on April 24, 1793 expresses with greater metaphysical flair the monistic sensibility of
the legislators at work in the various National Conventions. According to Robespierre, as the
citizen-monad is beneath the law alone, so the National Convention is “in the presence of
the Universe, and before the eyes of the Immortal Legislator [...] which is nature.”9
From the ultimate clarity of this position in the new regime, under the eyes of the
immortal law alone, Robespierre offers his national and universal vision of communitas: “The
men of all countries are brothers, and the different peoples must help one another,
according to their power, as citizens of the same State.” The social, cultural, economic,
political, and religious differentiations of all humans everywhere come to naught in the eyes
of the one law finally discerned by the revolutionary lawyers. The collapse of all this
difference in the ill-fated Constitution of 1793/Year I enables the Revolution to declare itself
9
“Robespierre’s Proposed Declaration of Rights,” in Stewart, 431, 434.
52
universally competent. So, after rehearsing the original Declaration’s rights and doubling their
number, 1793’s Constitution simultaneously declares France a republic and extends
citizenship to “every foreigner who is considered by the legislative body to have deserved
well of humanity.”10 The French legislature has finally found a voice with which to address
all persons everywhere at once, and so early 19th century France still suggests to us that in
order to speak truthfully about l’humanite, one must do so with the properly revolutionary that is, French - inflection. Mazzini will question this suggestion.11
In order to speak of 1789 as a decisive moment in the history of citizenship, and in
order to reconstruct a revolutionary export12 of modern citizenship, it is helpful to see how
the revolutionary reimagining of the category citizenship primarily in terms of liberty and
equality resulted in deep confusion regarding a variety of fraternal communitates. This
François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988),
101. The Constituent Assembly, in François Furet’s words, was “led gradually to proclaim a new international
law extending the liberty of citizens to other nations. The concepts of democracy and nation, which had come
together in 1789, forged around the war which began in 1792 a body of very strong feelings, welding together
classes and the Revolution itself in a common passion. The philosophy of the Enlightenment, so cosmopolitan
and European, had won over only a limited public, aristocratic and bourgeois, and almost entirely urban. Here,
in its most democratic form, it was penetrating the mass of the people in both town and country through an
unexpected channel: national sentiment. It thereby simplified and radicalized to a point where very soon the
Europe of the Enlightenment no longer recognized ‘its’ philosophy” (104).
11 I say deliberately that France suggests “to us” that we should speak of humanity in terms of Frenchrevolutionary ideals. Over the past few years, as terrorists have attacked France on multiple occasions, we are
always pointed to the stark contrast between France’s liberal legacy and its pivotal role in spreading democracy
throughout the world on the one hand, and the violence and oppression of the terrorists on the other. France’s
own illiberal treatment of various populations within its borders is necessarily muted at such contrastive
moments. We absolutely must keep up the appearance that Western, liberal democracies - France and the U.S.
as preeminent examples - are solely competent to speak for humanity. All threats to Western, liberal democracy
must be misanthropic errands in one way or another. Questioning this contrastive work is difficult when it
comes to terrorism, for the violence and oppression of terror are real. But the rightful condemnation of terror,
at least for now, seems to consistently abet a despicably myopic condemnation of non-Western, non-liberal
social forms. In the 19th century context, the Roman Catholic Church is the focus of this condemnation. Now,
Islam faces an analogous situation.
12 I use the word deliberately. Though we will examine his thought more thoroughly below, Mazzini can help
us get a sense of the reception of the Revolution as an export. Cf. Joseph Mazzini, “Thoughts on the French
Revolution of 1789” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co Inc, 1961), 252:
“[T]he idea of France, mistress of the destinies of Europe and hastening to unfold them for the good of all,
ploughs to-day like lightning through the soul of the young Italian generation, even as, when I faced the first
battles and sorrows of life, it dominated the soul of the generation that is now dead or in lethargic old age. [...]
Any thought that takes shape for few days [sic] in Paris [...] finds among us thoughtless and indiscriminating
applause. And at every fresh disillusioning, Italian lips utter, or Italian faces show, the cowardly thought: how
should we attempt what France attempted and failed to do? What! are we condemned to crawl for ever behind man-king
or people-king? Is Italy doomed to be the satellite of a greater planet?”
10
53
confusion is evident in four important antinomies that bring into stark relief Mazzini’s
criticism of the Revolution’s inadequate attention to fraternity. These four antinomies
characterize both 1789’s avowed departure from the ancien régime’s abuse and neglect of
human liberty and equality, and 1789’s fundamental inability to make a complete break with
the past in order to establish a new order of fraternal relations. As a result of this confusion,
citizenship ultimately becomes a divisive rather than a unifying reality after 1789.
IIa. The liberal suspension of liberty
The first antinomy glares with the sort of light that can only be reflected from the
guillotine’s blade. Despite the inalienability of the rights of the free human person, achieving
revolutionary goals sometimes necessitated the suspension of the citizen’s liberty in order to
“recreate” an equally liberated citizenry. Though citizenship expressed the native and
universal right of persons to be free from the tyrannies of history, that same citizenship
simultaneously served as a weapon against those who somehow did not possess the same
native, universal right. The equivocation at work here cost lives, and the pursuit of a more
humane communitas was put on hold.
Regarding this suspension of liberty in favor of ensuring equality, much has been
said in the extensive scholarly treatment of Robespierre, the Terror, and the Jacobin republic
more generally. Here, we need only point to the well-known Tocquevillian characterization
of the French Revolution: that it routinely sacrificed liberty for the sake of equality.13 In this
willing sacrifice to equality, we see the shifting conception of liberty as the concept departs
its former home in the ancien régime and takes up an uncomfortable residence in the post-
13 In what follows, I am indebted to Mona Ozouf’s excellent treatment of “Liberty,” in François Furet and
Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 716-27.
54
revolutionary era. Whereas in the ancien régime a positive concept of liberties had referred to
the privileges, duties, and immunities enjoyed by a plurality of communitates, in the postrevolutionary era, such privileges, duties, and immunities were anathema.14 The diversity of
liberties enjoyed by the pluriform body politic was deliberately replaced by a monistic and
negative conception of liberty rooted in the individual citizen and his right to freedom from
intrusions (from wherever).
The problem with this negative, monistic conception of liberty immediately arose as
the revolutionary governments attempted to legislate for a newly constituted nation. What
reliable social stability can obtain when the sole principle of social organization is the
protection of individual independence? Thus the utility of the critical modern distinction
between the “man of nature” and the “man of the civil state.” The former person is
unambiguously and completely free and has a right to dispense with himself and his property
as he sees fit. And it is to this person first and primarily that 1789’s Declaration is addressed.
The latter person, however, upon entering civil society lives a more ambiguous and partial
liberty depending on the exigencies of the society of which he is a part. He is subject to the
requirements of order and the sacrifices necessary for peace.15 1789’s Declaration addresses
this second man as well, but without due consideration of all the ways in which liberty is
conditioned and mitigated by the ideal of equality and the duties shared by all for the sake of
common harmony. Addressing these shortcomings of 1789’s Declaration becomes an
important task for Robespierre in 1793 and for the more conservative declaration of 1795
Thermidor. And as we will see below, navigating the possible forms of relationship between
Cf. François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988),
at 72: “What disappeared in August 1789 - and forever - was a society of corporate bodies defined by shared
privilege. What came into being was a modern society of individuals, in its most radical conception, since
everything which might come between the public sphere and each actor on the stage of social life was not only
suppressed but also roundly condemned.”
15 Cf., Rousseau, The Social Contract, I.5-8; II.6.
14
55
the man of nature and the man of the civil state creates a great deal of confusion when 1789
tries to characterize modern citizenship and export it to the international community.
By the time the Jacobins were able to say “no liberty for the enemies of liberty,”16
and made such hypocrisy policy, the natural liberty of the Revolution’s enemies - rooted in
their human nature - was not simply limited. It was sacrificed for the life of a chimera: “a
united people wholly at one with its government.”17 Robespierre could not countenance a
people divided by opposition to and support for the regime. Such division in the nation was
a sign of corruption and intrigue, a failure of patriotism, an irruption of private interests, the
resurgence of privilege, and the reappearance of social strata. And so the opposition had to
be eliminated.18 The history of the Terror is the story of an equivocation between the man of
nature and the man of the civil state. Citizenship was to be the communitas overcoming every
abuse of human liberty and equality. And yet here that same communitas was being used to
deprive the citizen not just of his liberty or his property or his equality, but of his life. That
is, the Terror’s equivocation regarding citizenship’s connection to human nature expresses
16 Cf. Ozouf, “Liberty,” 721, where Ozouf notes how the distinction is key for debates surrounding the
confiscation of clerical property (a natural, inalienable right), the freedom of the press (only free when it was
pro-Revolution), and the freedom to emigrate (which during extraordinary times might be suspended, especially
when the émigré is the king’s aunt). Cf. Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, at 72: “Within the modern
individual there are two legitimate sides: the private one, which keeps him apart from other sin enjoyment of
himself, his family and his private interests, and that of the citizen, which he shares with all other citizens and
which, in aggregate, forms public sovereignty. But the third side, that of the social individual who tends to
create inter-social coalitions on the basis of particular interests, must be ruthlessly excluded from the state.”
17 Cf. Ozouf, “Liberty,” 724.
18 Cf. Ibid.: “Opposition to this unified people could come, Chabot explained, from ‘only one party, the party
of intrigue,’ and any explicit opposition was necessarily criminal (not only from parties but also from groups of
friends, the principal charge against the Girondins having been defined as friendly conspiracy). Even implicit
opposition - including mental reservations, a form of liberty-independence of which the Constituent Assembly
had said no one could be deprived - was condemned as a challenge to the priority of public life over private
life. Hence there was no more private sphere, no zone about which the law was silent. Even voting was public,
since anyone who wished for the good of all had nothing to hide. Gone were Sundays and holidays, henceforth
to be devoted to the exercise of citizenship. Gone was the possibility of retreating into privacy; as Robespierre
said in his last, dramatic speech, the minute the people returned to its private abodes, ‘intriguers reemerged, and
charlatans resumed their roles’” (724).
56
eloquently all that a state may convince itself to do to the man of nature in the name of
preserving itself.
IIb. The equality of unequals
Despite the revolutionary rhetoric of universal human rights and the destruction of
the ancien régime’s irrational and arbitrary inequalities, talk of equality maintains or even abets
inequality. The revolutionary communitas signified by citizenship was promised as the weapon
suited to the final victory of universal human communitas over the abuses of history. But this
univocal collapsing of the two could not be accomplished, for just as more humane
communitas was forced to wait on the final arrival of a more perfect liberty, so was it required
to wait on the creation of an impossible equality.
Regarding the rhetoric of equality and the maintenance of inequality. Mona Ozouf
has shown how 18th century discussions of merit were important for shaping the
revolutionary imagination.19 In the century leading up to 1789, political thought was
preoccupied with the rationality of the human person, and so every person’s capacity to
render certain services to the political body. Montesquieu recognized that from this equality
of capacity would arise inequality of exercise in that certain “active” persons would
distinguish themselves in their service of the larger body, while other “passive” persons
would fail, or be unable, to do so. Some form of meritocracy was attractive, however, in that
it worked directly against the privileges that defined the stratified inequalities of the ancien
régime. Nevertheless, 18th century figures like Mably and especially Rousseau were careful to
aim their “new egalitarianism” not at inequality of birth, but rather inequality of wealth as the
Cf. Mona Ozouf, “Equality,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French
Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1989) 669-83. My discussion of meritocracy and equality is indebted to Ozouf’s essay, especially at 670-3.
19
57
main cause of social disharmony. The hope was to find an “equal distribution of happiness
among citizens” based on their need rather than on their status or their contribution.
Privilege and the inequalities arising from a purely legal conception of equality were perhaps
on their way to destruction.
The Constituent Assembly tried to combine the homogenous citizenry of rational
human persons with the proportional consideration of the various needs of that citizenry.
That is, the Assembly proceeded with an “obsession” for the “just proportion” of each
person’s capacity to be an active citizen to each person’s needs and general happiness.20 The
Assembly’s work for French socio-political equality, in Tocqueville’s analysis, should have
proceeded through three stages: equalization of legal status, of political rights, and of
material conditions. According to Ozouf, however, the Assembly never got much past the
first equalization, avoided the issue of political equality, and could not bring itself to abandon
the principle of property.21 After equalizing the legal status of the French person in terms of
a universal human nature, various factions of the Assembly were left with trying to manage,
engineer, mask, or discourage the ambiguous transition from formal to real equality. The
central problem with the Assembly’s work for formal legal equality is as follows:
it is all well and good to base social distinctions on ‘social utility’ from now on, but
who will be the judge of that utility, which will be used to justify inequalities? [I]t was
[...] Clermont-Tonnerre who, well before the socialists, gave the best definition of
formal equality: “To say that equality of rights comes down to possessing a right
equal to the very unequal portion of liberty and property that belongs to each
individual is [to utter] an abstraction so tenuous, so foolish, as to be absolutely
pointless.”22
Cf. Ibid., 675.
Cf. Ibid., 674-7.
22 Ibid., 677. Ozouf continues: “So whether they denounced, like Clermont-Tonnerre, the illusion of legal
equality when material equality does not exist, or feared, like Delandine, that the people, taking the concept of
original equality literally might forget that it was just a ‘philosophical fiction’ or thought, like Talleyrand, that
education as the way in which the two forms of equality could be brought closer together until the differences
between them vanished, the deputies of the Constituent Assembly always believed that material equality,
20
21
58
Formal, legal equality of rights could not answer critical questions of actual inequality
in the material lives of the citizens that such equality supposedly protected. “Unlike liberty,
which could be defined in negative terms [...] equality required a positive answer to pressing
questions: Equal to whom? Equal to what? Equal in what respect?”23 To work to bring about
material equality while affirming the absolute right to property would terminate almost
directly in bourgeois success.24 The Assembly remained divided, and so simply could not
answer, the question of whether or not force could be used to correct the inequalities that
would come from this “free and absolute right of property.”25 As a result of this impasse, the
explicit work for material equality through the mechanism of property became a way to
further foster social inequalities in terms of wealth, even while these inequalities were
masked by the legal equality established in a universal human nature.26 So, though 1789
dismantled the old, arbitrary inequalities in the name of a new, rational form of citizenship,
by replacing those arbitrary inequalities with a form of meritocracy the Revolutionary lawyers
failed compromised their own dismantling. Citizenship was to univocally represent the
communitas that was to overcome the broken relations of the ancien régime, but the insistence
on property turned citizenship into yet another feature of material inequality.
whether they feared it or devoutly desired it, was a possible and indeed an imminent extension of formal
equality” (677).
23 Ozouf, “Equality,” 682.
24 Cf. Michael D. Biddiss, The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe since 1870, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1977), 36-8 regarding the replacement of one social stratification based on aristocratic values
with another social stratification based on bourgeois values.
25 The story of Robespierre, the Jacobins, and the sans-culotte agitation cannot detain us here. But in their various
ways, these revolutionary forces all employed coercive measures against the propertied. Sans-culotte agitation was
particularly poignant: looting groceries, redistributing food, dressing identically, hosting banquets where the
rich would stand and serve the seated poor, destroying bell towers (on account of their verticality), and
developing pedagogical ditties (Tous à la même hauteur, voilà le vrai bonheur - Everyone at the same level, that is true
happiness). Cf. Ibid., 680.
26 Cf. Hunt’s introductory essay in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, 16-31,
especially at 19-20 for property rights and poverty, 23-26 for ethnic minorities, and 26-29 for women. Cf. Cole,
Socialist Thought, 14-17.
59
IIb. Universal human rights and limited citizenship
Despite the universal scope of the revolution’s vision of human political
participation, rooted in the natural liberty and equality of human persons, citizenship and its
exercise remained the reserve of a certain portion of the population, definable chiefly in
economic and utilitarian terms. The revolutionary communitas signified by citizenship was
described as a natural feature of human sociality. But the legislators equivocated, ultimately
basing citizenship in socially, historically, and economically contingent factors that mimicked
the old order. Authentic communitas was again made to wait for a liberation that the upper
classes were not willing to grant.
Patrice Gueniffey has given a useful portrait of political participation in terms of the
franchise and how French suffrage was deliberately limited in direct contradiction to the
universal scope of 1789’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.27 The Constituent
Assembly in 1789-90 limited suffrage to elections of representatives and gave electors no
agency regarding legislation or the powers exercised by the representatives they elected. The
Assembly also required that a voter be a “full-fledged citizen” who could not be impaired by
bankruptcy or legal trouble, a person of independent mind, and a person with an “interest in
the public establishment.”28 Minors, women, and domestic servants were considered to be
dependent and so could not meet the second requirement. In the Constitution of 1793,
domestics were granted certain rights, though minors and women remained excluded from
the franchise.
In what follows I am indebted to Gueniffey, “Suffrage,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical
Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1989), 571-81 and Pierre Rosanvallon, “Physiocrats,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf,
eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1989), 763-9.
28 Cf., Gueniffey, “Suffrage,” 572-3.
27
60
Throughout the pre-Napoleonic period, the revolutionary governments were
anxiously divided on how to extend suffrage beyond this limited scope. Their anxiety was
understandable. After all, the representative government supposedly put in place by universal
suffrage secured in the legislation of 1789-90 had, in 1792, been surrounded in the Tuilieres
and overthrown by the direct democratic agitation of the sansculottes. It was almost impossible
to quantify the “sovereign” power of the citizenry as the citizenry itself understood it. And it
was accordingly difficult to legally qualify that power. There were those who followed the
physiocratic doctrines that actual land ownership was essential if citizens were to have a true
interest in public life, but there were others who rightly noted that this requirement created
the same problem we encountered above: namely, the construction of another aristocracy,
barring merchants, workers, artisans, and manufacturers from active citizenship.29
Furthermore, factions within the Convention could not agree on what the franchise was for:
were citizens simply to elect representatives, or, as Condorcet proposed, were citizens’ votes
to play a deliberative role regarding legislation, constitutional articles, amendments, and
referenda? The Assembly thus felt itself caught between weighting the constitutional
conception of suffrage one way or another: toward institutional stability, or toward popular
sovereignty. In the Constitution of 1795, fearful of the power the “popular sovereign” was
able to wield during the Jacobin republic, the Assembly repeated the earliest voting
legislation of the Revolution, giving to male, tax-paying citizens the power only to elect
Cf., Rosanvallon, “Physiocrats,” especially at 765: “For the physiocrats, social involvement was governed by
the relation to land. A physical bond to the soil, an obligatory and permanent residence were for them the
tokens of true social integration. ‘Farmers,’ Condorcet concluded [...], ‘are more interested than others to make
sure that the country, which they cannot leave, is governed by good laws. They should be favored in political
laws by regarding them as more truly citizens than others…. The interest of the various classes in the general
prosperity of society is inversely proportional to the ease with which they can change homeland.’”
29
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affluent representatives, and thereby relieving suffrage of its potential as a mechanism for
radical participation.30
We may read the Assembly’s decision in 1795 as a pragmatic equivocation regarding
the revolutionary communitas of citizenship. Though citizenship was meant to liberate and
equalize persons in accordance with their native properties, the consequences for society
were too radical, and the Assembly opted for something like a status quo ante. As Alastair
Davidson suggests,
The majority of the men, mostly of the upper class and progressive nobility, who drafted the
first Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen were at most constitutional
monarchists. They believed and stated that the new rights were for all humans and selfevident, but where politics were concerned, they intended to rule for the people and on their
behalf. [...] They regarded the [people] as unfit to rule themselves without a long education.
[...] The moderates wanted a rule of law that protected the people from power and everyone
from even an elected power. They were concerned that the rights established in 1789,
especially that of the rule of law, might be obliterated if the people really took power directly.
[...] They would not countenance the inclusion of the most terrifying little people in formal
power.31
So, rather than expressing the social and political nature of the human animal, citizenship
became in the hands of the Assembly something more akin to a mechanism designed to
keep order among lower classes that were too keen on participating in power.
IId. Universalism and nationalism
The universal pretensions of the French Revolution awakened national rivalries that
contributed in various ways to perverting 1789’s ideals, paving the way for Napoleon, and
Alastair Davidson identifies this tension as one of the central challenges of the Revolution and its various
efforts at forming declarations of rights and constitutions throughout the period leading up to Napoleon’s rise.
31 Alastair Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind: The Struggle for Universal Human Rights, (New York: Springer,
2012), 185-6.
30
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ultimately nullifying the effort to destroy the ancien régime. The univocation became
unsustainable. French citizenship could not express communitas in the same manner as human
nature itself. And so equivocation became a way to again differentiate communitates and even
to pit them against each other when they refused the liberations of 1789. In this contentious,
nationalizing milieu, authentic communitas could wait indefinitely.
Alastair Davidson has thoroughly catalogued the ways in which the revolutionaries
attempted to eliminate all signs of contradiction between “democratic national-populism and
universal rights.”32 Both the nationalized and the universalized ideals expressed in 1789’s
Declaration were tackled in 1791’s constitutional directives regarding citizenship:
The following are French citizens: Those born in France of a French father; Those who,
born in France of a foreign father, have established their residence in the kingdom; Those
who, born in a foreign country of a French father, have established themselves in France and
have taken the civic oath; Finally, those who, born in a foreign country and descended in any
degree whatsoever from a French man or a French woman expatriated because of religion,
come to reside in France and take the civic oath. Those who, born outside the kingdom, of
foreign parents, reside in France become French citizens after five years of continuous
domicile in the kingdom if, in addition, they have acquired real estate, married a French
woman, or founded an agricultural or commercial establishment, and if they have taken the
civic oath. The legislative power may, for important reasons, bestow naturalization upon a
foreigner, without other qualifications than establishment of a domicile in France and taking
of the civic oath therein.33
The National Assembly thus attempted to create a simple space - ultimately untenable - in
which “foreigners wanting rights just sought refuge in France and French citizenship and
French rights could be legally obtained almost at will.”34 The solution to the potential
contradiction between universal human rights and national citizenship rights was, for a brief
Cf., Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind, 188.
Cf. “The Constitution of 1791” in Stewart, A Documentary History of the French Revolution, (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1951), 233.
34 Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind, 189.
32
33
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moment, solved by making the borders of France “porous” so that “those who wished to
enjoy [France’s] new human rights could simply have them.”35
According to Davidson, the tension that undermines this “open republicanism”
comes to light in the European response to 1789’s Declaration and subsequent political
innovations in France. Despite the universal36 pretensions of the revolutionaries, the
response of Europe was often hostile to the “new human rights,” and various nations vowed
to destroy the rights and their supporters.37 In response to European opposition, the
Girondin faction of the Revolution proposed the first “French” war of the revolution,
“vaunting their right to carry the new principles of the declaration to any other people who
wanted them. [...] France became ultra-nationalist and the defence of the declaration of
rights became the slogan of French nationalism. [...] Thenceforth, the new human rights
would be exported at the end of bayonets despite earlier statements that this would never be
done.”38 This coupling of the revolutionary competence in speaking for a universal human
nature available to the rational mind, with a national response to those who questioned that
competence contributed to deep national antipathy for the Other and even terminated in the
eventual mitigation or suspension of British39 and French40 rights in the early part of the 19th
Ibid. Davidson continues, “Clearly, most of the national leaders appear to have thought that the new rights
would be so attractive that everyone would want to emulate the innovations. Great numbers of progressives
did flood into France. [...] Equally, up to half of the nobility, depending on the region, fled the new regime.”
36 Rooted, as we will see below, in a rationalistic account of a “natural law.”
37 Cf., ibid., 191, where Davidson treats both official and popular rejection of 1789 and the “new human rights”
in various locales.
38 Ibid., 192, relying on the Arno J. Mayer’s treatment of “vengeance” and “re-vengeance” in Mayer, The Furies:
Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), at 171ff.
Robespierre, for his part, was consistently opposed to exporting the Revolution via the bayonet. In Davidson’s
description, Robespierre was a “little man” who “thought that improvements should begin at home, and with
little matters such as a decent life for little people” (Davidson, 192).
39 Cf., ibid., 204: “The new principles were seen by the state as a threat to British traditions of law and order,
and popular hostility towards the French and, therefore, towards “rights”, was used to roll back all the gains in
public rights for nationals that had been won in 1688. So nationalism and national-popular policies, this time
those of the British, showed themselves a reactionary force, destroying those human rights that had already
been won for national citizens.”
35
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century. Following the work of Ronald Beiner on citizenship and nationalism, we can
interpret this antinomy as symptomatic of a problem inherent to liberalism itself. Beiner
writes that “particularistic identities assert themselves most forcefully just when globalist
tendencies present real threats to such identities. [...] Hence there is an unsuspected
correlation between liberalism and nationalism.”41
The revolutionary crusade to bring 1789 to the rest of Europe was the supreme
joining of univocation and equivocation. First, the Girondins univocate: this communitas revolutionary citizenship - would be the fraternal relation that would secure liberty and
equality for all peoples everywhere. But upon the unexpected rejection of this export, the
Republic must equivocate: this communitas - French citizenship - is ours and not theirs. What
was meant to bind European society together according to a common human nature could
simply become a national battle cry.
Given these four antinomies, it is most accurate, then, to characterize revolutionary
conceptions of citizenship in terms that retain the actual befuddlement of the historical
debates that shaped the concept itself. As the revolutionaries had no idea what they were
doing in dismantling an ancient monarchy in the space of three months, so they had no idea
what they were doing in redefining human communitas in the shifting terms of natural and
civic liberty, legal and material equality, inalienable rights, or the nationalist defense of
universal human rights. To the extent that this befuddlement is a reality, the citizen living with
or through the liberations of the French Revolution was not in any thoroughgoing sense
relieved of the sense of being a subject. Talk of active participation, legislative responsibilities,
40 Cf., ibid., 213: In France, by the time of Napoleon’s reign, the nation itself - and not the “Immortal
Legislator” nature - had become “an insuperable premise for rights.” “After Napoleon, even in France, the
notion that rights should go only to those who would fight for the nation became a universal principle. [...] This
posed logical problems for universal rights since the notion of merit or worthiness had entered the calculation.”
41 Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, 23.
65
patriotic and national sentiment, and the arrival of universal human rights - as positive as
these modern developments are - does not relieve the tensions expressed by the vacillations
of the revolutionary theorists. Is citizenship finally now, here going to become univocally
identical with human sociality such that all persons everywhere may, through political
membership and participation, overcome the tyrannies of the past and so restore what has
been broken by long centuries of tradition and absolutism? Or is citizenship going to
become equivocally relatable to whatever a given regime - even one self-consciously and
publicly committed to universal liberty, equality, and fraternity - may decide about how
human sociality and political participation should be conducted? The answer is unclear.
Regardless of the lack of clarity, the category citizenship has a divisive utility that
contributes to political precision and the manufacture and maintenance of social order.
During and after 1789, despite the tensions and confusions regarding citizenship’s
relationship to human nature, or perhaps because of these tensions and confusions,
citizenship became prominent as a device useful for controlling political discourse
concerning rights and duties. Over against the arbitrary privileges of the ancien régime, the
Revolution proclaimed the rationalization of privilege in terms of legal and universal human
and citizen rights. Despite the rhetoric of the various declarations attached to the
Revolution’s three major constitutions, it was obvious enough at the guillotine that the
rationalization and simplification of citizenship could be quite irrational and complex. But
the rhetoric of universal human rights, citizenship, the nature of human persons, and the
sanctity of the nation are not easily deflated. Citizenship is not only useful in this context for
maintaining the state’s competence to manage rights discourse. It is also a useful contextual
prophylactic. The citizen as he is described in the Revolution’s declarations, though he may
be jealously protected from other possible nationalities, is also left untouched by a wide array
66
of more proximate communitates that do actually contact the lives and actions of human
persons. The citizen as he is described by the Revolution is nearly decontextualized, existing
only as nature has intended him and as the law protects him.
The prophylactic function of citizenship serves an important purpose for the young
nation post-1789. It is a device perfectly designed to allow a nation - in this case, France - to
speak coherently and simultaneously at a local, national, and international level to citizens
everywhere. Robespierre knew this perfectly when he made the following condemnations in
his proposed declaration of rights: “Whoever oppresses a single nation declares himself the
enemy of all. Whoever makes war on a people in order to check the progress of liberty and
annihilate the rights of man must be prosecuted by all, not as ordinary enemies, but as
assassins and rebellious brigands.”42 The high-octane blend of universal with national rights
here is critical. These condemnations reveal that the revolutionary conception of citizenship
names local subjects in a legal, inviolable manner that makes them the regime’s own. But the
Revolution’s deep conviction of its own righteousness suggests that France’s process of
rationalizing citizenship is natural, true, and good. The sanctity of the bond between the
citizen and the regime may be exported to other nations, putting all modernized polities on
an equal footing - even banding them together against the retrograde forces of the ancien
régime. E pluribus unum!43 And the one here is decidedly not the One Church spread throughout
the whole. Rather, the guaranteeing of rights according to the transcendental principles of
1789 can itself become something like an international spiritual authority. Citizenship
“Robespierre’s Proposed Declaration of Rights,” in Stewart, 433.
Cf. Davidson, Immutable Laws of Mankind, 191: “[B]oth Girondins and Jacobins, misled by tiny groups of
supporters’ letters from London, at first thought that nations like Britain and the US could get together with
them in a sort of unity like that proposed by the abbé de St Pierre, because all were progressive. Even when it
became clear that both the British state and the British people wanted nothing of the new rights, the moderates
were quick to distinguish between the evil rulers, notably Pitt, and a population duped into forgetting that it
was the source of the liberties newly won in France.”
42
43
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according to the principles of 1789 can be the perfect concrete universal, even the
incarnation of the logos that is the mind of the “Immortal Legislator,” nature.
Thus, the revolution uses universal citizenship rights to replace the arbitrary, bloated,
and byzantine hierarchy of the ancien régime with the slim, efficient, and rational hierarchy of
the nation-state and its citizen. The Committee for General Security attempts to discern the
presence of the virtues of citizenship in certain persons and their absence in others in order
to maintain the security of liberty and equality in the new regime. The Revolution declares its
absolute competence in matters of citizenship in order to restore ordered fraternity after the
fall of the Estates General. And by using citizenship as a device for creating distinctions
between political authority and all other institutions, the Revolution exports to the rest of
Europe a vision of a new kind of society. This new kind of society is no longer intelligible as
a constellation of communitates that determine rights and duties by virtue of the overlapping
and complementary authorities of their jurisdictions. Rather, this new kind of society is
intelligible in the light of a single star, the most glorious legal fiction there is: equality.
III. 1789’s Univocity and Equivocity
So, we might ask, if this citizenship was worthy of bloodshed, why not liberté, egalité, et
citoyonneté? Smoldering within the effort to construct a citizenship that would restore the
broken social relations were two critical principles of the Revolution: the nation and
humanity. Had the events of 1789 and their aftermath been solely directed toward
reimagining French fraternity and promoting and securing the rights of French citizens
within French borders, things would perhaps have been different. The Revolution could
have attended more deliberately to the various communitates that made up historic French life.
But within this national crucible, another communitas was being reimagined based on
an alloy of French political citizenship and something larger than the polis, the municipality,
68
the national regime, the country, the empire, and even the Catholic Church. Note the first
two rights of the Declaration. The revolutionary lawyers speak not only to le citoyen, but also
to l’humanité.
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights; social distinctions may be based only
upon general usefulness.
2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable
rights of man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.44
The Revolution, from its exalted height in the eye of nature alone, speaks directly to the
individual person, and indeed to all individual persons wherever on the map and whenever in
history they may be. The political innovations to follow from this Declaration are not first
embedded within communitates. So, whereas Aristotle’s Politics begins with a discussion of the
household, and so by implication the broader social context in which the political is formed,
the Declaration begins politics with an address to isolable monads. Any polity anywhere in the
world at any given time opposed to this latter politics the Revolution could consider
insufficiently political. It was a short step from accusing such polities of political
insufficiency to declaring such polities worthy of the bayonet.
The problem is the univocal habit at work here. If citizenship is to be sufficiently
political and so restore the broken relations of nature and history, the Revolution requires
that it be seen as the seamless joining of the local and the universal. In other words,
citizenship must become the local mode by which human persons participate in a more
authentic human communitas. As we will see below, Mazzini recognized the tremendous moral
energy in this vision of citizenship and made it the central aspect of his social thought. But
performing such a univocation between citizenship and authentic communitas carries with it
certain problems. Consider the local valence first. Univocating between citizenship and
communitas within a national political regime is somewhat intelligible. That is, we can look at a
44
“Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in Stewart, A Documentary Survey, 114.
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particular polis, municipality, a kingdom, or an empire in history and understand how political
theory could attach authentic human communitas to membership in that particular. This is
relatively straightforward jingoism. These are all physical political forms interpretable as
such, even if they vary in size, in conceptions of sovereignty, in notions of participation,
and/or in relative adequacy to the various forms of regime. Furthermore, these are all
political forms that are understandably titillated by the hegemonic lure of univocity. If the
communitas of the nation is the historical expression of the communitas of humanity itself,
perhaps these regimes could be like gods, creating humans.
But consider the universal valence. What could a universal political form be? Can the
human species itself express a common will describable in political terms? The Catholic
Church in 1789 France is the nearest contender for an archetype of the universal-political
form. But as we will see below in treating Leo XIII’s ecclesiology, such a description is
incompatible with the Church’s self-understanding, no matter what one might assume
regarding the Holy See’s desire for temporal authority. Indeed, the Catholic Church’s
universality is described in the 19th century in increasingly social terms directly in response
to a politicization of the Church that degrades the universal body of Christ to the level of
one more external authority absorbable by the state. Thus the possibility of describing a
human community in social or political terms is critical, for it speaks to orders of human
relations and how we imagine their authority. In section 1.2 of this chapter, we will see how
Mazzini’s eschatological vision of citizenship, within his romantic and idealist patriotism,
posits a universal political form in the shape of a future humanity. Provocatively, for Mazzini
this is the historical replacement of the Catholic Church, which failed, according to Mazzini,
to truly associate humans with each other. For Mazzini, it will be up to the nation to create
70
the universal political communtias that will ultimately absorb the nation’s own identity in an
unknown future.
1789’s first Declaration proclaims the Revolution competent as an interpreter of both
the human communitas embodied in political citizenship, and the human person’s sociality,
rooted in a universal, inviolable nature bound to be respected by all. The Declaration links the
meanings of the words citizen and social to a highly differentiated social imagination rooted in
the political form expressed by these first two rights.45 Less than four years later, in
Robespierre’s proposed declaration of the rights of man and citizen, the rhetoric became
metaphysical, placing the category citizenship directly before the eyes of the Immortal
Legislator’s “eternal laws of justice and of reason.”46 In Robespierre’s hands, the category
citizenship becomes a relation no longer describable in the humbler, more limited political
lexicon. That is, if the rights of citizens exist on account of the Immortal Legislator’s
“eternal laws of justice and of reason,” then are we not affirming a pre-political givenness,
perhaps even a created goodness, underwriting those same rights? According to Davidson,
the revolutionaries wanted “a statement of rights for all humans everywhere based on the US
model but updated in terms of natural law.”47 The natural law was, moreover, the
mechanism by which the revolutionary lawyers would establish a legal edifice that would
liberate modern citizens from responsibility to any “higher” legal regime such as comprised
It falls beyond the scope of my project to treat the many ways in which 1789 is an expression of central
tenets of political theory originating in the mid-17th century and then developing throughout the 18th century.
This intellectual ferment building up to 1789 is what the journalist Emmet John Hughes has called the
foundation work of the “liberal faith,” which rests on the social philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Hartley,
Condillac, Helvetius, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Smith. “The Enlightened [...] believed they
had found [...] a new instrument by which they might prove that their philosophy could make more good men
than sufficient or efficacious grace. [...] The social gospel of these men was a protest and a promise - a protest
against a rigidified social organization built on dead religious and social premises, and constricting the naturally
and, they believed, justly dynamic forces of the day; a promise that once those forces were released a new and
better life for mankind would follow.” Cf. Emmet John Hughes, The Church and Liberal Society, (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1944), 87, 88.
46 “Robespierre’s Proposed Declaration of Rights,” in Stewart, 430.
47 Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind, 175.
45
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the ancien régime.48 But Siéyès quickly disabuses us of any notion that revolutionary citizenship
is replacing the hierarchies of the ancien régime with hierarchies that signify human
participation in the Eternal Law of the Triune Lord. Whatever the “natural law” is to which
the revolutionary lawyers appealed, it is not a natural law recognizable to the Christian
tradition. Siéyès demanded that a
Declaration of Rights must change totally in spirit and nature. It ceases to be a concession, a
transaction, a treaty condition or a contract between authority and authority. There is only
one power, one authority. It is a human being, Man, who commits his business to an agent
(proxy), he gives his instructions; he declares to him the agent, what his duties are; he does not
amuse himself by saying: and I want to conserve intact this or that of my rights. That would
be cowardly, ridiculous, miserable, and I defy anyone to list them completely and
satisfactorily.49
The interpretation, in chapter two below, of Leo XIII’s social magisterium, his
doctrine of citizenship, and the analogia communitatis at work in his thought is an effort at
discerning a Catholic response to Siéyès, especially regarding the state’s competence to locate
the origin and end of political communitas in the singular power of l’humanité. Leo XIII is
engaged in a protracted debate with various forms of liberalism in his day, and this debate
centers on a fundamental question about our ability to discern the connection between the
Christian doctrine of creation, the attendant conception of nature, and the relation of these
two to human society - especially politics. In Leo’s approach to this thicket of issues, we will
see that the stability of any peaceful account of the social or the political will depend on
some metaphysics of creation. Without such a metaphysics, the social and the political
become privative and intelligible only as power and its hidden exercise as coercion.
48 Cf., ibid., 177-8: “Unlike all British declarations [of rights] and documents to [1789], this was no treaty with
what already existed. In this regard, the distance between the British tradition and the French declaration is not
bridgeable. All the British documents are explicit or implicit treaties with monarchs or other authorities. They
fall inside the powers of those authorities whether narrow, as with the monarch’s prerogative powers, or wide,
as with the claims of the British people’s ‘time-immemorial’ customs. The French goal was a declaration that
consciously created rights that had no correlative duties. They were rights created against the notion of duty to
some legal regime which was higher. [...] The clear object was to destroy all connection with past systems of
power and the community/ies that expressed them.”
49 Quoted in ibid., 177.
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Throughout Leo’s social magisterium, he is anxious that the social activity of politics
is becoming nothing more than the coercive exertion of the “one power, one authority
[...Man].” His anxiety was well founded. In asking whether or not politics without a doctrine
of creation ultimately terminates in coercion, Leo’s social magisterium is probing 1789’s
univocations and equivocations and their implicit violence. For in univocating and setting up
citizenship as the communitas, the Revolution sets the stage for the long 19th century effort to
force all non-state communitates into one of the two bureaucratic canals I mentioned above:
either the state department or the private conscience. If citizenship is the medicine that will
restore the broken relations of nature and history, no other relation may stand in the way.
But within this great promise of restoration is the corrosive equivocation that continually
undermines. The Revolution seeks the metaphysical origins of human communitas in the mind
of a god of its own creation. And this god is content to allow liberty and equality to abet
oppression and inequality.
Had the Revolution stopped short of such rare elevations, we may have remembered
it in terms of the struggle for liberté, egalité, et citoyenneté. But as it happened, citoyenneté was
allowed to morph into fraternité. And so, despite making some effort to separate in the
Declarations and Constitutions themselves the rights of man from the rights of citizens, and
despite the historical reality in 1789 and following of limiting citizenship and suspending
rights, 1789 now represents a pivotal moment in the dominant process of the 19th century:
the gathering of all communitates into one and naming it the state. Whatever other
mechanisms contributed to this process - and they are legion - central to the successful
homogenization and politicization of society is precisely this linguistic mash-up of fraternité et
citoyenneté. If citizenship and brotherhood can be held so closely together in the revolutionary
imagination as they are in the Declaration and in the motto of the Republic, then both
73
citizenship and brotherhood - or the fundamental political relation and all other communitates
- can finally be collapsed into one. If this collapse can be intelligibly commended to the
public, then the deepest motivation of the Revolution - equality - and the liberalism it
expresses can finally be imagined and described in terms of the achievable. And if this
collapse can be accomplished, the ancien régime is left finally in the barbaric night.
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CHAPTER 1.2:
ESCHATOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: MAZZINI’S
COMMUNITATES AND THE FAILURE OF ANALOGY
I see the people pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political
subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that wealth tosses
insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the intoxication of brutal, angry,
savage joy; and I remember that those brutalized faces bear the finger-print of God,
the mark of the same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and
behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one bond of equality
and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows in beauty, ungoaded by
wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and duties. And in the
presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish for the present and glories for
the future.1
This is a distillation of the social anthropology of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872),
Italy’s greatest interpreter of 1789 and the young country’s Romantic prophet of national
unity and European cooperation.2 Though he spent the majority of his life in exile from the
Italian peninsula, evading a sentence of death, Mazzini’s writings from Marseilles, Geneva,
Giuseppe Mazzini, quoted in N. Gangulee, ed., Giuseppe Mazzini: Selected Writings, (London: Lindsay
Drummond Limited, 1945), 12
2 It is beyond the scope of my project here to examine the sources of Mazzini’s thought. But this work need
not be done anyway. Without question, Mazzini’s entire system of thought is rooted in, even taken from, the St.
Simonian school of socialist thought, adjusted for the Italian context as Mazzini saw fit. Even the apocalyptic
rhetoric of the school’s founder, the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), is adopted by Mazzini. Both St.
Simon and Mazzini claim to speak prophetically about the coming age of duty, cooperation, and international
association. Mazzini is more certainly indebted to the St. Simonians, however, and their cultivation, after the
founder’s death, of a completely new religion. Cf. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners, 37-61. We know that
Mazzini read Hegel as well and was shocked when he moved to London that Hegel was not more popular
there. Though Mazzini’s vision of historical progress appears Hegelian at moments, Mazzini’s thought does not
rely on dialectical resolution. Association for Mazzini is so fundamental to human nature that the resolution of
subordinate communitates into the universal State is unattractive to him.
1
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and London inspired either admiration or enmity in every major figure of the risorgimento.1
His thought animates Gioberti and Balboa, even if they tried to distance themselves from
him as a matter of political expediency. Cavour fruitfully disagreed with him over key
elements of unification. His thought hounds Charles Albert’s conscience in Piedmont, and
threatens Metternich’s authority throughout the peninsula. Pius IX named him as a serious
threat to the Catholic Church, and the Vatican was even involved in intercepting Mazzini’s
correspondence. He inspires rebellion on the peninsula and admiration among Europe’s
liberal intelligentsia. The governments of Europe almost universally agreed to surveill him
and report back to Austria, which hoped to see him executed. And while the governments of
Europe cooperated with Austria, the national movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and Greece were fired by his eschatological rhetoric. These movements perceived
in Mazzini’s work a startling vision of citizenship and its relationship to authentic communitas.
My argument in this section of the chapter is that Mazzini’s concept of citizenship
within an eschatological communitas provides the Italian national cause with what appears to
be - but ultimately is not - an analogical account of communitas. Though the Mazzinian
concept of communitas often works as an insightful critique of the univocities and equivocities
exported from 1789, in this section I show through an analytical summary of his thought
several important ways Mazzini’s thought falls into univocal trouble. In short, Mazzini offers
us a spectrum concept of communitas that ultimately leaves every communitas within the
Cf. Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 229, where Smith quotes a
eulogy to Mazzini: “For forty-five years his name had been a watchword. When he began his course, Italy was a
geographical expression, when he finished his course it was the sixth great power….He was that rare character
a practical idealogue, who swayed men by the force of his ideas, the holiness of his life and the unique loftiness
of his character….This influence, rising in some cases to an ascendancy such as has hardly been given to the
greatest religious teachers, was employed unswervingly for a single end and it was employed successfully.
Cavour made Italy, but it was due to Mazzini, not Cavour, that such making was possible [...]. It is among the
greater popes that we must seek for the analogue of Joseph Mazzini [...]. Joseph Mazzini was what in the
Roman Catholic ideal every pope should be….He was as incapable of compromise as the Church whose
greater chiefs he in mind so closely resembled.”
1
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spectrum on an identical ontological footing. In doing so, Mazzini deprives the Italian
national cause of a more nuanced understanding of the way communitates are related to each
other simultaneously in terms of difference and similarity. Though Italy’s inability to
appreciate society in this mode is certainly not due solely to Mazzini’s error here, his
eschatological patriotism is a key factor in appreciating the character of Italian nationalism
and its extended conflict with its most significant competitor for social authority: the
Catholic Church.2
Mazzini’s gift to the Italian national cause is his articulation of a vision of communitas
that should be read in both continuity and contrast with 1789’s Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen.3 In continuity with the Revolution, Mazzini prophesies that citizenship in the
new Italian nation will restore the broken relations of nature and history by eliminating all
mediations and hierarchies that obstruct the relationship between humanity and the divine
law and thus stand in the way of the final liberation of the Italian people and eventually of all
humanity. Those revolutionaries of 1789 intent on destroying the ancien régime would have
There is close coherence between Mazzini and Catholic social thought, and this is not surprising, given the
decisive influence Lamennais’ writings had on Mazzini. Cf. Ibid., 80, where Mazzini quotes from Lamennais’
Livre du Peuple to summarize his own project: “Your task is to form the universal family, to build the City of
God, and by a continuous labour gradually to translate His work in Humanity into fact. When you love one
another as brothers and treat each other reciprocally as such, and each one, seeking his own good in the good
of all, shall identify his own life with the life of all, his own interests with the interests of all, and shall be always
ready to sacrifice himself for all the members of the common family, and they equally ready to sacrifice
themselves for him, most of the ills which weigh to-day upon the human race will vanish like the thick mists
gathered upon the horizon vanish at the rising of the sun; since it is His will that Love shall unite little by little,
and ever more closely, the scattered elements of Humanity and order them in a single body, and Humanity be
one, as He is one.”
3 We must recognize that the architects of the Revolution are working to draft a bill of rights and a new
constitution, while Mazzini is penning something like a manifesto. We might rightly judge the pragmatism and
feasibility of their respective projects according to genre. But such caveats only take us so far when it comes to
Mazzini, for he was consistently critical of the accusation that his romantic patriotism is too idealistic and that
martyrdom could “never become the religion of a whole party.” His entire project is designed to overcome the
inertia created by a capitalism and a liberalism focused solely on efficiency and individual liberty. In such a
social milieu, martyrdom is largely unintelligible. Cf. Mazzini, “Interests and Principles,” in The Duties of Man and
Other Essays, 125-38; Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, 58-82
2
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understood Mazzini’s objectives perfectly.4 But we can see the contrast between 1789’s
principles and Mazzini’s own in the title of his most popular work, The Duties of Man. In this
collection of every major piece of his thought, Mazzini recognized that Italy’s method of
restoring those relationships by combating tyranny and inequality could not be a simple
replication of 1789’s. The fifty year interim between the Revolution and the writing of the
materials that would eventually comprise The Duties of Man had proven to Mazzini that the
enemies of tyranny were divided among themselves regarding sovereignty and the purpose
of society. Some emphasized the sovereignty of the individual and focused almost
exclusively on rights, while others emphasized the sovereignty of society and focused almost
exclusively on duty within associational structures.5 Mazzini’s project is designed to
overcome this impasse. In doing so, he implicitly and explicitly addresses the four closely
related antinomies I highlighted in section 1.1 of this chapter.
I. The Duties of Man: The Work as a Whole
Whereas the architects of the French Revolution set about defining the rights of
human persons and citizens according to the primordial human properties of liberty and
equality, Mazzini defines the rights of human persons and citizens according to a romanticidealist concept of fraternal duty carried out in domestic, national, international, and
universal communitates. Writing to the “Italian working-men,” Mazzini shows his hand
immediately: “I want to speak to you of your duties. I want to speak to you, as my heart
dictates to me, of the most sacred things which we know - of God, of Humanity, of the
Mazzini seems to understand this, suggesting that his own project of prophetic or eschatological patriotism is
in fundamental continuity with an historical process begun in 1789. “Hitherto France has been in the lead. In
‘89 France assumed full direction of the process of civilizing Europe. [...] Now the time has come when the
exclusive supremacy of a single poeple must disappear through the rehabilitation of all peoples, through the
specification of new missions. Each people will have its mission and that mission will constitute its test of
nationality. From the harmonious interplay of these special missions will derive the general mission of all
peoples: Progress toward Humanity!” Cf. Ignazio Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1972), 55.
5 Cf. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, 84-5.
4
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Fatherland, of the Family. Listen to me with love, even as I shall speak to you with love.”6
What follows in Mazzini’s work is an extended meditation on the proper order between
duties and rights as they pertain to the maintenance of these different communitates. After
1789, Mazzini correctly notes, “whatever has been done for the cause of progress and of
good against absolute governments and hereditary aristocracies has been done in the name
of the Rights of Man; in the name of liberty as the means, and of well-being as the object of
existence.”7 But this approach to the liberation of the peoples has not worked and must now
give way to a new epoch.8
Granted, material progress has been impressive. And human rights are, as never
before in history, respected in word, even if not in deed. But the maniacal focus on rights
after the Revolution has, on Mazzini’s read, only led to more conflict between the classes.
Citizenship in the revolutionary communitas has not lived up to the great hope of 1789: that
citizenship could finally restore the broken relations. Furthermore, the focus on rights has
reduced the citizen’s ability to imagine sacrifice for anything beyond himself. The
consequence of this historical trend in Italy is that the peoples have remained under the
authority of foreigners (read: Austria). Liberation has not - because it cannot - arrived via the
exclusive focus on rights. In the “holy social war” being waged, “the old French ideas” must
be translated.9 These old ideas may indeed allow Italians “to rise and overthrow obstacles,”
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 8, emphasis original.
8 I use the word epoch deliberately. Mazzini is convinced that the French Revolution signals the end of one
epoch of history and the transition to a new epoch. The Italian national movement must rise to the challenge
of this new epoch by recognizing that the French Revolution was not the beginning of something new, but the
end of something old. Cf. Mazzini, “Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789,” 255-8.
9 Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 14. Cf. Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, 55. Mazzini writes regarding the
national “tactic” for Switzerland: “The age that has just passed, the age that ended with the French Revolution,
performed a mission, the mission of emancipating man as an individual, providing him with three dogmas, the
dogmas of liberty, equality and fraternity. The era that is now dawning will have the task of organizing
humanity, in other words, socialism, not only in its individual applications but as between people and people it will have the task of organizing a Europe of free peoples, independent as regards their domestic functioning,
6
7
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but more is required if Italy is to “found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements
which compose the nation.”10
The Mazzinian solution to this critical translation of the old French ideas is
education based on the principle of duty.11 Italian nationalists
must convince men that they, sons of one only God, must obey one only law, here
on earth; that each one of them must live, not for himself, but for others; that the
object of their life is not to be more or less happy, but to make themselves and
others better; that to fight against injustice and error for the benefit of their brothers
is not only a right, but a duty; a duty not to be neglected without sin, - the duty of their
whole life.12
Mazzinian duty is meant to move the Italian national cause past material considerations of
security, comfort, and wealth and toward a new “epoch like Christ’s.”13 Whereas previously
Italians have lived in a “society rotten as that of the Roman Empire,” the patriotic duty of
Italian citizens will revive and transform society, “associating all its members and its workers
in one single faith, under one single law, and for one purpose; the free and progressive
development of all the faculties which God has planted in His creatures. We seek the reign
of God upon earth as in heaven [...].”14 Society, precisely in its Italian identity and in the
realization of the people’s liberation is to become “an endeavour towards a progressive
approach to the Divine Idea.”15
Mazzini thus introduces in The Duties of Man two fundamental principles decidedly
absent from 1789’s effort to replace the old order through its Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen. The first is a principle of human liberty and equality conveniently unencumbered
mutually associated with one another as regards their common outlook - and the motto will be: ‘Liberty,
Equality, Humanity.’”
10 Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 15.
11 Cf. Ibid., 83-9. For Mazzini, education is distinct from instruction. The former is principally moral, while the
latter is principally intellectual. Education cultivates a sense of duty while instruction makes the fulfillment of
duty possible.
12 Ibid., 15-16, emphasis original.
13 Cf. Ibid., 19.
14 Ibid., 19.
15 Ibid.
80
by questions of material property and natural difference. This tidy estimation of liberty and
equality is then taken up into an idealist account of the human person’s vocation to devote
herself to the social whole - even to humanity itself. The second principle is an account of
the social relationships between parts and wholes whereby both exist for the sake of the
other on their progressive journey through history. The structure of this project is simple
and elegant. But we must not miss the pivotal phrase Mazzini uses to describe the mutuality
between part and whole. Mazzini suggests that the object of this mutuality is not simply to
make individual persons “more or less happy, but to make themselves and others better
[...].” This is the foundation on which duty rests, and it is richly implicated in the competing
social anthropologies of the 19th century. As we will see below, Leo XIII is sympathetic to
precisely this claim, and it makes every bit of difference in his social magisterium. What
Mazzini and the Pope have in common is a conviction that society is not only a functional
apparatus artificially designed by humans to help them manage property, maintain security,
and otherwise foster orderly relations among different persons and communitates. Instead,
Mazzini and the Pope both consider society as a natural context in which human persons
and communitates cause good. It seems that instead of imagining society as a place where
transactions are able to happen relatively peacefully and reliably, for Mazzini and Leo, society
is a moral activity whereby humans participate in the divine gift of bringing about goodness
in the lives of beings beyond the self. I would argue that Mazzini’s insight here is the deeper
source of his immediate appeal to the Italian nationalist movement. It is also the source of
his enduring appeal outside Italy.
After introducing the concept of duty in this way as the fundamental divergence
from 1789, Mazzini devotes chapters to God and the Law. In doing so, he describes the
metaphysical principles of his thought - truly, his new religion of humanity - and the binding
81
nature of the principles’ authority. He then proceeds to describe the human person’s duty to
Humanity, Country, Family, and Self, providing the reader an extended account of his vision
communitas, both in its historically contingent form and in its relation to human nature. He
addresses key social topics in light of his concept of duty: the nature of liberty, the role of
education, the necessity of association, the concept of historical progress, and the economic
question. As a whole, The Duties of Man thus stands as one of the most significant
commentaries on 19th century society.
II. God and the Divine Law
One of the broken relations of history, according to Mazzini, is humanity’s access to
God, which has become mired in a variety of mediations and obfuscations that separate the
Divine from its work in the peoples of earth.16 Overcoming these interruptions is the
purpose of awakening the national consciousness of Italians, Poles, Russians, etc. In so
awakening these peoples, Europeans and eventually humanity will become the royal
priesthood and holy nation that bears “God’s image upon earth.”17 Humanity’s vocation to
bear and even incarnate the “Divine Idea” in history is critical for understanding Mazzini’s
eschatological vision of citizenship and national patriotism. The stakes of national liberation
could not be greater: “The origin of your duties is in God. The definition of your duties is
found in His law. The progressive discovery and application of His law is the task of
Humanity.”18 And in the modern context, two forces stand in the way of this “discovery and
application:” liberal rationalism and Catholicism. His criticism of these forces is rooted in his
estimation of the theological presuppositions underwriting them.
Cf. Ibid., 71-2, where Mazzini criticizes Christianity for setting up the most interruptive mediation: the
historical Incarnation of Christ. This singular historical event was designed, according to Mazzini, to help
Christians of the past bridge the gap between “the immensity of the ideal of perfectibility which they had
conceived, and the sense of the brief miserable life of the individual [...].”
17 Cf. Ibid., 22.
18 Ibid., 21.
16
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On the one hand, Italians and nationalist movements throughout the rest of Europe
face the limitations and abuses of liberalism’s faux religiosity, which claims to know and even
to prove the existence of God, but also promises to separate religion from politics in order
to liberate individuals to follow their own consciences.19 According to Mazzini, liberal
rationalism, in treating religion as a private phenomenon, prevents two fundamental forms
of human communitas. On the other hand, liberal rationalism prevents national peoples from
approaching God in humans’ properly social form. And so it prevents humans from
enjoying communitas with the Divine itself. From Mazzini’s perspective though, when all the
“lies and corruption pass away, as tyrannies pass away: God remains, and the People
remains, God’s image upon the earth. Even as the People, through slavery, suffering, and
poverty, conquers, step by step, conscience, strength, emancipation, so out of the ruins of
corrupt systems of religion the holy name of God arises resplendent, surrounded by a purer,
a more fervent, and more rational worship.”20
In response to liberal rationalism, which knows God, but does not love God,21
Mazzini calls on Italians and Europeans to work for associational life through education and
the development of national consciousness. Only through these mechanisms can national
peoples develop the sense of duty required to form a human unity worthy of bearing God’s
image on earth. In this way, citizenship in a national unity becomes the new priesthood
shared by all persons, united in their common endeavor to progress further and further
toward the fuller incarnation of God in history. It seems that Mazzini accomplishes the final
Cf. Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 22. Cf. Ibid., 69: “You are, then, created for association. It multiplies your strength a hundredfold; makes
the ideas of others yours, and the progress of others yours; and raises, improves, and sanctifies your nature
through the affections and the growing sentiment of the unity of the human family.”
21 Cf. Ibid., 24.
19
20
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univocation: the communitas expressed locally in national citizenship is ontologically identical
to the communitas that characterizes human sociality. Liberal individualism could not see this.
But in addition to liberal rationalism, Italians and national movements throughout
Europe face the central plank in the foundation of the ancien régime: Roman Catholicism. If
liberal rationalism claims to liberate human persons and their pursuit of the Divine by
severing social connection and relegating religiosity to the privacy of the conscience, then
Roman Catholicism severs humanity’s relation to God by preaching his transcendent
inaccessibility and the fleeting suffering of this life. Mazzini characterizes Catholicism as
nothing more than the careful, byzantine maintenance of God’s inaccessibility and the
paternal insistence that humans should suffer the degradations of the vale of tears in hopes
of a world to come.22 Mazzini clearly has in mind not only the hierarchical, mediational
structure of Catholicism, but also the unique communitates growing out of this vision of nature
and history: the religious orders. These communitates, according to Mazzini, misunderstand
fundamentally human communitas in that the orders emphasize poverty and contemplation
over against action. To the Church, Mazzini writes, “Yours is not a religion; it is a sect of
men who have forgotten their origin, forgotten the battle which their fathers kept up against
a rotten society, and the victories which they won, transforming this world which you, O
men of contemplation, despise to-day.”23
The maintenance of this inactive contemplation and patient suffering is made
possible by a particular interpretation of Christ’s command to render to Caesar what is
Caesar’s. On this interpretation, the world may be divided up according to nature and grace,
where some things are reserved for the former and some for the latter. But Mazzini will ask
22
23
Cf. Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 27.
84
baldly, “Can they tell you anything which is not God’s?”24 Like liberal rationalists, Catholic
social and political thinkers sever the relationship between religion and society/politics,
making religion a matter of virtuous endurance through the sufferings of social and political
life. But if humans are serious when they pray, “Thy kingdom come on earth, O Lord, as it is
in heaven,” then they should be busy working to bring about the more perfect union of
humanity that Christianity itself proclaimed.25
In the case of both liberal rationalism and Catholicism, according to Mazzini, the
problem is inactivity, a loss of “spirit” in an age of the sovereignty of “facts.”26 But the spirit
“never departed from Italy as long as she remained, in spite of her divisions, great and active
[...].”27 True, for a time in the medieval and early modern period, Italians lost their religious
spirit when they were absorbed into Christendom, lost their national character, and tried to
“live as if [they] were Spaniards, Germans, and French.”28 The ancien régime was formed, and
the people were “despised by the learned, deceived and fleeced by the priests,” and
otherwise left abject and impotent.29 But it is Mazzini’s unique and prophetic task to call Italy
and the rest of the European nations to “rise again, great and honoured,” in order to recover
the “national tradition” and to awake the “religious sentiment” asleep in the peoples:
Preach in the name of God. The learned will smile; ask the learned what they have
done for their country. The priests will excommunicate you; say to the priests that
you know God better than all of them together do, and that between God and His
law you have no need of any intermediary. The people will understand you, and
Ibid., 28.
Cf. Ibid., 27-8.
26 Cf. Ibid., 29.
27 Ibid., 30.
28 Cf. Ibid.
29 Cf. Ibid. See also 70-1: Mazzini has no patience for this inertia. He likens it later to the belief in fate and
chance that caused “old Oriental and Pagan religions” to imagine the human person as “condemned to move
for ever in the circle described by individuals here below [...].” Interestingly, Mazzini suggests that both liberal
rationalism and ancient paganism are slavishly devoted to “facts,” incapable of “troubling or hoping to change
them.”
24
25
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repeat with you: We believe in God the Father, who is Intelligence and Love, Creator and
Teacher of Humanity. And in this saying you and the People will conquer.30
If Mazzini is correct in his estimation of rationalism and Catholicism as essentially
obstacles to true human liberty31 in relationship with fellow humans and the Creator, then
the natural question to ask is how awakening the “religious sentiment” of a national people
will heal the relations broken by the history of human tyranny. Mazzini’s answer is an idealist
conception of Divine Law incarnate in Humanity itself. Comprised by individual consciences
and the “general opinion of [one’s] fellow-men,” this law enables humanity to “soar
towards” God.32 Mazzini understands the two wings of conscience and opinion on which we
make our ascent in contrast to the liberal rationalist advocacy of “universal opinion” and the
Catholic advocacy of “a code or a book.”33 Rationalism and Catholicism are not the only
threats, however. Mazzini also separates his thought from other social gospels on offer in the
19th century. For Mazzini, capitalism leads to anarchy; socialism to tyranny; liberalism to
inequality and oppression; and communism to “petrification.”34 These social gospels all seek
some organizing principle whereby human action may be coordinated for some discrete end,
but none of them can accomplish the truly human task of furthering “God’s design in
creation.”35
Ibid., 31, emphasis original.
Cf. Ibid., 67-8. Mazzini writes of human liberty that persons possess the “right to be absolutely unfettered
and to be aided, within certain limits, in the fulfilment of your duties.” At 76-82, he describes more carefully his
doctrine of liberty, making it the root of morality, association, and right. “You ought to have liberty and
everything that is indispensable for the moral and material nourishment of life. Personal liberty; liberty of
locomotion; liberty of religious belief; liberty of opinion on all subjects; liberty of expressing opinion through
the press or by any other peaceful method; liberty of association so as to be able to cultivate your own minds
by contact with the minds of others; liberty of trade in all the productions of your brains and hands: these are
all things which no one may take from you - except on certain rare occasions which it is not necessary to
mention now - without grave injustice, without arousing in you the duty to protest” (79). It is unclear what this
latter, massive caveat signifies. But given the story of 1789 and its export, it is not difficult to imagine
conditions in which the liberty so vaunted by liberalism must be checked for the sake of temporary exigencies.
32 Cf. Ibid., 35.
33 Cf. Ibid., 33.
34 Cf. Ibid., 34-5.
35 Cf. Ibid., 35.
30
31
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Progress in this human vocation is accomplished only through education under the
guidance of a “light” and a “rule” that transcends all religions and social constructs. “And
this rule is Intellect and Humanity.”36 Mazzini’s description of this rule is worth quoting at
length:
God has given intellect to each of you that you may educate it to know His law. Today
poverty, the rooted errors of centuries, and the will of your masters withhold from you even
the possibility of educating it; and for this reason it is necessary for you to overthrow these
obstacles by force. But even when those obstacles are removed your individual intellect will
not be enough to teach you the law of God, if it is not supported by the intellect of
Humanity. Your life is short, your individual faculties are weak, uncertain, and need a
support. Now, God has placed beside you a Being whose life is continuous, whose faculties
are the sum of all the individual faculties that have been exercised for perhaps four hundred
centuries; a being which amid the errors and the faults of individuals ever advances in
wisdom and morality; a being whose development God has written and writes in every
epoch a line of His law. This being is Humanity.37
Instead of Christ and instead of a Church as the body of Christ and faithful teacher of
humanity, humanity itself becomes for Mazzini the “living word of God,” and indeed is the
incarnation of God Himself “successively” accomplished in history.38 Via humanity’s
incarnation of God, human- human communitas is restored along with human-divine
communitas. Society is thus the ongoing context of its own salvific work.
We must note how Mazzini imagines history. In the extended quote above, he states
that “now” we have beside us a “Being” who will teach us God’s law. Furthermore, God is
incarnate successively. That is, God becomes. And so all things, from the individual human
Ibid., 37.
Ibid., emphasis original.
38 Cf. Ibid., 71-2: “The men who founded upon the words of Jesus a religion superior to all the beliefs of the
ancient East and of Paganism, dimly foresaw, but did not grasp the holy idea contained in this word, Progress.
They understood the unity of the human race, the unity of the law, and the perfectibility of man; but they did
not understand the power of accomplishing it which God has given to man, nor the way in which it must be
accomplished. They limited themselves also to deducing the rule of life from the contemplation of the
individual. Humanity as a collective body remained unknown to them. [...] Their mental position between the
immensity of the ideal of perfectibility which they had conceived, and the sense of the brief miserable life of
the individual, created a need for an intermediary term between the two, between God and man; and not
having grasped the idea of a collective humanity, they had recourse to that of a divine incarnation; they declared
that faith in this incarnation was the only source of salvation, of strength, of grace for me. Not suspecting the
continuous revelation which descends from God upon man through Humanity, they believed in an immediate
and single revelation give at one fixed moment, and by the special favour of God” (emphasis original).
36
37
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person to the Divinity are subject to at least one principal that dominates their being: the
inexorable progress of history. So though Mazzini’s theism is a critical aspect of his patriotic
thought on the nation and the citizen, it is important to note that he sees this theism as a
movement past Christianity - especially as it is embodied in Catholicism.39 Put differently,
Mazzini does not imagine his prophetic patriotism to be a deepening of Christianity if by
“deepening” we are to understand a return to the particular genius of Christ or some inner
kernel of historic Christianity. Instead, his prophetic patriotism is an aspect of the
progressive revelation of human morality, which surpasses Christianities of the interval since
Christ, as the original Christianity itself surpassed paganism.40
III. Duties
The exercise of this law, incarnate lately in humanity - or perhaps about to be
incarnate, as Mazzini often speaks of the imminent arrival of a new age - is expressed most
perfectly in the commission of one’s duty. The order of Mazzini’s treatment of human duty
is significant. He constructs the following hierarchical structure of communitates: humanity,
country, family, self. Each station of the hierarchy is indexed to the needs of the human
person destined for ever more perfect communion with God and neighbor. Moreover, each
station of the hierarchy is related to the others as so many arenas in which human persons
are educated and trained in the virtues necessary to live out God’s law in time. No one
station can do without the others, and every lower station on the hierarchy is designed by
God to contribute to the fuller and fuller manifestation of God’s law, incarnate in
Cf. Ibid., 24. Mazzini associates Protestantism with the individualism that plagues liberal thought. In this, he
sounds strikingly similar to Catholic social and political thinkers in the 19th century. Cf. Ibid., 72. Mazzini
suggests that only Jesus himself had a “sublime intuition” of what Mazzini is now proclaiming when Jesus
teaches his disciples in John 14-16 that there is much more to be revealed by the Spirit who is to come.
40 Cf. Ibid., 38. At 70, he writes, “This word Progress, unknown to antiquity, will be from henceforth a sacred
word for Humanity. It comprehends a whole social, political, and religious transformation.”
39
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humanity.41 Put differently, one’s duties to the self as a rational, social creature, to the family
as a domestic creature, and to the country as a social and political creature are subject to
God’s will “that the Idea of perfectibility and of love which He has given to the world
should reveal itself in ever-increasing glory, ever more adored and better manifested.”42 The
hierarchy of relations, then, is designed to harness the human inclination to moral perfection
and to turn that energy toward quantitatively greater instantiations of the Divine Idea in
history.
The communitas signified by citizenship would seem, then, to exist within the
hierarchical structure of communitates here such that it would be contextualized and relativized
in something like an analogical scheme, where the communitas of the family would be
proportionally related to the communitas of the nation, etc. But it is important to note that in
Mazzini’s thought, the stations of this hierarchy exist on something more like a continuum
or spectrum.43 We have already seen that this is the case with Mazzini’s notion of
incarnation. All being is subject to the progressive march of history. And so every communitas
on this spectrum occupies the same ontological space: each one, even the Divinity, is
devoted to becoming the incarnation of the Divine Law. So what appears to be analogical
Cf. Ibid., 41-2. Cf. Charles Vaughan’s estimation of this analogical aspect of Mazzini’s thought, quoted in
Smith, Mazzini, 220: Mazzini “does not exalt the individual at the expense of the nation, like the disciples of
Rousseau; nor the nation at the expense of the individual, as wa the tendency of Hegel; nor humanity at the
expense of both, as was the incurable aberration of Comte. Recognising that each of these has its peculiar
function, he recognises no less fully that no one of them can put forth its energies without the others; that each
of them is conditioned absolutely by the others; and that only to the most limited extent is it possible to mark
off the sphere in which each operates….At the same time he marks out the limits beyond which the instinct of
nationality becomes dangerous, or even harmful. He denies that it is a final and absolute principle. He
persistently subordinates it to the larger claims of humanity...He declares the free development of the national
spirit to be essential to the true life of humanity. So far as it serves that end, it is nothing but good. AS soon as
it throws itself athwart that end, it becomes an enormous evil.”
42 Ibid., 42. At 76-7, Mazzini notes that the Idea of perfectibility surpasses human understanding. Humanity
cannot know its final end. “The important thing for us to be convinced of is, that whatever the end may be for
which we are destined, we can only discover and attain it by the progressive development and the exercise of
our intellectual faculties” (emphasis original).
43 Cf. Ibid., 61-2.
41
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relation, relativizing each sphere of social life with regard to every other, is actually
underneath it all pure univocity.
Duties to humanity
Mazzini feels he lives at an extraordinary moment. With the dawning of national
consciousness in the 19th century, Europeans are uniquely situated to understand history in
its truest light. Europeans are watching each other with great admiration as national peoples
raise “the banner of the Fatherland and of Independence,” fighting, conquering, and dying
for their countries.44 In addition to this burgeoning national consciousness, Europeans stand
at one of the pivotal linkages in the history of religions. Mazzini sketches this history as a
journey progressing from animism to polytheism to monotheism to Christ, who finally
reveals to us that all humanity is a family under God. The Pauline teaching on the unity of
the Body of Christ, and the Johannine teaching on the Good Shepherd’s single fold have
since been “ill understood or disregarded by the successors of the Apostles,” but now, after
eighteen centuries of study and experience and toil, the time has come for the
development of these germs, for the application of these truths not only to every
individual, but to that whole sum of human faculties and powers, past and present,
which is called Humanity; for the promulgation of the truth not only that Humanity
is a single body and ought to be governed by a single Law, but that the first article of
this Law is Progress, progress here upon earth, where we have to accomplish God’s
design as much as in us lies, and to educate ourselves for better destinies.45
The Mazzinian concept of duty to humanity is actually, for him, a “new faith” of
which national peoples are called to be “apostles.”46 Mazzini has borrowed from Christianity
Cf. Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 47. Cf. Ibid., 90-1: “The word communion, [...] was spoken to you by that Christianity which men
proclaimed in the past as the immutable truth, but which is in fact one step only in the ascending series of the
religious manifestations of Humanity. And it is a holy word. It taught men that they were a single family of
equals in God, and it united master and slave in the same thought of salvation, in the same hope, and the same
love of heaven. It was an immense advance on earlier times when people and philosophers believed the souls
of citizens and of slaves to be of different nature. This mission was enough for Christianity. The communion was
the symbol of the equality and the brotherhood of souls; it remained for Humanity to expand and develop the
truth hidden in that symbol. The Church could not and did not do it” (emphasis original).
46 Cf. Ibid., 50.
44
45
90
the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and the Church, turning each to his own purposes.
We see this most clearly with the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Church. Mazzini’s
eschatological patriotism is a new faith in the Incarnation of the Creator, not in the historical
person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in humanity as a whole. His patriotism is also a faith in the
Church as the presence or even tabernacle of God on the earth. But this Church is no longer
a Church of the baptized, and certainly not a Church comprised by any sacerdotal hierarchy.
Instead, the Church of Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism is humanity itself, instantiated like
so many denominations or synagogues or dioceses in the various national peoples that
comprise the human family.47
Mazzini has also co-opted the Christian doctrine of salvation and immanentized it
for the sake of the most downtrodden of society. Human persons do not actually suffer
under the weight of sin and ignorance and so are not meant to live through the vale of tears
in hope of the resurrection. Instead, they suffer under the weight of individualism and
tyranny, and so they are meant to perfect themselves by incarnating God’s law in their
relationships with their family members, neighbors, and fellow citizens in a gradually
resounding chorus of praise for the Divine Law they have discovered within themselves.
Fraternity, and not liberty or equality alone, heals the broken relations. Salvation is then most
certainly liberation in this life, the ushering in of the kingdom of Heaven in Italy, in Russia,
in Poland, and throughout the earth. The communitas of national citizenship, then, cannot
Cf. Ibid., 91-2. The Catholic Church could not accomplish this unification of the human family: “Timid and
uncertain in its beginning, allied with princes and temporal powers later, and imbued by self-interest with an
aristocratic tendency alien to the spirit of its Founder, it wandered from the right way and retrograded so far as
to diminish the value of the communion by limiting it for laymen to communion in bread alone and reserving
for priests communion in the two kinds. Thenceforward the cry of all who felt the right of the whole human
family to an unrestricted communion, without distinction between ecclesiastics and laymen, was, Communion in
both kinds for the people; the chalice for the people!” Mazzini proceeds to speak of Jan Hus as a martyr who witnessed
to the truth Mazzini is proclaiming for Italy: “that there is no privileged class between God and man; that the
best among us in virtue and in knowledge of divine and human things may and ought to counsel and direct us
on the right path, but without a monopoly of power or any class supremacy; and that the right of communion
is equal for all” (emphasis original).
47
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exist in analogical relation to other forms of communitas. Instead, national citizenship for
Mazzini names a recently developed sacerdotal ministry that is now liberated to mediate
between the self and all of humanity, the Incarnate God.
Duties to country
The restorative or even healing function of citizenship becomes clearer when we
consider Mazzini’s conception of one’s patriotic duties. In the great nationalizing trend so
pivotal to the events of the 19th century in Europe, Mazzini’s thoughts on the nature of a
country and its role in his new religion of humanity are a critical inspirational factor, not only
in Italy, but throughout Europe and beyond.48 Though liberal Italy in the latter half of the
19th century never lived up to the eschatological and romantic idealism of Mazzini’s
thought, even her middling attempts to liberalize after unification in 1860 are inspired by an
incorrigible Mazzinianism.49 Any examination of Mazzini’s thought on the nature of
countries and the place of patriotism in the order of human communitates must account for
everything we have described above, however. Mazzini was not a nationalist as we have
come to understand the term after the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.50 His patriotism,
as I have already suggested, must be seen in relationship to other communitates. That is, love
of one’s patria should not totalize one’s vision of sociality or moral duty any more than one’s
love of self should.
Nevertheless, Mazzini’s vision of the country and membership within it are a critical
aspect of his thought. We have seen why this is the case: he felt he was living at a pivotal
48 Cf. N. Gangulee, ed., Giuseppe Mazzini: Selected Writings, (London: Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1945), 37,
where Gangulee describes the impact Mazzini’s writings had on the national movement in India.
49 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 1-3. I will return to Mazzini’s influence on Italian unity in chapter four
below.
50 For this reason, I will use the word country rather than nation. One further distinction is useful for
understanding Mazzini’s thought as patriotic rather than nationalist: Mazzini names the state/government “an
institution legitimate only when founded upon a mission of education and of progress not yet understood. Cf.
Cf. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 115.
92
transition or linkage in history, where the old order of Christianity’s mediational structures
was giving way to a new order of participation in the incarnation of God in time, mediated
now via membership in the nation. The question is what does one’s country and one’s
citizenship therein have to do with this incarnation? The answer is important for
understanding Mazzini’s thought on how to live out the new religion of humanity, but it is
also important for understanding how Mazzini translates the ideals of 1789 into the Italian
context. As I will discuss at length in chapters two through four, the young Italian nation
was continually contending with another authoritative mediator between persons, society,
and God: the Roman Catholic Church. If we can understand more clearly Mazzini’s patriotic
vision of Italy’s eschatological role in incarnating God in history, then we can better
appreciate the gravity of the contest between Italy and the Holy See for the hearts and minds
of the peoples throughout the peninsula.
Though a human person’s principal duty is to humanity in Mazzini’s faith, we are left
with the inevitable question of how to accomplish this duty. How indeed does an individual
person follow through on the vocation to serve humanity with all the piety and devotion
Mazzini requires? In the ancien régime, as Mazzini notes, the only way to serve humanity was
through the Christian mechanism of charity. This was the way the Church taught a person to
give “sterile expression” to the belief that all humans are one family under the Father.51 In
this way, Christian charity is an expression of the faux-communitas inevitably caused by
Christianity’s focus on the individual soul. But in Mazzini’s new faith, the way to serve
humanity is through a more authentic communitas: association and cooperation toward a
common aim.52 In the 19th century, perhaps especially in the Italian context, but also in the
German, Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian contexts, such association and cooperation was
51
52
Cf. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,”, 51.
Cf. Ibid.
93
threatened by divisions of language, history, custom, and culture. These divisions were
exacerbated by the social question.53 And overcoming these divisions was inhibited, at least
in the Italian context, by the ubiquitous and authoritative presence of Catholicism, which
Mazzini considered an outmoded attempt at human communitas. Mazzini’s faith thus has to
contend with significant psychological, social, historical, and practical barriers that obstruct
the realization of human unity. In such a world, how can association happen?
For Mazzini, the country is a gift from the Creator designed especially to address this
critical social, political, economic, and historical problem. In other words, the country and
membership within it are divinely ordained to heal the broken relations of history and
society. From our perspective, this sort of rhetoric has already become nearly impossible to
understand. As we have already asked of 1789, how can it possibly be the case that
citizenship in a nation-state could overcome the divisions that prevent us from realizing true
human unity? Mazzini suggests that the country possesses in the divine economy several
munera designed exquisitely to promote the flourishing of both individual persons and
humanity as a whole. That is, the country occupies a unique office or ministry (munus) in
history. It exercises a specific function (munus) that cannot be outsourced to any other social
body. And in so doing, it offers certain gifts (munera) to human persons, social communitates,
and the human communitas itself that otherwise will never be offered. I will offer here a
synopsis of several of these munera. Each munus should be read as Mazzini’s description of
the office or function of a country, and as the gift a country gives to human persons and to
communitates for the fuller flourishing of humanity.
1. The country physically expresses God’s distribution of peoples, historically destined to incarnate
God’s law.
53
Cf. Ibid., 48-9.
94
Though “bad governments” have distorted the divinely ordained distribution of
peoples, the very geography of places is beginning in the 19th century to express the “divine
design,” which “will infallibly be fulfilled.”54 The paradigmatic case for Mazzini is of course
Italy, which enjoys the natural boundaries of the Alps and the Mediterranean. As if
“favouring you specially,” God has given to the Italian people “the best-defined country in
Europe.”55
2. The country gives human persons a united voice in the international sphere.
“Without Country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as
brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers
without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection;
none will be sureties for you.”56 Mazzini is not only thinking of national interests here, but of
the plight of the classes that comprise the country. To have a country is to present a society
as a corporate person to the rest of the international community. In light of the social
question of Mazzini’s day, this is of great importance for those who do not enjoy social,
political, or economic power. Only after national unification, Mazzini suggests, will Italian
workers be able to effectively address economic and social problems via the appropriate
mechanism of a national government, equal to other national governments.57
3. The country gives human persons a place to love as home and in which to work for the greater
good of humanity.
Cf. Ibid., 52.
Ibid., 53.
56 Ibid.
57 Cf. Ibid., 53-4.
54
55
95
A country is one’s home and family, “with which we have a more intimate and
quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others.”58 It is “the fulcrum of the
lever which we have to wield for the common good.”59
4. The country mediates to human persons a proximate, receivable, intelligible experience of
incarnating a larger whole in their own lives, thereby facilitating the mission to which God has called
humanity as a whole.
Mazzini suggests that humanity should be likened to “a great army moving to the
conquest of unknown lands,” and all the countries “are different corps and divisions of that
army.”60 This experience of hierarchical mediation is directly related to the moral formation
of individual citizens:
And may the constant thought of your soul be for Italy, may all the acts of your life
be worthy of her, and may the standard beneath which you range yourselves to work
for Humanity be Italy’s. Do not say I; say we. Be every one of you an incarnation of
your Country, and feel himself and make himself responsible for his fellowcountrymen; let each one of you learn to act in such a way that in him men shall
respect and love his Country.61
5. The country brings persons together in communitas rather than mere aggregation.
Mazzini states that one of the marks of the country is its oneness, or indivisibility. It
is a “fellowship of free and equal men bound together in a brotherly concord of labour
towards a single end.” Given the concord that obtains between fellow citizens, a Country is
more than an aggregation. It is instead a true association characterized by a “uniformity”
incompatible with caste, privilege, and inequality. From this perspective, what we call the
ancien régime was incapable of forming nations or peoples. In this way, 1789’s failure to
accomplish true fraternity places it in fundamental continuity with the ancien régime. Both the
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 55.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., emphasis original.
58
59
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ancien régime and the Revolution that signaled its demise could only form “a multitude, a
fortuitous agglomeration of men whom circumstances have brought together and different
circumstances will separate.”62 Catholicism, with its insistence that charity is the source of
authentic communitas only aided this privative form of association.
6. The country gives expression to the will and sentiments of the people.
In addition to legislating the will of the people, a country also gives expression to the
love that binds the “sons of that territory.” For Mazzini, the country is the perfect
expression of fraternité. “As the members of a family cannot rejoice at the common table if
one of their number is far away, [...] so you should have no joy or repose as long as a portion
of the territory upon which your language is spoken is separated from the Nation.”63 And
further, as long as a “single one of your brothers is not represented by his own vote in the
development of national life,” the love binding the territory together and the country itself
are compromised.64
The country, in Mazzini’s estimation, is thus the supreme mediator between one’s
proximate communitates and the ultimate communitas, God incarnating in humanity. Citizenship
in the national communitas thus serves purposes that no other membership can: it links
together all the forms of the human inclination to society and coordinates them to a singular
end, which is nothing short of life with God: beatitude.
Duties to family
Ibid., 57. It is remarkable that Mazzini’s notion of true concord within a social unity of order demands
uniformity. The 19th century Catholic conception of concord and social unities, on the other hand, emphasizes
plurality and even natural inequality. Cf. Ibid., 88, where Mazzini follows closely the sensibility of 1789. After
describing how liberalism advocates “arbitrary will” rather than authentic liberty, Mazzini states, “True Liberty
cannot exist without equality, and there can be no equality among those who do not proceed from one basis,
from a common principle, from a uniform sense of Duty. Liberty cannot be exercised outside that sense of
Duty.”
63 Ibid., 55.
64 Cf. Ibid., 59.
62
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Unsurprisingly, the vocation of the family in Mazzini’s new faith is to educate
children for the virtues of citizenship in the country. Mazzini speaks romantically about the
genius of “Woman,” who through the “divine mystery of reproduction” points the family
toward eternity.65 Mazzini’s thoughts on “Woman” are meant to inspire families to take their
sacred duty seriously. Indeed, Mazzini even wonders if one day the sacred country will
“disappear” and “every man shall reflect in his own conscience the moral laws of
Humanity.”66 Even in that day, when Mazzinian salvation has been accomplished, the family
will endure, because it is the “cradle of Humanity.” Until that day, and especially in the
national epoch, Mazzini calls Italians to “sanctify the Family more and more and to link it
ever closer to the Country [...].”67 Mazzini’s spectral conception of the hierarchy of social
bodies comes to the fore again here, and he suggests that as the task of a country is to
educate persons in their humanity, so the task of the family is to educate persons in
citizenship.68 For this reason, “Family and Country are the two extreme points of the same
line.”69 It is thus only with the family that Mazzini approaches an analogia communitatis.
Though the country may one day resolve itself into a universal humanity, the family’s fate is
apparently secure on account of its native integrity, rooted in the biological exigencies of the
sexes and their propagation of the species.
Nevertheless, the family’s identity is not simply biological. The family also has a
rational and social identity almost thoroughly characterized by the service it renders to the
new priesthood of the citizen. The family’s vocation to raise citizens may be ever more fully
realized in history as humanity approaches ever deeper unity. And so despite its integrity, the
Cf. Ibid., 61.
Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Cf. Ibid.
69 Ibid., 61-2.
65
66
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family’s native form and function remain on ontologically identical footing with the rest of
being, each aspect of which is journeying to the new age. I will return to these themes in
chapter four, on matrimony and civil legislation under liberal Italy. There, we will encounter
in more detail the ways in which Mazzini’s efforts to relate the person, the family, and the
nation or state participate in a broader theoretical debate about the natural integrity of the
family, the state’s jurisdiction over the family, and the ultimate destiny of the family in
history.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion I would like to draw out some connections based on what we
have said about univocal and equivocal accounts of communitas in light of 1789 and Mazzini’s
thought. Mazzini illuminates the lure and the ultimate lunacy of both univocal and equivocal
accounts of communitas. He is surely correct that liberty and equality are indeed the materials
required for an authentic social life, but they do not heal the broken relations of nature and
history. They are only materials - inert, capable of infinite manipulation, endless variation,
etc. In Catholic philosophy we would call them human endowments or properties. The
antinomies I identified above in discussing 1789’s befuddled vision of citizenship revolve
around this problem as the revolutionary architects attempt to move toward fraternity, but
get stuck on equality and then only unevenly address liberty, with violent contradictions. But
as Mazzini recognizes, fraternity is the true life that makes liberty and equality capable of
participating in the restoration of communitas.
As we have seen, Mazzini recognizes this for good reason. Though we will have
more to say about in chapter two, we can say at this point that Mazzini insightfully exposes
one of the primary reasons a social and political relation like citizenship can be outfitted with
human hopes about the restoration of broken relations in nature and history. Mazzini
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recognizes that human relationality is not simply a piece of anthropological data. Rather,
communitas is a moral activity that signals the priority of the vocation to participate in the
divine. Though Mazzini’s idealism ultimately trades on a heterodox notion of divine
becoming in history, he nevertheless demonstrates an important lack in 1789’s ability to
thematize fraternity.
Mazzini’s univocations are distinct from those of 1789. And in being so, they
illuminate 1789’s attractiveness to us. But Mazzini’s univocal troubles also expose the need
for analogical predication. How so? By placing all communitas - even human-divine communitas
- on the same ontological continuum, Mazzini simultaneously obscures the priority of the
Creator’s gratuitous gift of communitas, and deprives human communitates of their native
integrity. There is ultimately nothing unique about human communitas because they all resolve
into a future incarnation of human-divine identity. Even though he hopes family will remain,
the desire for undifferentiated union with humanity and with the Divine Idea is the engine
running Mazzini’s patriotic faith. In this respect, he cannot avoid 1789’s troubles, for
Mazzini simply repeats 1789’s great flattening of the social hierarchy and places it in the
eschaton. All communitas is thus only the practical means in history of achieving a final,
historical end. If this is the case, buried within the univocal ontology of Mazzini’s social
anthropology is yet another equivocation whereby all differentiated fraternal relations are
historicized and relativized into artifacts of humanity’s progress toward a fuller version of
itself. Without an analogical account of communitas, it is difficult to see how this univocal
ontology and this historical equivocation does not terminate in an ironic distance from the
various communitates of which one is a part and to which one has a duty. What are they, after
all? This question is the preoccupation of Leo XIII’s entire social magisterium, which is
founded on a thoroughly analogical account of communitas.
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CHAPTER 2
THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:
CITIZENSHIP WITHIN LEO XIII’S SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
John Milbank has aptly described Leo XIII’s social magisterium as a response to the
“chronotope of enlightenment.” That is, Leo advances a social anthropology that counters
an implicit claim made in 1789 and throughout Europe thereafter: only now, here in these
blessed modern days, has it become “apparent, after the decay of complex and exotic
mythical hierarchies, that political reality is a ‘simple space’ suspended between the mass of
atomic individuals on the one hand, and an absolutely sovereign centre on the other.”1 We
have seen in the first chapter how this “simple space” is imagined as nothing less than the
operating theater in which the broken relations of nature and history are restored to their
proper condition. Milbank’s characterization of this “chronotope” as the final condition for
the construction of an artificial communitas between citizens and state throws into stark relief
Leo’s social anthropology. Milbank states that the modern papacy’s counter to this
simplification was to advocate for “complex space” that could “variegate the monotonous
harmony of sovereign state and sovereign individual.”2
In this chapter, I will show how Leo’s teaching on political citizenship avoids the
pitfalls of univocal and equivocal conceptions of communitas by situating the category of
1 Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997),
275.
2 Ibid., 271.
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citizenship within the “complex space” of an analogical account of social membership. This
analogia communitatis is the anthropological mechanism by which Leo’s social magisterium
argues for the legitimacy of a plurality of communitates adequated to the human person and
necessary for her flourishing as a creature destined to image the Lord through both her
substantial unity and through causing good in her social relations. The communitates of
moment for Leo are the Catholic Church, the state, and the family. Leo’s critique of the
“simple space” of political monism exposes and seeks to counteract liberalism’s desire for
the social and political munera1 traditionally reserved to these social institutions that transcend
(as in the case of the Catholic Church) and/or undergird (as in the case of the family) the
political regime’s proper range. Furthermore, Leo’s criticism deals more explicitly with the
underlying rationale of Mazzini’s insights into the deficiencies and failures of 1789. That is,
Leo exposes the anthropological deficits in the social and political imaginations undergirding
liberalism inasmuch as he exposes the ways modern “simple space” makes human fraternity
less intelligible as a good. By illuminating his analogical account of human communitas, we
gain important insight into Leo’s incisive criticism of the nation-state’s failure to minister to
the socially embedded persons under its care and authority. In short, the analogia communitatis
developed here is an historical and theoretical account of how a Catholic social anthropology
must see the “simple space” created by the modern nation-state as ultimately insufficiently
political. As Mazzini understood so well, the maniacal inflation of equality and liberty is not
itself politics. It is rather so much gas. Without communitas as the final cause of the state’s
1 Throughout the remainder of the project, I will leave the Latin munus, muneris untranslated on account of its
rich power of signification. For my purposes, the word is consistently used to describe the coherence of two
realities fundamental to Catholic social thought: the office or duty or ministry possessed by a social body, and the
gift or offering that social body as a part gives to society as the whole. Though the parallel is not perfectly strict,
one sees in munus, muneris an analogy with the twofold imaging that is the vocation of the human person. On
the one hand, the human person occupies a unique office in the created order by virtue of the sort of
substantial unity she is. On the other hand, the human person performs a unique action in the created order by
virtue of the sort of relational being she is.
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interest in equality and liberty, politics cannot function as one of the contexts in which
humans communicate good to others in imitation of the Lord. Without the proper ordering
of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the political space must remain empty of political action. I
will leave further consideration of this last contention until chapter five below. The current
chapter will simply lay the groundwork for substantiating the claim.
Given the work I have done to establish accounts of univocal and equivocal
communitas in chapter one, this second chapter is organized as follows. In the first section of
the chapter, I will situate Leo within the nationalizing context inspired by Mazzini in Italy in
order to show how Leo receives from Pius IX the task of arguing for the temporal power of
the papacy in a context where the restoration of temporal power is an impossibility. In the
second section of the chapter, I will look at two pivotal moments in Leo’s social magisterium
where he offers a distilled articulation of the analogia communitatis. These two distillations
adequately express the constant vision of social membership operative throughout Leo’s
thought. By examining these two distillations, we will see how the analogia communitatis
enables Leo to speak coherently within the contradictions created by the “chronotope of the
enlightenment” as it is embodied in the Italian nationalizing movements. Once these
foundations are laid, we will be in a better position to understand what is at stake socially
and politically in the third and fourth chapters. There, we will observe how the analogia
communitatis functions as an indispensable tool in Leo’s criticism of monistic liberalism and in
his defense of the integrity, autonomy, and liberty of the Church and the family.
I. Leo XIII and the Risorgimento after Pius IX
In 1848, Italian nationalists were agitating for war against Metternich’s Austria in the
hopes that the Italian peninsula could finally become an autonomous national unity. The
nationalist faction was hopeful that the recently-crowned Pius IX would bless their political
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sentiments and their efforts. After all, his first year as pope was characterized by energetic
reforms and signs that the Papal States were finally to be modernized.2 The situation thus
seemed ripe for a papal-blessed (even if not papal-led) campaign for Italian national unity
and autonomy. With the entrance of Piedmont into war with Austria, the nationalists
thought that Pius would send papal troops to fight. Here, early on in Pius’s long pontificate,
with Piedmont’s forces and Pius’s spiritual leadership seemingly on the cusp of a more
perfect unification, the neo-guelph hopes articulated in Vincenzo Gioberti’s classic, Del primato
morale e civile degli Italiani, seemed justified, and the ideal of a federally unified Italy governed
under a constitution by a modern, liberalizing pope seemed attainable.3
The Roman Curia, on the other hand, advocated neutrality in the international
conflict given the pope’s spiritual authority over both Austrian and Italian Catholics. As
Roger Aubert has noted in his study of the redacted versions of Pius’s famous April 29, 1848
speech, the pope was deeply conflicted regarding his duty as a spiritual father and as an
Italian son. In the first version of the April 29 speech, Pius said two things: that he could not
intervene against his children in Austria and that he fully sympathized with the Italian
2 One need only catalogue Pius’s famous reforms begun in the first year of his pontificate: the controversial but
widely popular amnesty granted to political prisoners; the schematics for a railway; inquiry into the connection
between crime and unemployment; plans for an educational/trade institute in Rome to address unemployment;
the abolition of some criminal law courts and the consolidation of others; setting firmer criteria for the training
of the personnel of the criminal courts; improvement of the prison system; reforming the Code of Law;
establishment of an Agricultural Institute for the improvement of cultivation and raising livestock;
establishment of a gas distillery outside Rome; granting freedom to the Press (along with a Council of Censors
consisting of four laymen and an ecclesiastical presider); and the regulation of grain tariffs. Given this energetic
spirit, it is little wonder that by September of 1846, just months after his election, Romans in the Piazza del
Popolo placed an inscription on the triumphal arch: “He conquered discord by clemency; he conceded public
audiences; he made preparations for railways; he disclosed a fount of civilisation and riches; Applaud, ye
nations. Pius is the beloved name which will be blessed by all centuries.” Cf. G.F.-H & J Berkeley, Italy in the
Making, Volume II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 54-71.
3 For my purposes here, it does not matter that after the publication of Del primato in the 40’s, Gioberti in the
50’s came to advocate for a more liberal understanding of the relations between Church and state in Italy. His
Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia in 1851 expresses the following: “In our day times have changed; civilization has
grown; public opinion is master; and the absolute separation of the spiritual from the temporal is about to be
established among the most civilized peoples. These are the best guarantees and the most efficacious
safeguards of ecclesiastical autonomy.” Cf. S. William Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian
Thought from Cavour to Mussolini, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1937), 4.
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nationalists. It is likely that Pius’s secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, edited this text so
that the second draft of the speech actually delivered that day emphasized Pius’s spiritual
duty to Austria and virtually eliminated Pius’s national empathy with Italy. Aubert suggests
that it is at this moment that the “liberal pope” became the “antinational pope.”4
While “liberal pope” may never have been the most precise description of Pius IX,
from our vantage in history “antinational pope” too easily papers over the great hopes
Mastai-Ferretti inspired even in reform-minded friends who knew him well. Prior to his
unexpected election, Mastai-Ferretti had become friends with the liberal Pasolini family especially the young Conte, Giuseppe and Contessa, Antonietta. The three friends spent long
evenings discussing current events. And over the course of a year or so, the Pasolinis
introduced Mastai-Ferretti to Gioberti’s Del primato and to other key texts of the risorgimento
movement. Evidently, Gioberti’s work had a profound impact on Mastai-Ferretti. G.F.-H.
Berkeley suggests that through the influence of the Pasolinis liberal and reforming ideas
became more and more attractive to the “broad-minded and patriotic” cardinal.5 Though
these developments prior to his pontificate directly contributed to his national popularity in
his first years as Pius IX, they also raise an impossible question from our position: was
Mastai-Ferretti the proper replacement for Gregory XVI? Mastai-Ferretti
was a man whose guiding principle would be duty; but supposing he were called upon to
carry out two contradictory duties - that of the Italian patriot and that of the steadfast Pope would he not be torn in two between his patriotism and his religion? Moreover, he was a
good man; but had he enough hard shrewdness to hold his own among the worldly? Had he
enough stored up experience to cope with so great a crisis as that of 1846?6
Cf. Roger Aubert, “The First Years of the Pontificate of Pius IX: From the Neoguelf Mythos to the Roman
Revolution,” in Roger Aubert, et al., The Church in the Age of Liberalism, trans. Peter Becker, (New York:
Crossroad, 1981), 61-2.
5 Cf. G.F.-H. Berkeley, Italy in the Making, Volume I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 263. The
Mastai-Ferretti/Pasolini friendship and its importance in the formation of Pius IX’s political views is detailed
on pp. 257-66.
6 Ibid., 260.
4
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Mastai-Ferretti’s own estimation of himself inspires this fundamental question. Remarking
on recent excesses of Cardinal Bernetti’s Centurioni - the volunteer police force serving the
Pontifical government - Mastai-Ferretti said not long before his election,
I do not understand the provocative attitude of our government, which mortifies and
persecutes our young men because they breathe the air of their own century. It would take
so little to make them happy and to win their affection! And I cannot imagine why it
opposes railroads, gaslighting, suspension bridges and scientific congresses. Theology is not
opposed, so far as I am aware, to the growth of science, art and industry. But there! I know
nothing about politics, so perhaps I am mistaken.7
It is unclear that Mastai-Ferretti was prepared - even in his own estimation - for the Roman
Question as it would develop over the course of his pontificate.
The idea that his temporal power could in any manner prevent young Italy from
breathing the air of its own century was understandably anathema to him. He had developed
this conviction not only out of loyalty to the Church and in line with his duty to his historic
office. He had developed this conviction from studying the risorgimento movement itself most especially Gioberti.8 From the Vatican’s perspective at mid-century, the temporal
power of the papacy was not only essential to the free exercise of the Church’s spiritual
mission. It was essential to the social and political well being of Italy and Europe. Because of
the gravity of these twin convictions - expressed negatively at almost every point in Pius’s
Syllabus errorum - we can only interpret the Roman Question at the level of competing
principles.9 Two seemingly immovable forces confront each other here and provide us with
the most exquisite portrait of the Catholic Church’s difficult position in 19th century
7 Ibid., 263-4, quoting Pasolini’s recollection of an evening spent with Mastai-Ferretti and a Count from
Ravenna.
8 Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 3: Gioberti “had maintained that the state, in
subordinating itself to the moral authority of the church, would not lose its freedom. Indeed, the state, in
acknowledging the spiritual supremacy of the Roman hierarchy, would not be accepting a position of inferiority
at all. It would only be doing belated justice to its own essentially ethical character.”
9 Cf. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., The Pope and Italy, (No Location: The America Press, 1929), 16-23, 29-41. Parsons
brief and illuminating account has the advantage of being written as an immediate response to Pius XI’s treaty
and settlement with Mussolini.
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Europe. On the one side, liberal “Italy,” intent on continuing the rationalization and
modernization idealized by 1789 and translated by Mazzini; intent on consolidating political
power and unifying the disparate cultures, languages, economies, and geographies of the
peninsula; intent on making “Italians.” On the other side, the Roman Catholic Church,
intent on continuing its temporal authority in the Papal States from its historic seat in the
Eternal City; intent on remaining a visible reality in that City while extending its spiritual
authority throughout the whole of the world; intent on making Catholics.
But by the time Pius proclaimed himself a “prisoner of the Vatican,” his reforming
zeal - so clear and energetic in 1846-7 - had become immovable protest.10 1871’s Law of
Guarantees,11 despite whatever good intentions we might discern in the Italian parliament’s
efforts, was a unilaterally promulgated law - rather than a treaty or concordat - concerning an
affair supposedly internal to Italy. But from Pius’s perspective, the Roman Question could
not be interpreted within the national valence. In political terms, the Roman Question had
an international valence improperly disregarded by the Italian parliament’s unilateral law. But
even this international valence was further situated within the divine mission of the Catholic
Cf. Parsons, The Pope and Italy, 35-7: By refusing the Law of Guarantees, Pius IX created an “entirely novel
situation” for the papacy. Parsons notes that there are three means by which an independent sovereignty might
safeguard that sovereignty: possession of force to repel invasion, international agreement to protect
sovereignty, and/or “free, juridical status before international law. Here was the Pope possessing none of these,
and yet remaining a sovereign. The explanation of the anomaly is that a fourth mode of national existence had
come into being, that of protest. For by protest, and not by any other means, did the Popes protect their
precious sovereignty for fifty-nine years. That they did protect it, is evidenced by the fact that in the year 1928,
twenty-seven countries had full-fledged diplomatic representatives, ambassadors or ministers plenipotentiary, at
the court of the Holy See. Since the Pope could not be called a plenary subject of international law, the lawyers
invented a new and exclusive term for his status: they denominated him a subject sui generis of international law,
and as such he was entitled to entertain diplomatic relations” (emphasis original).
11 The law included the following stipulations: that the pope’s person is sacred and inviolable, akin to the
person of a king; that the pope be given an annual endowment of over 3 million lire; that papal property consist
of the Vatican and Lateran palaces and Castel Gandolfo; that the pope and cardinals enjoy liberty in exercising
their spiritual government in these properties; that clergy may assemble freely; that the Italian government
adjust its role - even in terms of renunciation - in nominations of bishops and in relation to other ecclesiastical
affairs, including spiritual and civil matters in the courts. Cf. J.F. Maclear, ed., Church and State in the Modern Age:
A Documentary History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 256-9.
10
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Church, set for her by the will of her founder. Pius’s letter, Ubi nos, promulgated two days
after the Law of Guarantees, is explicit on both these points.
Regarding the properly international scope of the Roman Question, Pius writes:
“[D]ivine providence has willed this civil rule to be protection and strength for the Apostolic
See; [...] For if the Roman Pontiff were subject to the sway of another ruler, but no longer
possessed civil power, neither his position nor the acts of the Apostolic ministry would be
exempt from the authority of the other ruler. This ruler could be either a heretic or a
persecutor of the Church or constantly at war with other rulers.”12 The Law of Guarantees
implicitly denies the pope’s temporal sovereignty by asking Pius to abide by the parliament’s
decision. Despite language ostensibly to the contrary, the parliament speaks to Pius as to an
Italian citizen.13
But this is not all. Quite distinct from the matter of the Church’s liberty and
autonomy in its temporal relations with other sovereign nations, Pius must also consider the
vocation of Christ’s Church, founded and guided in history by the Lord, and steward of
Christ’s perpetual mission to redeem humanity:
We, as the representative of blessed Peter, have received directly from God Himself all the
prerogatives and all rights of authority which are necessary for ruling the universal Church;
those prerogatives and rights, as well as the liberty of the Church, were produced and
acquired by the blood of Jesus Christ and must be valued in accordance with the infinite
value of His divine blood. So We would not be valuing the divine blood of Our Redeemer if
We borrowed Our rights from the rulers of the earth, especially in the curtailed and defiled
condition in which they now want to present them.14
Pius IX, Ubi nos, §7.
In this respect, the Law of Guarantees is thoroughly Cavourian and in line with his famous ideal, “a free
church in a free state.” According to Halperin, Cavour envisaged “the conferment upon the church of the same
juridical status enjoyed by all other associations within the state - a status which allowed the maximum freedom
consistent with the requirements of public order.” Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian
Thought, 13, 19-22.
14 Ibid., §8.
12
13
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From Pius’s perspective then, the highest stakes are involved in the Roman Question (and
by extension other Church/state contests in the nationalizing processes of the 19th century).
None of this would be lost on Leo XIII. It would fall to him to address in a more systematic
and nuanced manner the ways in which liberalism’s desire to deprive the Church of temporal
power expressed more profound disorders in modern social and political imaginations. What
was required for a successful extension of Pius’s arguments in Ubi nos was a rational
justification for the following claim: If the Church’s spiritual authority is truly implicated in
temporal matters, then the Church’s temporal authority is a property of her essentially
spiritual mission.15 Put differently, Pius’s arguments must be developed to show how the
autonomy, sovereignty, and liberty of Christ’s Church are actually the very conditions in
which persons of a given epoch can become truly liberated to breathe the air of their own
times.
These Pian convictions - the proper unity of the temporal and spiritual powers, and
the Church’s jurisdiction in social and political interests - are forged throughout the repeated
articulations of the Roman Question, and they remain at the heart of much later Leonine
teaching. Indeed, Leo develops a systematic and nuanced way of speaking about the concordia
that ought to obtain among the various communitates that constitute the theater of human
action and flourishing. Leo can argue for this concordia from several distinct but related
directions:
I note here that Pius’s vision of Church/state relations is distinct from Cavour’s concept of a “free church in
a free state,” where the latter phrase refers to a carefully calibrated program of sphere sovereignty that provides
civil immunity from ecclesiastical influence, but that does not completely return the favor in terms of
ecclesiastical immunity. Halperin’s summary of Cavour’s doctrine is useful. Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church
and State in Italian Thought, at 1-17; and 18-39 for the post-Cavourian separatist movement. I will treat Cavour
and his followers more carefully in chapter 3 below.
15
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1. He can point to historical examples of concordia between religious and civil authorities
during times when the temporal and spiritual powers of the Church were wellestablished and duly reverenced by civil authority. Accordingly, we see Leo
repeatedly engage in a particular historical argument regarding the medieval period as
a healthy synthesis of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, and civil and
religious authority.
2. He can provide a philosophical argument for subsidiary relations in which
communitates complement one another for the sake of an efficient and humane
organization of society. Leo is especially adept at such argumentation when he is
speaking about the office of the family in society. And most famously, he engages
this argument to significant effect in Rerum novarum as he advocates for associational
ties and organizations that would promote labor.
3. He can provide a theological argument rooted in sacred scripture and tradition:
namely that Christianity is good for polities and creates docile citizens who pursue
the common good for the glory of the Lord and for the welfare of even the poorest
and weakest. Leo repeatedly uses Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2-3 for these purposes. He
also depends explicitly and implicitly throughout his corpus on the famous
Augustinian claim that Christians make the best citizens. In this way, he defends a
claim that the Church contributes directly and by native right to the conditions for
authentic politics.
4. He can provide a natural law argument that social plurality proceeds from the eternal
law that is the Divine Wisdom of the Creator, ordered to the flourishing of human
creatures. This is perhaps Leo’s favorite strategy for extending Pius’s argument
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against the Law of Guarantees and all it signifies. But it is seldom found in isolation
from the other arguments.
Shifting emphasis one way or another changes the inflection of the argument. And
throughout Leo’s social doctrine, these arguments are inflected variously and for a wide array
of purposes. But two threads bind all four arguments together and allow them to function
coherently. First, and most obviously, are the Christian doctrines of creation and
providential governance. Second, and somewhat more muted within all the language of
social unities and authorities, is a Christian social anthropology. Together, these binding
factors strengthen the four arguments so that with Leo’s nimble treatment, these arguments
become sophisticated attacks on the political monism undergirding modern liberalism.
By placing his defense of the Pian convictions within the realm of a created and
providentially sustained order, Leo allows the eternal and natural law to illuminate his case.
In one way, instead of hectoring his liberal interlocutors, he becomes a fellow spectator with
them as he invites them to marvel at the beautiful complexity of human sociality as an effect
of the Creator’s Wisdom. This posture of marvel before the Creator’s Wisdom comes
naturally to Leo as a Thomist. But the posture also subtly mutes the tones of Pius’s social
doctrine and places the Church, society, the state, and the family in a common theater where
concordia is again possible.
By placing his defense of the Pian convictions within the realm of Christian social
anthropology, Leo becomes more aggressive. As we will see in what follows, Leo’s
anthropology describes a human person and human communitates that require an analogical
account of social membership in order to account for the properly “complex space” of
human society and politics. Within this complex of communitates, all social unities exist in both
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unity and distinction for the array of goods that comprise the flourishing of the rational
animal, created in the image of the Lord, and destined for communion with the Blessed
Trinity. Without explicitly saying so, Leo has proclaimed the Church an “expert in
humanity,” natively competent to restore the broken relations of nature and history. And he
has challenged liberal polities accordingly. This is a more aggressive maneuver because it
challenges the modern nation-state precisely where the nation-state seeks to exercise its
control most subtly and so, most powerfully: in the management of fraternity.
II. The Analogia Communitatis
Leo’s conception of communitas, and his teaching on citizenship in light of that
conception, is neither univocal nor equivocal. That is, Leo never collapses human sociality
into political citizenship, and so he successfully avoids the modern promise that citizenship
will restore the broken relations of nature and history. But while he avoids such univocal
accounts of the political, he nevertheless situates political life as a natural good possessing
integrity within a given cosmological order. Because of its position within this order,
citizenship is never allowed to become an equivocal category of human will and convention.
Pace Mazzini, for Leo, political participation is a natural part of human life that cannot
disappear into new historical expressions of universal communitas with humanity or with the
Lord. Put differently, neither membership in the nation-state, nor membership in universal
humanity, nor even membership in the Divine Idea provides the person with the ultimate
context of her action, her duties, or her rights. Instead, it is membership in the great
communitas of communitates cascading from the Divine Wisdom that provides the human
person with this ultimate context. The analogia communitatis is thus not simply a way of
describing the relations that obtain between the many human communitates in history. It is
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always also for Leo a way of describing the nature of the relationship between the Lord and
human sociality.
In the introduction, I summarized Russell Hittinger’s work on the social aspect of
the doctrine of the imago Dei in Catholic social teaching, noting how this social aspect
provides us with the lens necessary for perceiving Leo’s interpretation of communitas and
citizenship. Now, after encountering the univocal and equivocal accounts flowing from 1789
and from Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism, and after observing the Italian effort to
simplify the social and political space of the young nation, we are prepared for Leo’s
analogical doctrine.16 According to Hittinger, 19th century Catholic thinkers were
preoccupied with identifying “social domains having a sacred solidarity not reducible to state
citizenship.”17 Leo’s social magisterium stands as the paradigmatic example of this
preoccupation, for it is in Leo’s work that we see the first systematic effort on the part of the
magisterium to ‘limit’ and ‘contextualize’ citizenship after 1789 within a hierarchical order of
communitates that included the Church above and the family below the state. Chief among the
conceptual tools Leo used to accomplish this limiting and contextualizing of citizenship were
the works of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius as they were received through Aquinas.
Hittinger describes this constellation of authorities in terms of a philosophical anthropology
and a natural theology enabling Leo to counteract the methodical individualism that
constantly extracts the modern human person from her properly social context.18
16 In what follows, I rely on Hittinger’s “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in
Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 39-78.
17 Ibid., 40-1.
18 As we have already noticed, this extraction from society does not leave the modern human person in solitude
but rather places her elsewhere, beyond the reach of the family, the Church, and other social relations. The
extracted person is typically found in a pre-social state of nature followed by a contracted political milieu - that
is, in a nation - or she is found in the human family by virtue of her species kinship and her natural rights. Only
after we find her here can we reinsert her into a family, a Church, or any other social relations.
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Recall from the introduction that Hittinger suggests that Leo’s conception of social
membership - and so of citizenship - is best understood in terms, first, of the Aristotelian
notion of a “social unity of order,” or what I am here leaving untranslated as a communitas.
This social unity is not a substantial one such as we find in an individual being, whether a
horse, a human person, or an angel.19 But neither is a social unity reducible to aggregation
such as we find in a chance cluster of persons or items.20 Rather, in “a social unity of order (a
marriage, family, college, or church) each individual retains his own identity and operations;
yet the social whole is more than the sum of its parts. It counts as a subject, person, and
agent in its own right. Lawyers and philosophers call this kind of entity a ‘moral person’ or a
‘legal person,’ or even a ‘mystical body.’”21 The key here is the emphasis of these latter legal
and philosophical descriptions on the real integrity of these social unities of order. If social
unities of order are not reducible to legal fictions useful for various matters of taxation and
representation, and if social unities of order exist independent of a larger social authority’s
permission, delegation, deputization, or concession, then the real existence of social unities
of order is the proper context for considering the structure of the analogia communitatis.22
If social unities of order are real, the “simple space” created during the “chronotope
of the enlightenment” is not simply a mistake. It is more like the perversion or even the
destruction of a social reality human persons require if they are to live out their vocation.
The social anthropology following from the reality of social unities of order will recognize
It may be that the best way to read Mazzini’s social anthropology is to see him as searching for a way to make
relations substantial. His desire to see the individualism supposedly endemic to Christianity overcome by a
resolution of all communitates into a universal communitas that is God himself suggests to me that, at root, his
project is about defeating traditional accounts of substance and accident. If humanity is the incarnation of God,
then relation as an accident of the human substance is essentially meaningless.
20 As Mazzini noticed, this is where 1789 leaves us.
21 Ibid., 51.
22 Hittinger’s work draws in important ways from the works of Maitland and Gierke. For a remarkable and
influential introduction to the place of ‘legal persons’ or ‘mystical bodies’ in western political theory, see Otto
Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age. Trans. Frederic William Maitland. (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1958).
See especially Maitland’s introduction at pp. xviii-xliii; and Gierke’s text proper at pp. 22-30 and 61-73.
19
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political citizenship as meaningful and practicable only in analogical proportion to the
broader context of human sociality. This is terrible news for the Italian separatist who sought
to resolve the Roman Question by resolve all non-state social unities into a “simple space”
for the sake of “public order.”23 Such a leveling of natural social plurality fails for three
principal reasons. First, the “simple space” created by this leveling does not correspond to
the differentiated integrity we plainly recognize in the family, the college, the union, the
corporation, the Church, and so on. Second, the “simple space” created by this leveling
cannot minister to the array of needs to which these differentiated communitates are indexed.
And finally, the “simple space” no longer participates in the manifold imaging of the Lord’s
goodness. The social relations that would have borne his image in creation are made into so
many images of the state.
It was Leo’s great insight to recognize the reality of social unities, to appreciate the
gravity of the state’s failure of recognition with regard to these unities, and to address the
situation by developing an analogically proportional account of social membership. The
upshot of his analogical account is twofold. First, analogical proportionality between
communitates depends on a social anthropology capable of sustaining the proportions that
make up the analogy. The human person in all her sociality is unknowable solely in terms of
the domestic, or the economic, or the political, or the religious, etc. Imagining that she is
knowable in singular terms is the univocal problem expressed in the modern inflation of
citizenship as the communitas capable of restoring the broken relations of nature and history.
Second, the analogical proportionality between communitates requires that this social
anthropology precede politics in order to give politics its proper place in human living. The
political communitas is not a fabrication subject solely to the will of the persons constituting
23
Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 13, 22.
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the communitas. Instead, the political communitas exists as part of a given array of communitates
that express first the wisdom of the Creator, who provides for the conditions in which
humans may work in every “chronotope” in order to cause good on their journey toward
beatitude. By recognizing the priority of the social to the political and by ordering
communitates accordingly, an analogia communitatis avoids equivocating regarding human social
endeavor. We can observe this analogical proportionality between communitates - including the
citizenship communitas - at decisive moments in Leo’s corpus.
IIa. Quod apostolici muneris
Promulgated eight months after Leo’s inaugural encyclical, Inscrutabili Dei consilio,
1878’s Quod apostolici muneris is Leo’s programmatic statement against the manifold errors of
socialism. As a whole, the encyclical is critical for understanding the entire Leonine social
magisterium. In the letter, we observe the expansive scope of Leo’s social anthropology
wherein human nature is contextualized within a vision of divine communitas of communitates
comprehending all rational beings. For Leo, the chief error of socialism is that it works to
eliminate the natural hierarchy of this divinely ordained sociality.24 Socialism stands in deep
continuity with what we have seen above regarding 1789 and Mazzini’s efforts to contrive a
society that could restore society’s own broken relations. In the first place, socialism
John Milbank is perhaps correct in criticizing Leo for caricaturing socialism. Milbank writes, “The caricatures
of socialism presented by Rerum Novarum - that it abolishes all private property and threatens the institution of
the family - are indeed caricatures even in the case of German social democracy, yet could be applied to the
latter with somewhat more plausibility. (It should be added that much papal suspicion of socialism had the
character of dislike of a quasi-religious grouping - which socialism was, as much as a political organization outside the aegis of the official Church; hence the desire for explicitly Catholic trade unions etc. more subject to
hierarchical control).” For all of Milbank’s dependence on Gierke in his analysis of Catholic Social Teaching, it
is remarkable that his criticisms of Leo’s caricatures in Rerum novarum rest themselves on caricatures of Leo’s
social vision. If my interpretation of Leo is correct here, Leo’s criticisms of socialism are not firstly concerned
with the abolition of private property or the escape of quasi-religious groups from the aegis of the Vatican.
Instead, Leo’s criticisms of socialism are principally that it exempts a fundamental human social form (polity)
from the pluriform society donated to rational creatures by the Creator. Oddly enough, this reading of Leo
would only strengthen Milbank’s case, as he seeks to reinsert the social and political into a richly Christian
metaphysical context. Cf. Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 272-3.
24
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proposes a revitalized sociality by undermining authority and refusing “obedience to higher
powers, to whom, according to the admonition of the Apostle, every soul ought to be
subject, and who derive the right of governing from God [...].”25 In the second place,
socialism promises authentic fraternity through the elimination of social distinctions between
members of a society, proclaiming “the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties.”26
Finally, socialism works on the original communitas: the spousal union. According to Leo,
socialism “debase[s] the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among
barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, [socialists]
weaken, or even deliver up to lust.”27
For my purposes, it is instructive to note that in Quod apostolici muneris, Leo moves
quickly to the ostensible source of these errors: the “deadly war which from the sixteenth
century down has been waged by innovators against the Catholic faith [...]” who seek “to
subvert all revelation, and overthrow the supernatural order, that thus the way might be
25 Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris, §1. Leo is referring to Romans 13:1-4: “Let every person be subject to the
governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by
God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur
judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in
authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But
if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his
wrath on the wrongdoer.” All references to Leonine encyclicals are from the Vatican website
http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals.index.html. Critical passages have been cross referenced
with the Acta Sancta Sedis (A.S.S.) available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ass/index_sp.htm.
26 Ibid. As we see repeatedly throughout Leo’s social magisterium, this emphasis on the natural inequality of
rights and duties in society is chiefly imagined in terms of protection for the weak, poor, and laboring. Leo is
very aware that a leveling or equalizing of social duties will be of more benefit to the rich and powerful than it
will be to the poor and weak. Laissez-faire capitalism ensures this inequality of benefit from the great equalizing
of duty. Socialism seeks to overcome this, but Leo’s concern is that the redistribution of property will only
damage social relations rather than harmonize them. Leo is thus left between a rock and a hard place in his
negotiation of equality, duty, and socio-economic participation. If he sides with the socialists, property and
human labor are denigrated, breeding resentment between the classes of society. If he sides with laissez-faire
capitalism, property and human labor may be respected, but Leo correctly suspicions that material benefit will
not trickle down. More importantly, Leo is sensitive to the ways laissez-faire capitalism too easily leads to
exploitation. And so he opts for a crucial feature of the ancien régime: the maintenance of social hierarchies and
indexed duties through which the rich and powerful were to care for the poor and weak. Leo’s desire to
maintain this hierarchy does not necessarily amount to a sanction of the manifold abuses associated with this
hierarchy. But Leo does not appear to see a way out of his situation. Here at the beginning of the 21st century,
we still feel this pinch. Cf. §5 of Quod apostolici muneris for Leo’s conception of created equality and social
inequality, which I will discuss below.
27 Ibid. Matrimony and the family springing therefrom will be treated more fully in chapter four below.
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opened for the discoveries, or rather the hallucinations, of reason alone.”28 The results of
this encroaching rationalism occupy Leo’s mind for the better part of his pontificate. In Quod
apostolici muneris, they are summarized in outline: political voluntarism, secret societies, false
definitions of liberty as license, hatred of the Catholic Church, and distortion or even
cooptation of the Gospel.29
After this brief tour through the consequences of socialism and rationalism, Leo
arrives at his description of the Christian conception of sociality based on a reading of
Romans 13. I will quote Leo at length, for this section of the letter constitutes Leo’s outnarration of the modern theories of communitas represented 1789 and Mazzini:
For, He who created and governs all things has, in His wise providence, appointed that the
things which are lowest should attain their ends by those which are intermediate, and these
again by the highest. Thus, as even in the kingdom of heaven He hath willed that the choirs
of angels be distinct and some subject to others, and also in the Church has instituted
various orders and a diversity of offices, so that all are not apostles or doctors or pastors, so
also has He appointed that there should be various orders in civil society, differing in dignity,
rights, and power, whereby the State, like the Church, should be one body, consisting of
many members, some nobler than others, but all necessary to each other and solicitous for
the common good.30
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this passage for interpreting Leo’s
social magisterium. Through his use of Paul’s most important theological statements
regarding the Christian political imagination, Leo makes one thing abundantly clear: his
criticism is principally designed to expose the corrosive effects of liberal rationalism on the
human ability to imagine society as participating in an order beyond the one created by
human will and convention. The passage contains several elements that are essential to our
Ibid., §2.
Cf., ibid., §§2-5. The litany of errors catalogued in Quod apostolici muneris and in 1878’s previous encyclical,
Inscrutabili Dei consilio, should be read as Leo’s distillation of Pius IX’s Syllabus errorum (1864). Along with 1879’s
Aeterni Patris, these three encyclicals should be understood as the charter for Leo’s pontificate. The entire social
magisterium is contained in summary form in these three encyclicals, and portions of each of these three
encyclicals are later expanded to become full-throated articulations of foundational elements in Leo’s social
thought.
30 Ibid., §6.
28
29
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appreciation of the analogia communitatis and citizenship’s contextualized position within the
analogy:
1. Human sociality is an effect of the Divine Wisdom created in creatures for the proper ordering of
their flourishing.
If we track Leo’s reference to the Christian doctrine of creation throughout his
corpus, we find that Leo’s use of Aquinas facilitates a sophisticated negotiation of what we
would now call the nature/grace debate. This debate does not tidily map onto questions of
the Church’s relationship to the state or to society. Nevertheless, the Christian negotiation of
the several jurisdictions traced out by the authoritative social spheres does require an ability
to articulate the relationship between the Lord’s creating and sustaining of a providentially
ordered world and the presence of morally culpable agents and societies enjoying a
participated integrity that is truly their own, even as it is gift. In describing the essential office
of the Catholic Church, Leo is ever insistent that grace perfects nature and that the presence
of the absolute voice31 of the Lord articulated by the Church in society is not a threat to that
society’s flourishing, but is rather its very condition.
The notion is Pierre Manent’s. In his work on the triumph of modern voluntarism over Aristotelian
metaphysics, Manent asks, “But what does one do once the city itself becomes divided, when there is no longer
one but two cities, the human city and the city of God? The political and philosophical dialogue on justice is
interrupted and in fact prohibited by the eruption of […] certain religious claims. The pretensions of the
Catholic church […] that […] proclaim themselves the holiest or the only holy ones, are by definition
absolutely incommensurable with any other claim, just as eternal salvation is incommensurable with temporal
salvation and eternity is incommensurable with time. Aristotle had foreseen the case of an absolutely
disproportionate superiority […]. He then proposed, as the only solution in conformity with justice, to grant
him all power, but not without first giving serious consideration to the solution of ostracism.” According to
Manent, the Catholic Church of the medieval period opted for the first Aristotelian option (all power) over the
second (ostracism). But as the temporal power came under fire, modern political theorists “employed all the
resources of their imagination to work out the most honorable and rigorous form of ostracism by setting up
the whole human world as a self-sufficient universal body politic under the power of the emperor. […] Since
among the candidates for power in the Christian world there is at least one who is always so to speak outside
the game, a player who always has the trump card in hand, an interlocutor whose speech comes from God
himself, the configuration of power can no longer arise, as in Aristotle’s city, from the natural play of the
political community, the spontaneous and then developed dialogue on justice and the good. Power must be
created wholly from scratch, it must be fabricated artificially, that is, voluntarily, by the purely voluntary act that
is the contract.” Cf. Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans., Marc A. LePain, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 170.
31
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Modern political philosophies inaccurately describe human sociality as a concession
made by previously/primordially individual or isolated humans. But from Leo’s perspective,
human sociality is more accurately described as an endowment or a power or an activity that
corresponds to the Creator’s providential governing and sustaining of all things. Sociality per
se thus escapes human deliberation. The human person does not choose to be social, but
rather engages in this activity as he engages in all other properly human activities: as a
rational agent who can be nothing more or less.
2. Human communitas and the flourishing that redounds therefrom is naturally or inherently
hierarchical.
As sociality is properly an activity rather than a pragmatic provision for orderly
human transactions, so is communitas properly a participated activity. This participatory
structure expresses itself hierarchically in angelic, human, and non-human creation. Leo’s
preferred hierarchical schema is the Church - State - family hierarchy. In such a scheme especially as Leo handles it - the participatory nature of communitas is readily apparent in
terms of the munera occupied by every station within the hierarchy and in terms of the
interdependence of these munera for the complete care of human persons. But even within
the communitates that constitute the hierarchy, hierarchical participation is the norm. Given
that hierarchy is the principal mechanism by which a communitas reconstitutes itself from
generation to generation in history, and given that hierarchy is the principal mechanism by
which a communitas forms the social imagination of its members, the normativity of hierarchy
resists even the most strident dismissals of hierarchy as pure hegemony. As Leo notes in his
discussion of intermediaries and of the choirs of angels, hierarchy is the structural
complement of natural difference, or in his terms, “inequality.” The poet would simply say,
“You gotta serve somebody.”
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3. Hierarchical order is present even among the innocent angels of heaven.
Leo refers to the angelic hierarchy precious few times in his social magisterium. But
we should not miss the theological gravity of this characterization of the angels. Leo is on
the receiving end of a confrontation between varying conceptions of politics and its
relationship to fallen human nature. One tradition, often labeled the Augustinian, typically
characterize politics - and so hierarchical order and the presence of authority in a society - as
concessions to a fallen human nature. Were humans to have remained in paradise, no
political authority would be necessary. But since humans have become disordered, they
require the strictures of order and authority.32 Distinct from this line of reasoning is what is
typically labeled the Thomistic tradition of characterizing politics as a natural good
corresponding to the exigencies of created human nature - fallen or not. If hierarchy, order,
and authority obtain among the perfect angels, then what hierarchy, order, and authority we
observe among fallen humans cannot be described solely in terms of a concession to our
sinfulness. Instead, it must be imagined as a created good providentially ordered to the
flourishing of rational creatures.33
4. Hierarchical order is a necessary feature of Christ’s body in history.
As in heaven, so on earth. The Church is not accidentally hierarchical, but is
necessarily so. St. Paul’s analogy of the body eliminates any doubt that hierarchical order
Given the introduction to my project, it is worth noting that Rowan Williams questions this presentation of
Augustinian politics as purely concession to human fallenness. Williams’s read of De civitate Dei is in fact an
argument against Hannah Arendt that Augustine does not repudiate politics, but rather introduces us to a more
authentic politics that proceeds according to truth, justice, and most of all, humility, rather than according to
the superbia that characterized ancient politics. On Williams’s read, politics for Augustine is a natural good
corresponding to the exigencies of human nature inasmuch as politics is supposed to be a school of virtue.
That politics is corrupted in history by the libido dominandi does not exempt it from its high calling to minister to
humans.
33 For one among many useful introductions to these two streams of thought in the Christian tradition Cf.
Wilfrid Parsons, S.J.’s two articles: “The Influence of Romans XIII on Pre-Augustinian Christian Political
Thought,” Theological Studies I/4 (December 1940): 337-364; and “The Influence of Romans XIII on Christian
Political Thought II,” Theological Studies II/3 (July 1942): 325-346.
32
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within an historical community of humans is somehow an artifact of our fallenness. Again,
Leo is making his argument in the strongest manner possible. Hierarchy, order, and authority
are here conceived as essential to human salvation, to the accomplishment of the final end of
human nature.34
5. Hierarchical order in civil society and in the state is analogously related to the hierarchical order that
obtains in heaven and in the Church.35
As the hierarchy of the heavenly choirs is distinct from but related to the hierarchy
of ecclesial offices, so are civil and political hierarchies distinct from but related to heavenly
and ecclesial hierarchies. In a world where society is dominated by a political imagination
that would see all distinctions leveled to the lone State/citizen dyad, Leo sees society as
constituted by a plurality of hierarchical institutions, “differing in dignity, rights, and power.”
This trio of properties is designed to emphasize the natural integrity and irreducible necessity
of these institutions - their reality in other words. That is, when he imagines human
communitates, he does not imagine a group of individual human persons who happen to be
coordinating their activities in a given location or time. Instead Leo sees society as peopled by
social dignities - by actual social unities within which individual human persons live and act to
image the Lord. Again, his preferred focus is the triumvirate of dignities embodied in the
Church - State - family hierarchy. But a complete study of Leo would not limit attention to
these three dignities, especially when Leo is so attentive throughout his pontificate to
Gierke’s Political Theories of the Middle Age, 22-30 is again the place to turn to see how the corporeal metaphor
of Pauline thought is at work in medieval concepts of social organization. The influence of Paul’s ecclesiology
on western social forms cannot be overestimated.
35 Cf. Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris, A.S.S. 11 (1878), 375: “Sicut igitur in ipso regno caelesti Angelorum choros voluit
esse distinctos aliosque aliis subiectos; sicut etiam in Ecclesia varios instituit ordinum gradus, officiorumque diversitatem, ut non
omnes essent Apostoli, non omnes Doctores, non omnes Pastores; ita etiam constituit in civili societate plures esse ordines, dignitate,
iuribus, potestate diversos; quo scilicet civitas, quemadmodum Ecclesia, unum esset corpus, multa membra complectens, alia aliis
nobiliora, sed cuncta sibi invicem necessaria et de communi bono sollicita.”
34
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educational institutions, workers’ guilds and unions, religious orders, and a variety of other
non-state, non-Church, non-family institutions.36
6. The proper metaphor for hierarchical order is the bodily metaphor in which parts of the whole are
considered members of the organically unified body.
Though it is our predisposition to conceive of hierarchy-language in terms of
stratification, power exertion, dominance, and subversion, and of contractual relationships as
the condition of human liberation from such abuses, Leo’s predisposition is almost
thoroughly conditioned by the Pauline notion of an organic unity. We must say “almost,” for
Leo’s deployment of Paul’s ecclesiology in speaking of social bodies is not simply an
application of Christian scripture to institutional forms. Rather, Leo’s use of an
organic/corporeal metaphor for all institutions hearkens back not only to Paul, but to the
medieval reception of Pseudo-Dionysius and the effort to develop a doctrine of human
sociality that comprehended both the Church and the civil power. Leo’s vision of
hierarchical order is the product of centuries of Christian legal philosophy using scripture,
patristic thought, Augustine, Aristotle, local custom, Canon Law, and Roman Law.37
A complete study of Leo would also have to incorporate the work of Gierke on the fate of social unities of
order in western political theory, and of Hittinger on whether or not it is possible to speak coherently of social
orders as real unities capable of imitating the Lord. My work depends, in part, on Hittinger’s persuasive analysis
of the social ontology developed by the modern popes. It falls beyond my purview in this work to demonstrate
the validity of the claim that social orders are real unities capable of moral action - even imitation of the Lord.
Three works of Hittinger’s are critical for understanding his treatment of the neglected scriptural, theological,
and philosophical underpinnings of this social ontology. They are also critical for recognizing the gravity of one
of Gierke’s fundamental questions: why did western political theorists opt for a contractual vision of society
rather than an organic/corporate vision? I have already mentioned above Hittinger’s 2013 chapter, “Toward an
Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology.” See also “The Coherence of the
Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 7
No. 4 (2009): 791-838; and “Social Roles and Ruling Virtues in Catholic Social Doctrine,” Annales Theologici,
Vol. 16 (2002): 295-318.
37 Cf. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 1-2. Gierke writes, “And then to all that was obtained from these
various sources Jurisprudence added the enormous mass of legal matter that was enshrined in Roman and
Canon Law, and, to a smaller degree, in the ordinances of the medieval Emperors, for Jurisprudence regarded
what these texts had to say of Church and State, as being not merely the positive statutes of some one age, but
rules of eternal validity flowing from the very nature of things” (2).
36
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This work of philosophy creates interesting opportunities and challenges in
developing a social ontology. On the one hand, the emphasis on organic unity is a suitable
antidote to the “simple space” created by modern political monism. And Leo deploys the
idea of organic unity with just this sort of antidotal work in mind. On the other hand, for
Christians organic unity par excellence is found in the supernatural body of Christ. The
translation of ecclesial unity into terms that may apply to other forms of social unity is not
impossible, but neither is it the simple task undertaken by Mazzini. In other words, the
human sociality being completed or perfected by the Church is itself a created, natural good
possessing a dignity rooted in the Divine Wisdom. It is not an incidental part of the shuttle
bringing us to complete resolution into the Divine Idea. So, for Leo the mediation of
salvation to society through the sacramental ministry of the Church is not the introduction
of sociality to an aggregate of beasts who have decided to contract a polity with each other.
Neither is it the introduction of a sociality that is provisional and destined for eventual
nullity. Rather, the mediation of salvation to society perfects natural sociality in a manner
that surpasses the human imagination.
7. Human dignity has a twofold aspect indexed to the twofold aspect of the human person as individual
human substance and as social member.
We have already encountered this idea in the introduction and in the examination of
Mazzini’s notion of duty. For Mazzini, society is the condition in which human persons
bring about good and work to perfect each other. This aspect of the duty to cooperate with
others is the source of great energy in Mazzini’s thought. It is no less important in Leo’s
social anthropology and deserves sustained attention.
By way of appreciating the twofold aspect of human dignity, it is helpful to turn to
Michael Rosen’s work on human dignity. Rosen illuminates, to a certain extent, the way Leo
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imagines the social concepts of hierarchy and function and how they relate to human dignity.
Rosen’s insight is that when Leo speaks of human “dignity,” he does not mean it in the
modern, egalitarian sense of the dignity of individual human persons. Rather, Leo uses the
word to signify the “value” of “subordination itself.” In treating the same critical passage of
Quod apostolici muneris we are examining here, Rosen identifies an
Aquinian [sic!] conception of ‘dignity’ as the value something has in virtue of occupying its
proper place within a divine order [...]. [...] For the Catholic Church in the nineteenth
century, all members of society have dignity, but their dignity consists in their playing the
role that is appropriate to their station within a hierarchical social order, one in which some
are ‘nobler than others.’ Instead of sharing in equal dignity, the orders of society should
differ in ‘dignity, rights and power.’38
In this description of the Leonine doctrine, the phrase “members of society” refers
to principally to orders, not to individual human persons. Rosen pays no attention to Leo’s
doctrine of the individual human substance. Referring to Rerum novarum, Rosen writes:
“[T]he idea of the ‘dignity of labor’ [...] should be understood less as an assertion of equality
[of persons] than an expression of the view that labor should be given its proper place within
a social order, all of whose members are ‘necessary to each other, and solicitous of the
common good.’”39 In this way, Rosen gives the impression that Leo imagines human dignity
as relative to the function or office one occupies with others in the social body. This is a
valuable insight that only goes so far. Rosen’s description of a Leonine human dignity
illuminates the necessity of appreciating the ways Leo conceives of the human person
considered in her social relations. Given Leo’s concerns about institutional plurality and
modern individualism, it is no wonder that his attention is often trained on these relations.
But we must not miss Leo’s constant attention to the individual human substance as well.
38
39
Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 47-9.
Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning, 49.
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Elsewhere in Quod Apostolici muneris, Leo is careful to sound this more personal note
of Christian anthropology:
[T]he equality of men consists in this: that all, having inherited the same nature, are called to
the same most high dignity of the sons of God, and that, as one and the same end is set
before all, each one is to be judged by the same law and will receive punishment or reward
according to his deserts. The inequality of rights and power proceeds from the very Author
of nature, from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named. But the minds of princes
and their subjects are, according to Catholic doctrine and precepts, bound up one with the
other in such a manner, by mutual duties and rights, that the thirst for power is restrained
and the rational ground of obedience made easy, firm, and noble.40
Human dignity, then, is not solely rooted in participation in the communitates that constitute
the body of society. Rather, human dignity is rooted both in social participation and in the
creation, by the Blessed Persons, of individual human persons called to communion with the
Lord. Indeed, as we will see below in Sapientiae Christianae, social participation is a source of
human dignity precisely because it is the irreducible context in which human persons
respond to the call to Divine communion. We could express this twofold aspect in a variety
of ways that would extend our insight into Leo’s social anthropology well beyond Rosen’s
contribution. To put the matter in Mazzinian terms, to make ourselves and others better, to
work for the good and the perfection of one’s self and of others, is to incarnate the Divine
Idea in history. To put the matter in Johannine terms, whoever does not love the brother he
can see is incapable of loving the Lord he cannot see.41 And to put the matter in the starkest
terms, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and
strength; and the second is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself. The entire Law and
the whole vocation of the prophet hangs on this twofold commandment.42 Every human
substance stands before the Creator as an individual, rational animal capable of personal
response to the truth and goodness of the Lord. Every human substance lives this response
Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris §5. Cf. also Humanum genus §26.
Cf. 1 John 4:20.
42 Cf. Matthew 22:36-40.
40
41
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in the mode of the animate, participating image of that same truth and goodness. And every
human response is simultaneously a reception and a cultivation of that same truth and
goodness in all of created reality. As John expresses most exquisitely in his letter, the Lord
himself teaches that the principal site of this reception and cultivation is the neighbor. It
turns out that even human dignity is a “complex space” where relations are analogous. Only
in their proper proportion to one another can human-human and human-divine relations
take on their full intelligibility.
It is instructive to note that even the ordering of these several elements of Leo’s
teaching in Quod apostolici muneris works in a hierarchical and even cascading mode whereby
the wisdom of the Creator is donated to human communitates and finally to human persons
who then through their membership participate repeatedly in this same donation. Within this
hierarchical order, we note that every communitas, including the citizen communitas, is
contextualized within a vision of communitates that begins with the eternal law and terminates
not solely in the individual human will, but in the human activity of imaging the Lord for the
sake of the neighbor. The restoration of the broken relations of nature and history cannot be
the task of citizenship alone. But neither is citizenship simply artifice. Instead, the created
goodness of political participation originates in the eternal law of the Creator and then is
donated to the societies of angels and humans as one among many social modes of
responding to and cultivating the image of the Lord’s own truth and goodness in creation. In
other words, the citizenship communitas uniquely expresses one aspect of the flourishing of
the rational animal. Outside of this theological context, citizenship and human sociality
appear schizophrenically Janus-faced. They are either our totally unfathomable context, or
they are conventional labels human persons use to describe the machinations of corporate
activity.
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IIb. Sapientiae Christianae
In 1890’s Sapientiae Christianae, on the duties of Christians as citizens, we encounter
the analogia communitatis contextualized within a vision of the concordia that ought to obtain
between one’s memberships in both the Catholic Church and the nation-state. If, in Quod
apostolici muneris we were left wondering what exactly is meant by contextualizing citizenship
within Leo’s expansive, analogical social hierarchy, Sapientiae Christianae is Leo’s responses to
this question. Though much of the content of the encyclical can be found here and there
throughout Leo’s body of work, the structure of Sapientiae Christianae’s argument itself
illuminates the way Leo understands the historical phenomenon of citizenship in relation to
human communitates more generally and to humanity’s social nature.
Sapientiae Christianae begins with a distinction between modern progress in matters of
security and material well-being on the one hand, and modern neglect of the “higher and
more glorious things” for which the human soul was created on the other. Acknowledging
both the natural and supernatural vocations of the human person, Leo echoes Augustine’s
De civitate Dei by turning our attention to the possibilities of false societies springing from
inordinate love of purely material ends. Wherever society ministers solely to the material
needs of its members, without any reference to God, we find false society. However, the
shortcomings of such a materialist society do not suggest for Leo that true society is purely
spiritual, or that society must become somehow ecclesial, or that the material ends of the
human person are to be wholly disregarded or occluded by her spiritual ends. Rather, true
society in its natural, created integrity ought to function as the historical milieu in which
persons accomplish material flourishing on their journey to their final, supernatural end.
Thus, as we saw above in Quod apostolici muneris, the dignity of the human animal is twofold,
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reflected in both social acts of causing good and in the created integrity of the individual
human substance.
Throughout the rest of the encyclical, Leo justifies this reasoning by attending closely
to the duties of human persons vis-a-vis their memberships in both ecclesial and sociopolitical communitates. It is illuminating to note that the bulk of the encyclical is taken up with
a description of the duties of Catholics qua Catholics and a description of the Catholic
Church as a true society according to the will of her Founder. When Leo arrives late in the
encyclical at the topic of political participation - what one would expect from a letter on the
duties of Christians as citizens - it is apparent that defining citizenship solely in terms of
political participation or political membership is not the principal motivation of the
encyclical. Instead, the purpose of the encyclical is to identify the social conditions in which
political participation can be fully realized in terms of its proper place within the hierarchy of
sociality ordained by the Creator.
As Leo puts it, “Nature did not form society in order that man should seek in it his
last end, but in order that in it and through it he should find suitable aids whereby to attain
to his own perfection.”43 We must pause over this line if we are to appreciate the way Leo
confronts the vexed problem of competing sovereignties by teaching that the works of social
authorities - especially the Church, state, and family - are by their very nature complementary
and conducive to the supernatural end of the person. It is one thing to affirm that the Lord
formed the supernatural society of the Church in order that human persons should find
suitable aids whereby to attain beatitude. This is a fundamental Christian doctrine. But it is
another thing altogether to affirm that “nature” formed society in order that human persons
should find suitable aids whereby to attain beatitude. Such a claim is perennially
Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §2. Cf. A.S.S. 22 (1889-90), at p. 385: “Non enim ob hanc caussam genuit natura
societatem ut ipsam homo sequeretur tamquam finem, sed ut in ea et per eam adiumenta ad perfectionem sui apta reperiret.”
43
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controversial, and perhaps never more so than during the 19th century, especially in the
ongoing effort to separate the civil and religious spheres. Indeed, Italian doctrines of
separation leading to the development of the Roman Question are diametrically opposed to
such a claim.
Consider the loaded language of this statement about nature’s formation of society
for our perfection. Pace modern theories of “states of nature,” society is not solely an artifact
of the human will. Instead, it is something given to the human person by “nature,” which is
Leo’s way of acknowledging society’s origin in the Divine Wisdom.44 Leo is not only
combatting modern notions about society’s origin, however. He is also attacking modern
notions about society’s form and function. If in the 19th century citizenship was seen as
reconstituting the broken relations of nature and history, then membership in the state is the
preeminent, even salvific, form of communitas. Citizenship has finally purified human sociality
itself of the historical and theological accretions. In finally accomplishing this inevitable task,
the state has secured the competence to legitimize sociality as the state sees fit. And so other
“social memberships claiming their origins in nature, history, or divine revelation” are
legitimized only insofar as they are “either the private choice of individuals, or insofar as they
[are] permitted or ‘conceded’ by the state.”45 By absorbing human sociality into itself and by
inventing ministries of legitimation and concession, the modern state does not simply
This is not the only place Leo attacks Rousseau’s social contract or his pre-social state of nature. For
example, almost a decade earlier, Leo writes in Diuturnum (on the origin of civil power): “Those who believe
civil society to have risen from the free consent of men, looking for the origin of its authority from the same
source, say that each individual has given up something of his right, and that voluntarily every person has put
himself into the power of the one man in whose person the whole of those rights has been centered. But it is a
great error not to see, what is manifest, that men, as they are not a nomad race, have been created, without
their own free will, for a natural community of life. It is plain, moreover, that the pact which they allege is
openly a falsehood and a fiction, and that it has no authority to confer on political power such great force,
dignity, and firmness as the safety of the State and the common good of the citizens require. Then only will the
government have all those ornaments and guarantees, when it is understood to emanate from God as its august
and most sacred source” (§12).
45 Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology,” 40. It is noteworthy that the modern nation-state’s desire to
take over the social office of concessions is a reversal of certain medieval conceptions of the Church’s own
stewardship over all social and political authority. Cf. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 11-13
44
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compete with the Catholic Church or seek to replace her. Instead, the modern state
eliminates the social context of the human person’s participation in the Lord’s goodness.
Instead of promoting and defending the communitates that would manifest the Lord’s one
goodness through their pluriformity and integrity, the modern state requires these same
communitates to be images of itself.
But Leo will not countenance the hubris of this modern social ontology. In the
introduction to Sapientiae Christianae he writes:
To contemplate God, and to tend to Him, is the supreme law of the life of man. For we
were created in the divine image and likeness, and are impelled, by our very nature, to the
enjoyment of our Creator. But not by bodily motion or effort do we make advance toward
God, but through acts of the soul, that is, through knowledge and love. For indeed, God is
the first and supreme truth, and the mind alone feeds on truth. God is perfect holiness and
sovereign goodness, to which only the will can desire and attain, when virtue is its guide. But
what applies to individual men applies equally to society - domestic alike and civil.46
We are not misunderstanding Leo when we hear him suggesting that society is a natural aid
to the supernatural task of knowing and loving the Lord. Instead, we are observing his
placing of the natural, social life of the human person in its created context, which for Leo
can never be disengaged from its properly dependent relation to the Creator. There is
nowhere one can go to get away from the Creator’s calling his creatures to beatitude - even
beatitude in its natural elements. And so citizenship, if it is to take on its properly social and
political aspect - that is to say, if it is to truly articulate human dignity in terms of the social
cultivation of the imago Dei - must stand in relation to the many memberships that constitute
the life and action of the human person called by the Creator. In order for citizenship to find
its proper place within the analogia communitatis, it cannot fulfill the liberal hope that it alone
will restore human sociality to its pristine conditions. Such a repristination of human sociality
would depend on a univocal predication inappropriate to the relationship between a limited
46
Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §2.
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social relationship like citizenship and the full complement of communitates comprising human
sociality per se. But Leo’s account of a citizen’s duties in Sapientiae Christianae is never a
dismissal or denigration of the importance of those duties. Just because citizenship cannot
fulfill the liberal hope does not mean that citizenship does not image the Lord. Were Leo to
denigrate citizenship because of its failures to heal society, he would have to equivocate and
detach the communitas expressed by citizenship from the communitates that express humanity’s
natural inclination to social life.
In electing to devote an encyclical to Christian citizenship in political regimes, in
devoting the bulk of that encyclical to a description of the social nature of the Catholic
Church, and in describing citizenship as flowing therefrom, Leo is engaging in a protracted
and subtle negotiation of the theological-political problem as he has received it. In Leo’s
hands, this negotiation is not primarily about making the political more theologically
attentive. Neither is it primarily about making the theological more politically relevant.
Consider the following passage from the latter portion of Sapientiae Christianae:
The Church alike and the State, doubtless, both possess individual sovereignty; hence, in the
carrying out of public affairs, neither obeys the other within the limits to which each is
restricted by its constitution. It does not hence follow, however, that Church and State are in
any manner severed, and still less antagonistic. Nature, in fact, has given us not only physical
existence, but moral life likewise. Hence, from the tranquility of public order, which is the
immediate purpose of civil society, man expects to derive his well-being, and still more the
sheltering care necessary to his moral life, which consists exclusively in the knowledge and
practice of virtue.47
Leo is identifying the conditions in which the political life of human persons may
function as it was created to. In Leo’s mind, naming these conditions is the task of
philosophy rooted in the doctrine of creation and guided by faith in the Triune Lord who
47
Ibid., §30.
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has given humans in history the perfect example of society in the Catholic Church.48 But this
perfect example is not a family, it is not civil society, and it is not a polis. Rather it is a sui
generis mystical body bearing analogical relationship to all other mystical bodies: the choirs of
angels, the political state, civil society, the family, the matrimonial unit, and even the human
body.49 A social ontology that does not properly regard the pluriformity and
incommensurability characterizing this complement of mystical bodies will necessarily fall
short when it seeks to contextualize the human person within those bodies. As Leo is
indicating here in Sapientiae Christianae, this shortfall has grave consequences for human
persons: tranquil order amid the plural bodies of society is the very condition of rational
flourishing. It is the place and activity whereby humans bring about good. The 19th century
error Leo responds to is the politicization and bureaucratization of these bodies such that
they become nothing more than concessions from the sovereign state to human persons
rather than natural expressions of human sociality itself.
Leo never tires of identifying the task of Catholic philosophy, and it is precisely this connection of
philosophy to the revealed doctrine of the Triune Creator that makes 1879’s Aeterni Patris on the restoration of
Christian philosophy a constitutive part of Leo’s social magisterium. Leo does not think Catholic theologians
should become political activists in order to make the Gospel relevant to contemporary society. Neither does
he think political theorists/scientists should simply regurgitate Scholastic philosophy. Instead, he thinks there is
such a thing as Catholic philosophy that enjoys a simultaneous dependence on the revelation of the Triune
Lord and a mode of rational inquiry that differentiates it from dogmatic theology. Whatever we think of this
position now, it seems clear to me that Leo’s focus on the Catholic philosopher and his high hopes for Catholic
philosophy’s social utility are symptomatic of his more fundamental commitment to the simultaneous integrity,
intelligibility, and utter contingency of creation.
49 As far as I know, Leo never suggests that human communitas is analogous to the relations that are the Triune
Lord. This may be attributed to his Thomism, from which he would have understood that only the Triune
Lord is his relations. In the created order, no such statement is possible. Whatever analogies might be proper
and helpful when speaking of the Creator and creatures, it would have seemed obvious to Leo, from a
Thomistic perspective, that having relations to others is not easily analogous to being relation. This is distinct, I
would think, from the analogy of divine and human goodness. A creature can become good, even if a creature’s
goodness is always already participatory and infinitely distant from the Divine Goodness. But a creature cannot
become relation. Certainly, a creature cannot become its relation to the Creator. But in time, creatures cannot
become their relations to others. Neither can they become others. The difficulty of speaking of relations as
either substantial or accidental has occupied several recent theological debates. For all of the analogy’s
prominence in our own context, it is notable that Leo never makes the analogy, despite his intense focus on
human relations and participation in the Eternal Law of the Divine Wisdom.
48
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Conclusion
Whereas after 1789 citizenship and its rights color all conceptions of social
membership, Leo teaches that citizenship and its rights are part of a much richer order of
participation in which the human person with all her needs and perfections is enabled to
realize herself in harmony with others. Leo’s teaching cannot be separated from this context.
He does not imagine human sociality in an ideal form that does not exist. Instead, he attends
rather closely to the theological valence of what is in fact a mundane reality for the human
person who has grown up in a family and in a religious community, practiced certain arts and
crafts, joined business ventures, played sports, worked at some labor, pooled resources, and
otherwise cooperated with a variety of discrete social bodies for the realization of necessary
human goods. For Leo, it is simply and obviously the case that political citizenship is not a
category that provides the human person with an archetype of social membership. But this is
precisely what modern political theory implies when it teaches that society begins with a
contract that binds a polity together.
The binding of a polity was precisely the issue Pius IX and Leo XIII confronted as
the tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the Roman Question with Italy’s liberals. From the
Vatican’s perspective, the risorgimento ceased to be a problem - and indeed could have been a
natural boon - to the Catholics on the Italian peninsula if the Church’s temporal power had
been duly reverenced and allowed to play its historic role in the social and political life of the
region. But from the Italian perspective, the Roman Question necessitated a strict separation
of the Church from the social and political life of the young nation. Both Pius and Leo
appreciated that this separation would easily abet the total relativization of papal sovereignty.
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From their vantage, such a relativization was too great a threat to the divine mission of
Christ’s Body. Thus, Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus:
So, then, if anyone says that the Roman pontiff has merely an office of supervision and
guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this
not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and
government of the church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the
principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his
is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the churches and over all and each
of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.50
In the next chapter, we will encounter the liberal logic that occasioned the Council’s forceful
restatement of papal sovereignty.
While Leo maintained his sovereignty and defended the conciliar teaching via the
protest of the pontiff’s “imprisonment” in the Vatican, he also sought to ameliorate the
difficulty posed by the Roman Question by advancing a philosophically and theologically
rich account of what it means for humans to be social creatures. In doing so, he extended
Pius’s conviction that the Roman Question touched on vast and mysterious implications for
the Church, for Italy, and for the world. It was Leo’s great insight to see that the Roman
Question pointedly expressed a trend in modern social and political thought whereby human
persons and their social relations were no longer imagined as participating in an order
beyond the one created by human will and convention. By situating human membership in a
participated order, Leo develops an analogia communitatis. And by using this doctrine, Leo
exposes the ways in which liberalism tries to create subjects freed from membership in other
social unities.
Thus, within the post-Risorgimento development of the Roman Question is one of the
most exquisite expressions of the liberal state’s fundamental desires regarding the Catholic
Church and her position in 19th century society. That is, the Roman Question perfectly
Quoted in Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two Trent to Vatican II, (Washington,
D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1990), 814-15.
50
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encapsulates the liberal state’s need, not only to reduce or blunt the social authority of other,
non-state institution, but to actually reconceptualize non-state institutions as state
institutions that operate by the legal permission of the regime. This is the unacceptable logic
of the Law of Guarantees. It is also a proximate historical cause for Leo’s argument that
precisely this sort of reconceptualization of social authority and the communitates that wield
that authority is inadequate to the human persons who live under that same authority. In
Leo’s response, we see a response equal to the task of addressing the theological,
philosophical, and anthropological errors animating the liberal state’s desire to become
omnicompetent. In chapters three and four below, we will observe the subtlety and utility of
the analogia communitatis as Leo works to counter this desire for omnicompetence. Remaining
within the enduring conundrums of the Roman Question, we will see Leo articulate the
Church’s philosophical and theological rationale for the social competence and proper
integrity of the two communitates that transcend and undergird the state and its authority: the
Church (chapter three) and the family (chapter four). By turning to these non-state
communitates with the analogia communitatis in mind, we will be addressing the Catholic
response to the profound hope that modern, liberal citizenship can in fact restore the broken
relationships that have come to characterize our memory of our history and our
understanding of our own nature.
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PART II: INSTITUTIONS
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CHAPTER 3
ECCLESIAL MUNERA AND THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS: LEONINE
ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE PROPER CARE OF HUMAN PERSONS
In this chapter, I want to transition from considering the habits of predication
regarding communitas to two actual communitates of which human persons may be a part. The
first communitas is the Catholic Church and will occupy our attention here in chapter three.
The second communitas is the matrimonial unit and the family arising therefrom. These I
reserve for chapter four. Thus far, we have been considering how we might speak of
communitas in relation to a given, created human nature and in relation to historically
contingent conventions. I have suggested that an analogical conception of communitas is the
only sufficient way to speak of the human phenomenon of sociality in all of its created
givenness and in all of its historical contingency. Furthermore, I have provided historical
examples of what may happen when we attempt to work for unity with others - as through
the political artifact of citizenship - without this analogical habit of predication. The first
pitfall I have identified is the univocal habit of predicating communitas, which involves
totalizing our vision of human sociality in terms of one social form. In Leo’s historical
context, nations do this with citizenship, proposing it as the purification of all older forms of
membership. But in other contexts, tribes may do this with membership; and families may
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do this with kinship. The second pitfall I have identified is the equivocal habit of predicating
communitas, which involves fragmenting our vision of human sociality in terms of the plurality
and contingency of historical forms. This is a more abstract form of predication that seems
mostly to rely in history on the development of transnational processes like economic
globalization and on supposedly universal concepts like human rights. I argued in the first
chapter that even within the profound univocations of 1789 and Mazzinian patriotism, we
can observe an equivocation with regard to citizenship. Today, if univocal citizenship seems
a distant, nationalist dream to many people (though not all!), then this is likely because we
have become accustomed to equivocating about the role political participation and
citizenship can play in human flourishing. This equivocation is the source of Beiner’s
melancholy regarding the civic-republican ideal.
In this chapter, I am interested in the consequences of our habits of predication. Is
there a way to maintain the hope that our social relations - even citizenship - are implicated
in healing the broken relations of nature and history? Is there a way to affirm with Hittinger
that the imago Dei is not only an affirmation of personal human dignity, but also a sign of the
social vocation of the rational animal? I want to approach these consequences from the
vantage of Leo’s ecclesiology and how his analogical habit of predication impacts the way he
describes the Church as a communitas occupying a unique munus within the analogia
communitatis. In doing so, we encounter Leo’s own hope that human communitas could
participate in the restoration of our broken relations. But we also encounter the ways in
which Leo’s hope is radically divergent from the one expressed in 1789 and exported
throughout Europe during the 19th century.
In examining the Church as a social body comprising an important part of the
analogia communitatis, we are not interested in two things:
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1. We are not interested principally in how the Church functions as a communitas that
performs some prior task that has been conceded to it.1
2. We are not interested principally in how the Church functions as a moral educator
that benefits society indirectly through the members of the Church.
Why is this the case? First of all, in order to be faithful to Leo’s thought, we must
note that his promotion of the Church’s social authority is not a pragmatic argument about
how the Church happens to efficiently accomplish certain things human societies happen to
require. The connection between the Church on the one hand and the munera that redound
to society on the other hand is not accidental. It is, instead, necessary.2 Put in the strongest
language, the connection is metaphysical due to the nature of creation and its origin in the
Divine Wisdom. When Leo speaks about how the Church benefits society, contributes to its
health and security, works for its peace, promotes its activity, and all the rest, Leo is not
pointing to a record of successful initiatives undertaken by the Church. Neither is he listing
functions the state has somehow defined and developed on its own and is willing to
outsource to other social bodies. Either of these perspectives would place the state in the
By using the verb, to concede, and its variants, I am referring to one of the modern answers to the question of
how to “reconcile the state’s monopoly over public authority and power with the myriad of other groups
claiming authority, rights, and liberties according to custom, natural law, and ecclesiastical law.” According to
the concession model, resolving this question involves making societies legitimate by law. “Concession can
remain open to the reality of the group prior to the state’s award of jural capacities. Until then, they are
regarded either as so unimportant as to receive no notice, or they are regarded as illegitimate. The real group
simply moves from being not officially recognized to being publicly capacitated. [...] The state regards and
treats all group-persons as out-sourced instruments of its own group-personality.” Cf. Hittinger, “The
Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation,” Nova et Vetera, English
Edition, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2009): 791-838, at 811, 813. For a summary treatment in the paradigmatic historical
context of the French Revolution, cf. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People: A History of
European Catholicism since 1750, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49-50.
2 Leo is pushing upstream by the latter half of the 19th century. The age of concordats, by Leo’s time, had
largely been conducted under the fundamentally modern doctrine that Catholicism can be politically useful and
its dismantling or negating can be politically harmful. Much hangs on how one defines “politically useful”
however. From the Catholic perspective, Catholicism is indeed useful in human life, given that human life is
destined to beatitude and that political action and relation are fundamental aspects of that living toward
beatitude. But from the liberal perspective, Catholicism is useful for partisan purposes. Napoleon Bonaparte’s
sense of Catholicism’s utility is well-known. In the Italian context, separatism was never ignorant of the fact
that Catholicism could be politically useful. I will discuss this issue in terms of the non expedit below.
1
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position of having “priority of access to society,”3 and these perspectives would relegate all
other communitates to conceded ground as bureaucratic agents of the state’s principality.4
But the state has not - because it cannot - defined and developed on its own a series
of necessary social functions that constitute human flourishing. Neither has the state because it cannot - used the mechanism of concession to dole out these necessary social
functions to other social bodies that are more proximate to human persons. Instead,
according to Leo’s way of thinking, the Church occupies divinely revealed munera in society
by which she communicates munera that otherwise will not be communicated. From Leo’s
perspective, there are no surrogates for the Church. Human persons and communitates may
contrive surrogates, but they will remain human artifacts, subject to human limitations. The
Church on the other hand is divinely contrived, instituted by the Incarnate Lord himself.
This chapter is devoted in part to showing why the Church’s sui generis social munus is
necessary for a proper relationship between the ecclesial communitas and the political
communitas.
Second, and intimately related to this first consideration, Leo does not speak of the
Church simply as an educator or inspirer of human persons. Though the Church surely does
educate and inspire, the Church may not be reduced to a private dispenser of spiritual
resources that help human persons go about their public business more efficiently or
The language is Russell Hittinger’s. Cf. Hittinger, “Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, 50 Years
Later,” public lecture Nov. 1, 2012, University of Chicago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zMOH3k8qpQ. Accessed Jun. 15, 2016.
4 In Leo’s context, the concession theory would emphasize the role of non-state institutions in assisting the
state to more efficiently accomplish the state’s given tasks. In our own context, this focus on efficiency has
incorporated a revitalized conception of civil society, which is thought to check the power of the state and
otherwise provide for more efficient social action and more perfect liberty. Hittinger calls this contemporary
focus on civil society’s role in increasing efficiency and liberty an “intermediate powers model” that has taken
over for the “concession model” in the latter half of the 20th century. From the perspective of my analysis in
what follows, Leonine thought on the Church’s social munus is relevant in either model, for it depends on a
Catholic version of subsidiary relations that should not be confused with either liberal model. Cf. Hittinger,
“The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles,” 817-21.
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humanely. The Church is not a therapist or life coach or mentor or any other purveyor of
motivation. Put differently, membership in and formation by the Church may not be
reduced to personal, spiritual capital that human persons then use in their social and political
lives out in public. Neither does the Church simply provide refuge for persons who need to
escape from the rigors of public life.
Because we are not principally interested in such deficient interpretations of the
social nature of the Church, our attention is turned elsewhere. Not discounting Leo’s
significant attention to the pragmatic and spiritual benefits the Church gives to society, we
will attend to the public, social nature of the Church in order to understand more clearly
how Leo conceives of the munera she uniquely occupies. We will be interested in the way the
Church’s munera are non-transferrable, uniquely capacitating the Church to heal the broken
relations of human nature and history.
The chapter is organized as follows.
First, I examine the Italian historical and political context in which liberal
spiritualization and privatization of the Catholic Church serve to mold the Church’s social
character into something more palatable to the young nation-state. Second, I examine Leo’s
ecclesiology in terms of the social nature of the Church. This examination will draw from his
1890 encyclical, Sapientiae Christianae, on the duties of the Christian citizen. In examining
these historical and conceptual elements, I argue that Leo’s ecclesiology is an indictment of
the state’s inability to care for the human person in a mode appropriate to human nature and
in accordance with the state’s political vocation. Placing this indictment within his
ecclesiology is significant, for it expresses the anthropological concerns that undergird his
advocacy for the Catholic Church’s social authroity. This ecclesiological teaching is thus a
significant contribution to enduring theological-political concerns as they develop within
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liberal democratic regimes, where citizens and social bodies are forced to be free in a very
particular way if they are to enjoy the care promised to them by the state. By investigating
Leo’s ecclesiology, we are considering his analogical vision of the proper social and political
conditions in which rational animals in history may live together, not simply for mutual
benefit, security, or efficient action, but for both natural and supernatural beatitude. Leo’s
ecclesiology is thus essential for understanding the Catholic response to the hope that a form
of communitas - political citizenship - is capable of healing the broken relations of nature and
history.
I. Italian Separatism and the Spiritualization of the Ecclesial Munera
Some time before mid-century, the philosopher and jurist, Gian Domenico
Romagnosi, issued a very Mazzinian warning to the Italian nationalist movement: “The I, the
family, and one’s own paese are three levels of human affection in society. The fatherland, in
the sense of a nation, is a term that evokes a phantasm that scarcely touches the
imagination.”5 Romagnosi’s warning signals that, for the Italian nationalists who desired to
see Italy’s vibrant local life enlarged into a unified national life, much work had to be done to
cultivate a national imagination that could ultimately receive the phantasm of the fatherland.
The task for those intent on nationalizing the peninsula was to make “Italians” via a process
of civic education. The difficulty of this task is apparent when one considers that this
education had to proceed in an historical context where a rich local civic life on the
peninsula long preceded the national political life of something called “Italy.”6 In this
nationalizing context, local civic life was a threat to national unity precisely because of its
vitality. And so, from the vantage of burgeoning Italian liberal ideologies, this plurality of
Quoted in Raymond Grew, “Italy’s Nineteenth-Century Political Culture,” in Revolution and the Meanings of
Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996): 212-45, at
236.
6 Cf., ibid., 236-8.
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local communitates had to be addressed in a manner that facilitated a stronger sense of national
communitas among the various populations excluded from the ruling elite and unaccustomed
to thinking of themselves as Italians.
As I noted in the first chapter, Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism and sense of
national vocation provides the most romantically expansive and rhetorically powerful
context of this effort to draw local civic life into a national context. But Mazzinian patriotism
is not the sole factor to be considered. In addition to Mazzini’s prophetic doctrine, one must
account for the more mundane political realities of Italian politics, including the exclusion
from national politics of all those who would have seriously questioned the nationalist
project: peasants, artisans, reactionaries, socialists, and of course, Catholics.7 With the
relegation of these populations to local civic life, the national conversation could take place
on a political spectrum that disproportionately represented moderate to radical liberalism.
This is precisely the place where the debate about the relationship between liberal Italy and
the Holy See had to happen. Haunted by Count Cavour’s famous doctrine of “a free church
in a free state,”8 Italian liberals throughout the latter half of the century struggled to define
not only the status of the Church’s former territories, but also the Church’s liberty, especially
with regard to her exercise of authority in Italian civil society, national legislation, and
politics. Despite the liberal revolution in Italy, everywhere throughout the peninsula the
Catholic Church remained a constant institutional force, responsible for or deeply implicated
in education, entertainment, welfare, economic infrastructure, and moral formation.9 As we
will see in chapter four, the contest over the Church’s authority in these social domains is
Cf., Ibid., 242-3.
The phrase is Montalembert’s. Cavour was a lifelong devotee of French liberal Catholics. For a helpful and
concise historical introduction to the ideal expressed in this phrase, cf. Ernst C. Helmreich, ed., A Free Church in
a Free State? The Catholic Church, Italy, Germany, France, 1864-1914, (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1964),
especially at 36-57 for the Italian context.
9 Cf., John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861, (New York: Routledge, 2008),
40-1.
7
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synecdochically represented in the legislative battles concerning civil matrimony and
divorce.10 In a nationalizing movement, the temporal, visible, external presence of Roman
Catholicism is a thorn not easily removed.
Cavour’s doctrine of a free church in a free state became the critical effort to
accomplish this very removal, however. The ideal expressed in the doctrine was that the
Church and the state would both achieve a more perfect liberty by remaining completely and
securely within their separated jurisdictional spheres. All indications suggest that Cavour
himself believed that this was good both for the Church and for Italy. Indeed, Cavour’s
separatism, in theory, was designed to decrease state influence in society and to augment
religious liberty.11 Nevertheless, as the Statuo of 1848 announced, Catholicism remained the
official state religion. Furthermore, despite the principle of separatism active as an ideal
during Cavour’s tenure and following, civil legislation regarding the Church throughout Italy
remained practically wedded to 18th century modes of jurisdictionalism whereby the civil
authority gradually crowded the Church out of a variety of social spheres and claimed the
Church’s prerogatives as the state’s own.12 So, despite the Cavourian emphasis on the liberty
of the Church, Italy’s various attempts to negotiate features of the Roman Question
demonstrated that Cavourian freedom for the Holy See was an entirely spiritual freedom
separated from all matters of temporal sovereignty, which sovereignty was increasingly
Cf. Mark Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 16: “[...] Italy was unified and became a nation in a way that was
fairly easily made to appear as if it had been an ineluctable affair during which progress had triumphed over
centuries of stasis. What was to prove much less easy was the sustaining of this myth over the coming years, as
the new state struggled to conquer the loyalties of citizens, to establish its legitimacy, and to develop a national
secular culture. The first step in this process was to remove the legal traces of disunity by making the laws of
the land uniform. The law of the land that would most clearly symbolize the departure from the past was a law
on civil marriage.”
11 Cf., Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 7-8. This speaks to Cavour’s sensitivity to the
actual local, civic situation on the peninsula. Of the liberals, Cavour’s moderation is notable. Cf. Pier Carlo
Boggio, La chiesa e lo stato in Piemonte: sposizione storico-critica dei rapporti fra la S. Sede e la corte di Sardegna dal 1000 al
1854, 2 vols, (Torino: S. Franco e figli, 1854), especially at volume I, book IV where Boggio treats his own
context and gives the Cavourian doctrine its fullest exposition.
12 Cf., ibid., 10, n. 26.
10
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imagined as the sole province of the civil authority. In other words, Cavourian separatism
liberated the Church to be precisely the sort of Church liberalism required it to be: one
separated from the social and political implications of its own existence as a true society, a
real communitas in time.
The development of the Roman Question itself met with various 19th century
currents of thought that created a welter of voices in the debate over how to manage Italian
relations with the Vatican.13 The Cavourian doctrine established in the 1850’s and enduring
throughout the 60’s inspired adherents to Cavour’s diplomacy, reformers of it, and of
course, its detractors.14 On the moderate left, one finds Cavour and his disciples in the 60’s.15
Moving leftward, one finds Cavourians who were not only interested in the liberty of the
Church within Italian society, but also in liberty within Catholicism itself. One might even
describe them as proto-modernists because of their emphasis on the personal freedom of
the individual Catholic, their promotion of the autonomy of local religious communities, and
their faith in modern science and human rationality.16 At some point, however, on the
leftward span of the continuum, one observes the Cavourian commitment to ecclesial liberty
dropping out of the Church-state scheme of relations. Francesco Crispi (1818-1901), who
would become Prime Minister for two separate tenures during Leo XIII’s pontificate, and
13 In what follows, I am indebted to Jemolo’s classic, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, especially 28-52, where
Jemolo mines parliamentary speeches and political essays by major Italian political theorists working during the
1860’s and 70’s. Like Cavour, the politicians described below are obsessed with resolving the developing
Roman Question.
14 On the far right, of course, there were the pro-papacy clericals who sought to maintain the Church’s position
in Italy in terms of both the temporal and the spiritual sovereignty of the pope. The notable philosopher,
Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855) represents a more moderate clerical position that encouraged the Church to
come to terms with some aspects of modern life under a liberal regime. However, because of the inherent
position of these conservative forces, and because of the non expedit, these voices are excluded from the
legislative conversation. For Rosmini’s contribution to the national question, cf. Antonio Rosmini, The
Constitution Under Social Justice, trans. Alberto Mingardi, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), at 11-20 for
Rosmini’s own constitution, and at 30-5 for Rosmini’s teaching on the place of Catholicism in Italy.
15 Marco Minghetti (1818-1886), Carlo Boncompagni (1804-1880), and Quintino Sella (1827-1884).
16 Bettino Ricasoli (1809-1880) and Ruggero Bonghi (1826-1895).
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others17 may be labeled “neo-jurisdictionalists” who conceived of the Church as a purely
human social institution.18 The neo-jurisdictionalists considered Cavour’s separatism to be a
mistake in Italian politics and jurisprudence, for it allowed the liberated Church to escape the
civil authority that was trying to unify the peninsula.19 During Leo’s pontificate, the Italian
government eliminated church tithes, limited access to religious education in state primary
schools, and censored clergy for preaching and/or speaking against the regime. Finally, in
1889, Crispi passed a law on the Church’s opere pie, the large financial network that funded
religious and charitable works:
In the 1880s there were an estimated 22,000 charitable bodies in Italy, spending 96 million
lire a year, of which 31 million lire were subsidies from local government. Welfare provision
differed markedly between different regions. Most of the charities were run by
‘congregations of charity’, normally laymen appoined by each municipality and subject to a
vague supervision by the provincial authorities. Crispi’s new law strengthened this lay
control, and specifically excluded all priests from membership of the ‘congregations’. The
more old-fashioned charities were suppressed altogether; and many others were ‘merged’
together - nearly 6,000 by 1908. Yet others were ‘transformed’, i.e. their funds diverted to
quite different purposes from the founders’ original intentions - this happened to 1,193
charities by 1903, mainly those which had provided retreats, hospices for pilgrims and
dowries for novice nuns.20
The Italian state thus continued its participation - this time in a more open and obvious
manner - in a species of kulturkampf that had really begun during Pius IX’s reign. As with the
very structure of the Law of Guarantees proposed to Pius, so with the state’s
Giuseppe Piola (1826-1904), and Guido Padelletti (1843-1878)
For an introduction to Italian jurisdictionalism and separatism within the context of la laicità, cf. Lorena
Forni, La Laicità nel Pensiero dei Giuristi Italiani: Tra Traditione e Ennovazione, (Milan, Giuffrè Editore, 2010),
especially at 8-18.
19 Cf., Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 39-43 for a summary of anti-clerical animus under the ministries of
Agostino Depretis and Crispi (whom Pollard calls a “fire-eating anti-clerical” and a “mangia prete” [‘priest eater’])
during Leo’s pontificate. As Pollard puts it, “Governments of the Sinistra [left] pursued their legislative
campaigns against the Church for two main reasons: first, they were afraid of being outflanked by the Estrema
[radical left]; and second, especially under Crispi who became prime minister for the first time in 1886, they
sought to reduce the influence of Catholicism in Italian society and politics, which they judged to be
dangerously excessive” (40). Cf. also David I. Kertzer, “Religion and Society, 1789-1892,” in Italy in the
Nineteenth Century 1796-1900, ed. John A. Davis, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181-205,
especially at 191-203.
20 Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871-1982, (New York: Longman, 1984), 105.
17
18
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commandeering the opere pie. The state’s desire was to bring under its own, supposedly more
rational and efficient, jurisdiction the Catholic Church and her proper munera.21
While the neo-jurisdictionalists considered separatism a political error that would
deprive the civil authority of its rightful power, there were still other anti-separatist
contributions to the Roman Question that do not fit neatly onto a left-right continuum.
They might even be said to hover above it. The most enduring contribution is from Mazzini.
As we have already observed in the first chapter, Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism would
most certainly see separatism of any kind as a liberal and a Catholic mistake. The human
person and her associational life, for Mazzini, are fundamentally political and religious, and
the separation of politics and religion only stands in the way of their creative fusion in the
new age. To be sure, Mazzini’s argument for the fusion of the two powers is not an argument
for the establishment of Catholicism - far from it. Rather, it is an argument that liberal
rationalism and Catholicism alike have contributed to false conceptions of the relationship
between the two powers, that they have dampened the “religious spirit” proper to the truly
political and social nature of humans, and that the future will be characterized by an
identification of the two powers. This future identification, for Mazzini, is meant to
transcend both the secularism of liberal rationalism and the the outmoded authoritarianism
of Catholicism.
But Mazzini is not the only theorist who considers separatism more than a political
error. Hegelianism had made its presence known elsewhere in Italian politics. Bertrando
Spaventa (1817-1883) and Augusto Vera (1813-1885) both typify a philosophical approach
For more on the 1889 law reorganizing the opera pie within the context of anticlerical legislation during
Crispi’s tenures, cf. Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, 66-70; Humphrey J.T. Johnson, The Papacy and
the Kingdom of Italy, (London: Sheed and Ward, 1926), 60-9; Alice A. Kelikian, “The Church and Catholicism,” in
Liberal and Fascist Italy 1900-1945, ed. Adrian Lyttelton, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47-9;
Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 41-2; and Eduardo Soderini, Leo XIII Italy and France, trans. Barbara Barclay
Carter, (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, LTD., 1935), 82-92. For the Italian legislation as a species of
Bismarck’s kulturkampf, cf. Atkin and Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People, 141-59.
21
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to the Roman Question that sees the dialectical struggle between the Catholic Church and
Italy as the condition in which the state could finally cultivate its sense of the divine, even of
its own infinity.22 Commenting on Cavour’s famous formula, Vera considered separation
impossible. From the Italian neo-Hegelian perspective,
conciliation can exist only in the midst of conflict; freedom thrives on struggle. Religion is a
social institution, not a mere relationship between Man and God. Religion and the State
constitute two exalted spheres of reason, above which - though not outside them - there is
only philosophy. They are grounded in nature or reason that is absolute, determining their
relationship and embodying at one and the same time their conflicts, their virtues and their
objective reality.23
The arguments against Cavourian separatism from both a Mazzinian and a neo-Hegelian
perspective similarly emphasize the emptiness of the liberal approach to the relationship
between the ecclesial and political communitates.
The ideological battle between the positivist-leaning neo-jurisdictionalists and the
idealist Mazzinians and neo-Hegelians is a topic too large to be covered here. But a few
comments are in order. Cavour’s sincere desire to see the Catholic Church enjoy a spiritual
liberty separated from the temporal realm of Italian national politics did more than justify
legislation designed to disentangle the Holy See from the Quirinal. It created for the Holy
See a manageable form of sovereignty that the Holy See never requested. It was a form of
sovereignty whereby the pope could enjoy authority in the spiritual jurisdiction of the human
conscience. This spiritualization of the Holy See’s sovereignty features a variety of implicit
claims about the nature of the Church. As Italian liberals sought to unify a peninsula already
richly textured with associational ties that facilitated local civic and political action, it became
important to isolate and neutralize competitors for the state’s preeminent role in shaping the
22 Cf., Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, 47-8. Cf. Richard Bellamy, “Social and political thought, 18901945,” in Liberal and Fascist Italy, 1900-1945, ed. Adrian Lyttelton, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),
231-48, especially at 34-42, where Bellamy offers a helpful summary of the interaction between Italian neoHegelians and Italian positivists in the decades of the 1860’s-90’s.
23 Ibid., 48. The language is Jemolo’s, referring to Vera’s 1874 work, Cavour et l’église libre dans l’état libre.
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social imagination of the people. If the state was to be the Italian’s most fundamental teacher
regarding all things social, then the Church could not be. But if the Church could no longer
occupy this munus, then a redefinition of religion was in order - one that would take
“religion” out of the public realm and hide it within the private. But if the Church could no
longer occupy public space, then a redefinition of her nature was in order - one that would
finally reduce her from a true and perfect communitas, necessary for the health of society, to a
voluntary aggregation, necessary only for the moral and spiritual health of her members’
consciences.
Crispi himself, in an 1895 speech at the unveiling of a monument to Garibaldi, states
the liberal position with spectacular condescension and a wild misrepresentation of both the
Holy See’s interests and the Catholic conception of religion:
Religion is not and should not be a function of the State. It comforts those who believe by
offering them the hope of an eternal future. It nurtures the spirit of faith, and for that reason
it is holy. [...] The autonomy of the spirit, which we defend and guarantee, is a fortress in
which the Supreme Pontiff can take refuge, in which he will be immune from all attacks.
Material power eludes him, and it will be to his credit if he can put it behind him; but the
souls of men are his, and he rules them, to such effect that all the powers of Earth have
cause to envy him. [...] The Pope is subject only to God, and no human power can touch
him. Surrounded by all the honours and privileges of a monarch, freed from the
embarrassment of the temporal power and from all the hatreds, resentments and anxieties
that go with it, he exercises a sovereign authority over those who put their trust in him - and
they are numbered in millions. No prince on earth resembles him or is his peer; he is unique.
He has no territory under his jurisdiction - and, if he had, it would be narrow - but all the
world forms part of his celestial empire; and with that he should be content. [...I]n virtue of
the sovereignty that we have conferred upon him he transcends all the rest of mankind, and
therein lies his power. He exercises his functions in complete independence, he
communicates with all the world, he prays, he dominates men’s consciences, he protects
others yet himself has no need of protection, because the territory of Italy serves him in the
office of a shield.24
What follows should be considered an extended, Leonine commentary on Crispi’s speech,
which is the latter’s way of saying there should be no such thing as a Catholic nation or
Catholic society in history. Note particularly that Crispi here characterizes the Church as
Given in the Italian Chamber, November 28th, 1895, quoted in Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950,
69-70.
24
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something of a republic. For though he mentions the pope’s “empire,” he nevertheless has
in mind the individual consent of the persons who choose to put their trust in the pope.
Baptism is replaced by contract.
II. Ecclesial Munera and the Proper Care of the Human Person
We have encountered Sapientiae Christianae in previous chapters. I return to the letter
here because the encyclical is pivotal for understanding how Leo envisions the Church and
the state’s duties to care for the human person. In this second section of the chapter, I will
briefly summarize the first part of the letter before examining more closely Leo’s
ecclesiology.
The encyclical begins with the familiar Augustinian theme of the two cities (or
societies in Leo’s terms), each attuned in their proper mode to the care of the two principal
aspects of the res sacra in temporalibus: the temporal and the spiritual.25 Not wanting to
discount the temporal at all, Leo only cautions that modern society is in danger of trading
spiritual goods for material comforts in a way that causes persons and societies to become
forgetful of humanity’s transcendent destiny. Leo darkly recalls the “memorable disasters” of
his own century and looks forward with uncertainty to a time when “equally terrible”
25 The 1884 encyclical on Freemasonry, Humanum genus, also begins with the Augustinian theme. But there, as
Leo mounts his case against secret societies, he emphasizes the contrast between the two cities: “The race of
man, after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and the Giver of heavenly gifts, ‘through the envy of the
devil,’ separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue,
the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth,
namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ [...]. The other is the kingdom of Satan [...]. This twofold kingdom St.
Augustine keenly discerned and described after the manner of two cities, contrary in their laws because striving
for contrary objects; and with a subtle brevity he expressed the efficient cause of each in these words: ‘Two
loves formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an earthly city; and the love of
God, reaching to contempt of self, a heavenly one’” (§§1-2). Leo’s use of Augustine is consistent and trades
skillfully on the great doctor’s nuanced and complex analysis of nature, grace, anthropology, and salvation. In
Immortale Dei, Leo’s use of Augustine’s two cities is closer to his use in Sapientiae Christianae. The natural enmity
between the two cities is muted, and Augustine’s suggestion that Christians actually make the best citizens and
that Christianity is a boon for civilization. Cf. Immortale Dei, §§2, 20.
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disasters may be “impending.”26 The choice between the two communitates calls for a more
careful delineation of the duties of those persons who live in both. This is the motivation for
the encyclical: to hearten Catholics who are unsure of how to “contribute to the good of the
commonwealth” in such ambiguous and potentially inhumane times.
We must note briefly here - though I will consider the issue more directly in the next
chapter - that Leo significantly conditions the traditional duality of the two communitates by
inserting the “family circle” into his consideration of the “whole range of society.” In other
words, it is not quite accurate to see the contest and cooperation between the two
communitates in terms of the traditional doctrine of the two spheres.27 Instead, contest and
cooperation between the the temporal and the spiritual takes place throughout a variety of
spheres - indeed, a “range.”28 Leo further conditions the traditional teaching on the two
spheres by predicating all of his comments about the materialism of modern society on an
analogy with the individual human substance. As I have noted above, Leo teaches that “what
applies to individual men applies equally to society.”29 Human persons and their activities including the activity of making and being in communitas - are only properly knowable in the
light of the transcendent end of the person. The analogia communitatis is thus not principally a
doctrine describing or prescribing the proper function of the two spheres of authority in
society, though it is surely implicated in the theological-political problem. Instead, the
analogia communitatis is a doctrine describing and prescribing the proper function of the whole
of society. Charles Taylor would use the language of hermeneutics here, noting how
medieval habits (on which Leo was dependent in important ways) of imagining society do
Cf. Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §3.
Leo understands that the theological-political problem is not reducible to a battle between Catholic
philosophers and clerics on the one hand, and secular theorists and rulers on the other. Rather, the theologicalpolitical problem ramifies throughout the social whole. It is a testimony to Leo’s sensitivity and prescience that
he does not treat the theological-political problem solely as a contest between concepts of sovereignty.
28 Cf. Ibid.
29 Ibid., §2.
26
27
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not rely on eschatological forms, utopian ideals, or prescriptive norms. Rather, they rely on a
conviction that the order of society “provides the hermeneutic clue to understanding the
real.”30 I will return to this notion below in this chapter and again in chapter five.
Leo’s analogical vision of the complete social range - inclusive of Church, state,
family, and human substance - is discernible in the first major section of Sapientiae Christianae,
where he takes on the problem of rightly ordered loves in a world comprised by social
pluriformity. Ideally the natural law would enjoin love of family and country, and these
would be complemented by the Incarnation of the Son and the institution of his Church. As
these loves all “proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author
and originating Cause,” so it would be a sign of disorder if there were to be competition or
inversion among all these loves.31 Competition between loves would thus be a privation of
the real. Leo does not leave us in the ideal realm for long, however. History is replete with
times when the “stress of public calamities” or the “perverse will of men” divide the human
person’s loves and pit them against one another, asking the human person to serve two
masters.32 The Christian citizen is that person in society who is outfitted with the virtues
necessary to properly discern the identities of the various masters competing for her
devotion. Acting from the conviction that the authority of every legitimate sovereignty and
every just law originates in the “supreme Ruler and Lord of all,” the Christian is uniquely
capable of two closely related, but radically distinct, duties. The first is the duty that follows
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 7.
Ibid., §6. Though Leo cites Luke 12 in this section of the letter, he does not consider the Lord’s words in
Luke 14 regarding the disciple’s love for the Lord and the disciple’s hatred of family for the Lord’s sake. At
first, this seems like a deficiency in Leo’s estimation of the ideal case of ordered loves. But when we consider
the social ambit within which Leo is working, it becomes clear that Leo’s ideal case is one in which society, and
not solely individual disciples, has been Christianized to such an extent that every person’s loves are so
disciplined as to put the Lord above even the closest kinship ties.
32 Cf. Ibid., §§6-8.
30
31
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from the legitimate authority of sovereignties and laws: obedience.33 The second is the duty
that follows from life under any illegitimate sovereignty or law: disobedience.34 In both cases,
the Christian is principally docile to the Divine Will who rules all things and who is Incarnate
in history in order to “give testimony to the truth” and to “cast fire upon earth.”35 So,
despite the clarity and beauty of the ideal case, the historical context of properly ordered
loves is the social arena in which Christian virtue is constantly being “put to the proof,” and
where Christians are “ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the
cause of God or of the Church.”36 The historical context of properly ordered loves then is a
social arena, burned again and again by the Lord’s truth, wherein we live out our vocation to
image the Lord by causing good. So, if the order of our social loves is to function as a key to
understanding reality, then Leo is suggesting that this hermeneutical function is utterly
dependent on the Divine Wisdom at work in both creation and the incarnation.
If these are the ideal and historical contexts of the analogia communitatis, then it is an
injustice to accuse Christian citizens of sedition,37 and it is arrogance to detach social life
from the “authority and empire of God.”38 Such characterizations of Christian citizens and
of human sociality are ‘delusional’ because “they make over to human nature the dominion
of which [liberal rationalists] think God has been despoiled.”39 This delusion is rooted in the
claim that all truths, all duties, and indeed religion itself spring from nature rather than from
the revelation of the Lord himself.40 This revelation of the Lord would be, for Leo, available
Leo cites Titus 3.
Leo cites Acts 5:29.
35 Cf., Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §11, citing John 18:37 and Luke 12:49.
36 Ibid., §§6-7.
37 Cf. Ibid., §8.
38 Ibid., §12.
39 Ibid.
40 Cf. Ibid.
33
34
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in a natural mode according to creation and a supernatural mode according to the
incarnation and the Church’s ongoing mission.
Hence [liberal rationalists] deny all revelation from on high, and all fealty due to the
Christian teaching of morals as well as all obedience to the Church, and they go so far as to
deny her power of making laws and exercising every other kind of right, even disallowing the
Church any place among the civil institutions of the commonweal. These men aspire
unjustly, and with their might strive, to gain control over public affairs and lay hands on the
rudder of the State, in order that the legislation may the more easily be adapted to these
principles, and the morals of the people influenced in accordance with them. Whence it
comes to pass that in many countries Catholicism is either openly assailed or else secretly
interfered with, full impunity being granted to the most pernicious doctrines, while the
public profession of Christian truth is shackled oftentimes with manifold constraints.41
If in the past the contest and cooperation between the two communitates was negotiated with
difficulty on account of competing loves and of divergent conceptions of the relationship
between the spiritual and the temporal, this contest and cooperation nevertheless remained a
matter of negotiation between analogically related spheres. Leo’s historical narratives suggest
as much when he points back to the concordia that obtained in the medieval period.42 But in
the modern period, especially the 19th century, the Church confronts something distinct
from the difficulties of negotiating jurisdictional boundaries, which were and are always real.
In the modern, liberal context, Leo identifies a “delusion” where the negotiation at the heart
of the relationship between the two communitates is recast in terms acceptable to only one of
the them. One vision of communitas has been predicated of all historical communitates in the
name of restoring the broken relations of nature and history. Witness Crispi’s speech
regarding the pope’s “celestial empire.” Leo writes in a context where the terrestrial
communitas has arrogated to itself the voice of revelation and has declared that analogical
negotiations are finished. The celestial communitas has been put in its place, recessed and
hushed alongside all other voluntary memberships within the consciences of individual
Ibid.
Cf. Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, §§27ff, Diuturnum, §§18-25, The entirety of 1885’s Immortale Dei, on the Christian
constitution of states, is an extended analysis of the nature, history, and contemporary state of this concordia. See
especially Immortale Dei, §§13, 21-4.
41
42
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citizens. After this supreme univocation, the state may finally command the Church to
remain there in private, like the wife of a politician.
In order to contend with this de-socialized vision of the civitate Dei, Leo devotes the
remainder of Sapientiae Christianae to defining the munera of the Catholic Church, how her
munera necessarily contribute to authentic human sociality in history, and what her
contribution means for the political vocation of the state. In the remainder of this chapter, I
want to focus on two important features of this ecclesiological work. First, I will examine
Leo’s teaching on the principle of unity that causes the Church to be an identifiable,
enduring thing in the world. This principle of unity cannot be the same as the one
supposedly binding the liberal communitas. That is, ecclesial unity is not contractual in nature,
but is rooted rather in Christ. Second, I will examine the relation of the Church to other
communitates, especially the state. Leo’s concern is not only a defense of the Church’s social
authority. It is more fundamentally a promotion of the human person, whom the liberal
communitas is in danger of neglecting.
IIa. Ecclesial Unity in Christ vs. Social Unity in Contract
The Church’s unity as a communitas, or “true society,” derives from the historical life
and will of her founder, Jesus Christ, who
willed not only to train his disciples in His doctrine, but to unite them into one society, and
closely conjoin them in one body, ‘which is the Church,’ whereof He would be the head.
The life of Jesus Christ pervades, therefore, the entire framework of this body, cherishes and
nourishes its every member, uniting each with each, and making all work together to the
same end, albeit the action of each be not the same. Hence it follows that not only is the
Church a perfect society far excelling every other, but it is enjoined by her Founder that for
the salvation of mankind she is to contend ‘as an army drawn up in battle array.’43
The headship of Christ and the participation of the Church’s members in Christ’s life
are the principle of the “union of minds and uniformity of action” that are “greatly feared by
43
Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §17, quoting Col. 1:24 and Song. 6:9.
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the enemies of Catholicism.”44 In the communitas of the Church, a “perfect harmony of
opinion should prevail” among the diverse members. Leo is sensitive to the relationship
between this level of unity or harmony on the one hand, and the use of force or coercion we
assume is necessary to maintain such unity on the other. He tackles the subject head-on,
suggesting that liberal communitas provides us with an important contrast to Christian unity.
In a liberal communitas, where human reason is the sole guide, “means are often used to keep
those together by force who cannot agree in their way of thinking.”45 Not so, however, with
the Church of Christ. Christians “possess the saving principle whence proceed
spontaneously one and the same will in all, and one and the same tenor of action.”46 This
“saving principle” is Christ himself.
Christian unity, therefore, does not exist in mind or speech alone, much less in any
coercive power. Christian unity is not primarily dependent on the coordinated or coerced
assent of individual minds to the “intrinsic evidence of the truth [of the faith] perceived by
the natural light of our reason.”47 Neither is Christian unity partial or developing. It is not a
Ibid., §18.
Ibid., §20. Cf. §3 of Sapientiae Christianae where Leo associates the use of force with a society supposedly
liberated from religion’s influence. His question is an enduring one throughout his pontificate: in a liberal
society, what mechanism will be left to authorities to maintain unity? His consistent anxiety is that the answer
will inevitably be force. Cf. Diuturnum, §24 on the role of coercion in the state and the insufficiency of fear as a
motivating principle for unity and order. Cf. Immortale Dei, §36 specifically for the issue of religious coercion.
Cf. Libertas praestantissimum, §16 on liberal society’s recourse to force in order to check the license liberal society
has given persons.
46 Ibid., §21. Any account of Leonine and Catholic social teaching and their implication in the development of
Italian fascism must take seriously Leo’s conviction that for Christians, unity is something spontaneous, rooted
in the revelation of the Lord and not in a police force. For the historical context surrounding the relationship
between Catholic social thought and fascism, cf. Christine Firer Hinze’s commentary on Quadragesimo Anno in
Kenneth R. Himes, ed., Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, (Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 2004 ), 151-73. For a criticism of the Church’s relationship to fascism, cf.
Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, 269ff.
47 Ibid., §22, quoting Dei Filius §3. Cf. Aquinas, ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 9. Here, Aquinas entertains the objection that
a confession of faith or a symbol/creed is not suitable for Christians because such a confession would concern
“all the faithful. Now the faithful are not all competent to believe in God, but only those who have living faith.
Therefore it is unfitting for the symbol of faith to be expressed in the words: I believe in one God.” In response to
this objection (ad. 3), Aquinas states, “The confession of faith is drawn up in a symbol, in the person, as it were,
of the whole Church, which is united together by faith. Now the faith of the Church is living faith; since such is
the faith to be found in all those who are of the Church not only outwardly but also by merit. Hence the
44
45
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successively incarnating reality on its way to a future perfection it does not already possess.
Rather, it is already complete by virtue of its source: the Church’s one Lord, into whom all
Christians have been baptized. The fragile unity of a communitas originating in human reason
alone is subject to the weakness of the human mind, the uncertainty of opinion, and the
accidents of history.48 But Christian unity depends on the “authority of God revealing, who
cannot be deceived nor Himself deceive.”49 On account of the divine authority, the Church
is not the keeper of a divisible teaching subject to the scrutiny of those who would “deny
that God has spoken to men, or who bring into doubt His infinite truth and wisdom.”50
Wherever discernment of and determination about revealed truth is a question, humans have
recourse only to the “teaching Church, to whom God has entrusted the safekeeping and
interpretation of His utterances.”51 At the head of this Church is a visible one, the Roman
Pontiff, who deserves “complete submission and obedience of will [...] as to God himself.”52
confession of faith is expressed in a symbol, in a manner that is in keeping with living faith, so that even if
some of the faithful lack living faith, they should endeavor to acquire it.”
48 Leo’s appreciation, such as it is, of the Church’s own subjugation to the accidents of history, and the
relationship of this subjugation to Christianity’s ability to perceive the truth of revelation, should be understood
in terms of his teaching in Aeterni Patris, §24, 30-1.
49 Ibid., quoting Dei Filius §3. Cf. Aquinas, ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 1, resp.: “[I]f we consider, in faith, the formal
aspect of the object, it is nothing else than the First Truth. For the faith of which we are speaking, does not
assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God.”
50 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 4, ad. 3: “The light of faith makes us see what we believe. For just as, by
the habits of the other virtues, man sees what is becoming to him in respect of that habit, so, by the habit of
faith, the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to
others.” In IIa IIae q. 1, a. 5, resp. Aquinas states that “[I]t may happen that what is an object of vision or
scientific knowledge for one man, even in the state of a wayfarer, is, for another man, an object of faith,
because he does not know it by demonstration. Nevertheless that which is proposed to be believed equally by
all, is equally unknown by all as an object of science: such are the things which are of faith simply.” And at ad.
1, he writes, “Unbelievers are in ignorance of things that are of faith, for neither do they see or know them in
themselves, nor do they know them to be credible. The faithful, on the other hand, know them, not as by
demonstration, but by the light of faith which makes them see that they ought to believe them [...].” In ad. 2,
Aquinas notes that for the faithful, matters of faith can be “as well proved [...] as a conclusion drawn from selfevident principles is in the eyes of all.”
51 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 9, sed contra: “The universal Church cannot err, since she is governed by
the Holy Ghost, who is the Spirit of truth [...].”
52 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 10, resp.: “Now this belongs to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff, to
whom the more important and more difficult questions that arise in the Church are referred [...]. Hence our Lord said to Peter
whom he made Sovereign Pontiff (Luke xxii. 32): I have prayed for thee, Peter, that thy faith fail not, and thou, being once
converted, confirm thy brethren. The reason of this is that there should be but one faith of the whole Church,
according to 1 Cor. i. 10: That you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you: and this could not
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This absolute interpretation of the apostolic authority is for Leo necessary to the
Church’s vocation to witness to the faith’s unity against the privations of schism and heresy.
From the Christian perspective, schism and heresy are not simply religious terms for the
healthy, vibrant dialogue that expresses the pluriformity of the Church through time. Rather,
schism and heresy are signs of ill health in Christ’s body. They are signs that the body is
hosting something incompatible with its very nature. But this means then that when
Christians speak of schism and heresy, they do not do so in the language we often use to
describe the proper pluriformity of society. In other words, schism and heresy are privations
of unity, not because the Church is incompatible with difference, variety, inequality, or
disagreement, but because the Church is a body, united under Christ the Head. As a body
cannot flourish if it is divided against itself or if it has incorporated alien life into itself, so
the Church cannot be the Church if its bodily order under the Head becomes disorder.
The visible unity and order of the Church under Christ the Head, maintained by his
authority and participated by the life of the members, thus expresses a Christian social
imagination not seamlessly compatible with a social imagination that divides the world up
into democratic, fascist, totalitarian, monarchic, and oligarchic regimes. The Church’s bodily
unity under the Head is a sign of contradiction in various ways throughout history. This
contradiction leads Augustine to suggest that Rome was never an authentic polity. And in
the context of Italian separatism and laicism, Leo again sounds the deeper Augustinian
theme. That is, in Leo’s Italy, political life has not finally come of age. Rather, it is in danger,
compromised as it is by the rights to publish error, to believe and promulgate false and
be secured unless any question of faith that may arise be decided by him who presides over the whole Church,
so that the whole Church may hold firmly to his decision.” Leo will extend the sovereignty of the Pontiff to
include a general regulation of “the actions of Christian citizens that these may be in apt conformity to their
hope of gaining eternal salvation. Whence it is clear that, in addition to the complete accordance of thought
and deed, the faithful should follow the practical political wisdom of the ecclesiastical authority” (Sapientiae
Christianae §37).
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harmful ideas, to worship false gods, to idolize personal pleasures and comforts, to unjustly
amass and squander wealth, and to disregard the duty to care for the weakest. Even in a
liberal communitas as unsure of itself as Leo’s Italy was, these rights are considered
fundamental human liberties that express the natural equality of all persons, goods, and
communitates. In such a society, ecclesial unity under Christ the Head must be a sign of
contradiction again. Why is this the case?
A Leonine analysis would suggest that such rights contribute directly to division
within a communitas, thus making the communitas less and less intelligible as a body. But this
must be the case because social unity within a liberal communitas can no longer be seen in
bodily terms. A body is precisely what a liberal communitas is not and can never be. Instead,
from a modern, liberal perspective the true nature of communitas is the primordial contract,
made in nature for the protection of separated individuals and their property. The divisions
that would threaten an organic, bodily whole are, in this way of imagining society, the sorts
of barriers that must be constructed and maintained if the individuals comprising society are
to remain at peace. Unity as the Church would imagine it can only look, from the liberal,
contractual perspective, like fascism. This is the only way to imagine it and to name it.
The word fascist seems appropriate from a modern vantage. After all, the divine
gifting of revelation, the unity of the faith deriving from this gift, and the faith’s stewardship
by the one true Church with Christ’s vicar at its head - these principles of Christian faith
demand according to Leo a total obedience that “cannot be given in shreds.”53 This total
obedience sets Catholics apart in the world, according to Leo, for this level of obedience
signals a part/whole relationship that is not easily describable in terms of the contract and of
individual, consumptive preference. When contractual language is unavailable for usage in a
53
Cf. Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §22.
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social scenario, what is left? Recall that Crispi could only envision the Church as a sort of
republic rooted in the pietistic preferences of its members. Organic, bodily unity is
anathema to the social imagination that creates liberal communitas. But the inverse is also true.
The language of contractual relations between severed or divided members is also anathema
to the social imagination derived from Christ’s headship. Leo quotes Aquinas to establish
this fundamental difference between Christian unity and the unity of wills that obtain in
contractual communitates:
[H]e who does not adhere, as to an infallible divine rule, to the teaching of the Church,
which proceeds from the primary truth manifested in the holy Scriptures, possesses not the
habit of faith; but matters of faith he holds otherwise than true faith. Now, it is evident that
he who clings to the doctrines of the Church as to an infallible rule yields his assent54 to
everything the Church teaches; but otherwise, if with reference to what the Church teaches
he holds what he likes but does not hold what he does not like, he adheres not to the
teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule, but to his own will.55
An individualized adherence to one’s own will is what Leo repeatedly condemns throughout
his social magisterium. Such voluntarism is the root of the ills or evils or tempests that Leo
identifies as corrosive of authentic human sociality. I will return to an historical specification
of this voluntarism in chapter four when we treat Italian matrimonial legislation. But for now
it is only necessary to examine how Leo counters voluntarism: he teaches that, instead of a
Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 2, a. 1, resp. Here, Aquinas asks whether to believe is to “think with assent.” His
response is that thinking can be taken in several ways. When we consider belief, we should start by considering
to think as “that consideration of the intellect which is accompanied by some kind of inquiry, and which
precedes the intellect’s arrival at the stage of perfection that comes with the certitude of sight.” If this is what
we mean by “to think,” then we properly understand believing as “to think with assent.” He writes, “For
among the acts belonging to the intellect, some have a firm assent without any such kind of thinking, as when a
man considers the things that he knows by science, or understands, for this consideration is already formed.
But some acts of the intellect have unformed thought devoid of a firm assent, whether they incline to neither
side, as in one who doubts; or incline to one side rather than the other, but on account of some slight motive, as
in one who suspects; or incline to one side yet with fear of the other, as in one who opines. But this act to believe,
cleaves firmly to one side, in which respect belief has something in common with science and understanding;
yet its knowledge does not attain the perfection of clear sight, wherein it agrees with doubt, suspicion and
opinion.” In ad. 3, he gives more precision: “The intellect of the believer is determined to one object, not by
the reason, but by the will, wherefore assent is taken here for an act of the intellect as determined to one object
by the will.” By IIa IIae q. 2, a. 9, resp., he will provide the following definition of the act of believing: “an act of
the intellect assenting to the Divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God, so that it is
subject to the free-will in relation to God [...].”
55 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas, ST IIa IIae q. 5, a. 3, resp.
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contractual relation, a proper or authentic communitas is a social unity of hierarchical order in
which higher orders and lower orders, precisely through and because of their inequality,
participate in and with each other. This complementary participation, furthermore, is not
only ordered to the practical completion of tasks appropriate to the communitas. It is also
ordered to the manifestation of the goodness of social participation itself. The Church
exemplifies this participatory communitas in history, but it is neither the sole archetype nor the
only example of such communitas. As we saw in chapter two above, the angels enjoy such
communitas, and all other communitates are for Leo judged analogically by this same standard.
And as we will see in chapter four below, the biological and historical form of the family
must also be judged in this way. Taken together, these various hierarchical bodies function
for Leo in terms of Taylor’s “hermeneutic clue” that gives one a better “understanding of
the real.” They further reveal to us the human vocation to cultivate the imago Dei by causing
good in others.
One may contrast this vision of hierarchical communitas with modern, liberal
communitas. We can imagine the latter, comprised by the sovereign wills of individuals
contracting with one another for protection from each other, as a flatness or as a continual
process of univocating. Rather than the analogical relations that comprise bodily, organic
unity, the contract becomes the historical social form ontologized into a primordial truth
about human communitas itself. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that in modern
social and political theory, contract even possesses a hermeneutical value that supposedly
clues us into the truest, most authentic structure of society. Contract is supposed to provide
us with the language and concept and image necessary for insight into the various causes of
society, especially in terms of origin and finality. This flattening of all parts to the plane of
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the contract reduces the participation of the members to something extraneous to the
communitas itself.
In a bodily, organic unity, participation is identical with membership as both the fact
of membership and the act of participation constitute the context in which parts work
together to cause good in each other and in the whole. But in a contractual communitas
participation becomes a voluntary choice of individual members, even a matter of
preference. In other words, one can imagine a contractual communitas as an aggregation of
monads that have nothing to do with each other outside the dictates of preference and
pragmatism.56 But as Leo, following Aquinas, makes clear above, the Christian who does
adhere to the faith on account of preference and pragmatism is in fact dividing herself from
the body in order to become something other than a member of the body. She is dividing
herself from the body in order to become an isolated consumer of the goods of truth.
According to this way of imagining communitas, she is thus extracted from the hierarchical
relations of dependence that are in fact the very condition for the reception of truth in its
fullness.
Aquinas’s teaching on the virtue of faith further illuminates the contrast we are
drawing here between a Leonine and a contractual vision of communitas. Asking whether or
not all are equally bound to have explicit faith, Aquinas writes:
The unfolding of matters of faith is the result of Divine revelation: for matters of faith
surpass natural reason. Now Divine revelation reaches those of lower degree through those
who are over them, in a certain order; to men, for instance, through the angels, and to the
From our vantage, aggregation appears to be the only viable solution to the fascist absorption of individuals
that constantly threatens my writing here. But it appears to me that Leo does not see these options in a strict
binary. Put historically, for Leo the option is not simply between absolutism and liberalism, or between fascism
and liberalism. Leo imagines the hierarchical participation of social orders he observes in the celestial and
ecclesial hierarchies to be instead the proper home of true authority and true liberty, true sociality and true
individuality, true corporatism and true personalism. The analogia communitatis is precisely what is necessary here.
The only way to recognize the proper grounding of authority and liberty in the Divine Wisdom is to see their
analogical relationship to one another. The same would go for sociality/individuality.
56
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lower angels through the higher, as Dionysius explains. In like manner, therefore, the
unfolding of faith must needs reach men of lower degree through those of higher degree.57
Why is this so? In the case of Divine revelation, hierarchical participation is necessary on
account of the inadequacy of those who are lower (creatures) and their necessary inability to
receive on their own that which is higher (Divinity). This is straightforward enough. We
might even allow Leo, despite various contemporary allergies, to extend his account to
include the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church. It is the case, after all, that the faith is
handed on from one generation to the next. And within generations, the faith is taught by
experts (more or less) to novices (more or less). Hierarchy does seem to obtain. But does
Leo’s emphasis on hierarchical participation within a communitas (i.e. the Church) and
between communitates (i.e. society as a whole) provide us with anything other than a
description of conventional mechanisms by which communities replicate and sustain
themselves through time, passing down wisdom about how to live a good life? This is a very
difficult question to answer, for we now live in a social world that envisions hierarchical
participation as a feature of a dead past. And as we saw in chapter one, the modern West
identifies this past as dead because the modern West killed it in 1789. In keeping with the
spirit that animated that same kill, the liberal, contractual social imagination continually
cultivates a pronounced distaste for hierarchy. We are taught to see in hierarchy the cause of
everything that was broken in our relations to each other and to nature, throughout history.
Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 2, a. 8, resp. Cf. Russell Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects
of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert
Howard, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013): 39-78, especially at 53ff. Here,
Hittinger shows how Leo XIII and his successors use Aquinas, Aristotle, and Pseudo-Dionysius to criticize a
world where the “state reduced all dignities to individuals and to a single, homogenous social form of
citizenship” (56). Hittinger has identified how important this mode of argument is in Leo’s social magisterium,
extending all the way back from the 1890s to Quod Apostolici muneris in 1878. There, Leo makes a similar point
to the one he makes implicitly here in Sapientiae Christianae: that a society reduced to “one dead level” lacks the
pluralism that makes up true communitas.
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Why is this not the case for Leo? After all, he is not insensitive to the plight of those
on the lower ends of the social hierarchy. Indeed, his work in Rerum novarum is often enough
the only reason we continue to revisit his thought. In his way of seeing society, hierarchical
participation in that which is higher by that which is lower signals the analogical composition
proper to true communitas. Hierarchy is a “key part of the normative order.”58 It is not the way
things once were. Neither is it the way things should be or could be in some future. It is
rather the way things are. It is the real. And going against hierarchy is the same as turning
“against reality itself. Society would be denatured in the attempt” to work against the
givenness of this participatory structure.59 Recall that above, in chapter two, I referred to
Rosen’s work on Leo’s conception of social inequality among orders rather than among
persons. Leo has in mind divisions of society such as the estates that comprised the ancien
régime or, even further back, the orders of oratores, bellatores, and laboratores that comprised
medieval society. Within the Church, hierarchical participation is not a reference to the
subordination of individual laypersons to clerical persons. Rather, as Leo’s treatment of the
office of the papacy demonstrates, or as his constant attention to religious orders indicates,
he is again envisioning orders or munera within the body. And within the family, something
analogous obtains between parents and children. Following St. Paul, who recognized that the
eye is not the hand, Leo identifies the Church as a pluriform communitas ordered to a specific
function. In this communitas, born of one faith in one Lord and his singular baptism,
pluriformity is not the issue. Rather, disorder and division are. Pluriformity is, in fact, the
proper description of the ecclesial body, comprised by all the parts. The same goes, mutatis
mutandis, for society at large. Just as within the Church there are various hierarchical orders
58
59
The language is Taylor’s. Cf., Modern Social Imaginaries, 11.
Ibid., 11.
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participating with and in and through each other, so in human society, Leo suggests, there
are various hierarchical orders participating with and in and through each other.
Were Leo to abandon hierarchical participation for a flattening of the ecclesial body
in order to rid the Church of subordination, he would not simply be bringing the Church up
to date with the modern deliverances of a contractual society. He would be drawing the life
of the Head and the life of the members onto the same ontological continuum. At least two
options present themselves for overhauling the Christian social imagination here and
drawing the life of the Head and of the members into some form of identity. First, as we saw
in the first chapter, a Mazzinian univocation could perform this task. After all, a Mazzinian
ontology would allow us to falsely imagine the ecclesial communitas as identical to a
successively incarnating god itself, not yet fully realized in history, journeying toward ever
fuller manifestation in the new age. Second, as we have been considering here, a contractual
univocation could perform this task. Free, voluntary membership, selective consumption of
truth, and individual estimation of good could stand in for the hierarchical participation of
that which is lower in that which is higher.
But neither of these options represents what Christians believe about the relationship
between the Head’s divine life and the donated participation of creatures in that very same
life. The necessary relation between the Head’s life and the participation of the members is
not rooted in an ontologically identical journey toward unity in the future. Neither is the
relation rooted in the individual person’s will to contract with Christ or his Church. Instead,
the relation is rooted in the Lord’s own life, death, and resurrection, and in his invitation to
creatures to be baptized into him. Christ is the principle of unity, and so the unity of the
ecclesial communitas is unintelligible without an account of its participation in the incarnation.
Ecclesial unity, peculiar though it is in history, is nevertheless analogous to the unity of all
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other communitates. Their unity is founded in something beyond themselves. Their unity is not
exhausted solely in terms of the human preference for companionship or cooperation, much
less in terms of the human artifact of the contract. Instead, their unity is most perfectly
described as a gift of the Divine Wisdom, which has made the human person to image the
divinity both in her rational personhood and in her sociality. In the case of the Church, but
also in the case of all other communitates, the members are participating according to a
principle that cannot be derived solely from the human will. In the case of all memberships,
the members are participating in communitas - they are creating communitas - on account of a
divine initiative to make the whole conducive to a necessity of human flourishing. In the
case of the ecclesial body, the members are participating according to the divine initiative to
save human persons through membership in Christ’s body, the Church. In the case of
human society more generally, the members are participating according to the divine
initiative to provide human persons with the context in which they may cultivate the social
aspect of the imago Dei.
But within 19th century society, Leo’s commitment to this vision of communitas is an
unacceptable contention. A social imagination that can countenance hierarchical
participation after 1789 is antithetical to the social imagination that holds that all things even liberty and fraternity - must be sacrificed on the altar of the equality. After all, it is only
equality that finally freed us from the inequalities of the ancien régime and the oppressions that
followed therefrom. It is only equality that allowed us to finally pursue fraternité and so
restore the broken relations. The sacrifice of all things on an altar to equality ultimately
depends on a univocal habit of predication that cannot imagine distinction and unity existing
in complementary and even mutually reinforcing relationship. If the broken relationships of
nature and history are to be restored, they must be restored by reducing all social
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pluriformity to identity, all differential hierarchy to univocal flatness. This is the gospel of
1789, overcoming the distorted inequalities of the ancien régime. It is also the socialist gospel,
overcoming the inequalities of laissez-faire capitalism. But then again, it is also the dark gospel
undergirding laissez-faire capitalism itself, supposedly overcoming the arbitrary success and
power of hereditary aristocracy. In every direction, Leo encounters an atomized account of
the human person rooted in the univocal collapsing of all social relations into the singularity
of the consumptive will. This voluntarism expresses itself most eloquently in history via the
political communitas signified by citizenship in the liberal nation. So powerful is this model of
citizenship that, according to Crispi, even the pope’s own “celestial empire” is ultimately
founded on the preferences of those who choose to put their faith in him. Liberal citizenship
is thus designed by the state not only to counteract the problem of local, historical
sovereignties through the consolidation of national sovereignty. It is also designed by the
state to refashion the Church in the state’s own image. Liberal citizenship thus demands a
certain ecclesiology that de-socializes the Church.
IIb. Ecclesial Society, the Proper Care of Persons, and the Political Vocation
After treating of Christ as the principle of Christian unity, Leo continues in Sapientiae
Christianae to treat of the Church’s status as a perfect society in relation to other societies in
history. In doing so, Leo is countering this de-socialization of the Church. Throughout Leo’s
social magisterium, he examines the Church’s social relations with a variety of communitates,
including the family, secret sects, economic associations, lay religious orders, and schools.
But in Sapientiae Christianae, his attention is trained solely on the Church’s relationship to the
civil power.60 The Church, like the civil power, possesses particular munera that define her
“fixed laws, special spheres of action, and a certain method, fixed and conformable to her
At every key point in his treatment of Church/state relations in Sapientiae Christianae, he is drawing from his
previous work in Immortale Dei (1885).
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nature [...].”61 Both powers “have as their object to train men to perfection.”62 This
anthropological territory shared by the overlapping jurisdictions of the two powers is the
originating source of the most significant tensions between the Catholic Church and the
modern nation-state, which are both tasked with ministering to the res sacra in temporalibus.
But the negotiation of this anthropological territory cannot be reduced to a pragmatic
concern with jurisdictional overlap. We are no longer in the world of tense collaboration
between the two spheres. Instead, we are in a world where the needs of human nature are
being renegotiated.
As we noted above, in the ideal case, the work of the two powers within their given
jurisdictions would be perfectly harmonious since both powers originate in the Divine
Wisdom of the Lord for the benefit of humans journeying toward beatitude. Furthermore, in
this ideal case the two powers would be perfectly free within their jurisdictions to exercise
their authority.
[I]t is plainly evident that the governing powers are wholly free to carry out the business of
the State; and this not only not against the wish of the Church, but manifestly with her cooperation, inasmuch as she strongly urges to the practice of piety, which implies right feeling
towards God, and by that very fact inspires a right-mindedness toward the rulers in the state.
The spiritual power, however, has a far loftier purpose, the Church directing her aim to
govern the minds of men in the defending of the “kingdom of God, and His justice,” a task
she is wholly bent upon accomplishing.63
So, at a glance, Leo’s vision of the two powers’ relations and actions seems to fit
comfortably enough within a Cavourian conception of a free church within a free state
where separation would leave each power within its own sphere of influence. And Crispi
may have been pleased to hear Leo speak in such spiritual, interior terms regarding piety,
feeling, right-mindedness, and the like. Cavour, if not his more militantly anti-clerical
Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §25. Cf. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §§8-13.
Ibid.
63 Ibid., §26, quoting Matt. 6:33, emphasis added. Cf. Immortale Dei, §§3-6.
61
62
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followers, would also likely applaud Leo when he writes that, “No one can, however,
without risk to faith, foster any doubt as to the Church alone having been invested with such
power of governing souls as to exclude altogether the civil authority. In truth, it was not to
Caesar but to Peter that Jesus Christ entrusted the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.”64 Leo
seems to have set up a perfect justification for the separation of the powers, rooted firmly in
the integrity of civil authority and the Gospel witness to the Lord’s mandate. But a separatist
and spiritualized vision of the Church’s relationship to the civil power is not what Leo has in
mind.
It seems that influence between the two powers is unilateral. According to Leo, the
Church may influence the civil power in myriad, albeit spiritual, ways in order to help the
civil power in the commission of its duty to care for the humans under its charge. That is,
the Church may exercise spiritual authority over temporal, political animals exactly in their
temporality and in their politics. But the same is not true from the State’s end. The State may
not influence the spiritual power in order to help the spiritual power in the commission of its
duty to the humans under its charge. That is, the State may not exercise temporal authority
over religious animals exactly in their religiosity.65 So whereas Cavour and Crispi desired to
separate and spiritualize the Catholic Church in order to de-socialize it into the realm of
private conscience, Leo separates and spiritualizes the Catholic Church precisely in order to
socialize it within the public realm of institutions, authorities, and powers. In a way then,
Ibid., §27.
Thomas Pink has taken up the task of describing Leo’s relationship to past Catholic teaching regarding the
Church’s use of the civil power as her own “secular arm” and, furthermore, the relationship of this tradition to
Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae. Cf. Pink, “The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin
Rhonheimer,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 77-121, especially at 82-7. After being
significantly challenged by Martin Rhonheimer on his reading of Dignitatis Humanae, (Rhonheimer, “Dignitatis
Humanae - Not a Mere Question of Church Policy: A Response to Thomas Pink,” Nova et Vetera, English
Edition, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2014): 445-70) Pink has recently revisited Leo’s thought on temporal power and its
relationship to the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae in Pink, “Jacques Maritain and the Problem of Church and
State,” The Thomist 79 (2015): 1-42.
64
65
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Italian separatism operates on a half-truth: that the two powers are distinct and should
remain so. But in Leo’s mind, this distinction between the two powers is not an occasion for
separation, and certainly not for the relegation of the Church to any private realm.
Instead, Leo draws out the consequences of the analogical relationship between the
two powers: “A notable difference exists between every kind of civil rule and that of the
kingdom of Christ. If this latter bear a certain likeness and character to a civil kingdom, it is
distinguished from it by its origin, principle, and essence.”66 Given that both the spiritual and
the civil powers count as perfect societies, it is reasonable to affirm their obvious likenesses
in terms of discipline, law, organization, etc. But to do so without further distinguishing the
infinite gap between the Church and the State would be to immanentize the Church and to
bring her down to the State’s level. Since the Church “not only is a perfect society in herself,
but superior to every other society of human growth,67 she resolutely refuses, promoted alike
by right and by duty, to link herself to any mere party and to subject herself to the fleeting
exigencies of politics.”68
We see here the deeper justification for the non expedit reiterated to Italians during
Leo’s reign.69 It is not expedient for Catholics to participate in national politics not only
because non-participation strengthens the Holy See’s protest against the legitimacy of the
Italian nation, but also because in certain circumstances Catholicism may be used for
partisan purposes beneath the dignity of religion, which should “be accounted by everyone
as holy and inviolate.”70 To implicate Catholicism in the interests of partisanship in national
Ibid., §28.
It is worth noting Leo’s dynamic vision of human sociality. Society is not a static reality one enters or exits,
but rather is an activity of human rationality.
68 Ibid.
69 “Non expedit” her refers to both a lack of expediency and a curtailing of freedom. From the Holy See’s
perspective at the time, it was not useful, and so it was not licit, to participate in Italian national politics.
70 Cf. Ibid., §29. Leo is quite obviously writing to his fellow Italians, urging them to abide by the non expedit until
such time as it becomes obvious that national politics can “consult the interests of Catholicism.” Wherever the
66
67
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politics is to trade such holy and inviolable things as are the Church’s for the mundane and
mutable goods of this life. It is to take that which conducts us to our final end in beatitude
and use it for the sake of finite ends of dubious value. Thus Leo works with a form of
separation between Church and State that, first, ensures that the spiritual power of the
Church takes spiritual precedence over the temporal power of the State. This separation,
second, ensures that the Church is able to exercise its influence in the temporal sphere of
society and politics, but that the State is prevented from influencing the spiritual sphere of
Catholic religion. Finally, he has stated that the Church ought not get involved in partisan
politics. Though Cavour and Crispi would certainly object to features of Leo’s thought so
far, Leo again seems to have largely played into Crispi’s hand by setting up a celestial empire
within the minds of those who choose to put their trust in him. Perhaps Leo recognizes this
difficulty, for the next two paragraphs of the letter take a different tack.
Having established that the Church and the State are distinct and that “neither obeys
the other within the limits to which each is restricted by its constitution,” Leo notes that it
does not follow that “Church and State are in any manner severed, and still less
antagonistic.”71 The analogue, again, is the human substance, for nature has given us “not
only physical existence, but moral life likewise.”72 This is the heart of the matter, and we
must pause here to interrogate Leo’s reasoning. Why is it the case that the Church and the
State are distinct, perhaps even “separated,” but not in any way severed or antagonistic? The
answer lies in the human substance, the preeminent res sacra in temporalibus.
interests of Catholicism “appear by reason of the efforts of adversaries to be in danger, all differences of
opinion among Catholics should forthwith cease, so that, like thoughts and counsels prevailing, they may
hasten to the aid of religion, the general and supreme good, to which all else should be referred.”
71 Ibid., §30.
72 Ibid.
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Leo places the human person at the heart of his consideration of the relationship
between the two powers. The human person lives under the authority of these two powers
and receives a variety of munera from both of them. From the political communitas, the human
person may reasonably expect physical care, the tranquility of public order, and the
“sheltering care” necessary for the proper living of a moral life. This moral life “consists
exclusively in the knowledge and practice of virtue.”73 From this brief description of the
State’s duty to the human persons under its charge, we can see that the civil authority is in
no way severed from the spiritual interests of the Church. But the relation of the civil
authority to the spiritual/moral nature of the human person is somewhat attenuated. We
might say in more contemporary terms that, from Leo’s perspective, the civil authority is
responsible for creating conditions in which the human animal may flourish. And such
flourishing is necessarily flourishing that transcends the material. From Leo’s perspective,
the State’s temporal authority is implicated in the spiritual care of human persons insofar as
human persons cannot help but be spiritual animals. As we have seen above, Leo does not
give the political communitas primary access to the “power of governing souls.” But neither
does he allow the state to pretend it is disinterested in such governance.74
From the ecclesial communitas, on the other hand, the human person may reasonably
expect moral care, aids toward “religious perfection,” and the knowledge and practice of true
religion “which is the queen of virtues, because in binding these to God it completes them
Ibid.
It is worth recalling how Leo begins Sapientiae Christianae: “Progress, not inconsiderable indeed, has been
made towards securing the well-being of the body and of material things, but the material world, with the
possession of wealth, power, and resources, although it may well procure comforts and increase the enjoyment
of life, is incapable of satisfying our soul created for higher and more glorious things. To contemplate God, and
to tend to Him is the supreme law of the life of man. For we were created in the divine image and likeness, and
are impelled, by our very nature, to the enjoyment of our Creator. But not by bodily motion or effort do we
make advance toward God, but through acts of the soul [...]. But what applies to individual men applies equally
to society - domestic alike and civil. Nature did not form society in order that man should seek in it his last end,
but in order that in it and through it he should find suitable aids whereby to attain to his own perfection”
(§§1,2).
73
74
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all and perfects them.”75 From this description of the Church’s duty to the persons under its
charge, and given what we have said about the State, we can also see that the Church is in no
way severed from the temporal interests of the State. There is no moral care or religious
perfection for humans that is not care or perfection worked out in a body in time. Pace
Crispi, there can be no “celestial empire” for the Pope. His is an empire in minds and in
bodies just as much as the nation-state’s imperial desire comprehends the minds and bodies
of the citizens.
In order to meet these expectations, the two communitates, according to Leo, are
responsible for certain types of public work. For the State’s part, it must “neither [enjoin]
nor [forbid] anything save what is reasonably consistent with civil as well as with religious
requirements.”76 And as we have seen above, the State must remain out of the business of
governing souls. For the Church’s part, it must be active in society, especially when State
actions and legislation pass “beyond their due limits” and “trench upon the rights of the
Church.”77 But again, Leo takes one step beyond what could sound like Cavourian
separatism, writing: “From God has the duty been assigned to the Church not only to
interpose resistance, if at any time the State rule should run counter to religion, but, further,
75 Ibid. The phrase “true religion” requires some attention. In Libertas praestantissimum, §§18-21, Leo discusses
the liberties of worship and conscience, making it abundantly clear that he is not working with a modern
definition of religion as any sort of anthropological phenomenon. Instead, in Leo’s way of thinking, religion is a
virtue - a perfection of the human will in this case, as religion is annexed to the virtue of justice - that pertains
to the human person’s duty to worship the Creator. More specifically, religion is a virtue for Leo because
religion “performs those actions which are directly and immediately ordained for the divine honor.” Because
this is the case, religion is the condition of truly virtuous living. The implication is clear. If there is a doctrine
and/or society and/or body of practices and/or historical tradition that claims to train humans to truly and
properly worship the Creator, then it alone would qualify as true and proper religion. Thus there is no such
thing as a genus, religion, with various species housed beneath it. Rather, for Leo, Catholicism is religion per se.
For a later definition of Catholicism as religion per se, cf. Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common
Destiny of Man, trans. by Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sr. Elizabeth Englund, OCD, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1988), at 298, where de Lubac suggests that Catholicism is the “form that humanity must put on in order finally
to be itself.” For a provocative discussion of how modern states are diametrically opposed to considering
religion in this way, and how this opposition is implicated in the desire of the state to tame the Church, cf.
William Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the
State,” Modern Theology 11:4 October, 1995: 397-420, especially at 414-16.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
174
to make a strong endeavor that the power of the Gospel may pervade the law and
institutions of the nations.”78
Recall that Leo has taught that neither the Church nor the State obeys the other
within the respective limits of its jurisdiction. Recall also Leo’s earlier statement that the
Church exercises her influence in the temporal realm of politics, helping the State care for
human persons spiritually. From a contemporary perspective, this would appear to be a bald
contradiction. Isn’t it disingenuous to suggest that neither one sphere obeys the other and
that the Church should work so that the Gospel pervades the laws and institutions of nationstates? But in Leo’s social magisterium, the coherence of these two apparently contradictory
ideas is one of his most significant metaphysical contentions. It expresses perfectly the
nature of the analogia communitates: that there are hierarchical orders of social organization
indexed to the myriad needs of the human animal, that these orders possess munera unique to
them in order to minister to the human animal, and that the orders participate in and
through each other precisely for commission of these ministries. Leo refuses to imagine the
Church on the same level as the State, as though the Church were one more institution busy
governing society. This would be to immanentize and bureacratize the Church, bringing her
holy and inviolate laws, methods, disciplines, and ends down to the level of departmental
protocols conceded to her by an omnicompetent state. But neither does Leo’s hierarchical
vision of institutional plurality create a celestial realm for the Church, far and away above the
sublunary realm of the State. This would be to spiritualize the Church and leave her holy and
inviolate laws, methods, disciplines, and ends far away in an invisible heaven, or at least in a
private conscience. Crispi called for this directly.
78
Ibid., §31.
175
Instead, the hierarchical ordering of the analogically related communitates expresses
most adequately the deepest truths about human animals, and so about the communitates
humans are always making - namely, that the human animal, and so also human society, is
ordered to the perfection of a supernatural beatitude that transcends without destroying the
natural beatitudes of this life. The human animal is at once spiritual and corporeal - the
rational animal. And so, human societies bear both characters as well. The State can no more
be a purely temporal bureaucracy than the Church can be a purely spiritual motivator. In every
case, given the needs of the human, communitates are tasked with ministering to a sacred thing
in time. Their structure, order, and relationship to each other reflects this critical ministry.
In either case, to bureaucratize or celestialize the Church would rely on an
equivocation regarding communitas, for it would implicitly suggest that the historical and
conventional ministries of religious and political communitates are nothing more than that:
historical and conventional, severed from any given reality of human nature. If the munera
unique to each communitas comprising the analogia communitatis are detached from a real
human nature, the munera become negotiable, contractual, and malleable. Such an
equivocation is dangerous because it deprives humans of any stable way of assessing the
graces and abuses of their social lives. It is little wonder then that toward the end of his
pontificate, Leo looks back over the 19th century and forward into the 20th and laments
exactly this phenomenon. Detached from the sovereignty of the Creator and reattached to
the sovereignty of the people, the proper munera of the political communitas have become
nearly arbitrary. Rather than exercising true care for the persons under their authority, the
nations have formulated laws that “are but the expression of the power of the greater
number and the will of the predominant political party.”79 In the “popular passion” resulting
79
Leo XIII, Apostolic Letter, March 19, 1902.
176
from this form of rule, disorder can “only be quelled by violent measures and the shedding
of blood.” And so now, after repudiating the “Christian principles” that had formerly joined
political communitates into the “bonds of brotherhood,” and that had even worked toward
bringing “all humanity into one great family,” another form of politics has “arisen little by
little in the international order [...].”80 The worst abuses of 1789 have become policies in
service of the worst fears of Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism and internationalism. The
nations have contrived a “system of jealous egoism, in consequence of which [they] now
watch each other, if not with hate, at least with the suspicion of rivals. Hence, in their great
undertakings they lose sight of the lofty principles of morality and justice and forget the
protection which the feeble and the oppressed have a right to demand.”81 Severed from the
properly political task of caring for human persons, the nations have also severed the
ontological and semantic connection between human sociality and the historical and social
contingencies of their own communitas. From a Leonine perspective, the equivocation is so
near completion that the nations are in danger of forgetting why they exist.
A further question presents itself: Does Leo’s hierarchical notion of the Church’s
relation to the State, when combined with the idea that the Church can work to pervade the
State’s laws and institutions, violate the principle of subsidiarity? Noting that Leo does not
use the term subsidiarity but only thinks “subsidiarily,” we can answer as follows. Leo’s
analogical and hierarchical conception of social institutions does not violate the principle of
subsidiarity if we remember that subsidiarity is not first and foremost an organizational
mechanism whereby societies prevent higher orders from interfering in the prerogatives of
lower orders. “To be sure, subsidiarity is often described and deployed in a defensive sense as to what the state may not do or try to accomplish - but the principle is not so much a
80
81
Ibid.
Ibid.
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theory about state institutions, nor of checks and balances, as it is an account of the
pluralism and sociality of society.”82 That is, Leo’s conception actually articulates perfectly
the principle of subsidiarity if we consider that it is a description of the proper or healthy
exercising by social bodies of their unique munera. If it is in fact the Church’s munus to
exercise her spiritual care in the temporal realm (and it is hard to see how this could not be
the case), then subsidiarity demands that the Church work downward, as it were, and even
“pervade the law and institutions of the nations.” Though such language may be used to
defend an integralist interpretation of the Church’s relationship to society and/or the state, it
need not be so. Spiritual care in temporalibus need not entail the Church’s overriding the
legitimate integrity of lower social orders. To work downward in this manner would be
another violation of subsidiarity. Leo’s vision of the pervasive presence of the Church in a
nation is not oriented to the violation of the integrity of the lower orders of the State or the
family. Rather, Leo thinks of this pervasive presence as the very condition of their
flourishing in their own, proper mode.83
We see this line of thinking again and again in Leo’s thought, whenever he gives an
historical treatment of marriage or of the relationship between Christianity and paganism.84
Were the Church to cease to work for the pervasion of the Gospel throughout a society,
then first, the Church would not be following the Lord’s mandate to love, to make disciples,
and to teach, and second, the Church would be abandoning society to a variety of
Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles,” 825.
Cf. Ibid. “On [the Catholic] view, subsidiarity cannot be construed as judments, decisions, actions at the
“lowest level.” The notion of a “lowest” level perverts the concept of subsidiarity. The better term is proper
level. The term “proper” is taken from the Latin word proprium, denoting what belongs to, or what is possessed
by, a thing or person. On the modern view of the state, there are only two persons having propria: the artificial
person of the state, and natural, individual persons. The “lowest” level can only mean the individual, or,
perhaps, partnerships. Subsidiarity, on the other hand, presupposes that there are plural authorities and agents
having their “proper” (not necessarily, lowest) duties and rights with regard to the common good immediately, the common good of the particular society, but also the common good of the body politic.”
84 Cf. for example Aeterni Patris §§10-12, Arcanum §§5-9, Diuturnum §§18-22, among others.
82
83
178
degradations. It is a function of social orders that they not only influence individuals, but
other social orders as well. It would be impossible to limit the influence of a communitas to
the private realm of each member’s personal life. Instead, just as each communitas is
analogously related to every other, so the function of each communitas is analogously related
to the human vocation to cause good. Indeed, the pluriform relations of persons and
societies is the created context in which humans cultivate their likeness to the Lord’s
goodness. And so Leo’s way of thinking exposes a certain tension in Crispi’s condescending
praise of the Pope’s celestial empire. In Crispi’s mind, the State can make the Church what
the State needs the Church to be. The State can give the Church her territory. The State can
concede various jurisdictional responsibilities to the Church. And so the State can act, as a
social body, on the Church. But the reverse cannot be true in the separatist, laicist vision of
society. The Church may not tell the State what the State ought to be. The Church may not
touch the State’s territory, and indeed she must give her territory to the State. The Church
may not place the State’s jurisdiction under and within its own. And so the Church cannot
act, as a social body, on the State, or any other social bodies, for that matter, whether they be
marriages, families, schools, charitable organizations, fraternal associations, unions, or the
like.
Conclusion
The centrality of Leo’s ecclesiology to the coherence and utility of the analogia
communitatis is clear by now. By emphasizing the social nature of Christ’s Church, and by
acknowledging its sui generis status as an authority in society, replete with unique munera
essential for the flourishing of human animals, Leo has countered the liberal monism
underwriting the separatism that determines much of the anticlerical legislation in Italy
toward century’s end. Over against this monism, and for the sake of the flourishing of the
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human person and human societies, Leo advances an elegant defense of the hierarchical
pluriformity of true communitas. Comprehensive of both the material and spiritual, temporal
and eternal ends of the human person, this social pluriformity is not simply a thought
experiment advanced against Cavourian formulas or laicist theories. Instead, the Leonine
conception of social pluriformity corresponds to the mundane experiences of the average
human person, whose sociality is expressed by her membership in an array of social bodies,
all variously implicated in her flourishing and her journey toward beatitude. To name the
human person citizen and to envision the State as the primary access point to human sociality
is to ignore this array. Granted, the desire to ignore this array is easily understandable. From
the perspective of a young nation-state, such as Italy, the need to forge unity out of the
bewildering variety of local customs, traditions, and languages would seem to require that a
preeminent social body step in to begin to redefine communitas in terms of a national identity.
The competing loves signified by the family, the Church, and any number of other
communitates can seem to be implicated in the cultivation of local vice over against the
development of civic virtue.
But the Leonine teaching expressed in the ecclesiological matters we have discussed
would take an opposite tack, focusing on the integrity of the munera communicated at every
level of the social order. The Italian separatists are not wrong. This is a question of love. But
as Leo teaches at the end of Sapientiae Christianae, the love of nation and the duty of the
citizen are finally conditioned by a love that transcends without destroying them.
It is [...] urgent before all, that charity, which is the main foundation of the Christian life, and
apart from which the other virtues exist not or remain barren, should be quickened and
maintained. Therefore is it that the Apostle Paul, after having exhorted the Colossians to flee
all vice and cultivate all virtue, adds: “Above all things, have charity, which is the bond of
perfection.” Yea, truly, charity is the bond of perfection, for it binds intimately to God those
whom it has embraced and with loving tenderness, causes them to draw their life from God,
to act with God, to refer all to God. Howbeit, the love of God should not be severed from
the love of our neighbor, since men have a share in the infinite goodness of God and bear in
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themselves the impress of His image and likeness. [...] No one is unaware how deeply and
from the very beginning the import of the [commandment to love God and neighbor] has
been implanted in the breast of Christians, and what abundant fruits of concord, mutual
benevolence, piety, patience, and fortitude it has produced.85
85
Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §§40,41.
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CHAPTER 4
THE ORIGINAL COMMUNITAS AND THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:
LEONINE MATRIMONIAL THEOLOGY AND LIBERAL PEDAGOGY
Just as modern social and political theories throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in
Europe made a concerted effort to liberate economies, educational institutions, and political
regimes from the obstructive hierarchies and mediations of the ancien régime, so did they make
a concerted effort to liberate matrimony and family from the same. In the case of both
liberations, it seemed necessary to philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, and
legislators to return to the origins of these institutions, which by modern standards had
become overgrown and obstructive of human liberty in history. If citizenship in the modern
regime was to restore the broken relationships of nature and history, then a more radical
understanding of those relationships would surely contribute to the proper assessment of
their brokenness and the appropriate remedy. Thus, there developed in the 18th and 19th
centuries accounts of matrimony and the family that located them in theoretical realms
sharply differentiated from the socio-historical milieux in which the theories themselves were
developed. These theoretical efforts were translated into liberal matrimonial legislation in
nation-states across Europe.
In this chapter, my goal is to further illuminate the analogia communitatis in light of this
search for original forms of communitas and this legislative effort to bring these original forms
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more directly within the sight of the state. I argue that Leo’s matrimonial teaching in the
1880 encyclical, Arcanum Divinae, offers us an eloquent demonstration of how liberal
matrimonial theory enables a de-socialized and de-politicized formation of citizens. What I
will call “liberal pedagogy” or “liberal matrimonial morality” in this chapter signifies a social
anthropology that competes with the Church’s sacramental theology and tradition of canon
law. The objective of this competition is to make over the image of the domestic communitas
into the image of the state. Leo argues that this makeover is sacrilegious in that it extracts the
domestic communitas from its participation in the analogia communitatis flowing from the Divine
Wisdom.
First, I will briefly summarize the modern, theoretical effort to reimagine matrimony
and the family in terms of a liberation from social and historical accretions. Second, I will tell
the vexed story of Italian matrimonial legislation during Pius IX and Leo XIII’s pontificates.
Liberal Italy, like many other nations in Europe, attempts to experiment with matrimonial
legislation that will liberate human persons and their personal relationships from these same
accretions. Third, I will investigate Leo’s careful and direct response to this theoretical and
historical context. Arcanum Divinae is a sophisticated but contentious counter, not only to the
legislative proposals being heard by the Italian Chamber of Deputies, but also to the modern
thrill for origins and historical purifications expressed by liberal theory. Leo’s identification
of matrimony as a sacrament from creation is aimed directly at these searches for the origins
of matrimony. In this chapter we will see how the analogia communitatis enables Leo’s
matrimonial teaching to expose the civil power’s appetite for social munera that do not
properly belong to it. In the case of matrimony, the social and political stakes are rather high
in that the civil power desires to consume its own foundations.
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I. The Search for the Origin and End of Matrimony
The contemporary political scientist, Scott Yenor, has written an insightful account
of the stories of matrimony and family as told by modern social and political theorists. From
Yenor’s invaluable work, we can summarize these modern stories as follows:
Locke sought to rescue the patriarchal family from its enabling relationship to
political absolutism by restoring matrimony and family’s original form: a nuclear contract
ordered principally to the biological munus of propagation.1 And like Locke, Rousseau sought
a repristination of the conjugal family in a “new nature” that simultaneously acknowledged
the social dependence signified by biological necessity, but respected the separated, equal
spheres of the individuals comprising the family.2 Though Locke and Rousseau’s restorations
of natural relations in the family were ordered to different purposes,3 their fundamental
connection lay in the conviction that history had subjected the essential cells of society to
various abuses, and that society had built up within and around marriage and family a
complex and irrational array of munera that in fact belonged to other communitates. Only life
and membership within modern, rational regimes would suffice to purify marriage and
family of these accretions and so restore what had been broken.
This paleo-knowledge of the primary and final causality of both the human
substance and human relationship was a sign of a certain competence with regard to all
things social and political. Locke and Rousseau offer us some of the most famous and
broadly influential examples of this expertise in origins and the corresponding intuition that
liberalism may provide society with the chance to recover what has been lost. But this was
Cf. Scott Yenor, Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought, (Waco, TX: Baylor University
Press, 2011), 19-37.
2 Cf. Ibid., 39-60.
3 Cf. Ibid., 29-33, for Locke’s correlation of the family’s educative role and society’s interest in teaching citizens
how to properly possess private property, including human liberty. Cf. Ibid., 56-60, for Rousseau’s
understanding of a “new nature” where romantic love and biological dependence are joined for the creation of
virtuous republicans.
1
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not the only tack to take in discerning the fundaments of human sociality and liberating
them from the ancien régime. After Hegel, it became possible to speak, not only of the primal
origins of marriage and family, but of their ultimate telos in a not-too-distant future. In
addition to repristinating them, liberal society could shepherd their forward progress. The
history of the fundamental cells of society, for Hegel, is not the story of society’s continuous
departure from the family’s true origins so much as it is the story of the purifying
development of the family’s rational form over time. Whereas once the family was an end in
itself, in the resolution that is to come between the family and the state, the natural family
will forfeit its social functions to the state. Matrimony and family will then achieve their
purest form, serving as a means for forming citizens morally and spiritually for membership
within a universal political community.4
For his part, Mill’s conceptualizations of matrimony and family work in an historical
mode similar to Hegel’s. He suggests that the past forms of marriage and family have been
corrupted by the subjugation of women and by social conventions mistaken for natural
authenticity. The goal, though, is not to get back to the true origins of the family, prior to
such human abuses and artifices. These origins are unknowable, shrouded in the mists of
historical contingencies and conventions. The goal, rather, is a future form of marriage
experienced primarily as deep friendship with one’s soul mate. In this future, personal choice
will overcome what we have mistaken for “nature,” and we will arrive at the truly rational
form of the family: a consensual relationship based solely on mutual love.5
Cf. Ibid., 63-85, especially at 84: “[M]arriage and family as such are, in a sense, turned into means, in Hegel’s
analysis, so individuals can fulfill their ‘highest duty,’ which is ‘to be members of the state.’ The family is lower in
dignity than participation as a citizen in the state; the family’s self-understanding is shaped by the state’s legal
conceptions of the family.” Recall that in chapter 1.2 we saw how Mazzini envisioned the mediational munus of
the state vis-a-vis the international community. Mazzini’s thought is notably different from Hegel, however, in
that Mazzini speculated that no amount of historical progress could nullify the family’s fundamental munera.
5 Cf. Ibid., 115-35.
4
185
In the 19th century, the most explicit and radical synthesis of these themes is the
materialist historicism of Marx and Engels, which claims primal, historical, and
eschatological knowledge of every phase of matrimony and family history. Engels’ most
famous work in this area is The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. His project in
this seminal work is derived from Marx’s unpublished papers and from the discredited
anthropological research of Lewis H. Morgan’s 1877 work, Ancient Society, or Researches in the
Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. From Engels’ perspective,
Morgan’s historical narrative finally gives modern society what it has been searching for at
least since Locke’s efforts to repristinate patriarchy.6 That is, Morgan shows us that the
family is an “active principle” that is “never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher
form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition.”7 Engels seeks to trace the
dynamism of the family, from its earliest form(s) as it emerges from ape life, to its latter
bourgeois form, which Engels believes to be in need of emancipation. In turning to
Morgan’s anthropology, Engels provides what Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Mill were
incapable, hesitant, or opposed to providing: a thoroughly materialist account of matrimony
and family finally divorced from any need to account for a creator or a nature.
Beginning in a primitive stage and developing into a barbaric or savage stage,
matrimony and family were originally matriarchal, characterized by sexual liberty or even
promiscuity, and rooted in a natural division of labor on account of the human subjection to
nature. Unsurprisingly, Marx and Engels identify a “primitive communism” in these stages,
accomplished by human communities untouched, as yet, by the social and economic
It falls outside the scope of my project here, but it is at least important to note with Leo that certain trends in
modern rationalism and liberalism can be helpfully interpreted in terms of the Reformation. In the case of this
desire for the pristine origins of matrimony and family, it would be possible to extend our analysis of the desire
further back into Europe’s history: first, to a reforming impulse to cleanse the Catholic Church of various
sacramental mediations; and second, to Trent’s response.
7 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), 60.
6
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developments to come. Marx and Engels locate the origins of the next stage of the story in
the invention and jealous cultivation of private property. The maintenance of property
requires greater social and intergenerational control, so we observe in history the rise of
conventional monogamous matrimony and the development of bourgeois family life. In
sharp contrast to their primitive and barbaric beginnings, bourgeois matrimony and family
are built on the domination of women by men and of the proletariat by capital. But the good
news is that the time has finally arrived when marriages and families can be liberated from
the dominations of the monogamous, civilized expression of conjugal life. The future is an
era of personal choice, of “individual sex love,” and of open, communal marriages and
families.8
These returns or future discoveries of the authentic form of matrimony and the
family were designed to overcome what Scott Yenor calls the “most persistent problem in
modern marriage,” which is the “conflict between the individual purposes of marriage and
its transformative role” on the one hand, and the “communal purposes” on the other.9 Are
marriages and families naturally ordered to personal fulfillment, moral development, and
other forms of personal cultivation, or are they naturally ordered to social stability, legal
efficiency, economic production, and other forms of institutional functionality? It is possible
to see again the necessity of an analogia communitatis that does not require us to pit personal
flourishing against social membership even as it does not require us to pit one type of social
membership against others. Were we to employ the univocal/equivocal distinction I made in
the first chapter, we could speak of univocal and equivocal accounts of communitas in relation
to marriages and families.
8
9
Cf. Yenor, Family Politics, 137-56.
Ibid., 63.
187
A univocal account of the communitas of matrimony in this case might mistake
matrimony and family’s constitutive role in society for the idea that all other communitates are
privative or derivative forms of this nuclear human sociality. In other words, considering
matrimony and family as antecedent to society and the state can terminate in a domestic
individualism that disregards the authentic communitas embodied and fostered by other social
realities. This is the temptation of certain conservative trends that seek to defend marriage
and family from the state. Paleo-knowledge of matrimony then would supposedly signal a
competence to totalize the communitas of matrimony. The univocal emphasis would be on
privacy, property, and the protection of the domestic from the social and the political. Locke
heads in this direction. Rousseau less so. Even Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism stands
under the social primacy of the domestic. Recall his suggestion that national unification
might one day give way to the total unity of the human family. But even in that future, the
domestic would retain its primacy. Indeed, it would fund la famiglia umana of the eschaton
with its primary analogate.
An equivocal account of the communitas of matrimony might mistake institutional
functionality for historical-conventional malleability. In this way of thinking, matrimony
especially, but also childbearing and rearing, could be imagined as platforms or mechanisms
for the most efficient accomplishment of various social and personal goods that could very
well be accomplished otherwise. The marital union especially could be recast as simply one
more form of partnership, rooted in a voluntary loyalty that may or may not last, and
ordered to ends determined by the wills of the partners. If the communitas of matrimony is
equivocal, matrimony does not so much occupy a unique munus in the analogia communitatis as
it expresses the human ability to organize an economy. In the cases of Hegel, Marx, Engels,
and Mill, we see an emphasis on the provisional status of traditional matrimonial forms, or
188
even “natural” matrimonial forms. The journey of these forms through history can be
described variously. Hegel, for example, imagined that the form of matrimony and family
was journeying toward resolution in the state. But Marx, Engels, and Mill each in his own
way, imagined the form of matrimony and family as journeying toward deeper levels of
personal satisfaction and liberation from social domination. In both cases, the domestic
munera are destined for the political. This is their rational form.
In the case of those marriages that welcome children, equivocation is more difficult
to sustain. The majority of parents, and more importantly, the majority of children, do not
see their kinship with their immediate family as equivalent to team membership or
commercial partnership. That is, we can recognize in kinship a sign that the biological
realities usually housed within matrimony are resistant to this equivocation. Seeing
matrimony and family as social artifacts in this way can terminate in a voluntaristic
individualism that disregards the ways in which biological and social inclinations are prior to
human will. Equivocation reconceptualizes the natural communitas embodied and fostered by
the family as simply one more example of how the power of the human will shapes reality.
This is the temptation of certain liberal trends that seek to liberate human persons from
biology, society, and history.
In the Italian context, we will see how univocal and equivocal habits of predication
compromise the legal definition of matrimony. As we have seen in chapter three, after the
official unification of the Italian peninsula in 1860, the task of creating a unified national
culture was the central challenge facing the new country.10 La famiglia became a sort of ideal
10 My discussion of Italian matrimonial law relies on the following: Lesley Caldwell, Italian Family Matters:
Women, Politics and Legal Reform, (New York: Macmillan, 1991), especially 1-27 and 51-68; Roderick Phillips,
Putting Asunder: A history of divorce in Western society, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially his
discussion of canon law at 1-39 and of liberal legislation at 403-78; Mark Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy:
Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860-1974, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially 1-134 for
189
model for the young nation’s conception of itself as a social and political unity. The family
thus represents for the nationalist imagination a social archetype. A certain univocal habit
thus undergirds this move to make the nation over into the image of a family. But there’s an
equivocation within Italy’s legal treatment of matrimony. As we will see, Italy wants to make
over the nation into a family, but in order to do so, the nation attempts to make the family
into its own image: a unity founded on the contract of the individual will. In making over the
family into its own image, Italy is ironically corroding its own ability to foster authentic
political life.
II. Patria, Famiglia, Libertà!: Liberal Italy’s Divorce Legislation
In addition to the struggle to overcome the formerly fragmented socio-political
geography of the peninsula, the new Italy faced the local-universal reality of the Roman
Catholic Church. Italy’s jurisdictional battle with the Church was always a contest over the
lives of human persons, a contest over cultural allegiances, moral formation, and a consensus
regarding human flourishing - in short, a contest over social anthropology.11 Within this
contest, the status of matrimony was of central importance given its peculiar position within
the analogia communitatis: it is a uniquely personal munus with a decidedly public valence.
Managing this munus has thus never been a matter solely of personal/private choice on the
the Pian and Leonine context; Giovanni B. Sgritta and Paolo Tufari, “Italy,” in Divorce in Europe, ed. Robert
Chester, (Leiden, Belgium: Martinus Nijhoff Social Sciences Division, 1977), 253-81, especially at 253-59 for
the 19th century context.
11 Cf. Caldwell, Italian Family Matters, 10: “In developing an argument for the importance of cultural unity as a
necessary condition for national unity, Gramsci emphasises the centuries-long existence of identifiably Catholic
traditions. Despite the lack of territorial, political and national unity, such traditions had been vital to the
history of the area. This association with Catholicism was distinctive, and the loss of the Papal territories, far
from contributing to the dissipation of its influence, appeared to draw upon it in establishing a different base of
power for the Church. It was the Church’s strength in cultural terms that Gramsci argued was central, and in
the discussion of Catholic Action, he described the fundamental inevitability once assigned to Catholicism by
pointing to its traces in the language and ways of thinking of the peasantry, where to be a Christian was taken
to be synonymous with being a human being: ‘I’m not a Christian’...’Well what are you, a beast?’”
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one hand or public/institutional authority on the other.12 In the terms I have been using, on
account of the peculiarly personal and public nature of matrimony, there’s something in the
institution that is particularly resistant to efforts to univocate and equivocate concerning the
type of communitas matrimony is. As such, the history of matrimonial law in the West is the
uneven and conflicted story about how institutions (primarily the ecclesial and civil powers)
have coordinated their aims with the personal choices, legal traditions, and local customs
under their jurisdiction and with the broader human conviction that matrimony is in some
sense deeply natural, but also deeply conventional.
Legislators in the new Italy recognized this immediately, seeing in matrimony a
“legal territory” it could wrest from the Church. Without victory in this territorial struggle,
Italy’s legal code would continue to be compromised by the legal authority of the Church
over the bodies and property of Italians. By allowing vestiges of Canon Law to remain in the
Civil Code, Italy would lack the consistency a liberal state desires as the communal sign of its
departure from the old order of things. The goal in addressing matrimony in Italy was to
legally establish civil matrimony (and perhaps even divorce) over against the Church’s
sacramental matrimony (and indissolubility), and this establishment was seen as ingredient to
making Italians out of the peoples of the peninsula. From 1860 to 1920, civil matrimony,
and especially divorce, are a legal conundrum openly and fully signifying what historian Mark
Seymour calls the “conquest of the Italian family.”13 Seymour, has carefully detailed this
story in his work on the history of Italian divorce legislation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
12 One of the best introductions to the complexity of the Church’s jurisdiction over matrimony in European
history is George Hayward Joyce, S.J., Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study, (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1933), especially 1-37 on matrimony according to nature, 146-85 on the sacrament, and 301ff on the
historical development of matrimonial law and sacramental theology. For a more modern treatment, Philip L.
Reynolds’s work is essential. Cf. Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic
and Early Medieval Periods, (New York: Brill, 1994); and How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental
Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent, (Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially at
727 and following for the Tridentine context, out of which Leonine matrimonial teaching is born.
13 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 17.
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Following Seymour’s analysis, we should contextualize family here in terms of the Italian
minister of justice, Giuseppe Pisanelli’s, speech to the Senate in 1863: “From the moment
Italians recognized the possibility of being reunited into one single family, the desire for
unification of the law has spread among all educated citizens.”14 Pisanelli and liberal
legislators following him saw in the Civil Code the chance to accomplish Mazzini’s great
dream: the country as family. The conquest signified by the marriage question during the
latter half of the 19th century is thus a complex battle over not only the personal lives and
relationships of citizens, but also over the public and political language and imagination of
the young nation. What social authority will shape the life of la patria? Whoever wins the
jurisdictional battle over la famiglia.
In 1852, prior to Leo’s pontificate, there had been an abortive attempt by Piedmont the most powerful political entity on the peninsula before unification - to introduce civil
matrimony. But it is not until the post-risorgimento legal and political context that civil
matrimony can really become a social reality for Italians. By January 1 of 1866, the Civil
Code approved the year before was made the law of the peninsula, and within the code was
legal provision for civil matrimony. The civil contract was not accompanied by provision for
divorce, however, and so Italian liberals created an “anomalous hybrid” - civil matrimonial
law that proscribes divorce - that was to prove contentious until the rise of fascism in the
1920s.15 Pisanelli describes this hybrid with great sensitivity:
It almost goes without saying that the new civil code totally excludes divorce. Divorce
produces great harm, worse for the children than the parents; but the greatest harm divorce
produces stems from the evils generated by the mere possibility. If a law...were to place the
idea of divorce at the threshold and in the heart of marriage, it would poison the sanctity of
the marriage...because the very idea would cause...a perennial and bitter suspicion.16
Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 17.
The phrase is Seymour’s.
16 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 18.
14
15
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Pisanelli’s description of the hybrid identifies perfectly two legal, theological, and
philosophical problems Leo tackles in Arcanum.
First, matrimony is sufficiently distinct from other contractual relations such that
both Pisanelli and Leo recognize its peculiarity, albeit from different perspectives. From
Leo’s perspective, matrimony’s peculiarity is constituted by a sanctity given to it by the
Creator and not by any other authority. All other authorities under heaven, including the
individual wills of the spouses contracting, participate in this prior sanctity. From Pisanelli’s
perspective, on the other hand, matrimony’s peculiarity is almost purely social, rooted in the
unique munus occupied by the domestic communitas in society. Second, on account of this
peculiarity, both Pisanelli and Leo see dissolution as incompatible with the nature of the
contract. Leo roots matrimony’s indissolubility in the Divine Wisdom. He teaches that
marriage participates in both natural and sacramental keys in the Lord’s providential ordering
and redemption of creation. Pisanelli, on the other hand, roots matrimony’s indissolubility in
pragmatic social implications, suggesting that dissolubility would poison spouses, children,
and by implication, the society at large. From both perspectives, dissolubility corrodes
matrimony, so indissolubility follows rationally from the peculiarity of the contract, which
must be maintained for the wellbeing of spouses, children, and society.
But the difference between Pisanelli’s approach and Leo’s is an important one that
will work as a wedge gradually dividing liberal matrimonial legislation from Catholic
teaching. Though Pisanelli advocates for indissoluble civil matrimony, his advocacy is
pragmatic, implicitly relieving the matrimonial contract from the duty of participating in an
order transcending anything other than the health of the domestic communitas and the
security of the state. Pisanelli thus begins an equivocation regarding the communitas embodied
in matrimony. And this equivocation is hidden within his desire to univocate regarding the
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family as the communitas on which new Italy’s unity should be founded. As we will see below,
the trend in Italy following Pisanelli’s advocacy is toward a further perfection of this logic.
To the extent that the health and security of the domestic communitas and the liberal state
alike are made to depend in the 19th century on securing society’s liberty from all former
hierarchies and mediations, an indissoluble civil contract made within this commitment to
liberation can easily be seen as a contradiction in terms. By the 1880’s, this contradiction will
be a matter of open debate in the Chamber of Deputies. Though the state may ask its
citizens to sacrifice all manner of goods, including life, for the good of the nation, the liberal
state that openly asks citizens to see supposedly non-political bonds such as matrimony as
indissoluble is being too overt. Indeed, a liberal state that places liberty and indissolubility at
the heart of civil matrimony appears to be contradicting itself. It is more convincing for the
liberal state to claim it teaches only a matrimonial morality that respects the wishes of the
individual wills contracting the union. It is little wonder then that, during the rise of fascism,
the divorce question all but disappears from Italian society. In its temporary defeat of
liberalism, fascist Italy is civilly capacitated to openly demand everything of the citizen. The
maintenance of an indissoluble bond underwritten by the authority of the state is perfectly
synchronized with the interests of a fascist regime. A young, liberal nation like new Italy
cannot appear so openly fascist. But below we will investigate more thoroughly how Leo
exposes the deeper moral formation going on in liberalism’s supposed rejection of this
fascist tendency.
In the course of Italy’s history, overcoming the problem of an indissoluble and civil
matrimonial contract, at least from the civil power’s perspective, was not helped at all by the
popular response to civil matrimony throughout the almost-uniformly Catholic peninsula.
From the enactment of the Civil Code in 1866, to 1877, the year prior to Leo’s ascent to the
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papal throne, it is estimated that 385,000 marriage contracts were made without the civil
ceremony. Instead of following the civil injunction on “Italians” to bind themselves in the
sight of the civil power first, these Catholics remained content17 to contract their marriages
in the sight of the Church.18 Furthermore, throughout Leo’s pontificate, one important
argument was leveled against the divorzisti19 again and again: there was an “almost complete
absence of any public clamor for a divorce law.”20 For this reason, as we will see below, Leo
is careful to note that liberal legislation appears to be forced on the citizenry.
Whereas the public was largely silent about divorce, the situation was somewhat
different in the Chamber of Deputies. Legislative debate regarding matrimony and divorce in
the 1870’s proceeded unevenly and usually due to action in the Chamber of Deputies by the
Mazzinian nationalist and proto-feminist, Salvatore Morelli. Morelli proposed divorce
legislation to the senate in 1873, ‘75, ‘78, and ‘80. Of these four proposals, the senate voted
to hear only the last two. Leo was elected in February, 1878, and Morelli’s first divorce bill
was heard in May of that year. On February 10, 1880, Leo released his central teaching
statement on matrimony - Arcanum Divinae. And the next month, Morelli proposed his
second divorce bill. And so the beginning of Leo’s pontificate coincides with the beginning
of the Italian Chamber’s public willingness to finally entertain divorce as the logical
consequence of the Civil Code’s provision for civil matrimony. Morelli’s cases for divorce
I choose the word deliberately. It would be easy enough to suggest that during this period, these 385,000
couples forewent the civil ceremony on account of their subjugation to and fear of clerical authority. But such
an interpretation too easily dismisses or ignores the authenticity of Christian convictions, the reasonability of
the Church’s teachings, and the culture-making reality of Christianity. In fact, such an interpretation can only
view the Church as desirous of the state’s power. My argument in this chapter is that it is in fact the state that is
desirous of the Church’s sacramental munus.
18 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 21.
19 Those advocating for divorce legislation.
20 Ibid., 45.
17
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and the senate’s willingness to hear his proposals thus shed a great deal of light on Leo’s
early encyclical on matrimony.21
In 1878, Morelli proposed divorce to the Chamber of Deputies as a healing munus
the government could provide to a society compromised by broken communitas in the
domestic sphere. In legislating divorce, Morelli suggests the Chamber would be
accomplishing a number of social goods: strengthening families, promoting mutual affection,
preventing the abuses of permanent separation, liberating women, and modernizing Italy’s
social imagination. Morelli continues the equivocation introduced by Pisanelli’s pragmatism.
Regarding the form and function of matrimony and the family unit, Morelli suggests that an
honest appreciation of the history of these institutions forces moderns to accept their sociohistorical instability. His 1878 proposal on the Chamber floor was an effort to demonstrate
the logical, moral, economic, and political necessity of Italian divorce.
From Morelli’s point of view, divorce follows logically from the Civil Code’s
provision for civil matrimony. Divorce is also a moral necessity given that matrimony’s
status as a contract should respect the free will of those contracting the relationship. But in
Italian society, Morelli suggests, many are pressured in a variety of ways to contract
marriages that should be dissolvable on account of those illegitimate pressures. Morelli’s
moral argument is further supported by his concern for the domestic, social, and political
liberation of women. Following Mazzini’s mystical essentializing of woman, Morelli calls for
divorce as a tool whereby women could finally be made equal citizens. Economically
speaking, Morelli argues that the social costs of dealing with the unhappy fallout of
prohibiting divorce far outweigh the costs of permitting it. And politically, Morelli suggests
My treatment of Morelli depends on Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 36-58. Seymour’s analysis features
much more detail than my summary here. Seymour notes at 55 that though Morelli’s widely publicized
arguments in favor of divorce do certainly occasion response from Leo in Arcanum, Alfred Naquet’s prodivorce proposals during the same time in France are also a key factor for the pope.
21
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that permitting divorce would contribute to the reduction of civil strife. Morelli’s proposed
legislation is thus a piece of social anthropology that emphasizes the importance of
matrimony and family life for personal and social health on the one hand, but that sees
divorce in terms of a balm that could restore broken relationships among the new Italian
citizenry on the other. This social concern of Morelli’s is wedded closely to an anticlericalism
that he does not try to mask. He states on the Chamber floor in 1878 that Italians have
“proclaimed liberty in the town square, but maintain despotism in the family….We have
abolished the papal temporal power in the legislative arena, but we permit the adoration of
its symbols in the home.”22
The response to Morelli’s 1878 proposal on both the floor (by the minister of justice,
Raffaele Conforti) and in the press (by both L’Osservatore romano and La Capitale) reflects the
difficulty I mentioned above regarding the popular disregard for civil legislation. Conforti’s
immediate response after Morelli’s proposal was that divorce legislation would be an
impossibly radical development. Moreover, Conforti’s pragmatic concern about the radicality
of the proposal was situated within a more fundamental question regarding Morelli’s vision
of law and its purpose. He “contested Morelli’s argument that it was the legislator’s task to
develop laws for the good of society regardless of whether that society demanded them or
22 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 43. Morelli’s comment suggests that Catholic matrimonial law
makes the family in the image of the hierarchical, authoritative Church. The implication is that liberal
matrimonial law will free the family from being forced into this image. (Giuseppe Ricciardi’s 1876 work, Il
divorzio, claims that married women are in slavery, which is to be blamed on “the tyranny of priests.” Ricciardi
even suggests that priests use “women as their agents” in order to exercise “far too much influence within the
family home” [31-2]). But of course, Morelli will not acknowledge that being freed from this image entails
being made in a different image. Morelli’s argument assumes that liberalism can liberate human persons and
communitates to be “natural.”
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not. [Conforti] thought such a substantial revision of the law should first be called for by
public opinion.”23 This same argument would come up again and again throughout the era.
The Vatican’s paper, L’Osservatore romano treated both Morelli and his proposal with
deep sarcasm, even lampooning his southern accent. And the anticlerical paper, La Capitale,
featured an editorial praising Morelli, though it subsequently dropped its coverage of the
legislation. The nine committees that vetted Morelli’s bill ultimately buried it through their
members’ inability to agree on whether or not divorce was indeed moral and, if it was moral,
whether or not the time for the bill was expedient.
Around the time that Morelli’s first bill was dying in committee in 1879, the great
military hero of the risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was initiating legal proceedings to
dissolve an unconsummated marriage he had contracted almost twenty years earlier. In his
old age, he was looking to legalize his subsequent de facto marriage and to legitimize his heirs
before his death. This very public legal process ultimately terminated in the state’s granting
Garibaldi and his first wife an annulment based on a Canon Law dispensa for those who
desired (for legitimate reason) to dissolve an unconsummated marriage. Garibaldi’s civil
annulment in December of 1879 nearly coincided with another very public annulment in
January of 1880. In this latter case, the Vatican annulled the contract of the Prince of
Monaco and the Duchess of Hamilton, though the contract was made eleven years earlier
and had clearly been consummated (the spouses had two children). The discrepancy between
the state’s fidelity to the canonical requirements for a dispensa and the Vatican’s apparent
disregard for those requirements was not lost on Morelli.
Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 44-5, where Seymour discusses “the almost complete absence of any
public clamor for a divorce law.” Seymour also notes that by “public opinion,” Conforti almost certainly refers
to “learned opinion” and not “the masses” or “the people.”
23
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In March of 1880, Morelli proposed a second divorce bill. This time, his bill featured
a more pragmatic approach that emphasized the logical necessity of divorce following from
the Civil Code’s permission of civil matrimony. His bill proposed that divorce should be
granted to married persons who had been separated for three years (when no children were
involved) or six years (when children were involved). From 1880-1901, all legislative
proposals for divorce were based on this feature of Morelli’s bill. Conforti’s replacement as
minister of justice, Tommaso Villa, responded favorably to Morelli’s speech, suggesting that
divorce should be taken more seriously as a tool for further separating the Catholic Church
from the jurisdiction of the state. His response would have made the suspicious Robespierre
proud: “[W]here the eye of the civil legislator does not penetrate, religious morals retain the
power to do so.”24 The civil power required the development of a more penetrating sight.
In October of 1880, Morelli died in retirement by the sea.25 The development of his
argument for Italian divorce fell to Villa, who for the next twenty years worked to persuade
the Chamber of Deputies to follow civil matrimony to its logical conclusion, to acknowledge
the de facto divorces represented by marital separations throughout every sector of the Italian
population, and so to finally administer the medicine of divorce to those relationships
wounded by violence, neglect, emotional duress, and other tragedies. Whereas Morelli’s 1878
and ‘80 proposals were known for their rhetorical flair and even their entertainment value,
Villa’s approach on February 1, 1881, a year after the release of Arcanum, was more
conservative and systematic. Citing examples from around Europe, stretching from 1789 to
the most recent divorce debates in France and Belgium and in other, non-Catholic nations,
Villa argued for divorce in two cases: where a spouse was condemned to death or life
imprisonment, and where an official separation had lasted three or five years (depending on
24
25
Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 56.
What follows in my narrative of Villa’s activity depends on Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 85-112.
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the presence of children and their age). The latter case being the more common, Villa’s
proposed bill maintained all legal strictures on securing an official separation, and it created,
per each divorce case, a council of family members who would be intimately involved in
working toward reconciliation between the petitioners. Only following the years of
separation and the work of the family council would a divorce then be granted to the
spouses. As Seymour rightly notes, Villa’s bill acknowledges the “extent to which marriage
was truly a social institution, subject not only to the free will of the participants, but also to
the intervention of close family, and ultimately, in concert with them, the state.”26
Villa envisioned his divorce bill to be a continuation of the liberal spirit animating
the risorgimento. He granted that the legalization of civil matrimony in 1865-6 was an
enormous step for a Catholic nation, and one that would not have been made with provision
for divorce added onto it. But now, in the early ‘80s, the time seemed expedient to Villa. As
he said to the Chamber, “[T]oday the Church’s power has providentially been returned to
within its proper confines,” and so it was time for the state to assume its proper role vis-avis matrimony.27 Villa’s sensitivity to the issue is notable. He asks the Chamber “whether the
civil law should incorporate the ‘mystical doctrine of the union between Christ and the
Church represented by the sacrament of marriage.’”28 He also wonders why, in the case of
marital separations, the civil authority should have to “require the ‘legal fiction’ of the
maintenance of the marriage bond, even when in reality that bond no longer existed.”29
Finally, given the essential role played by the free wills of the persons contracting the
marriage, Villa wondered why a civil law that recognized this liberty in contracting then
refused to recognize that same liberty in dissolving the contract. After all, as Villa rightly
Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 92.
Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 92.
28 Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 93.
29 Ibid.
26
27
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notes, “the civil law did not create marriage but merely recognized the matrimonial state
after subjecting it to certain conditions in the name of the public interest.”30
Villa enters the very thicket of issues that occupy Leo’s attention in Arcanum. Taking
a step out of this historical frame, it is illuminating to note Seymour’s own interpretation of
Villa’s arguments and their relationship to the Catholic position on matrimony and divorce. I
will quote Seymour himself at length, for his interpretation of Villa is a perfect
misrepresentation of the Catholic position expressed in Arcanum. By misrepresenting the
Catholic position, Seymour highlights how difficult it is to hear Leo’s teaching in our
context:
In a liberal vein, Villa emphasized the contractual nature of marriage, in which the essence of
the contract lay in the free consent of the two individuals concerned. He argued that the
improvements of the modern world owed a great deal to the tendency for relationships,
whether between nations or individuals, to be contractual in nature rather than based upon
force. The contractual view of the basis of marriage was anathema to Catholics, for whom
the “mystical doctrine” of the sacrament that Villa had rather lightly dismissed was its true
essence. These worldviews were fundamentally irreconcilable, and for all Villa’s elegant
argumentation, he must have known it.31
Given that Arcanum teaches that matrimony is essentially a contract, that its
fundamentally natural form is an indissoluble union, and that the Catholic position is in the
state’s best interest, this is a remarkable estimation of the Catholic response to liberal
legislation. For as we are going to see, Arcanum does not turn on a Catholic definition of
sacramental matrimony over against a liberal definition of contractual matrimony. Instead,
Arcanum turns on whether or not a social contract has the ability to communicate grace and
so participate in the salvation of human persons. This interpretation of the nature and
capacity of certain human contracts is aimed not simply at defending the sacramental munus
of the Catholic Church, but at exposing the dangers of a liberal program to recreate human
30
31
Ibid.
Ibid.
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contracts (including vows) in the modern nation-state’s own image: that is, as detached from
all authoritative ground prior to the human will and as expressive of the utility of the
commercial contract. Put in terms appropriate to the analogia communitatis, Leo’s concern in
Arcanum is to link the indissolubility of matrimony to its natural form. Indissolubility is what
separates the matrimonial contract from all other human contracts, making it only
analogically relatable to those other forms of contract. Indissolubility is thus the feature of
this communitas that defines its integrity and its proper munus among human things. On Leo’s
reading, if matrimony is made legally dissoluble, then the liberal state has actually invented a
new form of relationship, made not in the image of the covenanting Lord, but in the image
of a commercial transaction.
III. Chiesa, Patria, Famiglia: the Analogia Communitatis
As with all other communitates that make up the analogia communitatis, Leo’s concern
regarding matrimony and family is not simply the maintenance of the Church’s authority.32
His concern is rather the defense and promotion of the flourishing proper to the social and
political animal. We can begin by identifying a constellation of troubles that condition Leo’s
teaching on matrimony and family:
First, liberal legislation misunderstands matrimony and family in both their natural
form and according to Catholic teaching. Second, the liberal position underestimates the
intimate relationship between divorce on the one hand and society and the state on the
other. This underestimation is rooted in more fundamental errors regarding the necessary
relationship between matrimony on the one hand and society and the state on the other.
My usage of “matrimony,” “family,” and “matrimony and family” in any grammatical configuration follows
Leo’s. That is, “matrimony” here is only conceptually distinct from “family” when it comes to discussing
specific legislation regarding the spousal union, its status as a contract, and its dissolubility. Though the family
is impacted by such legislation, it is legally untouched: no one is proposing the legal dissolution of kinship ties.
When it seems appropriate, I will use “matrimony and family.” Context will determine whether or not a
singular usage of one or the other term is meant to distinguish between the two.
32
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And so ultimately Leo identifies a liberal error regarding human communitas and its relation to
nature. The overriding concern is that if liberals such as Morelli and Villa have their way,
they will indeed succeed in making the nation a family of “Italians.” But these “Italians” will
be morally incapable of perceiving and actively living authentic social and political life on
account of their compromised sense of communitas. The task of this second portion of the
chapter is to mine Leo’s matrimonial teaching for this deeper moral root of the problem.
Given what we have said so far about the analogia communitatis, it is fitting that we
highlight the heart of Leo’s matrimonial teaching precisely in those terms. We find this heart
in Rerum novarum’s most important statement on the social nature of the family. Though
Rerum novarum is published after Arcanum Divinae, the former eloquently summarizes our
concerns here:
A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority
peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits
which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family
has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its
preservation and its just liberty. We say, ‘at least equal rights’; for, inasmuch as the domestic
household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community,
the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the
community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on
entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth
instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would
rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.33
This is a precise analogical response to any social authority - but especially a state predicated
on contractual communitas - that seeks to act on matrimony and the family.
First, note from the outset of the quotation that the contest is between a liberal
vision of the state as being the primary social authority, and an alternative vision of the
33 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, §13, emphasis mine. Cf. Rerum novarum, §12: “No human law can abolish the natural
and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage ordained by
God’s authority from the beginning: ‘Increase and multiply.’ Hence we have the family, the ‘society’ of a man’s
house - a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State.
Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.” Rerum novarum
is not concerned with matrimonial law per se. The socio-economic concerns of the encyclical nevertheless
occasion a vital summary of Leo’s estimation of the domestic sphere of society. This summary is perfectly in
sync with Leo’s matrimonial teaching throughout his magisterium.
203
state’s analogical relation to other “true” societies. As Leo teaches regarding the Church, the
family (the matrimonial union included) is ordered in a way “peculiar to itself” and so in no
need of external authorities for its constitution. Though we bristle at the phrase, “the
authority of the father,” it is necessary to situate Leo’s language within the broader context
of competing social authorities in the nationalizing process. Without a doubt, Leo intends
the phrase “authority of the father” to refer to the authority of a male on account of his
sex.34 But even if we reject this interpretation of domestic authority’s proper location in
favor of egalitarianism, maleness here remains only one factor among several determining
the authoritative status of the father. That is, from our perspective, even if we prefer the
“authority of the parent” to the “authority of father,” we can follow part of the Leonine
logic in interpreting domestic authority according to its multivalence. The authority that
orders the domestic sphere is “peculiar” because it is always already biological,35 religious,
moral, spiritual, social, economic, political, educational, etc. No other social authority - not
even the Church - can claim such an expansive and complex jurisdiction in all of these
bailiwicks. As I mentioned above, some theorists, such as Hegel, were open about the
political appetite for just this sort of expansive, complex jurisdiction. But more often, as in
the cases of Morelli and Villa, the expression of this appetite is coded in terms of eliminating
other authorities - such as the Church - from these supposedly private spheres. Here in Rerum
It goes without saying that Leo is a gender complementarian who, from our perspective and standards,
emphasizes an inflated distinction between women and men as it pertains to their domestic and public roles. It
is uninteresting to point this out. I delivered a paper on Leo’s matrimonial teaching at a conference where a
well known ethicist asked me why I focused on Leo when John Paul II’s teaching more nearly - but not
completely or sufficiently, this scholar was careful to add - approximates our developing commitment to gender
equality. This is a fair, if flat and inevitable, question. In addition to the desire to recover familiarity with the
entire Leonine corpus, it struck me as important to note the ways in which Leo’s teaching offers insight that
does not depend on his view of gender. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that the value of
contemporary papal teaching does not consist of its having left behind certain distasteful elements of past papal
teaching.
35 The case of adoption is an obvious exception. But adoption does make it possible to replace the biological
relation with a real kinship relation that transcends the merely legal. But even the legal transformation of
adoption requires something that states cannot provide: the relational ability to name children as “daughters”
and “sons” rather than “wards” or “dependents.”
34
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novarum, and in a more developed way in Arcanum, Leo calls this coding into question,
suggesting that in seeking to eliminate the Church from the domestic sphere, liberals are in
fact intent on gaining a monopoly of social access to their citizens.
Second, note that in Rerum novarum Leo’s description of the domestic sphere’s
antecedence to society is expressive of not only the rights of spouses and children, but also
the duty of the family. These rights and duties are founded, furthermore, not in legislation or
contract, but in nature. Whereas in Rerum novarum the emphasis is on family rights, we will
see below that in Arcanum the emphasis is on a family’s duty.
Finally, Leo is concerned about the subjective experience of life in society. In the
case of Rerum novarum, he fears that families in liberal states, facing various forms of
interference and subject to a lack of proper social and economic support, might come to
perceive life in the commonwealth as unbearable. Were this situation to obtain, associational
life among families, and so society more broadly, would suffer. Family, on this reading, is a
critical factor in shaping how society’s members view the good of human sociality itself.36
At the heart of Leo’s matrimonial teaching, then, is a concern that the domestic
sphere be rightly seen from two complementary perspectives. From the perspective of Rerum
novarum, the domestic sphere possesses a native integrity that precedes all other social
authority. Domestic rights are rooted in this precedence and demand the respect of all other
social authorities, most especially a civil authority that sees in the “authority of the father” a
Here and at several points below I refer to the subjective aspect of perceiving society as a good, as a goal
capable of being idealized, and so as an end intrinsically worth pursuing. The Nobel Prize laureate, Robert
Fogel, would refer to this capacity to idealize sociality as a “spiritual resource” essential for human flourishing.
The Catholic economist, Andrew Beauchamp, has turned to precisely this subjective aspect in his investigation
of the conditions contributing to inequality. Beauchamp shows from a social-scientific perspective that family
life provides an irreducibly necessary “input” that contributes to the formation of the human capacity to
idealize society and so pursue sociality as a worthwhile endeavor. Cf. Andrew Beauchamp, “Humane Capital: A
Re-examination of the social teachings in light of the shift to human capital,” unpublished paper provided by
the author, forthcoming as a chapter in Rowman and Littlefield’s Catholic Social Scientists Volume: Catholic
Perspectives on Economics.
36
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host of prerogatives that would enhance the state’s ability to form its citizens in its own
image. But from a second, complementary perspective, the domestic sphere’s native integrity
is that of a communitas itself, a “true society,” in a world populated by other communitates.
Domestic duties are rooted not only in the host of relations signified by the term, “father,”
but also in the public imbrication of these communitates such that the domestic sphere’s
proper integrity and antecedence should never be misinterpreted as social isolation. Thus, in
Rerum novarum Leo succinctly expresses the substance of his critique of liberal matrimonial
legislation: civil matrimony and divorce are legal intrusions into the native integrity of the
domestic sphere; and these legal intrusions, by permitting the dissolution of familial bonds,
corrode the domestic sphere’s ability to realize its duty to be a communitas among communitates.
Indeed, as we will see in our discussion of Arcanum, Leo is concerned that civil matrimony
and divorce amount to little more than a liberal pedagogy that forms citizens for
individualized membership in a communitas of aggregates, bound together by a commercial
contract.
IIa. Arcanum’s Argument
In order to understand Leo’s response to both liberal theory and to pro-divorce
legislation in Italy and throughout Europe, we should first appreciate Leo’s interlocutor and
the overarching argument of Arcanum:
Leo writes against the “naturalists” who, according to his characterization elsewhere,
teach “that marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts, which can rightly be
revoked by the will of those who made them, and that the civil rulers of the State have
power over the matrimonial bond.”37 Note especially Leo’s identification of a commercial
“genus” of contracts in which matrimony purportedly exists.
37
Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §21.
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Leo’s first claim is one we have already encountered in examining Sapientiae
Christianae in chapter three: the Church enjoys a unique competence regarding the eternal
salvation and temporal flourishing of the human res sara in temporalibus. By a right rooted in
her divine mandate, the Church possesses both temporal and spiritual jurisdiction in matters
matrimonial given that matrimony is a communitas implicated in this flourishing.
Leo’s second claim is that matrimony is naturally known as an originally holy, even
sacramental, institution. Indeed, “Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very
beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides
in it a something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but
implanted by nature.”38 Leo’s predecessors, Innocent III and Honorius III, even affirm that
“a sacrament of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and unbelievers.”39 From Leo’s
perspective, the witness of antiquity supports this idea that matrimony is a sacrament
according to nature, for ancient pagans ceremoniously surrounded matrimony with “religion
and holiness.” Guided by the natural law, they recognized the innate sacrality of matrimony,
and so Leo argues against modern “naturalists” that “marriage is holy by its own power, in
its own nature, and of itself, it ought not to be regulated and administered by the [imperio] of
civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone in sacred matters
professes the office of teaching.”40 It should be noted, however, that the ancient appreciation
of matrimony’s primal holiness is variously obscured throughout history. Prior to the
Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §19. Regarding the sacraments prior to the incarnation of Christ, cf. Aquinas ST
IIIa q. 61 a. 3, resp.: Sacraments are necessary for man’s salvation, in so far as they are sensible signs of invisible
things whereby man is made holy. Now after sin no man can be made holy save through Christ, Whom God hath
proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood, to the showing of His justice...that he Himself may be just, and the
justifier of him who is of the faith of Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:25, 26). Therefore before Christ’s coming there was need for
some visible signs whereby man might testify to his faith in the future coming of a Saviour. And these signs are
called sacraments. It is therefore clear that some sacraments were necessary before Christ’s coming.” In ad. 1,
Aquinas writes, “Christ’s Passion is the final cause of the old sacraments: for they were instituted in order to
foreshadow it.”
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid. The pedagogical munus of both the Church and the state will be at issue below.
38
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incarnation of the Lord, according to Leo, pagans and even Israel had all but lost sight of the
Lord’s original intentions for matrimony. Through the incarnation, the Lord restores
matrimony to its original purity and elevates it to a sacrament of grace. The Lord’s
sacramental munus is now the Church’s.41
The third claim is that contemporary efforts to deprive the Church of her
matrimonial competence, regardless of their legal, social, economic, or moral justification,
cannot in any way truly change the Church’s relationship to the institution. Liberal states try
to separate the Church from matrimony, usually by an effort to separate the contractual
nature of matrimony from the sacramental. Leo’s argument is that on account of the Lord’s
work in history this separation is impossible.
It follows from these three claims that the Church’s matrimonial law, especially as it
pertains to the identity of the contract with the sacrament, should not be compromised by
the error of civil matrimony, the evil of divorce, or any other perversion. Given that the
domestic communitas has been instituted from the beginning by the Creator, and given that it
has been elevated to a sacrament of grace by the incarnate Christ, then to disavow the
Church’s law protecting this communitas is to deprive human persons of access to one of the
primary sources of human sociality. Leo warns that if civil legislation is severed from Canon
Law, the result will be the corrosion of the very virtues and ideals human society prizes.
IIb. Matrimony’s Origins in Creation
Arcanum Divinae can thus be read as an extended defense of the statement in Rerum
novarum concerning the integrity of the family as a “true society.” In order to accomplish this
defense, Leo consistently attends to three interrelated factors:
There is thus a certain parallelism between a Thomistic account of the natural virtue of religion and Leo’s
account of original matrimony. In both cases, the natural is in need of purification. Both receive this
purification and further elevation on account of the Lord’s incarnation.
41
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First, matrimony and family have a created nature that is discernible from pagan and
Christian perspectives as holy and even sacramental. Second, matrimony and family have a
revealed nature expressed in Christ’s elevation of matrimony from a naturally holy institution
to a sacrament of grace. Third, the Church has not in any way perverted or interfered with
the natural or revealed integrity of matrimony and family, but has on the contrary always
defended and promoted them in accord with her divine mandate. I will examine these
elements of his teaching as they unfold in the letter.
Leo’s aim is to describe the origin and form of “that family union of which marriage
is the beginning and the foundation.”42 The origin of matrimony and its proper form is the
Lord’s creation of male and female persons. From the beginning, matrimony “manifested
chiefly two most excellent properties - deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it - namely,
unity and perpetuity.”43 Christ further confirms this teaching in the Gospel, emphasizing the
one flesh union of the couple in a bond “so closely and strongly made fast that no man may
dissolve it or render it asunder.”44 This elegantly simple core Leo then situates within the
historical record of the “vices” and “ignominies with which marriage was defiled” by Israel
via polygamy and by pagans via licentiousness, concubinage, and unchecked paternal
authority.45 Morelli, in his speech on the Chamber floor, had given an historical defense of
divorce by developing his own account of the historical record of societies in Greece, Egypt,
and Rome that had legalized divorce without destroying themselves. But on Leo’s reading of
the history, prior to the Incarnation of the Lord, “all nations seem, more or less, to have
forgotten the true notion and origin of marriage [...].”46 Such distortions and perversions of
Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §5.
Ibid., §5.
44 Ibid., citing Matt. 19:5-6.
45 Cf. Ibid., §§6-7.
46 Ibid., §7.
42
43
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the created good of matrimony are a part of the fallen, historical context in which the
Incarnate Lord conducts his earthly ministry: “He brought back matrimony to the nobility of
its primeval origin by condemning the customs of the Jews in their abuse of the plurality of
wives and of the power of giving bills of divorce; and still more by commanding most
strictly that no one should dare to dissolve that union which God Himself had sanctioned by
a bond perpetual.”47
Christ’s teaching regarding the origin and proper form of matrimony was then
handed on to the Apostles and their successors who, according to Trent,
have always taught [...] that Christ our Lord raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament;
that to husband and wife, guarded and strengthened by the heavenly grace which His merits
gained for them, He gave power to attain holiness in the married state; and that, in a
wondrous way, making marriage an example of the mystical union between Himself and His
Church, He not only perfected that love which is according to nature, but also made the
naturally indivisible union of one man with one woman far more perfect through the bond
of heavenly love. [...] It is for these reasons that marriage is a “great sacrament” [...].48
On the one hand, we can interpret Leo’s meaning here simply enough. Christ teaches
that the natural institution of marriage is a sacrament, so it is indeed a sacrament. The
authority of the Lord and of the Church stewarding his teachings are sufficient warrant for
the Catholic claim that the matrimonial contract is not like any other human contract. But
this is not the only way to interpret Leo’s thought. He is arguing that in a complementary
way, the unity and perpetuity of the matrimonial relation, in its original, created goodness, is
also a reason for its sacramental status. Unity and indissolubility, on Leo’s read, are not
artificial or peculiar features of Catholic matrimonial doctrine so much as they are the natural
characteristics of the primal communitas that was created to be perpetual. In other words,
Ibid., §8. Leo describes Christ here as the “supreme Lawgiver,” standing in the place of Moses. Cf. Matt.
19:9.
48 Ibid., §9.
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matrimony is a natural human institution that is fitting for certain reasons to be elevated to
the status of a sacrament.49
We can appreciate Leo’s perspective here if we attend to how he describes the
relationship between the Church’s interests in families and the natural inclinations that give
rise to the domestic sphere. According to Leo, Christian matrimony takes up the natural
human inclination to propagate the species and situates it in analogical relationship with the
Christian mandate to make “children for the Church, ‘fellow citizens with the saints, and the
domestics of God’; so that ‘a people might be born and brought up for the worship and
religion of the true God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.’”50 Just as the new Italy looked to
matrimonial law as a mechanism by which to “make Italians” and thus consolidate its
authority, so the Church looks to the family as its own source of citizens prepared for
membership within a very different patria. But the natural inclination to propagate the
species is not the only aspect of matrimony implicated in the broader projects of those social
authorities that rule over the domestic sphere.
Cf. Aquinas, ST IIIa q. 84 a. 1, ad. 1. Asking whether or not penance is fittingly called a sacrament, Aquinas
makes the following useful distinction between types of sacraments. “[I]n those sacraments, whereby an
exceptional grace surpassing altogether the proportion of a human act, is conferred, some corporeal matter is
employed externally, e.g. in Baptism, which confers full remission of all sins, both as to guilt and as to
punishment, and in Confirmation, wherein the fulness of the Holy Ghost is bestowed, and in Extreme
Unction, which confers perfect spiritual health derived from the virtue of Christ as from an extrinsic principle.
Wherefore, such human acts as are in these sacraments, are not the essential matter of the sacrament, but are
dispositions thereto. On the other hand, in those sacraments whose effect corresponds to that of some human
act, the sensible human act itself takes the place of matter, as in the case of Penance and Matrimony, even as in
bodily medicines, some are applied externally, such as plasters and drugs, while others are acts of the person
who seeks to be cured, such as certain exercises.” In ad. 2, he writes, “[H]uman actions take the place of matter,
and these actions proceed from internal inspiration, wherefore the matter is not applied by the minister, but by
God working inwardly [...].”
50 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §10, quoting Eph. 2:19 and the Roman Catechism. Cf. Leo XIII, Nobilissima
Gallorum gens, §3, where Leo details the political importance of parental education of children. “Both the Divine
and the natural law impose this duty on them, nor can parents on any ground whatever be freed from this
obligation. The Church, guardian of the integrity of the Faith - which, in virtue of its authority, deputed from
God its Founder, has to call all nations to the knowledge of Christian lore, and which is consequently bound to
watch keenly over the teaching and upbringing of the children placed under its authority by baptism - has
always expressly condemned mixed or neutral schools; over and over again she has warned parents to be ever
on their guard in this most essential point. To obey the Church in this is to obey the requirements of social
utility, and to serve in the most excellent manner the common welfare.”
49
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St. Paul famously teaches that the spousal communitas itself signifies Christ’s
communitas with the Church. From the Catholic perspective, the natural matrimonial contract
is thus capable of an analogical, “heaven-born love guiding both [spouses] in their respective
duties.”51 So in addition to the human acts of making and rearing children, the spousal
communitas images Christ’s love for the Church, drawing together the natural structure of the
relationship with the supernatural purposes of the Lord. This primitive, spousal communitas
thus participates in a created order that transcends it even as it makes it more intelligible.
From the Christian perspective, the natural teloi of the spousal union are not reducible to the
biological, domestic, and social. Instead, these teloi are revealed as signs participating in the
broadest possible theological context of human sociality: the family or kingdom or people or
city of the Lord.52 Without canceling the natural integrity of these signs rooted in the human
need to propagate the human species, without denigrating the natural bonding of kinship
ties, and without neglecting the qualitative and quantitative role families play in creating
socialized moral agents in history, Leo recognizes that our desire to make more humans who
are bound together by blood, convention, law, cooperation, necessity, and pleasure
participates in an inclination directly linked to the origin, purpose, and structure of the
Church, both on earth and in glory: bringing persons to communion with the Lord.
It would be most accurate to say then that Arcanum is an argument constructed in
diametric opposition to the modern positions I sketched above, for Arcanum’s argument is
that Christ’s elevation of the natural sacrament of matrimony to the status of a supernatural
Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §11.
At points, Leo is quite literal about the role of the family in revealing the Lord’s salvific purposes. Cf. Leo
XIII, Neminem fugit, in Benedictine Monks of Solesmes, Papal Teachings: Matrimony, trans. Michael J. Byrnes,
(Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1963), 176-7. This 1892 apostolic letter on the Holy Family states: “[T]he
merciful God - wishing to accomplish the work of the restoration of humanity which had long been awaited so prepared the details and the manner of Redemption that from the beginning this work would present to the
world the august form of a divinely constituted family, in which all men could contemplate the most perfect
model of family life [...].”
51
52
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sacrament of salvific grace does not extract Christian matrimony from the realm of nature.
Such would be the implied lesson of the various modern theories that teach that only now,
after the rationalization and elimination of the old social orders, can we see matrimony in its
natural light, unpolluted by the manufactures of Christianity, absolute monarchy, hereditary
aristocracy, and the like. Morelli and Villa envision just this rationalization and elimination
when they propose to relieve Italian marriages of the burdens and obscurities of Canon Law.
Over against this lesson, Leo teaches that Christ’s supernatural elevation of matrimony is the
deepest expression in history of matrimony’s naturalness: its fittingness to the redemptive
purposes of the Creator. Leo’s insight in Rerum novarum bears repeating here: this primitive
union is a communitas. Its diminutive size does not in any way detract from the authenticity of
its social nature. Given that the formal cause of the sacrament is in fact the two wills of the
spouses consenting to the union, the parallelism to the first nuptial contract in the garden
remains perfectly intact. Even if modern interpretations of the history of matrimony imply
that the Church and other social institutions have encumbered matrimony in layers of
institutional artifice, at the heart of Catholic matrimonial theology is the simple consent of
the spouses directly within the sight of the Lord.
So, though Leo’s arguments are preceded in history by political accounts of
matrimony’s relationship to pre-social states of nature,53 or by historical narratives of
declension from original promiscuity and liberty to social convention and domination,54 or
by philosophical portrayals of history’s inevitable progress,55 Arcanum is designed to best
these accounts by placing the created goodness of the domestic communitas within its proper
context: a first givenness, a priority, of human sociality as a constitutive aspect of the human
E.g. Locke, Rousseau
E.g. Marx, Engels
55 E. g. Hegel.
53
54
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person’s vocation to image the Lord’s goodness by causing good in others. For their part,
Morelli and Villa - and the liberal pedagogy they represent - do not want the primitive
communitas to signify any relation. Strangely, the communitas is made a sign solely of the liberty
of the persons voting to contract a certain partnership for a time. Morelli and Villa thus
move beyond the univocation that would see in the family a form or pattern for the nation,
to a most startling equivocation regarding the matrimonial communitas and its relationship to
human sociality. The naturalists must make over the matrimonial contract in terms
compatible with the commercial “genus.”
Two different social anthropologies derive from these incommensurable starting
points. The “naturalist” position undergirding civil matrimony and divorce legislation is a
social anthropology that strikes at the union of the spouses in order to make over the family
and society into the image of the liberal nation-state. That is, the state requires citizens
adequate to the purposes of forming a political regime (supposedly) based on the will of the
people. The Catholic position undergirding Leo’s teaching is a social anthropology that looks
not only to the social and political needs of the nation, but also to the historical fact of
Christ’s will to elevate matrimony to a sacrament of grace. Matrimony is indeed a sign of
something greater than itself, something in which it participates in its peculiar way. The
question is whether or not we have an adequate grasp of this participation and its telos.
This means for Leo that all discipline pertaining to matrimony belongs “as of native
right,” not to the social authority requiring properly formed citizens, but to the social
authority serving the salvific purposes of Christ. The witness of matrimony’s own complex
history suggests to Leo that it would be exactly backwards to capacitate the civil power with
all matrimonial jurisdiction and to leave the Church out of matrimony altogether, or to allow
214
her in solely via concession.56 Leo points out that Christ and the apostles did not teach on
matrimony by delegation of any civil power. Indeed, the Church’s teaching on the
indissolubility of marriage and on the unions of slaves and free persons was directly contrary
to Roman law and was occasion for several apologists to note the incompatibility of
Christianity and the empire.57 And even with the advent of Christendom, after “all power
had devolved upon the Christian emperors,” the Church continued to legislate concerning
matrimony.58 The primacy of the Church’s prerogatives regarding matrimony corresponds to
the superiority of the end set for matrimony by Christ. The matrimonial contract, being
made by the Lord to participate via its natural integrity in the sacramental order, can only
become the sole province of the civil power if the connection between the contract and the
sacramental order is broken. This is the heart of the matter in Arcanum.
IIc. Severing the Contract from the Sacrament
From our perspective, a liberal matrimonial code such as Morelli’s or Villa’s would
suggest that matrimonial matters are finally given to the contracting parties who are, as a
Cf. Leo XIII, Ci siamo, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 127: “Therefore, insofar as the substance and sanctity of
the bond are concerned, marriage for Christian jurisprudence is an essentially sacred and religious act, the
regulation of which naturally belongs to the religious power, not by a delegation of the State, nor by consent of
the Princes, but by mandate of the Divine Founder of Christianity and Author of the sacraments.”
57 Cf. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §21. Leo cites Ignatius, Justin, Athenagoras, and Tertullian.
58 Cf. Ibid., §22. Leo lists the councils of Granada, Arles, Chalcedon, Milevum II, and Trent. Cf. Ibid., §13: Leo
points out the various historical moments when the Church’s task was to defend matrimony from destruction.
He is uncharacteristically direct here with regard to the historical context we discussed above. In history, the
Church has protected matrimony from the “Gnostics, Manichaeans, and Montanists.” But even now, the
Church is tasked with protecting matrimony from the “Mormons, St. Simonians, phalansterians, and
communists.” It is unclear what knowledge Leo would have had of Mormonism, but it is easy enough to
suppose that he has in mind here a form of serial polygamy due to legal dissolubility. However, his familiarity
with St. Simonians, phalansterians, a.k.a. Fourierists, and communists would surely have been greater. St.
Simonians and Fourierists were early socialists rooted in the thought of French theorists, and as we have seen,
their thought is instrumental in shaping both Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism and Morelli’s legislative
proposals before the Italian senate. Regarding the Church’s record in defending matrimony in history from
various abuses, Cf. Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §§ 14-15: First, the Church overcame the “old distinction
between slaves and free-born men and women [...].” Second, the “dignity of the woman was asserted and
assured; and it was forbidden to the man to inflict capital punishment for adultery, or lustfully and shamelessly
to violate his plighted faith.” Third, the Church has established various impediments to marriage, and these
have strengthened the institution by granting more agency to the spouses (rather than to the parents), by
preventing close degrees of consanguinity, and by preserving the chastity and honor of the spouses.
56
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result, left at liberty to pursue their various preferences. We might even appreciate a liberal
matrimonial code as useful for respecting the desires of religious persons who seek to
contract matrimony according to their faith. But if Leo is correct, liberal matrimonial code
abets a pedagogy that places the state’s influence precisely where the modern state claims it is
afraid to tread: within the consciences of its citizens and their capacity to form ideals and
visions of the good life.
Leo is acutely aware of the anticlerical animus within Morelli and Villa’s legislative
efforts. In an 1879 letter regarding civil matrimony in Piedmont, Leo refers to the autocratic
state’s “sorry task of creating a matrimonial morality wholly human, under merely juridical
forms and guarantees. The State - insofar as it is able - imposes this by force on its citizens,
substituting it for the religious and sacramental form, without which marriage between
Christians cannot be either lawful, honored or stable.”59 He writes again in 1893 that it is
inaccurate “to say that the civil power by its law of the precedence of the civil rite does not
affect the Sacrament administered by the Church, that it does not deny it and it does not
recognize it, leaving to the free will of the contracting parties the right to celebrate the
religious service afterwards if they wish to do so.”60
In civil matrimony and pro-divorce legislation, Leo sees at work the appetite of the
civil power, looking to consume not only the Church’s authority in matrimonial matters, but
even the moral formation of the persons contracting the matrimonial union. That is, Leo has
identified in the desire to separate the contract and the sacrament a deeper motive that has
little to do with liberating spouses from the strictures of Canon Law or the social
conventions of the ancien régime. He writes in Arcanum that the “naturalist” position seeks to
59 Leo XIII, Ci siamo, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 129. The notion that this legislation is being forced on the
Italians is not an overstatement on Leo’s part. Recall that above I noted how one of the central arguments,
even from liberal legislators, against divorce was the complete lack of public interest in pro-divorce legislation.
60 Leo XIII, Il divisamento, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 180
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“deprive [matrimony] of all holiness, and so bring it within the contracted sphere [exiguum
gyrum] of those rights which, having been instituted by man, are ruled and administered by
the civil jurisprudence of the community.”61 If these naturalists have their way, then the
sacrament becomes for the spouses an “added ornament” or an “outward endowment,” and
nothing intrinsic to the union itself. In so transforming matrimony, the naturalists place an
ever greater emphasis on the will of the persons contracting to make their union participate
in whatever larger economies of signification they please. The implication of his argument is
that if the contract and sacrament are left in their proper identity to one another, then
matrimony retains two critical marks of its nature: first, it remains a social institution
participating in the analogia communitatis; second, it retains its natural integrity as a communitas
immune to the Promethean urges of the civil authority.
Leo makes this clear in the same 1879 letter addressed to the issue of civil matrimony
in Piedmont. On the one hand, we observe in Morelli and Villa’s legislative efforts the state’s
desire to separate the contract and the sacrament and so arrogate to itself jurisdictions to
which it has no right. But on the other hand, the same cannot be said for the Church’s desire
to maintain its own jurisdiction in the domestic communitas. That is, on account of both the
fundamentally social nature of the domestic communitas, and on account of its natural
integrity, Leo’s analogical social anthropology allows him to openly own that the Church’s
prerogatives regarding matrimony are not solely her own. Rather, on account of the nature
of the animals involved in the sacrament, and on account of the irreducibly social and
political nature of matrimony, matrimonial jurisdiction is again an imbricated affair. Leo is
explicit about this:
No one can question the State’s rights to regulate the temporal aspects of matrimony for the
common welfare and to regulate justly its civil effects. But not so when the State, entering
61
Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §17. Exiguus, exigua: small, meager, dreary, scanty, petty, poor.
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the sanctuary of religion and conscience, sets itself up as arbiter and reformer of the intimate
consequences of a sacred bond which God Himself ordained and which the powers of the
world, since they have no power to effect it, can never dissolve or change.62
The separation of the contract from the sacrament is thus not a piece of secular legislation. It
is instead an alternative theological social anthropology that invades the properly inviolable
forums of religion and conscience, arbitrating and reforming matrimony in such a way that it
can be remade in a new likeness.
It would seem that the Church - especially as she is presented in Leo’s matrimonial
teaching - could be accused of the same thing. And I have apparently argued something
similar in suggesting above that both the civil and the spiritual authorities look to the
domestic communitas for their supply of properly formed members. But the nature of the
matrimonial sacrament according to Catholic teaching prevents Leo - and us - from accusing
the Church of the same peremptory invasions. That is, Leo is not arguing against severing
contract from sacrament solely because he seeks the preservation of the Church’s privileges.
Instead, Catholic sacramental theology demands that Leo recognize that severing contract
from sacrament is inadequate to the natural and revealed status of matrimony as a communitas
itself. A “severance of this kind cannot be approved; for certain it is that in Christian
marriage the contract is inseparable from the sacrament, and that, for this reason, the
contract cannot be true and legitimate without being a sacrament as well. For Christ our
Lord added to marriage the dignity of a sacrament; but marriage is the contract itself,
whenever that contract is lawfully concluded.”63 From what Leo has said so far, “it is clear
Leo XIII, Ci siamo, 129. Interestingly enough, Leo refers here to liberal matrimonial law as “injurious and
disastrous to religion, the priesthood, liberty of conscience and public morals.” That he willingly uses the
phrase “liberty of conscience” when he elsewhere derides it serves to show that the debate about modern
liberties is truly about the operative definition of liberty and not about a desire for social control.
63 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §23. Cf. Leo XIII, Il divisamento, his 1893 letter to Italian bishops regarding civil
marriage in Italy, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 177-87, at 179: “It is a dogma of Faith that the marriage of
Christians was raised by Our Lord Jesus Christ to the dignity of a Sacrament [...]. Vain distinction between the
62
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that among Christians every true marriage is, in itself and by itself, a sacrament [...].”64 The
language here is important.
The sacramental nature of matrimony is both intrinsic (in se) and autonomous (per se).
That is, its sacramental nature is a given feature of the matrimonial union, not determined by
the consumptive preference of the spouses contracting nor by the social authorities
officiating. And indeed, even though matrimonial law remains within the Church’s
jurisdiction by native right, it is important to remember that the Church does not in any way
administer the sacrament. Rather, the spouses administer the sacrament with the Church as a
witness in the person of the priest or deacon and in those gathered from the community.65
So when Leo argues that matrimony is a sacrament in se et per se, he is reiterating that though
the Church has jurisdiction over certain matters of matrimony, she too, like the civil power,
must keep her hands off of the nature of the union, lest its created integrity be violated.66 It
is clear why Leo consistently characterizes the Church’s role regarding matrimony in terms
of stewardship, care, and defense. In keeping with what we have already said about the
analogia communitatis, Leo recognizes the importance of this defense against any social
contract and the sacrament from which one would infer therefore, is that distinction that between Christians
there can exist a valid marriage contract which is not a Sacrament.” Cf. Leo XIII, Dum multa, §2.
64 Ibid., §24. “Itaque apparet, omne inter christianos iustum coniugium in se et per se esse sacramentum: nihilque magis abhorrer
e a veritate, quam esse sacramentum decus quoddam adiunctum, aut proprietatem allapsam extrinsecus, quae a contractu disiungi
ac disparari hominum arbitratu queat.”
65 Cf. Leo XIII, Inscrutabili Dei consilio, §14, where Leo notes that the Church’s interest in matrimony is in
controlling the “duties of married people and of their offspring.” Leo is consistent in his affirmation of the
Church’s incompetence regarding the formal causality of the sacrament. As he writes in Ci siamo, the Church
“intervenes” and “interferes” but does not make the contract itself. Liberal matrimonial law, however, would
seem to desire to become the formal cause of the union. Cf. Leo XIII, Ci siamo, 129-30, where Leo discusses
the state’s use of force to impose matrimonial legislation on citizens. Cf. Leo XIII, Il divisamento, 180: “Now a
law that would prescribe the precedence of the civil rite to the true marriage which is contracted in the Church
would really have as its object the matrimonial contract itself and not merely its civil effects. Thus the State
would pretend to administer the Sacrament.”
66 Cf. Leo XIII, Consistorial Allocution, December 16, 1901, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 192-5, at 193:
“Elevating it to the dignity and virtue of a Sacrament, He placed it above the type of ordinary contract and
above the jurisdiction of civil power, even above ecclesiastical power itself.”
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endeavor to dissolve the integrity of even the smallest social body into the simple space of
the citizen-state dyad.
It is easy to see how severing the sacrament from the contract ensures that the
Church’s historical jurisdiction over matrimony can no longer be a social and political
jurisdiction. But this is only part of Leo’s concern in arguing against civil matrimony and
divorce legislation . If the contract and the sacrament are severable, and the sacrament is
relegated to the preference of those who would like to so ornament or endow their civil
union, then the analogia communitatis is again threatened by an omnicompetent state’s desire
for a monopoly on social sovereignty. Leo is intent on showing that severing the contract
from the sacrament changes the nature of the union. If the sacrament is left to the
preference of the spouses contracting, then the sacrament becomes a piece of private
sentiment. Furthermore, if the contract is left to the civil power, it too becomes a piece of
private commerce, bearing no necessary relationship to society. The spouses, imagined
legally as isolable wills, are left attached directly to the law that has taught them this new
“matrimonial morality.” Their persons and their union are thus detached from the social and
moral formation of non-state bodies. In Leo’s context, this means not only that the spouses
are detached from the formational authority of the Church, but also from the formational
authority of matrimony itself.
IId. Competing Matrimonial Moralities
We are accustomed to defenses of traditional matrimony and family that rely chiefly
on showing how the ends of matrimony and family are irreducibly necessary for personal
and social health. Arcanum is not without such arguments.67 But the more provocative
67 Cf. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §29: “Matrimonial contracts are by [divorce] made variable; mutual kindness is
weakened; deplorable inducements to unfaithfulness are supplied; harm is done to the education and training of
children; occasion is afforded for the breaking up of homes; the seeds of dissension are sown among families;
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element of Leo’s teaching, especially with regard to my argument that the analogia communitatis
is fundamental to a truly humane society and politics, is his examination of the relationship
of the natural form of matrimony to the moral development of the social and political
animal. Leo justifies his attention to the original or primal form of matrimony thus: “From
the beginning of the world, indeed, it was divinely ordained that things instituted by God
and by nature should be proved by us to be the more profitable and salutary the more they
remain unchanged in their full integrity.”68 According to Leo’s demonstration of the
traditional teaching on matrimony so far, the institution has been divinely ordered to human
beatitude. That is, matrimony exists as a part of the divine initiative to order all human
inclinations to the benefit and support of the journey toward our ultimate end.69 If humans
are to change this institution, they ‘prove’ its original purpose to the extent that their
departure becomes the occasion for punitive repercussions. As the psalmists, prophets, and
Paul knew so well, departure from the Divine Law is itself punishment. And so the
“naturalist” who denies that matrimony is holy, or who, by severing the contract and
sacrament, relegates matrimony to “the class of common secular things” within the “genus
of commercial contracts” is not actually returning to some mythic pre-social, pre-political,
pre-Christian aeon of “natural marriage.” Instead, the “naturalist” is “uproot[ing] thereby the
foundations of nature, not only resisting the designs of Providence, [but also] destroying the
order that God has ordained.”70 We should not be surprised, Leo says, if such resistance to
the dignity of womanhood is lessened and brought low, and women run the risk of being deserted after having
ministered to the pleasures of men. [...]. [D]ivorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of families
and States, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people [...]”.
68 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §25.
69 Cf. Leo XIII, Inscrutabili Dei consilio, §14: Christ elevated matrimony and family life so that “by the discharge
of [the family members’] duties one to another, they might with greater ease attain to happiness both in time
and in eternity.”
70 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §25.
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the Creator’s wisdom results in “evils pernicious in the highest degree both to the salvation
of souls and to the safety of the commonwealth.”71 The question is, what are these evils?
We can appreciate Leo’s estimation of these evils from the perspective of the ends of
matrimony and family. This is relatively straightforward. Leo thinks that the “evils
pernicious” following from abandoning the Creator’s wisdom can be verified by the
evidence of how the Lord intends matrimony “to be a most fruitful source of individual
benefit and of public welfare. The benefits are: 1) biological - the propagation of the species;
2) conjugal - an increase in the happiness of the spouses through mutual help, constant and
faithful love, the sharing of possessions, and the reception of the grace of the sacrament; and
3) familial - the strengthening of parents’ hearts in union with one another, the education of
children, the tempering of patriarchal authority, and the cultivation of obedience.72 Put
together, we find several personal and public goods.
But this cannot be the end of the discussion for Leo. He also attends to personal and
public goods from the perspective of the form of matrimony:
A very torrent of evils has flowed from [abandoning Christian teaching on matrimony], not
only into private families, but also into States. For, the salutary fear of God being removed,
and there being no longer that refreshment in toil which is nowhere more abounding than in
the Christian religion, it very often happens, as indeed is natural, that the mutual services and
duties of marriage seem almost unbearable; and thus very many yearn for the loosening of
the tie which they believe to be woven by human law and of their own will, whenever
incompatibility of temper, or quarrels, or the violation of the marriage vow, or mutual
consent, or other reasons induce them to think that it would be well to be set free. Then, if
they are hindered by law from carrying out this shameless desire, they contend that the laws
are iniquitous, inhuman, and at variance with the rights of free citizens; adding that every
effort should be made to repeal such enactments, and to introduce a more humane code
sanctioning divorce.73
This is a rich paragraph that deserves comment. While on the one hand it demonstrates
Leo’s open acknowledgement of the many reasons persons have for contracting a divorce,
Ibid.
Cf. Ibid., §26. Cf. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §17.
73 Ibid., §27.
71
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on the other hand, it reiterates Leo’s sensitivity to the deeper moral implications of liberal
legislation. Recall that above Leo referred to the biblical teaching that departure from the
Divine Law is punishment in itself. In contrast to departing from the Divine Law, Leo
suggests that the maintenance of the identification of the sacrament with the contract
contributes to the proper fear of the Lord74 and to our remaining within the care of the
Church. Departure from the prior facts of Divine and ecclesial law results in a very specific
moral calamity that perfectly characterizes Leo’s criticism of modern liberalism and the
deeper perniciousness of the evils he sees redounding to society from liberal matrimonial
law.
We see in the passage quoted that marital duties can take on a certain aspect due to
the subjective nature of our experience of duty. In Leo’s account of Christian matrimony,
the drive to union with a spouse, the desire for children, and the necessity of maintaining the
union and nurturing and educating the children that issue therefrom all constitute the many
duties of spouses that are “neither few nor light.” This is a classic understatement. Leo’s key
insight here though is that the commission of these duties is a matter of moral subjectivity.
From one perspective, domestic duties are, or can become, onerous. Indeed, from a Marxist
perspective, these duties become understandable solely in terms of illegitimate domination.
From another perspective however, this is not the case. Leo writes that, “to married people
who are good these burdens become not only bearable but agreeable, owing to the strength
which they gain through the sacrament.”75 But in Leo’s mind, if society separates the
sacrament from the contract, gives the civil power exclusive control over matrimony, and
Cf. Leo XIII, Nobilissima Gallorum gens, §3: “Those, indeed, whose early days were not enlightened by religious
instruction, grow up without any knowledge whatever of the greatest truths, which alone can nourish in man
the love of virtue, and repress in him his evil passions [...]. Where these [truths] are unknown, all intellectual
culture will prove unhealthy; young people, unaccustomed to the fear of God, will not endure the restraint of
an upright life, they will not venture even to deny anything to their passions, and will easily be seduced into
troubling the State.”
75 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §12.
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introduces dissolubility, these marital burdens are in danger of seeming unbearable. When
the inevitable challenges of marriage are viewed in this way, the experience of them is not an
occasion for compromise, cooperation, selflessness, or other virtues we otherwise rightly
prize. Instead, the difficulties become occasions for looking to dissolve what is properly
indissoluble. The desire to treat indissoluble social bonds as dissoluble cannot help but
impact the human estimation of the nature of social bonds themselves.
Thus, we see in the passage quoted that the desire for an end to the union leads to a
misrepresentation of the nature of the union itself. Rather than see the union as a tie woven
by the Divine Law and the human will’s participation in it, the union becomes a form of
bondage wrought by human law and human will. In short, what was an expression of the
Divine Wisdom, even with all its difficulties and burdens, becomes pure convention and
artifact.76 Finally, given the developing presupposition that matrimonial bonds are
conventional and artificial, those desirous of an end to their union believe that anything
standing in the way of the accomplishment of their desires must be “iniquitous, inhuman,
and at variance with the rights of free citizens [...].”77
It is important to realize what Leo is teaching against the “naturalists.” From the
Leonine perspective, the sacramental act of covenanting with another person to a perpetual
union is a - if not the only - source of the strength required to view that same union and the
familial duties that develop out of it as positive human goods that constitute one’s
Cf. Leo XIII, Ci siamo, 129, where Leo refers to this tendency as “the sorry task of creating a matrimonial
morality wholly human, under merely judicial forms and guarantees.” The Christian counter to this tendency is
the Holy Family. Cf. Leo XIII, Graves de communi re, §25, where Leo calls on Catholics to “keep aloof on all
occasions from seditious acts and seditious men; to hold inviolate the rights of others; to show a proper respect
to superiors; to willingly perform the works in which they are employed; not to grow weary of the restraint of
family life which in many ways is so advantageous; to keep to their religious practices above all, and in their
hardships and trials to have recourse to the Church for consolation. In the furtherance of all this, it is of great
help to propose the splendid example of the Holy Family of Nazareth, and to advise the invocation of its
protection, and it also helps to remind the people of the examples of sanctity which have shone in the midst of
poverty, and to hold up before them the reward that awaits them in the better life to come.”
77 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §27.
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flourishing. This appears to be the case for Leo in terms both of the natural-sacramental and
graced-sacramental character of the matrimonial contract. The continual act of covenanting
with another person is a fundamental human good, the commission of which act increases a
person’s ability to appreciate its goodness. From this perspective, binding oneself to another
person via duty, rather than separating oneself via right, is the condition for restoring the
broken relationships sinful humans have made in history. The bonds of matrimony and
family, on this reading, can only trammel human liberty if humans fail to give themselves
fully to each other.
This estimation of the human communitas realized in a marriage and in a family does
not sit comfortably with the conception of human communitas that is supposed to obtain in a
liberal society. We saw that this would be the case in chapter three when we compared
ecclesial and contractual forms of communitas. So it is not surprising that Leo’s position in this
contest of “matrimonial moralities” is intimately related to his account of the deficiency of
three important modern doctrines: political voluntarism, popular sovereignty, and the
necessity of the free market. Indeed, one could read his criticism of these doctrines and think
he was still referring to the deeper contours of the legislative debate regarding matrimony. In
each case, a voluntaristic individualism passes over the Lord’s authority
in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if
men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing
to God, or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and
authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a State becomes nothing but a
multitude which is its own master and ruler. And since the people is declared to contain
within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not
consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God.78
If Morelli and Villa have their way, Leo fears that the Italian social imagination will
eventually countenance a matrimonial unit that has more in common with this simple,
78
Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §25, emphasis mine.
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aggregated multitude and less in common with a proper human communitas. Put starkly, a
matrimonial code that includes dissolubility as a fundamental aspect of what it means to
freely contract matrimony encourages the persons contracting the union to place a
prophylactic between the initial act of union on the one hand, and the ongoing promisekeeping that sustains that union on the other. Such a legal provision is not unlike a state’s
making legal provision for treason, or a religion’s making doctrinal provision for apostasy.
Were we to analyze this strange phenomenon from the perspective of late, global capitalism,
we would simply say that Leo knew that eventually, we would approach even the primitive,
pristine communitas as shoppers.79
Leo’s entire social magisterium demonstrates his sensitivity to the state’s desire to
make over all other social bodies into smaller, lesser images of itself, which self is in turn
patterned, not on any participatory communitas, but on the detached, monistic human will. To
the extent that this is true, the liberal state is deeply invested in a profound univocation
regarding communitas in that it is patterning all communitates on the singular reality of the
consumptive will. But what sort of pattern or model or archetype does an individual human
will provide for human communitas? Confronted with such a question, the solution is
equivocation: all communitas is an artifact of the human will.
Conclusion
Such is the deeper moral root, according to Leo, of the modern advocacy for the
reform of the matrimonial code. For Leo, civil matrimony and divorce are not primarily
individual decisions or preferences. Rather, they are forms of liberal pedagogy, encouraging
In our current milieu, Catholic advocacy on behalf of traditional conceptions of matrimony and family does
often look like advertising for brand loyalty. And the typical advertising strategy emphasizes the superiority of
the Catholic brand in terms of its benefits. Attention to living the form - something uninterpretable in
consumerist terms - is woefully lacking in this advertising. Indeed, knowledge of and advertising for the form
and its intrinsic relation to the ends of matrimony are similarly expressed solely in socio-economic terms.
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citizens to openly countenance dissolution in the first social unity of order within the analogia
communitatis. If this contract is “made variable,” then according to Leo it is difficult to see
how citizens will have the wherewithal to maintain unity and concordia in the rest of their less
proximate social commitments.80 Given that the difficulties and burdens of matrimony can
take on the aspect of unbearability, it only makes sense that persons enduring great marital
difficulty would dissolve their marriages and feel that they had secured a truly human good
from that dissolution. But Leo is more attentive to the public cost of these personal
decisions. For him, they are not private in the least. Rather, “private families” and the
“public society” are intimately and necessarily connected and ought to be so connected that
they foster harmony and unity both within and between each other.
So whereas Morelli and Villa had presented divorce as a sort of healing sacrament
the state could finally administer to the spiritual wounds of those who were truly living
through difficult or unbearable marriages, Leo suggests that what appears to be a healing,
personal balm is in fact a political poison corrosive of the very ideals that polities should
prize in their citizens: human liberty within the duties that make unity, fraternity,
cooperation, and sacrifice not only possible, but morally praiseworthy ideals. Leo cannot
imagine how civil matrimony and divorce would contribute to unity and harmony between
persons and communitates because the argument for these matrimonial innovations appear to
him to be founded on a deficient understanding of communitas in the first place. Leo’s
argument is thus not with liberals who would see matrimony made over into a contract.
Leo’s argument is rather with liberals who fail to see that the matrimonial contract is
analogously related to the promises, agreements, initiations, and other bonds that make all
human acts of communitas capable of imaging the Lord’s singular goodness. Leo’s is an
Cf. Leo XIII, Longinqua, §: “For difficult it is to imagine a more deadly pest to the community than the wish
to declare dissoluble a bond which the law of God has made perpetual and inseverable.”
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idealistic portrait of matrimony and family life, to be sure. But it is pitted against a supposed
liberal realism about the truth of matrimony and family that abets a social anthropology out
of touch with human communitas viewed from both a natural and a revealed perspective.
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CHAPTER 5
THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS, CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, AND
SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
I would like to return to the two theologians, working on the problem of how to
respond from a Catholic perspective to the unity of the Italian musicians. Recall that my
observation was that a perfectly theological and perfectly Catholic response would be to ask
the musicians when it was time to play again. I do not want my observation to be mistaken
for a dismissal of the theological task or a denial of the theological valence of the event. But
it does seem to me that the theologians were caught on the horns of a false dilemma that
pitted the natural goodness of the musicians’ unitive activity against the participatory nature
of that activity. The theologians avoided affirming human unity as a natural, even mundane,
good and as a participation in the Lord’s goodness. And in avoiding both these affirmations,
there appeared to be no way to theologically assess the way one’s heart stops and one’s finer
hairs stand on end when one sees, let alone participates with, a thousand musicians in perfect
synchrony. The desire to find some way of affirming the natural goodness of the humans’
unitive activity while acknowledging that humans’ unitive activities are never independent,
final, or closed off from the Lord seems to me to be yet another way of affirming that the
natural law is in fact a created reality that remains critical for a theological perception of
human persons, and indeed all of creation.
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In his important work on “modern social imaginaries,” Charles Taylor suggests that
there are several ways – not theories exactly, but comprehensive habits of vision or
comprehension – of understanding the moral demands of our particular social order in
history. Sometimes, Taylor notes, a moral order does not actually “carry with it a real
expectation of its integral fulfillment.”1 He offers two examples of this sort of demand. One
is the communion of saints as it stands to the Church militant. The communion of saints is
the model of what the Church militant in fact becomes in the eschaton.2 The other is the
modern utopia, which may refer “us to a way of things that may be realized in some
eventually possible conditions, but that meanwhile serve as a standard to steer by.”3 But
there are other times when a social order may “demand a more or less full realization here
and now.”4 He offers two further examples of this sort of demand. One is the medieval
notion that social order is “not so much a prescription as a key to understanding reality,
rather as the Chain of Being does in relation to the cosmos that surrounds us. It provides the
hermeneutic clue to understanding the real.”5 The other example is the “imperative
prescription” that may not yet be realized but must “be integrally carried out.”6 In contrast
with the utopia, the imperative prescription brings with it the expectation that the moral
demand is realizable now. Society does not wait for a propitious stellar alignment. Rather,
society has a vocation to realize the imperative now. This imperative prescription is
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6.
It lies beyond the scope of my project to question Taylor’s characterization of the communion of saints as a
social reality that will not be integrally fulfilled but that nevertheless stands as exemplar to the Church militant.
Suffice it to say here that one has to attend to the notion that the communion of saints is not integrally fulfilled
in history to the extent that the Church militant is always in via and a corpus mixtum. But it is also critical to
confess that the communion of saints, though it may not be integrally fulfilled until the eschaton, is for
Christians still the truer story about what is actually happening in history. Sensitivity to this confession may be
the reason Taylor suggests that modern utopias are privative of the communion of saints. There is no cynicism
or irony in the Christian confession that the communion of saints is fulfilled in the eschaton. There is, on the
other hand, a fair amount of cynicism and irony in the modern use of the utopia as a mirror for society.
3 Ibid., 6-7.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
1
2
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decidedly modern, and even revolutionary. We feel its imperiousness all the time now in our
advocacy for greater and greater expansion and realization of rights to liberty and equality.
Using Taylor’s description of the possible ways of imagining the moral demands of a
social order, I would like to return to the beginning of this project and revisit Beiner,
Hittinger, and Heyer in light of what we have done in the preceding four chapters and
keeping in mind the theological task of affirming the natural goodness and participatory
dependence of humans’ unitive action. My aim is threefold: 1) to provide some philosophical
and theological ground on which to place Beiner’s beautiful and melancholy description of
the civic-republican ideal and its utility in political theory precisely as a utopia; 2) to address
the enduring relevance to Catholic theology and philosophy of Hittinger’s estimation of the
social aspects of the imago Dei; and 3) to address with more theological and philosophical
precision the reasons Leo’s social magisterium is incompatible with Heyer’s typology and
why this incompatibility matters for contemporary Catholic social thought. By doing this
work, we may understand more fully why an analogical social anthropology remains
necessary for a suitable Catholic response to the social and political challenges we face today.
I argue that only via an analogical conception of human sociality will we be able to avoid the
temptations to finalize the political task. Analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain
incarnationally committed to the enduring task of promoting humane unitive activities like
society and politics. Leonine analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain so
committed in light of the eschatological, and so completely un-ironic hope that the broken
relations of nature and history will be restored only at the end of all things. This
eschatological hope funds the incarnational commitment and makes it intelligible in the first
place. Precisely this hope enables the theologian to ask the musicians, “When can we do this
again?”
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I. Leo XIII and the Civic-Republican Ideal
In the introduction, I referenced Ronald Beiner’s beautiful, if ultimately melancholic,
hope that contemporary political philosophy would not abandon the utopian ideal of civic
republicanism and the form of citizenship that ideal entails. I call Beiner’s hope a melancholy
one because he has identified in the civic-republican ideal a social order comprised in part by
what Christians would call “goods constitutive of human flourishing.” Then he has
suggested that the accomplishment of such goods is a utopian dream. Granted, Beiner’s
identification of a utopia here is reflexive. He thinks that utopian ideals are important for the
philosophical task. And there is plenty to be said about the “utopianism” of the Gospel, or
the Sermon on the Mount, or the evangelical life and their relation to the way most
Christians live their lives. As Charles Taylor notes, the communion of saints may be read as
functioning this way for the Church in as much as the former embodies for the latter a
society “devoid of rivalry, mutual resentment, love of gain, ambition to rule, and the like.”7
Taylor suggests that a modern utopia (and we could insert Beiner’s here) is actually a “distant
analogy in another context” to this ecclesial vision of a moral order. But after what we have
seen of Leo’s treatment of citizenship within the normative, created structure of the analogia
communitatis, it is clear that “utopian” is not the only or the best way to describe the civicrepublican ideal. Indeed, as Taylor suggests, there are other ways of describing the social
function of a moral order, including the decidedly non-utopian demand for a “more or less
full realization here and now.” One of the ways in which medieval – and here, Leonine –
visions of moral order demand this realization is by functioning hermeneutically. In Taylor’s
words, rather than supplying us with ideals to aim for but never ultimately realize,
7
Ibid., 6.
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hermeneutical moral orders provide society with the “clue” necessary for a society’s ability to
understand reality.8
Beiner’s utopian hope is a poignant manifestation of the hope of 1789 - namely, that
citizenship would have an important role to play in the restoration of the broken relations of
nature and history. In the introduction, I related this utopian vision of citizenship’s
restorative power to Hittinger’s work on the social dimension of the imago Dei. In other
words, given what Hittinger claims about the role of social relations in the human vocation
to image the Lord by causing goodness in others, it makes a great deal of sense that Beiner
would identify citizenship as a human relation possessed of great capacity to contribute to
human flourishing. Recall that Beiner’s description of civic-republican citizenship was
ultimately a description of a political form of friendship among humans. Beiner’s hope is
thus that love would remain the utopian ideal that steers the normative statements of
political theory. At a deeper level, it appears to be a hope that love will overcome contract
and competition, not in some pre-political or a-political realm, but exactly within political
membership.9 But the social anthropology implicit in Beiner’s work and explicit in the
magisterial work of the modern popes need not function as a utopia for political philosophy.
It may function hermeneutically, providing us with an irreplaceable clue to how we are to
acknowledge the human person and her relations in the most realistic terms.
In the introduction, I agreed with Beiner that the challenge to the civic-republican
ideal is indeed a serious one today because it reflects the reality of the complex pluriformity
of modern social life wherein people are distracted from political participation by all sorts of
Ibid., 7.
Beiner sees in the civic-republican ideal an opportunity for a polity to overcome modern contractualism. The
work of overcoming contractualism entails, for Beiner, the creation of a political unity based on a form of love
(friendship). Thus it seems to me that Beiner is trying to address the problems inherent to abandoning an
organic conception of communitas, even if according to his categories, he would find organic communitas (and its
hierarchical component) disdainful for various reasons.
8
9
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other proximate social relations that deprive them of the “leisure and disinterestedness that a
fully committed civic-mindedness would require.” But after working through the analogia
communitatis, is complex pluriformity actually a sufficient cause for civic apathy? It seems to
me that the problem for Beiner is again “complex space,” perhaps not the mystical
byzantinianism of the ancien régime, but a complex social order nonetheless. Are we being
asked again to buy the story that the solution to complex social space is simple political
space?
A Leonine read of Beiner’s civic-republican ideal would not see the pluriformity of
social commitment as corrosive of the hope for political friendship, but rather as its very
condition. If the analogia communitatis is indeed a determination of the Divine Wisdom
ordered to the flourishing of the human person and human communitas, then the communitates
that comprise the hierarchy are not social over against the political, or pre-political against
the political, or domestic against the political, or private against the political. They are not
subject to one imperative claim or to steering toward a utopian ideal. Rather, the munus of
each communitas is to form persons, per the prerogatives of each communitas, capable of exactly
the sort of love that defines Beiner’s hope: friendship. It is worth asking then if we should
direct our attention, not to an ideal or a utopia, but rather to precisely this array of
communitates in order to realize the moral formation Beiner implicitly requires.
What is that moral formation? Recall that in the introduction, Beiner characterizes
the utopian ideal as follows:
citizens motivated by the apprehension of a common good rather than by merely
private interests; civic unity rather than an aggregate of subcommunities at crosspurposes to each other; engaged citizens rather than passive and indifferent ones;
citizens who treat each other as co-citizens rather than as strangers, competitors, or
parties to a contractual arrangement [...].10
Ronald Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, (Vancouver,
Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), 6.
10
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In other words, Beiner’s citizenship is characterized principally by the possession of the
virtues of (at least) prudence, justice, generosity, and temperance, and by the normativity of
self-gift. But where do human persons find the moral formation required for such a
character? And are “civic-republicanism” or “civic virtue” sufficient descriptors of that
character? Without re-entering the communitarian-liberal debate, of which Beiner was an
important part, we can affirm with Leo that this description of character has as much to do
with the ultimate human vocation to beatitude as it has to do with the temporal human
vocation to political participation. Furthermore, with regard to the question of moral
formation, we can affirm with Leo that social pluriformity is precisely what is required if
institutional life is to actually correspond to the human need to cultivate virtuous character
and the capacity to give the self. Social pluriformity need not function in our moral vision as
a problem to be counteracted for the sake of steering more directly toward a utopia. Neither
does it need to function as an ideal to be forever approached. It can function as a “clue to
understanding the real.”
Leo’s anxiety at the beginning of Sapientiae Christianae is relevant here. Modernity
presents us with an amazing menu of human goods that quite easily distract the human
animal from the cultivation of the virtues necessary for recognizing self-gift as an ideal. In
fact, this menu appears to be designed to do one of two things. It either makes virtue and
self-gift seem to be preeminently political, terminating in the fascism that lies at the other
end of univocal predications of communitas. Or it makes virtue and self-gift seem to be
poisonous, corrosive of authentic human liberty, terminating in the deepest individualisms
that lie at the other end of equivocal predications of communitas. If we are to become persons
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capable of virtuous self-gift even in the political sphere, then the rich imbrication of
communitates is where the requisite character must be shaped. One cannot have the one
without the other. The rich imbrication may itself be read as one of the “clues” that
illuminate the vocation of the human substance, thus further enabling the proper
acknowledgement of the person. As Leo teaches, the state must indeed contribute via its
proper munus to the creation of this rich, complex space. But a variety of other communitates
are additionally responsible for making the human vocation to political citizenship intelligible
as a site of individual and social moral action.
Why is this the case? As I stated in the introduction, social pluriformity can be
interpreted from a philosophical and theological perspective as the pluriform manifestation
of the Lord’s singular goodness. In other words, social pluriformity is the proliferating
context in which we make the likeness of the Lord present in creation through virtuous
action and self-gift. Though Leo’s focus is on the triumvirate of Church, state, and family, I
also noted in the introduction that the move beyond the traditional doctrine of the two
spheres signifies that the theological-political problem is an expansive one indexed to the
pluriform reality of human relations and needs. As there are multitudes of angels, each
created to manifest uncreated goodness in a created mode, so there are multitudes of social
relations in which creatures may image the Creator. The rationalization and bureaucratization
of modern life sees all this plurality as pointless, or superfluous, or distracting. This is the
reason nationalist revolutions eliminated religious orders. Their contemplative vocation
could not be interpreted as a cause of goodness in society. If the religious orders were to
maintain a public reality, they had to make cheese and beer instead. But even in the more
benign setting of the theological conversation about the 1,000 Italian musicians, the anxiety
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remains: what do we do with all this unitive activity that is not economic, not political, not
religious?
The fact that citizens of liberal democracies do not appear to be capacitated with the
virtue required for Beiner’s civic-republican ideal thus does not necessarily indicate that the
civic-republican dream of 1789 is now best seen as nothing more than a utopia capable of
steering political philosophy. It could rather indicate that we live in the republican utopia of
1789, and we do not like it. Consider it. We were told that citizenship would restore the
broken relations of nature and history. We were told that political friendship would finally
liberate us from the mediations and obscurations of the old orders, where priests and
aristocrats told us they were necessary for our proper formation. This is the great liberal
dream. Mazzini even promised us a new epoch of universalized civic republicanism, a new
religion of humanity and the further incarnation of the divine idea. But as I have suggested
throughout this work, all we got from this promise was a mandate to work for empty visions
of liberty and for vacuous forms of equality among our supposed fratres. As Mazzini
understood so well, we were actually neglecting fraternity. Had we trained our social
imaginations on the ideal of fraternity, we would have quite naturally had to count the
personal cost of restoring the broken relations of nature and history. That is, we would have
developed an account of human duty. This restorative work is a duty – it costs – because it is
the work of virtuous self-gift. But virtuous self-gift is an ongoing rational activity not easily
comprehended by animals focused on liberty from and equality to others. Given that we
have indeed neglected fraternity and focused almost exclusively on liberty and equality, we
quite easily avoided the moral demands of the social order we were constructing. The social
order provides us with no hermeneutic by which to interpret duty or sacrificial action. Our
concern is not duty or sacrifice at all. Our concern is protection from, liberty from,
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separation from. If one of the goals of destroying the ancien régime was the elimination of old
orders of duty in favor of new orders of rights and liberties, then it was actually necessary
that the modern civic-republican ideal of fraternité remain unattainable in order for the entire
order to stand to our social imaginary as the imperative it still is: the duty to work for the
continual elimination of duty. How can this be a moral demand, let alone a demand that
must be realized here and now?
In light of the analogia communitatis, Beiner’s characterization of the civic-republican
ideal as a utopian concept providing normative steering for political philosophy easily leaves
each citizen individually looking to the state as the institution primarily tasked with creating
virtuous citizens. Indeed, it is the need of the state itself for a united citizenry that demands
that we work tirelessly for the civic-republican ideal. But looking to the state in this way, out
of all associational formations, can be read as the exact cause of our civic apathy. If the
communitas asking me to make the moral sacrifices necessary to become a virtuous person is
itself the communitas that has liberated me from the duties traditionally associated with
membership in virtue-causing institutions, it is unclear why I would want to make the
sacrifices necessary for the civic-republican ideal in the first place. The dream of 1789 can be
interpreted, in other words, as a true utopia – a social nowhere.
Given the reality of my membership in a wide array of communitates, why would I
want to imagine the political sphere as the primary sphere of my moral activity? What could
it possibly be about the political sphere alone that could occasion my desire to give myself?
As the Italian nationalists, following Mazzini, knew perfectly well, when we propose the
nation as the whole to which we should donate ourselves, it is important to use our vision of
order to recast that nation itself as some other kind of communitas. Often enough, the nation
is recast as a communitas bound together not only by history, law, language, and geography,
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but by blood. But in the case of Mazzini, we see other options. He recasts the nation as a
communitas more akin to a synagogue or a parish, tasked not only with promoting fraternity,
but with incarnating the divine in a given chronotope. For Mazzini then, the ultimate source
of the moral energy behind the imperative to work for the civic-republican ideal lies in the
human capacity to incarnate the divine in history.
This is a lot to ask of the citizen, perhaps especially today, when political relation can
seem lost within an array of far more proximate identity communities. Even matrimonial,
familial, and ecclesial memberships now exist alongside other voluntary choices expressive of
the individual person’s desire to be this or that sort of person. So now, it seems much more
likely that the human animal would interpret the vocation to self-gift in terms of the many
wholes of which she is a part. In other words, instead of proposing the civic-republican ideal
as an imperative that demands our very moral formation, shouldn’t we propose social
pluriformity as the hermeneutical key to understanding why and how the civic-republican
ideal could ever be attractive in the first place? If Beiner is correct and we should find the
civic-republican ideal normatively attractive, if this is truly the condition of engaging in
sound political philosophy, then we should not repeat the mistake of asking the modern
state to bear burdens it was not created to bear. We quickly grow weary of its failure to bear
those same burdens. It is a short step from this weariness to the belief that the political
sphere is, ultimately, a tragic comedy only understandable from a cynical, ironic perspective.
Irony like this can even affect our ability to assess other forms of communitas, such as the
1,000 Italian musicians.
On the other hand, an analogical conception of the communitates that make up the
institutional powers responsible for forming virtuous, self-giving citizens corresponds more
closely to the vocation of the human person to cause good in others, and so to become the
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sort of animal states rightly desire in the first place. An analogical conception of communitas
thus relieves the state - not to mention the Church and the family - of the burden of setting
unrealizable imperatives in their own name. The analogy recognizes that all communitates –
even groups of musicians – exist hermeneutically, providing us with the clues necessary to
discerning the human vocation to image the Lord in creation, manifesting his goodness
through our social action.
If Charles Taylor is right, then a “social imaginary” – a way of imagining and being in
social order – comes with a moral demand that may be understood as un-realizable or
realizable. By moral demand, we should understand Taylor to be speaking of the imperative
to create persons and relations capable of corresponding to something external to
themselves, be it a communion of saints, a future utopia, a cosmic order, a primal state of
nature, or some other imperative. I suggested in the introduction that Hittinger’s work on
the social aspects of the imago Dei is essential for understanding the burden of this project. I
want to return to Hittinger in order to say more about the imperative that persons and social
orders correspond to something beyond themselves.
II. Leo XIII and Social Anthropology
By questioning whether or not it is adequate to follow Beiner in characterizing civicrepublican citizenship as a utopian ideal that simply steers political philosophy, we are
entering further into contemporary iterations of how to thematize fraternité in modern
politics. As I have noted, after 1789 it was not difficult for modern political regimes to
thematize liberty and equality. In doing so, modern regimes made a moral demand that our
vision of social order correspond not to a reality beyond the social order (such as the
communion of saints, a future utopia, or a cosmic order) but to individual human substance.
Rather than viewing social order hermeneutically as a “clue” to the real, and thus as a
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constitutive aspect of understanding the nature and vocation of the human person, modern
regimes proposed a vacuous definition of the human person as a will capable of engaging all
relations under the “genus of commercial contract.” The perfection of our capacity to
execute commercial contracts became the social imperative.
In the introduction, I summarized Russell Hittinger’s intervention in this issue.
Hittinger suggests that from the perspective of Christian theological anthropology, the
doctrine of the imago Dei is not only a doctrine affirming the unique dignity of the individual
human substance. The doctrine also features a social aspect. The modern popes - Leo XIII
chief among them - illuminated the social aspect of the imago Dei in order to counteract the
promise that society could use citizenship to restore authentically human fraternity by
making society in the image of the contracting consumer. According to Hittinger, this social
aspect of the imago Dei is constituted by the vocation of human persons to image, in the
created multiplicity and pluriformity of our social relations, what exists simply in the Lord:
namely, the Lord’s goodness. The social aspect of the imago Dei is thus not a recognition that
humans are their relations. It is, rather, a recognition that human relations image the Triune
Lord in being perfectible, imitative (which is to say, accidental) sites of moral action in which
humans manifest the Lord’s goodness.
As far as I know, Leo never suggests that human communitas is analogous to the
relations that are the Triune Lord. This may be attributed to his Thomism, by which he
would have understood that only the Triune Lord is his relations. In the created order, no
such statement is possible. Whatever analogies might be proper and helpful when speaking
of the Creator and creatures, it would have seemed obvious to Leo that having relations to
others is not easily analogous to being relation. This is the case with all analogical predication.
A creature can become good only via participation. We do not say that creatures become
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goodness itself. A creature’s relations, like a creature’s goodness, are always already
participated in, infinitely distant from, and utterly dependent on the Divine Goodness. Were
a creature capable of becoming goodness or relation, the creature would be capable of
becoming the Creator. But this is not the only implication. In time, creatures can neither
become their relations to others, nor become others. Instead, their sociality, like every other
participated predicate, is never finished. Whereas the individual human substance possesses
an integrity precisely as substance, human accidents possess a provisional quality in as much
as they are susceptible to cultivation, perversion, and diminution. And whatever finality we
can discern in the accidents of the human substance, whatever accomplishments of ideals or
realizations of potentialities, the end of human accidents is not resolution into identity with
the Creator. It is instead the perfection of worship.
So, with regard to the human substance’s participation in and imaging of the Divine
Goodness, human persons accomplish this vocation through being in relation, which is a
form of action. Given that all truly human action is moral action, and so never a private,
individual affair, but always a social reality of causing or detracting from good, social
relations constitute the primary created site in which human persons live out their vocation
as image bearers. We are truly, as Basil the Great teaches, “artisans of the likeness of Christ.”
In a marriage, a family, social relations, like groups of musicians, political relations like
citizenship, and in religious relationships, human persons find themselves not only as
individual, rational substances, but as volitional neighbors tasked with bringing about
goodness in creation. Throughout the work, I have referred to this as the vocation to cause
good, or to cultivate the divine image in the self and in the other. And now we may add to
this terminology Taylor’s language of the hermeneutical clue. The rich pluriformity of human
communitas is not a problem that must be managed by social authority. Neither is it an
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unrealizable ideal or utopia for which we must strive. Rather, it is a natural given that
communicates theologically to us concerning both the structure of reality and human action
in accordance with that reality.
Hittinger performs this work on the social aspect of the imago Dei in a theological and
philosophical context that is concerned with the category of relation. In the long modern
project of negotiating the patrimony of Aristotle, there is a developing notion that
Aristotelian substance is somehow related to an individualism we perceive as corrosive of
authentic human existence. W. Norris Clarke, David Schindler, and Tracey Rowland, for
example, affirm variants of the beautiful thesis that we “are only ourselves in relation to
others, yet in relation to others we are truly ourselves. We must be abroad for the sake of
others if we are to be at home with ourselves.”11 Rowland, for her part, suggests that we
must pursue this line of bringing relation nearer and nearer to substance in order to outnarrate alternative forms of solidarity, such as the one we find “within the Liberal tradition
in the concept of fraternity [...].” The problem with liberalism’s fraternity, according to
Rowland, is that it is “based upon a common citizenship of a given polity,” whereas an
authentic solidarity would be based on a theological anthropology derived from scripture. 12
After considering 1789’s fraternité, we can affirm Rowland’s characterization of liberal
solidarity but also condition it by attending to the ways in which liberal solidarity is not
simply a search for national or political unity. It is also a perpetual forestalling of human
unity in favor of aggrandizing liberty and equality. The fraternité of citizenship was supposed
to restore the broken relations of nature and history because it was able to deliver on an
identification of the national task with the human vocation: political membership here, now,
in this polity was also simultaneously a restoration, a repristination, of the fraternal relations
11
12
This is again Aidan Nichols’ useful summary of the project in Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition, xiii.
Ibid., 43.
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humans had before the old orders were made. 1789’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
is the befuddled expression of this identification. The Declaration identifies the modern
political vocation: the dual search for the concrete solidarity that is supposed to obtain in an
historical, cultural form called nation, and the universal solidarity that is supposed to obtain in
a transcendent, biological genus called human. How national and cultural differences are to
serve universal solidarity is a question that goes unanswered. And the question of how
universal solidarity is to be realized within national and cultural differences is similarly
neglected. This is our current situation, though Catholics in the west feel it less acutely than
they did in 19th century France, Germany, Italy, etc. Now, various migrant populations, and
perhaps especially Muslims in the West, live with the consequences of our inability to answer
these questions.
The broken relations of nature and history are supposedly going to be restored by
two commitments. First, the commitment to the concrete, national communitas is now a
commitment to a communitas even stranger than a geographically bound nation. It is
commitment to communitas as tolerance, pluralism, and multiculturalism. This commitment is
based on a deeper univocation regarding the word communitas and how it is predicated of
human groups. That is, authentic human communitas becomes ontologically identical, not to
any act or feature of a group as a group, but to a mechanism designed to overcome
difference. This vision of communitas is essential if persons are to remain “unencumbered
selves.”13 Second, the commitment to the universal, human communitas is now a commitment
to something actually unrecognizable as communitas. It is commitment to the only thing that
remains universal and stable: individual rights. This commitment is based on a new
equivocation regarding the word communitas and how it is predicated of human groups. As
13
The phrase is Michael Sandel’s.
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Kenneth L. Grasso puts it, even the “deepest commitments” to our form of political life we
now see as having their “foundation not in universal truths about human nature and politics,
but simply in our culture’s particular traditions and preferences.”14 That is, we simultaneously
speak of rights as universal and as human constructions. They are everywhere valid, not on
account of their correspondence to anything beyond themselves, but on account of their
status as expressions of human will. After equivocating about our communitas in this way,
politics is finished and rights are all that is left.
It goes without saying that Leo could never have foreseen any of this. But as
Catholic theology seeks new ways of addressing the hopes and fears of the late modern
world, we still require habits of predication, modes of theologizing and philosophizing, and
humane ways of imagining sociality that correspond to the needs of human persons and the
communitates they form. Taylor argues that our current social imaginary sees society as an
instrument designed to perform very limited and specific tasks: 1) to serve the needs of
ordinary life; 2) to meet these needs through mutual services; and 3) to engage in this mutual
service as free, equal, rights-bearing individuals.15 In this way, by ministering directly to the
individual, society (including politics) “is seen as an instrument for something prepolitical.”16
Membership in modern communitates is ordered to a primordial ministry that treats the human
person as something isolable. According to Taylor, this vision of the modern social order,
with the natural, individual rights-bearer at its heart, encourages a certain distortion in our
thinking. He suggests that we are prone to interpret this “rise of ‘individualism’” as
something that happens “at the expense of ‘community.’”17 But, cautions Taylor, “the new
14 Kenneth L. Grasso, “Introduction: Theology and the American Civil Conversation,” in Theology and Public
Philosophy, ed. Kenneth L. Grasso and Cecilia Rodriguez Castillo, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), xix.
15 Cf. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3-22.
16 Ibid., 19.
17 Cf. Ibid., 17-18.
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understanding of the individual has as its inevitable flip side a new understanding of sociality,
the society of mutual benefit, whose functional differentiations are ultimately contingent and
whose members are fundamentally equal.”18
If Taylor is correct, then the contest, it seems to me, is not between modern
individualism rooted in a misappropriation of Aristotelian substance vs. postmodern
relations rooted in neo-Platonism and/or Jewish and Christian scriptures. Rather, the contest
is between rival visions of social order and rival conceptions of the moral demands our
social order places on us. If this is the case, it will not do to jettison a philosophy of human
substance and a complementary doctrine of the human person as made in the imago Dei for a
philosophy of human relations and a complementary doctrine of the human person made in
the imago Trinitatis. What is required instead is twofold. First, a philosophical analysis of the
analogical reciprocations between the individual person, her social memberships, and the
societies of which she is a member. Second, a theological analysis of the analogy between the
individual person, sociality, and the Lord. Why is this the case and what does it have to do
with Leo?
III. Leo XIII and Theologies Public and Prophetic
In the introduction, I suggested Kristin Heyer’s typology of contemporary
Catholicism’s social witness was helpful, but that her typology of Thomistic and Augustinian
modes also obscured elements of Leo’s social magisterium. The latter cannot be sufficiently
described in terms of “incarnational humanism” vs. “eschatological humanism,” or “public
Catholicism” vs. “prophetic Catholicism.” I then stated that these binaries seem to me to
correspond to Arne Rasmussen’s identification of two different modes of thinking about the
Church and its relationship to the world. One mode Rasmussen identifies as “political
18
Ibid., 18.
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theology,” and the other mode he calls “theological politics.” My contention in the
introduction was that both modes fail to the extent that they do not properly analogize
theology and politics. According to Rasmussen’s way of using the terms, “political theology”
is a mode of making theology politically relevant. Heyer, following Murray, would consider
this the more incarnational mode, expressive of the Christian desire to dialogue and
cooperate with the world. “Theological politics,” on the other hand, is a mode of exposing
the politics that flows from Christian theology. Heyer, following Murray, would consider this
the more eschatological mode, expressive of the Christian desire to measure the world
according to the Gospel and to call the world to conversion.
Now I would like to relate Leo’s social thought to some aspects of “political
theology” and “theological politics.” After this, I will compare Heyer’s typology to another
typology constructed by Tracey Rowland. In doing so, my suggestion is that the difficult
work of fitting Leo’s social magisterium into these contemporary typologies should be a
warning sign to us that we are engaged in a habit of thinking about our situation that is not
constructive. In the end, my criticism is less of the typologies themselves and more of the
styles they seek to clarify. If my analysis is correct, these styles are engaged in a mode of
reasoning about Church and world, grace and nature that seeks what Rowan Williams
cautions against: “a theory that would allow final security and ‘finishedness’ to any form of
political life. The claims of such a theory would be, ultimately, anti-political because antihuman: denials of death.”19 Christian reasoning though - especially about the res sacras in
temporalibus - should acknowledge that it is not given to humans to establish a “final
security.” If the human person is always about the vocation of cultivating the image of the
Lord’s goodness, then the desire to finish the task of politics might demonically correspond
Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55-72, at
69.
19
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to the desire to finish this vocation. Leo’s social magisterium, on the other hand,
demonstrates the humility required of the human creature and of human communitates. Both
persons and our relations are to be always engaged in what is ultimately an awkward,
provisional, revisable task: living together toward a common good. The theological response
can indeed be, “When is it time to play again?”
IIIa. Leo and “political theology”
Whether we are to use Rasmussen’s or Heyer’s terminology to describe “public” or
“political” theology, it is clear that Leo’s social magisterium has much affinity with it. In the
way this mode is described, the natural law plays a prominent role in promoting cooperation
and dialogue between persons and groups that are otherwise divided according to a wide
array of historical, social, cultural, philosophical, political, and theological differences. The
hope is that a robust acknowledgement of a universal, stable human nature, accessible to
some degree to the historically contingent mind of human persons and communities, will
ground dialogue between diverse groups in a stable consensus regarding non-negotiable
fundamentals, such as human rights, for example. The complex history of Catholic natural
law reasoning, its relationship to Enlightenment and Romantic epistemologies and cultural
anthropologies, and its theological resurgence in the 20th century extends far beyond the
scope of my project here. But Tracey Rowland has helpfully described why this approach is
currently perceived as problematic. Referring to the conciliar period of the 20th century and
the Church’s magisterial affirmation20 of “universal values,” Rowland writes:
[T]he concept of “universal values” is itself highly problematic. It can be understood
in at least two senses: first, that there are a range of goods or values that are
universally required for human flourishing regardless of the peculiar social
circumstances of individuals. However, “universal” can also mean transcending all
divisions among traditions or “common” to all traditions. In the first sense, the
Rowland is thinking especially of the social magisteria of John XIII and Paul VI, though John Paul II’s is
implicated in her criticism in interesting ways.
20
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expression is but a synonym for the idea of natural law; in particular, what are now
commonly called the “goods of human flourishing.” However, in the second sense, it
is a postulation of a belief that there are some values or goods which are common to
all traditions, or that different traditions, regardless of their theological pedigree, will
reach the same or similar conclusions about the goods of human flourishing.21
This description of the problematic is a useful way into Leo’s relationship to a
political or public theology. Rowland herself suggests that Leo is in part responsible for the
advent of a “Whig Thomism” that seeks, like political or public theology, to affirm an
affinity between Catholicism and liberalism based on the reality of “universal values” in the
second sense.22 That is, Leo’s commitment to the rational availability of nature - especially a
universal, stable human nature - seems to commit him to the idea that different traditions
will eventually arrive at similar conclusions about human flourishing. Rowland’s suggestion
gives us the impression that Leo was capable of proposing “universal values” as an ideal to
be striven for by Catholics, socialists, and liberals alike. This does not seem quite right to me,
Given Leo’s suspicion that liberalism is not actually an adequate political vision of
the human person, and that liberalism does not actually conduce to the human person’s
vocation to cause good via her social relations, it is unclear why we should affirm that Leo
would think that different traditions would arrive at similar conclusions about human
flourishing, let alone the idea that Leo opens the way for “Whig Thomism.” First, consider
Sapientiae Christianae, which we have encountered at length above. Recall that in chapter three
we saw that Leo cautioned that the great material advancements achieved by science and
Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: after Vatican II, (New York: Routledge, 2003),
Cf. Ibid., 16: “The belief that it is possible to effect a suynthesis of the Liberal and Thomist traditions is
described by George Weigel, one of its contemporary proponents, as the project of ‘Whig Thomism”. It can be
traced to the works of nineteenth-century “Liberal Catholics” such as Lord Acton in England and the comte de
Montalembert in France. It continues in Jacques Maritain’s efforts to reconcile Thomistic natural law with the
Liberal natural right doctrine and his endorsement of the natural rights doctrine in the United Nations’
Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. This strategy of reconciling natural law with natural right is prefigured in
Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and ahs been followe in the encyclicals of John XIII, Paul VI and John Paul II.”
While Rowland acknowledges that Leo uses the “rhetoric” of liberalism and avoids trying to synthesize
liberalism and Thomism, she nevertheless argues that Leo’s work expresses the lack of “conceptual tools”
necessary to deal with liberalism as an “ideology.”
21
22
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industry are corrosive of a theologically accurate account of the human person and of
society. There, Leo contends that at the level of society and indeed culture - not simply at
the level of theory - modernity presents human persons with an alternative vision of all
reality as ordered primarily around the practices of material acquisition, physical security,
comfort, and even luxury. The historical, social, and cultural reality of this corrosion is the
occasion of the social question as Leo confronts it throughout his magisterium. So, as I
suggested in the introduction, Leo’s own historical context and his attention to that context
seem to militate against the suggestion that he was confident that if people would simply
acknowledge the natural law, society would agree on and work toward securing the goods
necessary for human flourishing. The plight of labor under the ideologies fostered by both
socialism and laissez-faire capitalism prevents Leo from reasoning according to the natural law
in this mode.
And yet we have seen that Leo is consistently committed to the intelligibility of
creation and to the universal nature of the human substance, made in the imago Dei. Does it
make sense to speak of Leo in terms of Rowland’s first definition of “universal values” as
the reality of goods necessary for human flourishing, regardless of contingencies like
personal preference or circumstance? It seems to me that this is the more fitting way to
describe Leo’s confidence in the intelligibility of creation. I have repeatedly claimed above
that Leo sees human nature and sociality as a gift of the Creator, ordained to the end of
human beatitude in this life and the next. My particular burden has been to show how the
analogia communitatis is expressive of a pluriform sociality attractive to Leo not as some sort of
lowest common denominator among varying cultures and traditions, and not attractive as
some sort of ethical imperative or utopian ideal to be pursued, but attractive as a normative
philosophical and theological statement regarding what human persons require and what
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they in fact create in order to live humane lives. Leo’s hierarchical, complementary “social
imaginary” is thus hermeneutical. It provides society with a clue to understanding the real.
Leo’s vision of the analogia communitatis is most certainly dictated by a conviction that human
nature is universal and stable. But again, his own context does not inspire confidence that
just any tradition will arrive at such a normative statement regarding social anthropology.
Neither does his context inspire confidence that just any tradition will be able to propose an
adequately humane ideal for which to strive.
Consider the historical work I have done in the chapters above. What are Leo’s
recommendations for the revitalization of society and for the restoration of the broken
relations of nature and history? The public authority of the Catholic Church and the
purgative benefits of Catholic philosophy. In other words, Leo presents traditioned,
theological agents as both dialogue partners and prophetic challengers to the economic and
political liberalism of his day. Leo’s claim is rarely, if ever, that the Church and the state, or
the Church and society, or the Church and the economy simply need to arrive at an
agreement on an ideal or workable definition of justice, or of liberty, or of equality. His claim
is rather, nearly always, that the Church and the state, or the Church and society, or the
Church and the economy alike must submit to the law - natural and revealed - of the
Creator. Moreover, this submission to the law must be carried out according to the unique
vocation of each “sphere” of society if the human person is to receive care adequate to all
her domestic, social, political, and religious complexity. The rational availability of the
Creator’s law, via both reason and revelation, is the reason a social order can be thought
hermeneutical at all.
Leo’s idea of a public or a political theology flows from this last conviction about the
formation of society according to the Creator’s law. The Catholic Church’s authority and
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Catholic philosophy’s rational utility are not based on their ability to establish common
ground with divergent traditions. Neither are their authority and utility calculable solely in
terms of the efficient accomplishment of certain desirable ends. Rather, authority and utility
are calculable primarily in terms of their theological ability to witness publicly and rationally
to the givenness of Creation and to the Creator’s providential care for humans in both their
individuality and their sociality. As a simple test case, consider Leo’s treatment of liberty,
undertaken most directly and systematically in 1888’s Liberats praestantissimum, on human
liberty. In that encyclical, Leo’s strategy is not to affirm commonality between the Church
and liberal democracy based on their mutual recognition of liberty as a fundamental human
endowment. Instead, his strategy is to mount a philosophical argument regarding the
insufficiency of liberal accounts of liberty and the superiority of Catholic accounts of the
same. But given Leo’s proximity to the temporal power of the papacy, and given the
uncertainty of the ultimate fate of that power, the incompatibilities Leo identifies between
liberalism and Catholicism are not moments of sectarian rivalry or simply a contest of -isms.
Rather, they are public moments in which the pope is prudentially exercising his magisterial
office in accordance with its historical position vis-a-vis societies and regimes. From the
perspective of political prudence, Leo’s engagement with the “modern world” proceeds
according to theological convictions about the intelligibility of creation and the irreducible
necessity of the Church in history for stewarding that intelligibility. It is a scriptural theme
after all that humans as individual moral agents and in society can fail to perceive the
givenness, the goodness, and the naturalness of creation.23 Thus Leo is indeed a “public” or
a “political” theologian in that he addresses Catholic theology to the needs, hopes, and fears
of a particular social and political context. However, his effort to be “relevant” to this
I have in mind here Aquinas and Leo’s dependence on Romans 1:18ff regarding the privative ability of
humans to ignore, and then forget, and then deny that the Lord is known through his effects in creation.
23
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context takes the shape of developing a rational argument for the public necessity of the
Church as a guardian of society’s ability to recognize the truly human, the actually natural. In
this sense, his political or public theology verges on the prophetic.
IIIb. Leo and “theological politics”
In the introduction, I suggested that Leo’s social magisterium has something to do
with two modes of Augustinianism in politics. First, I suggested that though we often
portray Leo as an incarnational Thomist focused solely on concordia among the spheres of
society, he is not at all averse to following Augustine in recognizing that two different loves
order the common life of the two cities. In Humanum genus, this theme is front and center. In
Sapientiae Christianae, the theme endures but is historically contextualized so that the love of
self that orders the common life of the earthly city is described in distinctly modern
terminology. Rather than being ordered around the love of the Lord as the civitate Dei is, the
earthly city is ordered around love of the material benefits and luxuries of science and
industry. Second, I suggested that though we often associate Augustinianism in politics with
this incompatibility between the two loves of the two cities, Leo also highlights the way in
which Augustine affirms that Christian formation is actually good for the regime. To the
extent that the Church makes virtuous persons, she makes citizens who are capable of living
a more authentically political existence.24 To be sure, this Christian formation must often
take the form of prophetic living according to a love that has become unintelligible to the
earthly city, but both Augustine and Leo see this prophetic living as authentically public and
political, ordered to the realization in time of what will be fully present only in the eschaton.
24 Leo typically has in mind the munera of both the Church and the family in society. From a Leonine
perspective, these two communitates, especially through their intimate cooperation, form persons who are able to
value cooperation, self-sacrifice, patience, and various forms of union.
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As I noted in the introduction, Rowan Williams’ work on De civitate Dei is useful here,
providing us with a suitable way to understand the enduring relevance of Augustine’s
thought for affirming the political in just the way Leo does.25 Williams sounds the charge
against Augustine, articulated forcefully by Hannah Arendt, that Augustine repudiates the
“public realm” that had defined ancient politics and its relationship to all other social spheres
(especially the domestic). As Williams describes it, Arendt’s criticism of this repudiation of
the public realm is a grave one with stark anthropological consequences:
[W]ithout this public realm of active, creative persons taking responsibility for the integrity
and continuation of a form of talking and understanding, we are condemned either to the
animal pointlessness of the mere effort to subsist, or to the more typically modern
unfreedom of “mass society”, in which financial achievement and reward or security replaces
glory and repute, the notion of worthiness to be remembered, and the quality of public
action as creative, as formative of a “conversation” extending beyond individual death, is
undermined. Society becomes increasingly incapable of intelligent speech, common
imagination, increasingly enslaved to idolatrous objectifications, fetishes and slogans.26
Arendt’s charge against Augustine is that Christianity subverts the public by selfconsciously embodying a community that marginalizes itself from political authority, lives
with an eye only for eschatological glory, and rejects all other forms of belonging that do not
correspond to the call to Christian charity. According to Williams’ read of Arendt, this last
factor is perhaps the most a-political of them all, for the “bond of charity” encourages the
formation of a people that is “essentially wordless. [...] Caritas is, in the Augustinian system, a
love which is indifferent to merit and achievement: it sees the bonds between persons as
resting simply on their common createdness and equal sinfulness, and thus operates
impartially and, in a sense, impersonally.”27
Cf. Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 5572.
26 Ibid., 56.
27 Ibid., 56-7. Interestingly enough, it appears that Arendt’s criticism of Augustinian caritas would also be a valid
criticism of liberal egalité. For Arendt, ancient politics are attractive in that they provide humans with a venue
for the pursuit of excellence and distinction, conceived of here as contributions to culture and not simply as
personal gains. To the extent that distinction is the most loathsome feature of the ancien régime, and to the extent
25
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Williams’ response to Arendt’s criticism of Augustine strikes me as interestingly
Leonine. And if Williams is correct - and I think he is - then it’s actually the case that Leo is
interestingly Augustinian. Williams argues against Arendt that Augustine does not so much
give us a politics as a “theological anthropology and a corporate spirituality.” In doing so,
Augustine demonstrates throughout De civitate Dei that “the political and the spiritual are not
separate concerns [...] the spiritual is the authentically political.”28 What does Williams mean by
this? His answer throws my work here on Leo’s social magisterium into beautiful,
Augustinian relief. Williams suggests that instead of repudiating the public and political for a
sectarian, eschatological community ordered around the great equalizer of charity, Augustine
is “engaged in a redefinition of the public itself, designed to show that it is life outside the
Christian community which fails to be truly public, authentically political. The opposition is
not between public and private, church and world, but between political virtue and political
vice. At the end of the day, it is the secular order that will be shown to be ‘atomistic’ in its
foundations.”29
Both Augustine and Leo are engaged in a prophetic challenge to the social
anthropologies of their times. But their challenge is not issued from a non-political or apolitical space (wherever that may be). Neither Augustine nor Leo lives in the wilderness.
Rather, their prophetic challenge comes from a very “incarnational” or “public” concern that
human beings require certain goods for their flourishing in this life and for beatitude in the
next. Williams puts it this way:
that egalité becomes the new form of caritas around which the political community is ordered, Arendt exposes to
us both the ways in which the modern social project sharply diverges from ancient conceptions of society and
politics and how Christianity has been instrumental in the slow construction of that divergence. Mazzini may
have been correct: 1789 simply brought the epoch of Christendom to a close and distilled from that patrimony
the liberty, equality, and fraternity necessary to surpass it. What is required then? An acceptance of modernity
after 1789 as dilute Christianity and eventually atheism? A rejection of modernity in favor of a new version of a
former mode (medievalism, neo-paganism, etc.)?
28 Ibid., 58.
29 Ibid.
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A social practice which impedes human beings from offering themselves to God in fact
denies that central impulse in human nature which Augustine defined as the unquenchable
desire for God and his truth. It provides ersatz gratifications, finite substitutes for the infinite.
And as such it diminishes humanity itself, in that it takes away the one principle that can
rightly order our wills and affections. [...] Thus if the pagan res publica is deficient as a
commonwealth, it is not because Augustine polemically sets a standard of unattainably high
righteousness or religious probity, but because a society incapable of giving God his due fails
to give its citizens their due - as human beings made for the quest and enjoyment of God.
Where there is no jus towards God, there is no common sense of what is due to human
beings, no juris consensus.30
In chapter three, we observed Leo’s contention with the political practice of
separatism. In chapter four, we observed Leo’s contention with the social practice of
divorce. In both cases, Leo’s argument is not that the res publica is failing to live up to an
“unattainably high righteousness or religious probity.” Leo does not demand that we
measure the res publica by an unattainable ideal or a future utopia. Rather, his argument is that
the res publica is simply failing to exercise its native munera. It does not correspond to the real
and so fails to be the sign that it ought to be: namely the sign that humans are called to
communitas in order to manifest the Lord’s goodness in creation. As I showed in chapter
three, Leo does not envision the munera of the state as including the spiritual as spiritual.
Rather, the state has care for the spiritual needs of its citizenry in a mode peculiar to the
state: a temporal, material mode ordered to fostering the conditions necessary for what
Williams is describing as authentic political life in the sight of the Creator. Without
exercising this temporal care for the spiritual needs of the citizens, the state does not
somehow fail to be as spiritual as the Church would like it to be. Instead, the state fails to be
a commonwealth. Leo, like Augustine, is interested in speaking prophetically and
eschatologically for the sake of the temporal order and human flourishing.
For this reason, it is insufficient to characterize Leo as an integralist, where
integralism is defined as the conviction that “the Church, though her own vocation be
30
Ibid., 59.
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exclusively supernatural, nonetheless has the right, when majoritarian, to dictate to natural
society’s shapers the form their work should take.”31 If Williams is correct in his
interpretation of De civitate Dei, and if I am correct in my characterization of Leo’s
Augustinianism, then Leo’s social magisterium should be interpreted as working in a very
peculiar type of “prophetic” or “eschatological” mode. This mode of “theological politics” is
interested in the incompatibilities between the two cities, not simply because the state fails to
live up to the Gospel, but because the Church understands its prophetic vocation as existing
for the sake of the res sacras in temporalibus. As de Lubac suggested, the spiritual makes the
truly temporal possible. We might also borrow Murray’s terms then, and say that Leo is
interested in the way the eschatological makes the incarnational truly authentic. As Leo states
emphatically whenever he treats the virtue of religion, the political regime that does not
acknowledge God is not simply insufficiently Catholic. It is insufficiently political.32 Without
the proper acknowledgment of the final end of the human person, human communitates are
malformed.
IIIc. Leo XIII and “postmodern Augustinian Thomism”
Tracey Rowland’s typology of modern modes of Catholic engagement with the
world, or society, or the state is useful here as we consider Leo’s social magisterium and its
relationship to modern modes of doing Catholic theology in relation to modernity.
According to Rowland, Leo should be associated with the “Whig Thomism” of Lord Acton
and Montalembert in the 19th century, Murray and Maritain at mid-20th century, and
31 I borrow this definition of integralism from Aidan Nichols’ foreword to Rowland, Culture and the Thomist
Tradition: after Vatican II, ix.
32 The most systematic treatment of this issue is his 1885 letter on the Christian constitution of states, Immortale
Dei. Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae quotes this encyclical once, and in a rather attenuated fashion.
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George Weigel, John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Robert George in our own day.33 Rowland
contrasts “Whig Thomism” with another tradition of Thomistic thought she names
“postmodern Augustinian Thomism.” Whereas “Whig Thomism” adopts pieces of the
“conceptual apparatus of the Liberal tradition, and, in some cases, its substantive content,”
Rowland’s “postmodern Augustinian Thomism” provides modern Catholicism with another
method of interpreting and addressing liberalism and (late) modernity. According to
Rowland, Alasdair MacIntyre embodies this latter form of Thomism in that he combines 1)
the desire to overcome liberal modernity; 2) an Augustinian emphasis on grace, memory,
narrative, and the relationship of the secular and sacral orders; and 3) a Thomist emphasis on
natural law, the virtues, and universal moral norms.
In this presentation of modern iterations of the Thomist tradition, we can see an
imperfect but illuminating parallel to Heyer’s typology of the public and prophetic, or the
incarnational and the eschatological. On Rowland’s reading, “Whig Thomism” attempts to
accommodate liberalism, seeking a way of addressing the world in terms that are “relevant”
to the world. To the extent that this is true, “Whig Thomism” may be associated with a more
public, incarnational mode that emphasizes continuity and complementarity - usually
founded on natural law’s universality (in the second sense) - between Church and world.
“Postmodern Augustinian Thomism,” on the other hand, avoids accommodating liberalism
by seeking, via ressourcement within its own narrative history, a way of addressing the world in
terms that call the world to account and, ultimately, to conversion. This mode of Thomism
seeks only that “relevance” appropriate to the Gospel’s ability to still the human heart’s
restlessness. To the extent that this is true, “postmodern Augustinian Thomism” may be
Ibid. Thomas Pink is currently at work differentiating Leo’s social magisterium from Maritain’s political
philosophy and is in fact constructing something like an argument for the enduring intelligibility of
Christendom as a political option - something Rowland would appear to support.
33
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associated with a more prophetic, eschatological mode that emphasizes - especially in a latemodern, liberal context - incompatibility, rupture, and a MacIntyrean contest of traditions.
Rowland creates this typology of “the Thomist tradition” in order to question the
concept of culture (or lack thereof) at work in “Whig Thomism,” in Vatican II’s Gaudium et
Spes, and in post-conciliar Catholic theology. According to Rowland, this broad swath of
Catholic theology is characterized by a naive “openness to modernity” that tries to avoid
integralism by affirming the autonomy of human culture and the secular order. This naive
openness, however, is so optimistic about the possibility of consensus between the Church
and the modern world that it fosters a very specific and dangerous neglect. Drawing from
the work of Charles Taylor, Rowland suggests that the bulk of modern Catholic theology has
failed to perform
a cultural analysis - an understanding that clusters of values fit together into constellations
that become embodied in the practices and beliefs of individuals and the institutions in
which they work, and further, and most significantly, that one can have, for example, a
culture which embodies a belief in rights and duties without having any interest at all in a
notion of justice that is linked to a transcendent truth, including the theological virtues of
faith, hope and charity.34
The consequences of neglecting this analysis, according to Rowland, are several. But perhaps
the most significant consequence is modern Catholicism’s inability to appreciate the ways in
which liberalism constitutes not just a constellation of modern ideas in need of repudiation,
but an entire civilization incompatible with the Gospel. As she states with regard to John
Paul II’s social magisterium, when it came to counteracting Communism, it was clear that
Communism presented Catholicism with “an entire philosophical system or ideology which
had taken a concrete form as the content of a particular culture, understood as Kultur, or
civilization.”35 But on Rowland’s read of things, it is unclear that the Council or any of the
34
35
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 42.
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modern popes prior to Benedict XVI understand the same cultural dynamic when it comes
to liberalism. Too often, when it comes to Catholicism’s relationship to liberalism, the
relationship is described in terms of complementarity or genetic relation, and not in terms of
dialectical tension or even necessary incompatibility.
In this case too, I think the reading of Leo is insufficient. Thankfully, it is neither my
job nor my desire to describe Leo as a “postmodern Augustinian Thomist,” whatever
benefits may redound to Catholic theology from that happy coincidence of terms. Instead, I
only want to highlight that Rowland’s analysis - much like Murray’s in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s reduces Leo’s social magisterium to an obsession with binaries such as Church-state or
Church-world, or with modernism as expressed in other -isms: individualism, socialism,
liberalism, etc. One of the goals of this project, however, has been to show Leo’s sensitivity
not only to the existence of modern theories, but also to their anthropological, social, and
cultural consequences. This sensitivity is expressed chiefly in his realization that the Church
herself was no longer the sole object of concern for the spiritual authority in its ongoing
dialogue with the civil authority. That is, the theological-political problem under Leo’s
magisterium begins to countenance a more expansive notion of the political. Indeed, Leo’s
social magisterium should be read as the beginning of Holy See’s deepening realization that,
in the liberal, modern epoch, the Church’s objects of concern will continually proliferate
according to society’s neglect of the created nature of the human. This must be the case
where the Church’s munus to conduct souls to beatitude is exercised in a context that is
becoming more and more misanthropic.
It is true enough that Leo did not possess the familiarity with Christianity and
liberalism’s incompatibility that late modern popes possess. But given the amount of work it
takes to fit Leo’s social magisterium within the abovementioned typologies, it seems to me
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that this is not necessarily a shortcoming. Whether they intend it or not, the structure of
both Heyer and Rowland’s typologies suggests that one is either stuck affirming or denying
the goodness of a given political regime. Indeed, we cannot even speak of 1,000 Italian
musicians playing a song without wringing our hands about fascism and beauty. It remains
the case that we continually encounter fears about accommodation and sectarianism and that
identifying and criticizing the shortcomings of these approaches amounts to sufficient
analysis. One of the refreshing aspects of magisterial social teaching though is that it does
not pretend to have the luxury of accommodation or sectarianism. Indeed, trying to imagine
any modern pope as either an accommodationist or a sectarian is a very frustrating endeavor.
Leo’s own incompatibility with our contemporary typologies, especially when seen in
relation to his historical context, illustrates rather fully the need and the possibility of
approaching the social and the political with a humility not always associated with
sectarianism and a prudence not always associated with accommodation.
The untidy relationship between faith and reason, law and virtue, nature and grace,
public and private, Church and world is a sign of the restlessness that characterizes one of
Leo’s favorite themes regarding the res sacra in temporalibus: the journey to beatitude. In
Williams’ words, “real temporality is [...] vulnerable, and so also more open to radical hope
(hope in God). It is the awkwardness and provisionality, the endlessly revisable character
(morally speaking) of our social and political relationships, that [...] keeps us faithful to the
insight of humility - that we are timebound in everything here below, that our love is an
unceasing search.”36 The Christian desires for accommodation and sectarianism alike
represent a temptation identified by Williams as the promise of “final security” and
“finishedness.” To find a way of accommodating the Gospel to, or preserving the Gospel
36
Williams, “Politics and the Soul,” 69.
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from, the culture or the state or the world can become a way of eliminating the risk of acting
prudentially in complex situations that require nothing less than Christian charity. Leo’s
social magisterium, like the bulk of papal social teaching, does not have the luxury of
working for this “final security.”
I call these luxuries because they are expressive of two very attractive options. As
Williams puts it, Christians may fall prey to two temptations:
an elitist concept of human commonalty [sic] (immortality as the acquisition of a
remembered name) and a nostalgia for some escape from the shapelessness and uncertainty
of temporal existence as such (the Manichaean isolation of a pure and inviolate, ahistorical
soul in us, the Platonist promise of ecstasy, the Donatist quest for absolute institutional
purity, the Pelagian hope to achieve purity of will, unconditioned moral liberty).37
That is, we can imagine the life of the human res sacra in temporalibus in terms of a desire to
participate so deeply, or to escape so completely, that we become immortal. Shades of the
typologies return. For the desire to participate deeply is another way of speaking of the
incarnational humanism that looks for a way for to bring about the kingdom of heaven on
earth. And the desire to escape completely is another way of speaking of the eschatological
humanism that prophetically calls us toward an eventual glory.
Some method of analogizing between the two is required. There must be a way of
doing more than “balancing the two in tension” or affirming that Catholics are particularly
adept at using the phrase “both/and.” It strikes me that a theological anthropology capable
of affirming the reality of the human substance as made in the imago Dei is absolutely
necessary. It is the foundation of our enduring commitment to participate deeply in the work
of recognizing, defending, and promoting the humanum. It inspires the incarnational
humanist, repeatedly commends the universal validity of the natural law to us, and makes
cooperation among incompatible traditions a matter of justice. In other words, the human
37
Williams, “Politics and the Soul,” 69.
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substance, made in the imago Dei is one of the chief antidotes to the temptation to finish or
secure the political task, to pretend that it is possible to find a chronotope in which we can
finally stop working for the good. But it is also the case that a theological anthropology
capable of affirming human relationality as the site of our restless effort to cultivate the
likeness of Christ is no less necessary. Unlike the substantial unity of the human person,
which is ever in need of affirmation and protection, human relationship is never finished or
complete or secure. Like all other accidents, it is in via. Relationship is the pluriform and
complex space where erotic, hopeful desire for purity and goodness manifests the Lord’s
goodness.
Leo’s social magisterium, and especially the analogia communitatis as a central
component of its theological coherence, is well aware of both of these aspects of the imago
Dei. Because the analogia communitatis makes a moral demand on the persons and communitates
comprising it, calling them to recognize in human communitas a certain way of envisioning
order and its relationship to both the Lord and to human nature, we must have a way of
accounting for the manner in which it makes demands of the Church’s social vision. Seeing
the human as both a substantial unity and as a relational being whose manifold social
relations are the context of the journey to beatitude, Leo cannot call Christians to separate
themselves from the world. They are indeed citizens of the earthly city. Neither can he call
Christians to acquiesce before the world’s shadowplays of success, power, goodness, or
truth. They are indeed citizens of heaven.
Conclusion
After nationalist fascism and in the midst of consumerist fascism, after world wars
and in the midst of terrorism and ecological suicide, after revolutions and in the midst of
global capital’s triumph, I want the theologians to ask the 1,000 Italian musicians about the
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possibility of playing together again. And I want that to suffice as a theological response to
the sublimity of seeing 1,000 Italians doing something in unison. Why? Because the request
signifies a desire to be a part of the performance, to be a part of the communitas that makes
music possible. And that desire seems to me to be the perfect analogy for the moral energy
(read: love) required for the many sorts of friendship that are necessary if humans are to be
formed into persons capable of seeing many sorts of friendship as goods in the first place.
What if the theologians were to accompany the musicians with an eye solely for
accompaniment? What if the theological response to the musicians was a request for
friendship? I’m not at all sure how we would characterize such a “Benedict,” or “Francis,” or
“Dominic” option. Maybe we wouldn’t use the term option at all. Maybe we would have to
affirm that by nature and by grace we are moved to love the goodness of fraternity as Christ
loved it: by sacrificing ourselves for it. If the Lord of creation is the Lord on the cross, then
there must be some relation between the love of the Creator, who walked with the humans
in the garden in the cool of the day, and the love of the Crucified, who bled in the garden in
the middle of the night. The relation between Eden and Golgotha would provide us with a
hermeneutical clue to the real: that human persons, made in the imago Dei, have been called
to a similar array of friendships, indexed to the many hierarchical and complementary needs
of the human substance.
Irony would wither this array. But Leo’s social magisterium, with the analogia
communitatis at the center of its theological and philosophical coherence, is an important
antidote to irony. Leonine analogy is a way of affirming that the theological task proceeds
according to the deeper, eschatological logic of creation and incarnation: that all of reality –
including political participation and music making – comes from and is returning to the
Lord, who graciously tasks us with manifesting his goodness along the way.
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CONCLUSION
This project has been a theological and philosophical reflection on a relatively simple
question: what good is political membership? In inquiring into political membership’s status
as a human good, we proceeded by way of certain philosophical assumptions, not least of
which is the Aristotelian teaching that the human animal’s perfection requires political
activity and relationship. We also proceeded by way of certain theological assumptions,
including the Christian conviction that the human person’s vocation may be summed up in
terms of self-gift. These assumptions have funded an historical interpretation of modern
citizenship that trades a great deal on ambivalence and even ambiguity. That is, it is no
longer clear, at least in Western states, that modern political membership is a social form
capable of restoring broken relations in nature and in history. I would say we have largely
lost confidence that this could ever be true. Accordingly, 19th century accounts of nation,
state, and citizenship seem terribly far removed from us.
But as Beiner’s work shows, neither is it clear that we have finally shirked the hope
that political membership could be a social form implicated centrally in the task of human
flourishing. Given the Aristotelian presuppositions of the current project, I would say that
one does not need to look to Mazzini or 1789 or any other 19th century phenomenon for a
robust calculation of what is humanely good about politics. Though the degradations of
politics are always with us, the hope that membership in a whole greater than the self will
heal us is a hope that dies hard. Perhaps not at all. Thinking “subsidiarily” with Leo
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throughout this project has thus been an exercise in giving a theological and philosophical
account of the durability of that hope and that hope’s relation to the Divine Wisdom,
ordaining the human animal and human communities to both natural and supernatural
beatitude. By exploring the consequences of these theological and philosophical convictions
via the historical contexts of the Church’s relations with young Italy and of the Church’s
contest with liberal matrimonial legislation, we have seen how thinking in an analogical
manner with Leo can actually contribute to a natural law perspective on the theologicalpolitical problem and the social question that is in fact subversive of modern regimes.
That a natural law perspective on these issues could be seen as subversive of liberal
political order should not be surprising to us. The Christian conviction that all natures are
proceeding from and returning to the Creator, that they run this circuit according to courses
suitable for their flourishing, and that their flourishing is ultimately a manifestation of the
wisdom and glory of the Creator – these are not convictions conducive to the maintenance
of social imaginations that require us to remain silent about nature. From within such a
social imagination, silent as it is about the human person, it is little wonder that we approach
a middling topic like citizenship with a certain hesitancy.
I drafted an introduction to this dissertation that I then submitted to my director.
She read it and gave it back to me, frowning and saying flatly, “Okay. I get it. But I still don’t
really care about citizenship.” I burst out laughing. She’s right. In the 21st century in the U.S.,
citizenship is something immigrants care about. For the rest of us who already have it, at
least during the election cycle of 2016, it is a badge we want to forget. But if I am right about
Leo’s social anthropology and the place of political membership and action within it, then
the ironic distance that comes so easily to us right now is a lamentable response to what
266
humans have traditionally recognized as a responsibility to participate in the Lord’s
providence.
Someone asked me what Leo would think of our situation right now in the U.S. The
answer is pretty simple, actually. I think he would tell us to pray, worship, and strengthen the
social bonds between each other. He knew we would long to go to the desert. But he also
knew our longing would too easily be prompted by a sarcastic desire to cut ties, to separate,
to no longer associate. Leo’s sensibility here is most clearly seen in his 1882 letter, Auspicato
concessum, on the anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death. In that letter, Leo has the
remarkable idea that modern Catholics could best respond to the abuses of liberalism and
the plight of those suffering under capitalism’s domination by joining a Franciscan Third
Order. Leo saw the “extinction of charity” as the ultimate cause of social upheaval and
abuse. And he saw Francis’s life as the perfection of the disciple’s ability to carry the cross –
to suffer for love. Associational life ordered around such a commitment was, for Leo, really
the only way forward in any era, for any Christian.
As we look forward to the Catholic social teaching of the 21st century, it seems to me
that a willing embrace of the cross, precisely within our social and political relationships, will
be decisive. Such an embrace makes sacrificial love publicly intelligible. As Pope Francis has
recently said, “Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and
political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world. Love for
society and commitment to the common good are outstanding expressions of a charity
which affects not only relationships between individuals, but also ‘macro-relationships,
social, economic and political ones.’”1 I have no doubt that this commitment to love will
entail suffering. But what friendship doesn’t?
1
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §231.
267
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