Pius X: Lamentabili Sane (“Condemning the Errors of the Modernists”). July 3, 1907.

Pius X: Pacendi Dominici Gregis (“On the Doctrine of the Modernists”). September 8, 1907. 

Pius X: “The Oath Against Modernism.”

 

Pius X is best remembered today as a critic of “modernism,” as set forth in the writings of the French Catholic priest Alfred Loisy, author of The Gospel and the Church, published in 1903. A student of Ernest Renan, the Hegelian scholar whose widely distributed Life of Jesus denied the divinity of Christ and the occurrence of miracles, Loisy maintained that the Church was founded by His disciples in the years after Jesus’ death. (Mistakenly supposing that His Kingdom would be established very soon, Jesus Himself had no reason to found the Church, Loisy claimed.) In a 1907 document, Lamentabili Sane, compiled by the Church’s Holy Office and endorsed by Pius, this claim was listed as the thirty-third of sixty-five modern heresies listed—thirty-three being Jesus’ age when crucified. [1] Other heresies included the ‘scientific’ criticism of Scripture, which claims that “Catholic teaching cannot really be reconciled with the true origins of the Christian religion”; denial of God’s authorship of Scripture; denial of the unerring character of Scripture; the claim that the Book of Revelation is only “a mystical contemplation of the Gospel,” not a real prophecy; the definition of revelation as consciousness; the assertion that because revelation is only human consciousness it is incomplete, ongoing, the Bible being an important way station in its unfolding but no more than that; the charge that Church dogmas have been designed by human beings with no divine assistance; the claim that faithful assent to Church teaching is a probabilistic human judgment, uninfluenced by the Holy Spirit; denial of Christ’s divinity, messiahship, Sonship; denial of the Resurrection, of the expiatory character of Christ’s death, and of the validity of the sacraments, including baptism. Loisy accordingly took a more or less contemptuous view of the Catholic Church, considering it hostile not only to modern natural science but also to advances in theological science. In the words of the Holy Office, modernism holds that the Church “obstinately clings to immutable doctrines which cannot be reconciled with modern progress,” and that such progress “demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be re-adjusted,” since “truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.” These are indeed claims consistent with Hegelian historicism, and therefore a century old at the time Loisy published them. The novelty of them, and Pius’ indignation, likely derived from Loisy’s status as a Catholic priest. He would be excommunicated, a year later.

Pius himself wrote a detailed critique of modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, published a few months after the Lamentabili. “These latter days have witnessed a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ”—enemies who “put themselves reformers of the Church” and are the more dangerous because they know the Church more intimately than the outsiders do.” They lay the axe to the root of Church, faith itself, by “play[ing] the double role of rationalist and Catholic.” One of their techniques consists of a sort of intellectual guerrilla warfare, “present[ing] their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement” while hiding under several guises: philosopher, believer, theologian, historian, critic, apologist, reformer.

As philosophers, Modernists affirm the doctrine of agnosticism, holding that human reason applies rightly only to the phenomena, with “neither the right nor the power to overstep these limits.” Reason cannot reach God, affirm his existence, “even by means of visible things”—i.e., the argument from design, cited by the Apostle Paul. Thus, they rule out Thomism, “which they denounce as a system which is ridiculous and long since defunct.” This might have led them to a Protestant-like reliance on faith alone, but their agnosticism is only a way station to atheism, at least in the fields of science and history. There, “God and all that is divine are utterly excluded.” They replace God with “what they call vital immanence”—Hegel with a Bergsonian twist. Religion, Modernists maintain, can be understood scientifically and historically within the life of man, originating not in the Holy Spirit but in “a certain need or impulsion,” in “a movement of the heart,” a ‘religious sense’ located in man’s subconscious mind. God is a sort of life-force, permeated the human mind; ‘revelation’ is only the consciousness of the initially subconscious religious sense. “The religious sense, which through the agency of vital immanence emerges from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness, is the germ of all religion.” This being the case, all religions are “both natural and supernatural,” and there is no principled way to distinguish them or to prefer one to another. Catholicism “is quite on a level with the rest.”

Having rejected God in their scientific and historical work ‘in advance,’ Modernists predictably find nothing about “nothing that is not human” in “the Person of Christ.” Christ is not eternal but ‘historically relative’: in considering Him, “everything should be excluded, deeds and words and all else, that is not in strict keeping with His character, condition, and education, and with the place and time in which He lived.” What Christ taught has been clarified in subsequent generations by the logic of the human intellect, as Christ spoke in terms of mere symbols and parables. Thus, there has been an “intrinsic evolution of dogma,” consistent with the Modernists’ historicism. 

Modernists distinguish philosophers and theologians from believers. As believer, the Modernist claims to know God through their “personal experience,” thereby departing from rationalism “only to fall into the views of the Protestants and pseudo-mystics.” He reaches God-as-life-force by way of “a kind of intuition of the heart” which “exceed[s] any scientific conviction.” If I deny this ‘God’s’ existence, it is only because I am “unwilling to put [myself] in the moral state necessary to produce” the religious experience. This again affirms the claim that many religions are true. 

This split between science, the knowable, philosophy, and faith, the unknowable, belief, accrues to the advantage of science, which judges religious belief. Modernism makes science “entirely independent of faith” while “faith is made subject to science.” In this, Modernists reject the teaching of “Our predecessor,” Pius IX, wrote, “In matters of religion it is the duty of philosophy not to command but to serve, not to prescribe what is to be believed, but to embrace what is to be believed with reasonable obedience, not to scrutinize the depths of the mysteries of God, but to venerate them devoutly and humbly.” Pius X instead stands with Pius IX and indeed with the distinguished Counter-Reformer Charles Borromeo, deploring the Modernists, who act “on the principle that science in no way depends upon faith” and therefore “feel no especial horror in treading in the footsteps of Luther!”

The Modernist as philosopher holds that “the principle of faith is immanent”; the Modernist as believer adds, “this principle is God”; the theologian concludes, “God is immanent in man.” In so arguing, he reduces the elements of the Catholic liturgy to the status of mere symbols. But what do these symbols now symbolize, if not a Bergsonian, a Hegelian, or even Spinozist God, the God not of holiness or separation but of pantheism? 

The Modernist theologian denies that the Church and the sacraments were instituted by Christ. After all, according to them “Christ [was] nothing more than a man whose religious consciousness has been, like that of all men, formed by degrees”—developed, evolved over time. “All Christian consciences were, [Modernists] affirm, in a manner virtually included in the conscience of Christ as the plant is included in the seed.” Scriptural writers ‘heard’ God, but “only by immanence and vital permanence,” since “inspiration…is in nowise distinguished from that impulse which stimulates the believer to reveal the faith that is in him by words of writing, except perhaps by its vehemence.” The Bible is “a human work, made by men for men,” but an expression of the immanence Modernists call God. As for the Church, it is simply “the product of the collective consciousness” of believers—not revealed to individuals and surely not founded by Christ. In this, Pius suggests, the Modernists are the ones who are limited by the ‘spirit’ of their time and place. “For we are living in an age when the sense of liberty has reached its highest development,” seen in the civil order by the prevalence of “popular government” and in the ecclesiastical order in the democratic notion of collective consciousness. To the Catholic Modernist mind, the highest authority is the Church as collective consciousness, an attempt to reconcile “the authority of the Church” with “the liberty of the believers.”

Politically, Catholic Modernism seeks separation of Church and State. The traditional Catholic teaching also separated Church and State but with the State subordinate to the Church. For the Modernists, the Church no longer exercises authority over citizens as citizens. This means that “in temporal matters the Church must be subject to the State.” And if the magisterium of the Church “springs, in its last analysis, from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it necessarily follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be dependent upon them, and should therefore be made to bow to the popular ideas.” Without this democratization of theological teachings, the evolution of Church dogma will be stymied. To hasten this desired end, ecclesiastical authority “should strip itself of that external pomp which adorns it in the eyes of the public.” Ultimately, democratization “would make the laity the factor of progress in the Church.”

At the central point of his Encyclical, Pius pivots from the Modernists’ ideas to their practice as Church historians, critics, apologists, and reformers. Their “historico-critical conclusions are the natural outcome of their philosophical principles.” So, for example, in considering the life of Christ as historians, the Modernists’ agnosticism assigns the human aspect of Jesus to the realm of historical research while relegating His divine aspect to the realm of faith. The same goes for “the Church of history and the Church of faith. To be sure, faith itself has a history, but it cannot be explained historically by having recourse to supernatural explanations. “The historian must set aside all that surpasses man in his natural condition”—his natural condition being limited to his psychology and “the time and period of his existence.” Historians also limit themselves, perhaps unwittingly, to the presuppositions of their own time and place, a time and place characterized by ‘democracy’ or egalitarianism: “They will not allow that Christ ever uttered those things which do not seem to be within the capacity of the multitudes that listened to Him,” or, even more boldly, those things that they take to have been beyond his character, condition of life, and education. “Their method is to put themselves into the position and person of Christ, and then to attribute to Him what they would have done under the circumstances.”

“As history takes its conclusions from philosophy,” from the ideational framework of the historians, “so too criticism takes its conclusions from history.” According to the Modernists, there is “the history of the faith” or “internal history”—the story the Church tells its members about itself—and there is “the real history” of the Church; there is the Church history of Christ and the “real history” of Christ, the first reflecting the “of faith, who never really existed,” a Christ “who never lived outside the pious meditations of the believer,” the second reflecting “a real Christ. Add the doctrines of immanence and evolution to the equation and one gets the “scientific criticism” of the Bible. Scientific criticism gives us an originally incoherent Bible, whose books were not written by “the authors whose names they bear,” whose passages have been cobbled together from diverse materials by men who lived long after the events described. Such coherence as the Bible now comes from its compilers and editors, who contributed to its “vital evolution springing from and corresponding with the evolution of faith.” 

All of this puts apologetics on a new footing. No longer do those who defend Catholicism defend Church teachings as authoritative, simply. They rather admit “errors and contradictions” in them, adding “that this is not only excusable but—curiously enough—that it is even right and proper,” given not only the evolutionary character of faith but the logographic necessity under which Church authorities have operated, their teachings limited by the capacities of the persons they addressed. Errors of science and of history have been defended because the majority of Catholics couldn’t handle the truth, as it were. Focused primarily on “religion and morals,” the authors and editors of Scripture deployed history and science for heuristic purposes, only. As Nietzsche had claimed during the same epoch Modernism arose, “life has its own truths and its own logic—quite different from rational truth and rational logic, belonging as they do to a different order, viz., truth of adaptation and of proportion both with what they call the medium in which it lives and with the end for which it lives.” What is “true and legitimate [is] whatever is explained by life”—an expression of their vitalism.

Pius X intervenes in his description of Modernist arguments to observe that “this is equivalent to attributing to God Himself the lie of utility or officious lie,” the “noble lie” of Plato’s Socrates. Biblical prophecies are no more than “artifices of preaching, which are justified by life.” Such noble lies include Jesus’ apparent claim that his Kingdom was coming very soon. “They tell us that we must not be surprised at this since even He Himself was subject to the laws of life!” In justifying the supposedly “flagrant contradictions” of Church teachings, Modernists justify them on the grounds of the necessities of life. “But when they justify even contradictions, what is it that they will refuse to justify?” Will their lies enhance life, or only aggrandize their own lives? And even if their lies enhance life, does this not amount to worshipping Creation in the place of the Creator? 

In Pius’ estimation, even as a form of apologetics, this will not do. Modernist defenders of the Church must attempt “to persuade the non-believer that down in the very depths of his nature and his life lie hidden the need and the desire for some religion, and this is not a religion of any kind, but the specific religion known as Catholicism,” which must be held up as “the perfect development of life,” as somehow immanent in life itself. “They would show to the non-believer, as hidden in his being, the very germs which Christ Himself had in His consciousness, and which He transmitted to mankind.” But like all such claims, this one subverts the actual teaching of Scripture, which adjures human beings to worship God as their Creator, not as integral to Creation, and to understand God as Holy, separate from all He has created and all He has inspired. Jesus may live within me, but He is not part of me. 

The Modernist as Church reformer exhibits a passion for comprehensive innovation. He demands that Church government “be reformed in all its all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments.” These “must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity.” While the Church should remain outside political organizations, it “must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit.” Pius calls this “Americanism,” and it includes not only democratization but the claim “that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice.” This insistence fits with egalitarianism, as the active virtues are the virtues of ‘the many,’ theoretical or contemplative virtues primarily for ‘the few.’ 

Adroitly aiming Hegelian language against the neo-Hegelian Modernists, Pius calls Modernism “the synthesis of all heresies.” The new theorists, the new ‘few,’ redirect the human intellect in accordance with their core doctrine, agnosticism. “By it every avenue to God on the side of the intellect is barred to man.” Since “the sense of the soul is the response to the action of the thing which the intellect or the outward senses set before it,” agnosticism cuts off the distinctively human characteristic, reason, from the Creator of human beings. This is highly unlikely to lead to an enhancement of faith; “take away the intelligence, and man, already inclined to follow the senses, becomes their slave”—as already seen in the writings of Hobbes, who calls reason the scout of the passions. But “all these fantasies of the religious sense will never be able to destroy common sense,” which “tells us that emotion and everything that leads the heart captive proves a hindrance instead of a help to the discovery of truth”—human appetites being foolish and inconsistent counselors, as Socrates had remarked. As defined by Modernists, religious experience in its variety adds nothing “beyond a certain intensity and a proportionate deepening of the conviction of the reality of the object.” “But these two will never make the sense of the soul into anything but sense.”

Common sense begins the road to prudence or practical reason. Pius appeals to the religious experience of the bishops: “Venerable Brethren, how necessary in such a matter” as religious experience “is prudence, and the learning,” the theoretical framework, by which prudence is guided.” You deal with human souls all the time, “especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates,” those most urgently in need of rational guidance. You have also read “the works of ascetical theology,” which possess “a refinement and subtlety of observation far beyond any which the Modernists take credit to themselves for possessing.” Modernist democrats are not as democratic as they suppose, inasmuch as “the vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly that sense and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason, cannot reach to the knowledge of God.” Absent this rational path, what can remain to men “but atheism and the absence of all religion,” the denial of God as a Person and the affirmation (at most) of pantheism? The Modernist doctrine of immanence does not “leave God distinct from Man”—the definition of pantheism.

While Modernists may “have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church,” “in reality they only offend both.” Why are they doing this? Here, Pius permits himself an argumentum ad hominem. They are in the grips of a curiosity, a philosophic eros, “imprudently regulated,” seeking to know what the human soul is not “meant to know,” namely the course of Divine Providence, which they have reduced to supposedly knowable ‘laws of History.’ Even worse than their unregulated curiosity is their pride; “they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves.” And they are ignorant, having effected “the union between faith and false philosophy,” a faith in self-generated ‘progress’ of human affairs. They do, however, see some things all too clearly. “They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy”—Thomism, which adjusts the relation between the reasonings of Aristotle and the revelations of Scripture—the “authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church.” “On these they wage unrelenting war,” a long march through the institutions, “seiz[ing] upon professorships in the seminaries and universities, and gradually mak[ing] of them chairs of pestilence,” preaching their doctrines from the pulpits (“although possibly in utterances which are veiled”) and advocating them at conferences. They ‘network’ at social gatherings and publish in books, newspapers, and reviews”; “sometimes one and the same writer adopts a variety of pseudonym to trap the incautious reader into believing in a multitude of Modernist writers.” They are especially influential among the “many young men, once full of promise and capable of rendering great services to the Church,” whom they have now led astray.

Pius accordingly ordains that “scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences” and that all Catholic priests should “promote the study of theology,” understood Thomistically. In the universities, study of the natural sciences shall be undertaken without neglecting the sacred sciences,” which are indeed sciences, that is, forms of knowledge rationally arrived at. Catholic presses shall not publish Modernist books; let publishers outside the faith do so, if they will. Establish a “Council of Vigilance” in every diocese, capable of recognizing and exposing Modernist heresies. 

Pius was not slow to write an “Oath Against Modernism,” requiring that Catholic clergy and teachers in Catholic colleges and universities affirm that God “can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world,” as stated by the Apostle Paul in Romans I:19. The Oath further stipulated acknowledgment of miracles as proof of divine revelation, proofs valid for all time, “even of this time”; of the authority of the Catholic Church, “the guardian and teacher of the revealed truth”; of the falsity of any claim that Church teachings “evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously” or that any Church teaching was formulated by unassisted human reason; of the understanding of faith as “a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source, not “a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; and of the rejection of pantheism and of the historical relativism modern pantheism tends to support. The Oath endured until rescinded by Paul VI’s Holy Office, which replaced it with the “Profession of Faith.” The Profession eliminates the condemnation of Modernism and the affirmation of Thomism, stipulating only profession of belief in monotheism, the divinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church and its teachings in their current form. That is, the Profession drops the condemnation of pantheism and appears to give some leeway to the historicist or evolutionary conception of Catholic teachings. Understandably, defenders of the Oath, and of the Thomistic Catholicism it supports, have dissented.

 

Note

1. The Holy Office is the informal term for what was then called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, so named by Pius X in 1908. The Office was founded in 1542 as part of the Counter-Reformation and was originally called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Its officers at that time conducted heresy trials. The liberalizing Pope Paul VI renamed the Office yet again in 1965, calling it the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; twenty years later, the word “Sacred” was dropped. 

 

 

Pius X: The Complete Collected Encyclicals of Pius X. Privately published, 2023.

 

Born in 1835 in the Kingdom of Lombardy, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto attended the Seminary of Padua, where he studied the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and canon law before being ordained as a priest in 1858. He rose in rank within the Church, serving as spiritual director and later professor at the seminary in the Diocese of Treviso, then as Bishop of Mantua, beginning in 1884. Nine years later, Pope Leo XIII appointed him to the Sacred College of Cardinals, and he succeeded Leo in the papacy in 1903. Notable as a critic of “modernism” in the Church, he died in August 1914, on the eve of the war that has sometimes been described as the debacle of European modernity. The Church canonized him in 1952. 

In his first message as pope, Pius professed himself “disturbed” at having succeeded such an eminent pastor as Leo but “terrified beyond all else by the disastrous state of human society today.” “For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction?” Against this, citing Ephesians i.10,”We have no other program in the Supreme Pontificate but that of ‘restoring all things in Christ'” amidst a society in which “every effort and every artifice is used to destroy utterly the memory and the knowledge of God,” for Whom “all respect” has been “extinguished among the majority of men.” In modernity, “man has with infinite temerity put himself in the place of God,” making “of the universe a temple wherein he himself is to be adored.” The result has been a Hobbesian world, in which “the greater part of mankind [are] fighting among themselves so savagely as to make it seem as though strife were universal.” While many cry for peace, “to want peace without God is an absurdity, seeing that where God is absent thence too justice flies, and when justice is taken away it is vain to cherish the hope of peace.” He therefore calls upon his Church brethren to “lead mankind back to the dominion of Christ” as a spiritual necessity, “a natural duty,” and in “our common interest” as human beings.

The path to Christ “is the Church.” Once the Church has refuted the pretension of human self-deification, it must continue on “to restore to their ancient place of honor the most holy laws and counsels of the gospel; to proclaim aloud the truths taught by the Church, and her teachings on the sanctity of marriage, on the education and discipline of youth, on the possession and use of property, the duties that men owe to those who rule the State; and lastly to restore equilibrium between the different classes of society according to Christian precept and custom.” Central to these tasks will be the reform and reinvigoration of Catholic education: “How many there are who mock Christ and abhor the Church and the Gospel more through ignorance than through badness of mind.” “Progress of knowledge” need not extinguish faith; it is ignorance that does so. “The more ignorance prevails the greater is the havoc wrought by incredulity.” In the parishes, however, the most effective way to teach is by example, as “luminous examples given by the great army of soldiers of Christ will be of much greater avail in moving and drawing men than words and sublime dissertations.” [1]

His first specific step to realize this reformation was a letter on Church music, crucial to satisfying the need to establish “the decorum of the House of God in which the august mysteries of religion are celebrated” with “sacred chant and music.” There has been “a general tendency to deviate from the right rule,” which is “to clothe with suitable melody the liturgical text proposed for the understanding of the faithful…in order that through it the faithful may be more easily moved to devotion and better disposed for the reception of the fruits of grace belonging to the celebration of the most holy mysteries.” Although “every nation is permitted to admit into its ecclesiastical compositions those special forms which may be said to constitute its native music,” those forms “must be subordinated in such a manner to the general characteristics of sacred music,” the supreme model of which is the Gregorian Chant. The congregants should themselves participate in the Chant, so that they “may again take a more active part in the ecclesiastical offices, as was the case in ancient times.” The human voice should predominate over organ music.  Modern music “in the theatrical style” (“which was in the greatest vogue, especially in Italy, during the last century”) should be avoided in worship services, for “its very nature is diametrically opposed to Gregorian Chant and classic polyphony, and therefore to the most important law of all good sacred music.” But even the best music should be kept in strict subordination to the liturgy; “it must be considered a very grave abuse when the liturgy in ecclesiastical function is made to appear secondary to and in a manner at the service of the music, for the music is merely a part of the liturgy and its humble handmaid.” As Plato’s Socrates knew, music tunes souls, readying them for reason or for unreason and in a Christian church it should be such as prepares them for receiving the Holy Spirit by word, the Gospel, and in action, by the sacraments.

If Logos means God’s Word, and His Word is reasonable, then the Church should follow the Fourth Council of the Lateran, which in 1215 made sacramental confession and Holy Communion mandatory only after a child “had attained the age of reason.” By the age of reason, the Church Fathers did not mean the age where formal instruction in logic might be undertaken but simply the time when the child “knows the difference between the Eucharistic Bread and ordinary, material bread, and can therefore approach the altar with proper devotion.” For this “full use of reason is not required, for a certain beginning of the use of reason, that is, some use of reason suffices.” Thought governed by the principle on non-contradiction enables the mind to make distinctions between one thing and another, a capacity that small children have attained.

Beyond this elementary instruction, further knowledge of God begins with this natural capacity of the intellect. But if the intellect lacks “its companion light,” the light of the Gospel, it remains unable to see its way “to the paths of justice.” “Christian teaching reveals God and His infinite perfection with far greater clarity than is possible by the human faculties alone.” Mere “knowledge of religion” can coincide with “a perverse will and unbridled conduct.” Christian education therefore requires not only faith, “which is of the mind,” but hope, “which is of the will,” and love, “which is of the heart.” Christian education addresses “the whole man” as “the son of the heavenly Father, in Whose image he is formed, and with Whom he is destined to live in eternal happiness,” as is revealed “only by the doctrine of Jesus Christ.” Outward actions, such as baptism and giving alms, are thus less important than teaching. This is why the Council of Trent decreed that the “first and most important work” of pastors is to educate the faithful, carefully distinguishing the “milk” of catechetical instruction from the solid “bread” of the Gospel. The catechist will “take up one or other of the truths of faith or Christian morality and then explain it in all its parts,” comparing God’s command to “what is our actual conduct,” using “examples appropriately taken from the Holy Scriptures, Church history and the lives of the saints” applying them to his hearers’ own lives, showing them “how they are to regulate their own conduct” and “exhort[ing] all present to dread and avoid vice and to practice virtue.” Without this fundamental instruction—aimed, like the liturgy, including music, at preparing the soul for attention to the things of God—the more advanced instruction in the Gospel will prove little more than puffery.

Citing the intention to restore “all things in Christ” enunciated in his first Encyclical letter, Pius reaffirms the substance of the Gospel doctrine on the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine which had been reaffirmed fifty years earlier by Pope Pius IX. “For can anyone fail to see that there is no surer or more direct road than by Mary for uniting all mankind in Christ and obtaining through Him the perfect adoption of sons, that we may be holy and immaculate in the sight of God.” That is, it is in a sense no less miraculous that decidedly unholy human beings may be ‘born again,’ becoming sons and daughters not only of their own parents but of God, than it was for God to be born of a woman. Both the ‘reconception’ Christians experience and the Conception of God in Mary are ‘immaculate’ or untainted by sin. Upon Mary, “as upon a foundation, the noblest after Christ, rises the edifice of the faith of all centuries.” Since faith is a thing of the mind, and education guides the mind, Mary is indispensable to Christian education.  “With her alone of all others Jesus was for thirty years united”; as a result, “Who could better than His Mother have an open knowledge of the admirable mysteries of the birth and childhood of Christ, and above all of the mystery of the Incarnation, which is the beginning and the foundation of faith?” In “sharing as she did the thoughts and the secret wishes of Christ she may be said to have lived the very life of her Son,” and “nobody can ever be more competent as a guide and teacher of the knowledge of Christ.” Devotion to Mary also remedies the defects of the will and the heart, since in seeking “to gain the heart of Mary,” in courting her favor, one must “correct his vicious habits and to subdue the passions which incite him to evil.” Mary educates the whole man, and does so by her nature, having been exempted from “all stain of original sin” by God. This must be so, because the Son of God took not only his human nature from her but something of her own nature. By affirming the truth of the Immaculate Conception precisely as a miracle, Christians reject rationalism and materialism. Mary “has exterminated all heresies in the world” not by preaching but by her life, crushing the head of the serpent and his ‘worldly wisdom’ with “Christian wisdom,” the purpose of Christian education in full.

Such heresies have entered the Church itself. “An air of independence which is fatal for souls is widely diffused in the world, and has found its way even within the sanctuary, show[ing] itself not only in relation to authority but also in regard to doctrine.” He tells an assemblage of bishops that “some of our young clerics, animated by that spirit of unbridled criticism which holds sway at the present day, have come to lose all respect for the learning which comes from our great teachers, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the interpreters of revealed doctrine”—foremost among them, Thomas Aquinas, with whose Summa the mind of Pius himself had been fortified. “If ever you have in your seminary one of those new-style savants, get rid of him without delay…. You will always regret having ordained even one such person; never will you regret having excluded him.” Since “a poisonous atmosphere corrupts men’s minds to a great extent today,” bishops should proceed deliberately with ordination. “Your priests will be as you have trained them,” and you are the ones who must train them, rather than releasing them into the secular universities without “very good reasons” for doing so and after “necessary precautions have been taken.” Seminarians are not to “take part in external activities,” to read newspapers and periodicals except “those with solid principles and which the Bishop deems suitable for their study.” Bishops should appoint a spiritual director for each seminary, a man with the innocence of doves and the prudence of serpents, ready “to train the young men in solid piety, the primary foundation of the spiritual life.”

So reformed, so re-centered on Christ, the Church can then resume what Pius regards as its rightful task not only as “the guardian and protector of Christian society” but as the “solid foundation for civil legislation. In the past, proper relations between Church and State require “the public recognition of the authority of the Church in those matters which touched upon conscience in any manner” and “the subordination of all the laws of the State to the Divine laws of the Gospel,” ensuring that “the harmony of the two powers in securing the temporal welfare of the people in such a way that their eternal welfare did not suffer.” In modern life, religious toleration prevails, offering “indiscriminately to all the right to influence public opinion.” Very well then, Catholics “can certainly use this to their advantage.” To do so, they must “prove themselves as capable as others (in fact, more capable than others) by cooperating in the material and civil welfare of the people,” to “acquire that authority and prestige which will make them capable of defending and promoting a higher good, namely, that of the soul.” In regimes of liberal democracy, the Church can no longer wield political power directly but it can reestablish itself among in the minds and hearts of the sovereign people without formal Church establishment. 

Since the twelfth century, the Catholic Church had formalized its relations with civil governments by signing concordats—effectively, treaties whereby a given state would agree to a set of licit practices within it by a ‘foreign power,’ the Church. The Church never committed itself to treating with any one regime type. So long as the Church could freely perform its duties to God and to men, it was ecumenical with respect to rulers and ruling institutions. What Pius deplores in modern times is ‘laicization’ of civil society, particularly as seen in the French Law of Separation the Churches and State, enacted in 1905. Although the Concordat of 1801 had re-established the Catholic Church in France after its disestablishment and the dispossession of Church properties under the First Republic, secularization had resumed, gradually, in the 1880s within the education system. In 1904, the Third Republic had severed diplomatic with the Holy See. The new law completed the task, permitting divorce, replacing nuns with laywomen as hospital nurses, ending exemption from military conscription for priests, transferring Church property to the national and municipal governments, banning public prayers at the beginning of parliamentary sessions, and eliminating religious references from oaths taken in courtrooms as well as any religious symbols in the courtrooms. Pius deems this violation of the Concordat to be “as disastrous for society as it is for religion,” an act of “injustice to God,” inasmuch as “the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own,” incurring an obligation to “a public and social worship to honor Him,” not merely a guarantee of Christian worship conceived as “a private cult.” The purpose of the God-ordained political community isn’t “the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only”—a “proximate” aim—but of “man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course.” Under the Law, however, the Church in France survives “under the domination of the civil power,” having taken over education and other important functions of Christian charity and having revoked the government subsidies Napoleon had instituted as compensation for the despoiling of Church properties during the Revolution. The framers of the Law admit that they intend to “de-Catholicize” France, even to the extent of severing religious institutions from the Church hierarchy by making them “judicially answerable to the civil authority.” Pius adjures French Catholics to defend the Church by “model[ing] all your actions and your entire lives” so that they “may do honor to the faith you profess” and then unite with “your priests, your bishops, and above all with this Apostolic see,” going forth fearlessly and prayerfully to resist these statist depredations, “employ[ing] all means which the law recognizes as within the rights of all citizens to arrange for and organize religious worship.” In so doing, French Catholics must anticipate that their adversaries will falsely claim that “the form of the Republic in France is hateful to Us,” that the Pope intends “to overthrow it.” They will pretend that the Church seeks “to arouse religious war in France,” but on the contrary, “the whole world now knows that if peace of conscience is broken in France, that is not the work of the Church but of her enemies.” [2]

Some of Pius’s suspicions were directed at would-be ‘helpers’ of the Church. In 1894, a French lay Catholic named Marc Sangnier founded Le Sillon (“The Path”). Responding to Leo XIII’s call for increased civil-social engagement by Church members, Sangnier hoped generally to reconcile Catholicism with the democratic-republican regime in general and with the French labor movement in particular. Membership grew to 500,000—predominantly laypersons and the younger clergy. The Sillon arrayed itself against the resolutely monarchist enemy of the Third Republic, Charles Maurras’s Action Française. [3]

Initially hopeful, by 1910 Pius became skeptical of the Sillon. Admittedly, “the Sillon did raise among the workers the standard of Jesus Christ, the symbol of salvation for peoples and nations,” inculcating “a respect for religion upon the least willing groups, accustoming the ignorant and the impious to hearing the Word of God,” “proudly proclaiming their faith in the face of a hostile audience,” often consisting of urban workers more accustomed to hearing secular-republican and Marxist doctrines from union organizers. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Sillon “were not adequately equipped with historical knowledge, sound philosophy, and solid theology to tackle without danger the difficult social problems in which their work and their inclinations were involving them.” They incautiously allowed “the penetration of liberal and Protestant concepts” into their talks, adapting Catholicism as much to laïcité as they adapted laïcité to Catholicism. In so doing, “the Sillonists are deceiving themselves when they believe that they are working in a field that lies outside the limits of Church authority and of its doctrinal and directive power,” a misconception Pius was not slow to correct.

In calling for Catholic civic engagement, Leo XIII rejected radical egalitarianism or social leveling, affirming rather that Christian Democracy “must preserve the diversity of classes which is assuredly the attribute of a soundly constituted state.” Neither popular sovereignty nor social egalitarianism met with Leo’s approval, yet these are the doctrines the Sillon promotes. Pius firmly replies: “In these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker—the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be set up unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy nations; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants.” 

Pius regards the Sillon’s regard for human dignity as praiseworthy, but its conception of human dignity is mistaken, taken from philosophers “of whom the Church does not at all feel proud,” the ‘philosophers of freedom’ who define liberty as autonomy. [4] From the principle of autonomy they derive the principles of economic, political, and intellectual emancipation from bosses, from all regimes other than democracy, and from the Church hierarchy, respectively. “The leveling down of differences from this threefold point of view will bring about equality among men, and such equality is viewed as true human justice.” Without the traditional hierarchies ordained by God, the bonds of society will consist of “love or one’s occupation and for the welfare of the community.” Thus, fraternity will give shape and cohesion to the society of equality and liberty. None of this comports with Leo’s intention, which had been consistent with “the sentiments of Catholics who hold that the right of government derives from God as its natural and necessary principle.” Sillonists have committed “the error of philosophism,” embracing doctrines propounded by the philosophes who endowed the Jacobins with what little intellectual heft they had. In a word, the Sillon resembles a salon. By making authority “a shadow, a myth,” Sillonists establish a principle whereby there can be “no more law properly so-called, no more obedience” to rulers secular or religious. “Even the priest, on entering [The Sillon], lowers the eminent dignity of his priesthood and, by a strange reversal of roles, becomes a student, placing himself on a level with his young friends, and is no more than a comrade.” The philosophy of freedom inclines toward anarchism. But in fact, as Leo himself had declared, the people are entitled “to choose for themselves the form of government which best corresponds with their character or with the institutions and customs handed down by their forefathers.” Following Aquinas, who follows Aristotle, the Church has long considered kingship, aristocracy, and mixed regimes as licit forms of government, since “justice is compatible with any of them.” “Democracy does not enjoy a special privilege.” In embracing it, and rejecting all other regimes, the Sillon “subjects its religion to a political party,” when the Church “has always left to the nations the care of giving themselves the form of government which they think most suited to their needs.”

Nor does the Church endorse the secularist notion of fraternity. “Love of our neighbor flows from our love for God,” and “any other kind of love is sheer illusion sterile and fleeting,” inasmuch as “pagan and secular societies of ages past…show that concern for common interests or affinities of nature weigh very little against the passions and wild desires of the heart.” Catholicism means universalism, but it is far from an indiscriminate universalism. Indeed, “by separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization,” especially since their version of fraternity tolerates false ideas, errors, and vices—interdenominationalism and indeed “promiscuity” of association. Similarly, secularist notions of human dignity only exalt “human pride.” The Sillonists are therefore utopians: “Unless human nature can be changed, which is not within the power of the Sillonists,” their envisioned society will never arrive. Real fraternity will occur only when “all minds” are “united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ,” which only the Catholic Church affords. “Vague idealism and civic virtues” will not do. And “worse is to come,” as “the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish” but an egalitarian ‘Religion of Humanity.’ [5] Sillonists have been “carried away towards another Gospel which they thought was the true Gospel of Our Savior,” but which “put[s] aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency.” But the real Jesus “has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors.” Yes, Jesus loves sinners, but He also teaches them “in order to convert and save them.” “He was as strong as he was gentle,” teaching “that fear [of God] is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body.” Such teachings “show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.” Cutting off the offending limb was exactly what Pius then proceeded to do, telling the leaders of the Sillon to turn their leadership over to the French bishops, whom he charged with superintending the civil-social work of the rank-and-file members. 

Pius outlined his own understanding of the Church’s role in a democratic republic and in regard to labor organizations in his Encyclical, Singular Quadam, published in 1912. There is to be no revival of religious warfare. “We desire and intend that the faithful live with their non-Catholic fellow citizens in that peace without which neither the order of human society nor the welfare of the State can endure.” But spiritual warfare is another matter. A Christian “cannot ignore the supernatural good,” but “must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good,” subjecting all his actions “to the judgment and judicial office of the Church.” This goes for labor organizations, which ought to be “established chiefly on the foundation of the Catholic religion and openly follow the directive of the Church.” Associations composed of Catholics and non-Catholics are forbidden to Catholics, given the “serious dangers to the integrity of their faith and the due obedience to the commandments and precepts of the Catholic Church” such organizations entail. “Provided they exercise due caution,” Catholic labor organizations may “collaborate with non-Catholics for the common good” as “cartels”—associations, that is, which imitate the already existing cartels among capitalist firms, cartels involving labor instead of goods. It is entirely possible that Pius may have noted the resemblance of existing cartels to medieval guilds, organizations the Church had dealt with, and among, for centuries.

Beyond Europe, Pius intervened on behalf of South American Indians, consistent with a longstanding Church policy of defending them against European colonizers. [6] Quoting Pope Benedict XIV’s 1741 Encyclical, Immensa Pastorum, Pius recalled the rebuke of nominal Catholic Spaniards who acted “as if they had utterly forgotten all sense of the charity poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost,” reducing the Indians to slavery, selling some into slavery, and “treating them with such inhumanity that they were thus greatly hindered from embracing the Christian faith”—example being more persuasive than precept. Although slavery has since been abolished, in some instances Indians are still scourged and branded, “often for most trivial causes, often for a mere lust of cruelty”; whole villages and districts have seen the people slaughtered, with the extinction of some tribes. Surviving women and children are sold acts in which the rulers “have surpassed the worst examples of pagan iniquity.” Pius calls on European Catholic bishops to sponsor missions in America and to denounce “these base deeds,” which do “dishonor to the Christian name.”

Pius X’s Encyclicals clearly evidence the work of a pastor-statesman, one who undertook the reforming the regime he served in light of new circumstances, implementing a comprehensive policy consisting of recurrence to the regime’s first principles, attention to its ruling persons and institutions (especially its educational institutions, under assault from several quarters), and formulation of what might be described as a foreign policy regarding friends and enemies alike. He upholds the regime’s way of life and the end or purpose of that way of life, both as set down by its Founder. The besetting vice of the statesman might well be pride; this is even more likely in a monarchic regime, wherein the ruler has no equals, and so no one likely to rebuke his errors. To avoid this, to humble himself, Pius looks first to the King of kings and of popes. But to do that isn’t necessarily to see how a non-divine being might rule in the office he has inherited. He therefore looks to the examples set by one of his most distinguished predecessors in the Holy See, St. Gregory the Great, the great missionary and defender of the Church against monarchic interference St. Anselm of Acosta, Archbishop of Canterbury, and also St. Charles Borromeo, reformer of both the Catholic Church in Milan and the city itself and, like Pius, a strong advocate of sound education for the clergy. 

Pius celebrated the thirteenth centenarian of Gregory, “that great and incomparable man,” that “most prudent father of the family of Christ,” in 1904. In praising Gregory for his prudence, Pius follows both the teaching of Christ, who advises His disciples to be as innocent as doves and as prudent as serpents, but also Aristotle, who regards prudence as the preeminent virtue for the ruler. The parallel between the circumstances of the sixth century and the twentieth are clear: “When Gregory assumed the Supreme Pontificate the disorder in public affairs had reached its climax; the ancient civilization had all but disappeared and barbarism was spreading throughout the dominions of the crumbling Roman Empire.” Although the barbarism Gregory faced down was violent—Italy “had been left a prey of the still unsettled Lombards who roamed up and down the whole country laying waste everywhere”—Pius foresees a similar condition of anarchy in then-peaceful contemporary Europe, if the forces of modernity remain unchecked. More than only a defender of the Faith, Gregory sent to missions to England, adding that country to the realm of the Church while stipulating that it was Christ, not his own human wisdom, Who must be credited with that success. His “profound humility” led him never to “put himself forward as one invested with the might and power of the great ones of the earth,” calling himself rather “the Servant of the Servants of God.” Not despite because of this humility, carried on by his successors, the Church remains, even as the powerful men who rose up against her have disappeared and “philosophical systems without number” have been forgotten, confirming Jesus’ prophecy, “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.” For this reason, the Church today can “calmly wait until all the voices be scattered to the winds that now shout around Us proclaiming that the Church has gone beyond her time, that her doctrines are passed away forever, that the day is at hand when she will be condemned either to accept the tenets of a godless science and civilization or to depart from human society.”

In the coming struggle, the “unshakeable firmness” of Gregory in understanding the necessity of “a perfect harmony between the two powers, ecclesiastical and civil,” stands as an example for this pope and for all the clergy. Brought to understand that the Church does no injury to “the common weal” and may not abandon its own rights, vis-à-vis the state, “the world regained true salvation, and put itself on the path of a civilization which was noble and fruitful in blessings in proportion as it was founded on the incontrovertible dictates of reason and moral discipline, and derived its force from truth divinely revealed and from the maxims of the Gospel.” The Church today in one sense finds itself in the opposite condition. Christendom has been built, yet the world “seems as though it were tired of that life which has been and still is the chief and often the sole font of so many blessings—and not merely past but present blessings.” This exhaustion derives from the denial of the “supernatural order” and, “as a consequence, the divine intervention in the order of creation and in the government of the world and in the possibility of miracles.” “Men even go so far as to impugn the arguments for the existence of God.” Contemporary “historical criticism” of Scripture ignores the intention of the Scriptural authors, instead “forcing them to say what [the critics] wish them to say.” With the truth of Scripture effectively so erased, men “take away the principle that there is anything divine outside this visible world”; that in turn “take[s] away all check upon the unbridled passions even of the lowest and most shameful kind,” enslaving the mind, the seat of reason, to those passions and thereby negating “the morals of individuals and of civil society.” Absent moral authority, “the only check” on lawlessness governments retain is force. The rule of force causes men to “become discontented with everything,” to “proclaim the right to act as they please,” to “stir up rebellions” and “provoke revolutions, often of extreme violence,” which end in “overthrow[ing] all rights human and divine.” “The very liberty that belongs to the law of nature is trodden underfoot; and men go so far as to destroy the very structure of the family, which is the first and firmest foundation of the social structure.” With the rejection of Christ, the corner stone, the architecture of Church and state must collapse. 

Hence what began as a circumstance opposite to that seen by Gregory threatens to become something nearly identical to that circumstance. Catholics “must, above all else, have recourse to prayer, both public and private, to implore the mercies of the Lord and His powerful assistance.” But prayer is “not enough.” Gregory rebuked a bishop who had retreated to a life of solitary prayer, a man who “fail[ed] to go out into the battlefield to combat strenuously for the cause of the Lord.” Even a bishop cannot set an example if no one sees him—out of sight, out of mind. Catholic clergy must engage the errors of their time, preaching the truth of Church doctrine, especially Christian moral principles, and more “to show charity towards all, to  temper with Christian love the bitterness of social inequalities, to detach the heart from the goods of the world, to live contented with the state in which Providence has placed us, while striving to better it by the fulfillment of our duties” and “to thirst after the future life in the hope of eternal reward.” Only then, if God so wills, can “these principles be instilled and made to penetrate into the heart, so that true and solid piety may strike root there.” There is prudence and then there is prudence; not all forms of prudence are genuinely prudent at all. To concede anything to modern “science falsely so-called” bespeaks a “prudence of the flesh” and to fail to preach, teach, and fully to practice the Gospel is a failure of prudence, not the exercise of it. Gregory’s “spirit of energetic action” caused “the whole medieval period” to bear “what may be called the Gregorian imprint,” seen in “the rule of ecclesiastical government, the manifold phases of charity and philanthropy in its social institutions, the principles of the most perfect Christian asceticism and of monastic life, the arrangement of the liturgy and the art of sacred music.” Christendom proceeded to see “the ever more perfect observance of the natural law inscribed in our hearts,” as “the ferocity of the barbarians was…transformed to gentleness, woman was freed from subjection, slavery was repressed, order was restored in the due and reciprocal independence upon one another of the various classes of society, justice was recognized, the true liberty of souls was proclaimed, and social and domestic peace assured.”

Pius finds his second example of Christian statesmanship in St. Anselm of Canterbury, who served as archbishop from 1093 until his death in 1109—that is, beginning three decades after the Norman Conquest. Anselm did not confront barbarism but state oppression of the Church, the problem Pius has seen in contemporary France and Portugal. Anselm won freedom from the monarchic domination of Kings William II and Henry I, signing a concordat in which Henry renounced his claimed power to invest bishops. 

Anselm was capable of accomplishing this and other statesmanlike tasks because his soul consisted of “a wonderful harmony between qualities which the world falsely judges to be irreconcilable and contradictory: simplicity and greatness, humility and magnanimity, strength and gentleness, knowledge and piety, so that both in the beginning and throughout the whole course of his religious life” he was could “calm the angry passions of his enemies and win the heart of those who were enraged against him,” who ended by “prais[ing] him because he was good.” [7] He did this not by hedging on Church rights, “as though any compromise were possible between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial,” but by firmly asserting them. Nor did he restrict his resistance to the political realm, joining the intellectual battle against “the quarrelsome and the sophistical, ‘the heretical dialecticians’ of his time, as he rightly calls them, in whom reason was the slave of the imagination and of vanity,” even as imagination and vanity had prevailed in the minds of heretics in Pius’ day. Anselm described the heretics he saw as souls in whom “reason which should be the king and the guide of all that is in man is so mixed up with corporal imaginations that it is impossible to disentangle it from these, nor is itself able to distinguish them from things that it alone and pure should contemplate.” Such men are false philosophers who, as Anselm wrote, “because they are not able to understand what they believe dispute the truth of the faith itself, confirmed by the Holy Fathers, just as if bats and owls who see heaven only by night were to dispute concerning the rays of the sun at noon, against eagles who gaze at the sun unblinkingly.” With such men, “it must be shown to them reasonably how unreasonable is their contempt of us,” to show “the reasonableness of our faith.”

St. Charles Borromeo is Pius’ third Christian statesman. As Archbishop of Milan and a member of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Borromeo reformed both the Church and the city of Milan in the sixteenth century. More broadly, he proved a staunch defender of the Church during the Counter-Reformation. “In those days,” like today, “passions ran riot and knowledge of the truth was almost completely twisted and confused.” Calling “perversion of faith and morals a reformation,” “in reality” the Protestants” “were corrupters” who “undermin[ed] the strength of Europe through wars and dissensions,” thereby “pav[ing] the way for those modern rebellions and apostasy” Pius opposes today. To counter Protestant doctrines, Borromeo emphasized the need for “Christian instruction”—even as Pius has condemned the “public schools, lacking all religion, where everything holy is ridiculed and scorned,” “stronghold[s] of the powers of darkness” which traduce “the rights of religion and the family.” Pius thus distinguishes “between true and false reform.” False reform, “imitating the fickleness of the foolish, generally rush to extremes: exalting faith while neglecting good works or, contrarily, overlooking faith and God’s grace by “canoniz[ing] nature” in the form of human virtue, making it seem as if human beings can become self-sufficient. Such reformers never achieve reform because their extremism undermines the discipline upon which any reform depends. [8] Borromeo, his example now followed by Pius, undertook true reform, founding schools and colleges and promoting the example of Mary. “The Catholics of our days, together with their leaders, the Bishops, will deserve the same praise and gratitude as Charles as long as they are faithful to their duties of good citizenship,” obeying even evil rulers “when their commands are just” while resisting commands that are unjust,” avoiding the “impious rebellion” of seditionists as well as “the subservience of those who accept as sacred the obviously wicked laws of perverse men” who “uproot everything in the name of a deceitful liberty and then oppress their subjects with the most abject tyranny.” In Borromeo’s words, “It is a certain, well-established fact that no other crime so seriously offends God and provokes His greatest wrath as the vice of heresy.” But the warfare touched off by today’s heresies are “far more dangerous than those former conflicts which crowned Borromeo with such glory.” The religion of humanity is worse than Protestantism.

Writing of Borromeo, but likely thinking of himself, as well, Pius cites “the divine word saying that men will remember the just man forever, for even though he is dead, he yet speaks.” This is possible because the Roman Catholic Church “alone conceives, nourishes, and educates the noble family of the just.”

 

Note

1. In his letter, “For the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Immaculate Conception”—i.e., of the reaffirmation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX—Pius X elaborates: “If we know how to make ourselves the light of the world by our teaching, and the salt of the earth by our example; to put it in a word, if we employ the resources of virtue and doctrine that Paul enjoined on his own disciples, Titus and Timothy, namely sanctity and perfection of life, strength in teaching the spirit of sacrifice and self-denial, active and enlightened zeal, charity that is at once strong and gentle, then we will win the love and veneration of the good, yea and the esteem and respect even of our enemies.”
2. See also the Iam Dudum of May 1911, in which Pius condemns a similar law of separation in Portugal, also by a secularizing republican regime, which “proclaims and enacts that the Republic shall have no religion, as if men individually and any association or nation did not depend upon Him who is the Maker and Preserve of all things.” In Portugal, “the harshest and gravest stroke of all” against “the domain of the authority of the Church” was aimed at “the formation and training of young ecclesiastics,” who must now “pursue their scientific and literary studies which precede theology in the public lycées where, by reason of a spirit of hostility to God and the Church, the integrity of their faith plainly is exposed to the greatest peril”; what is more, “the Republic even interferes in the domestic life and discipline of the Seminaries, and arrogates the right of appointing the professors, of approving of the textbooks and of regulating the sacred studies of the Clerics”—in all, an attempt “to deprave the morals of the clergy and to provoke them to abandon their superiors.”
3. See Charles Maurras: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Reawakening, edited and translated by Alexander Jacob. London: Arktos Press, 2016. See also “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website.
4. See Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. See also “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom,” on this website.
5. See Pierre Manent: The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times. Edited and translated by Paul Seaton. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022. See also “Manent on ‘The Religion of Humanity,” on this website.
6. See Tzetan Todorov: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Richard Howard translation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [1982]. See also “Spanish Conquistadors Through a ‘Postmodernist’ Lens,” on this website.
7. For a summary of the Thomistic argument reconciling humility with magnanimity, see David Bobb: Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2013.)
8. For example, Pius condemned the “Mariavitas,” a group of young Polish priests who had “turned aside from the right road and from the obedience they owe the Bishops” by proclaiming “a certain woman,” a Franciscan nun named Maria Franciszka Kozlowska who claimed to have experienced mystic visions, “to be most holy, marvelously endowed with heavenly gifts, divinely enlightened about many things, and providentially given for the salvation of a world about to parish,” consequently “entrusting] themselves [to her] without reserve and to obey her every wish.” (Tritus Circiter, April 5, 1906.) The priests seemed to be putting Maria Franciszka on a par with Mary—an instance of extremism, indeed. As a good Thomist, Pius could be depended upon to view such mysticism with suspicion.

Pierre Manent: The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times.  Paul Seaton, editor and translator. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022.

 

In his introduction to this judiciously ordered thematic selection of Manent’s writings, Paul Seaton distills the philosopher’s central thought: “The Imago Dei is also the zōon politikón.” One might initially respond, How can this be? Upon reflection, aided by the arguments Manent frames, one might equally ask, How could it be otherwise? If human beings are made in the Image of God, and if God is a person who rules not only His creation but Himself—in no fewer than three Persons, as the Gospels teach—then human beings must be political by nature. By contrast, the “Religion of Humanity” which animates so much of European and American politics rejects God and denigrates self-government. Insofar as we adhere to this novel faith, the identity of the Image of God and the political animal will be lost on us. At the same time, precisely because it is true, we will fail to understand ourselves, with all the attendant moral and political derangements that lack of self-knowledge must engender.

Seaton has Manent open his argument with an account of the political history of Christianity, the story of “a succession of theological-political arrangements, of solutions to the theologico-political problem,” wherein “each solution ends by revealing itself to be as unsatisfactory as the one that it succeeded”—precisely because the “problem” can only be truly solved by the rule of God on earth, an event which has yet to occur. The first solution, which posited God’s Assembly or Church as “the true republic, the perfect society,” in contrast to which all merely human associations held “an ontologically inferior rank,” led to the doctrine of the plenitude of power or authority in the Catholic Church. But because this Church lacked the physical power to rule human beings directly and in all respects—Jesus Himself recognized this in telling His disciples to leave the things of Caesar to Caesar (who didn’t need Christians to tell him how to raise and spend taxes, and did not wield his sword in vain)— this led to an uncomfortable dual citizenship, an allegiance to God’s regime and to whatever worldly regime a Christian lived in—”a permanent division and uncertainty, since two loyalties necessarily share the heart of each Christian.”

In an attempt to overcome this dualism, European rulers founded a new state form, the form of absolute national (and some might say ‘statist’) monarchy. In these countries, “religion remains a command, but this command is essentially administered by the temporal sovereign,” as exemplified by the Tudor dynasty in England and, most strikingly, the Bourbons in France. “The national monarchy was intended to overcome the medieval duality of the priesthood and the emperor, ‘to reunite the two heads of the eagle,’ to bring it about that Christian subjects ceased ‘to see double,'” as certain modern political philosophers put it. The Christian or apparently Christian modern state (“apparently” because, after all, the philosophers quoted followed Machiavelli and his hints about the benefits of a purely ‘civil’ religion) might have one of several regimes: the English monarchy heading the ‘English’ or Anglican Church, attempting to adapt such an institution to English common law, thereby satisfying neither Catholics nor the more ardent Protestants; the democratic-republican regime of American Puritans, who fled the English regime only to establish a sort of absolutism of ‘the many’ instead of ‘the one’; and European nationalism, first instantiated as monarchic and then, in France, very much in opposition to the Church and to the God of the Bible, as republican. 

It is the European form that concerns Manent, first and foremost. Whether under a monarchic, republican, or oligarchic regime, nationalism without God, the elevation of each nation to quasi-divine status, has ended badly. The ‘secularized’ nationalisms that advanced throughout Europe after the French revolution culminated in the debacle of nationalism in the world wars. Those wars “have worn away the charm of the sacredness of the nation.” The victory of republican regimes over the others has ameliorated the problem but at the cost of the exhaustion of the nationalist sentiments that animated them. Ambitious and fearful men alike began to call for, then to implement, a “supranational” Europe; among other things, supranationalists imagine that political borders are at best meaningless, at worst harmful to trade and dangerous to defend. The resulting “massive immigration of non-Christian populations,” populations whose supranationalism often consists not in the dream of the European Union but in the dream of the ummah, not the Religion of Humanity but the religion of Allah, contradicts the very principle it was intended to demonstrate. 

Having first separated Church and Caesar on Christian terms, then fusing them on terms that might have been sincerely Christian or covertly Machiavellian, European liberalism separated them. Manent observes that separation is one thing, separate but equal another. “When one considers the question of government, or of command…one sees how much separation—far from being a stable situation that leaves the two protagonists intact—is an endless process that implies the ever growing and indefinite domestication of the Church” because the Church relinquishes coercive power to the State. “This gives a decisive advantage of the public institution over the private one.” The Church can and does attempt to rule within “civil society,” beneath the ruling apparatus of the State, ruling by consent rather than coercion. “However, to govern is to govern. To govern in civil society is not so different from governing in the State.” Under any genuine liberal regime, I can exercise my right to liberty by leaving the nation ruled by the State or by leaving the church that I have joined, but it’s much more difficult to leave my country than it is to leave my church. I can exercise religious liberty simply by attending the church across the street, or by staying home. And even the ‘liberal’ attempt to make exercising political liberty by leaving my country almost that easy, by making borders porous throughout Europe depends upon a shared sense of belonging that transcends one’s sense of national language and way of life—no simple effort, one animated by the rather casual expectation of a sense of ‘Europeanness’ as strong as Englishness, Frenchness, Germanness, and so on. 

This being so, the Church might pretend that religion entails no form of government at all. It then becomes “the collective ‘beautiful soul'” of the German Romantics, a “bearer of ideals and values”—entities which, “in contrast to law, cannot be commanded.” European churches today “propose ‘Christian values.'” Unlike laws, such entities “cannot be commanded”; “unlike the old Decalogue and also unlike democratic law,” they “are impossible either to obey or to disobey.” This leads Christianity away from itself and towards the Religion of Humanity because “under the rubric of ‘values’ it is hopeless to make ‘the Gospel message’ listened to, or at least heard, except by engaging in humanitarian and egalitarian overbidding.” ‘More compassionate and democratic than thou’ replaces ‘holier than thou.’ But ‘holier than thou’ always remained in principle governed by the admission that only God really was. Humanitarian and egalitarian sentiment come with self-righteousness built in, with no real authority above it.

The same goes for the standard of natural, as distinguished from ‘human,’ rights. The natural rights of the original liberal republicanism were said to inhere in every human being as such, thus serving as a criterion for human conduct. But ‘human’ rights as conceived by the Religion of Humanity cannot have recourse to nature because “modern humanity…desires to be the sovereign over nature, creator of its own nature,” right down to ‘gender assignment’ by oneself rather than by birth or (as in Eden) by God. The Church has long posed the question, What is man? or (what amounts to the same thing) What is Adam? But modern democracy “neither can nor wants to respond to this question in any manner or form”. Modern democracy rules, but it cannot say in the name of what, other than in accordance with certain sentiments, coming from it knows not where. The Church no longer rules, but it does attempt to “overbid” the democratic State in terms of the State’s own self-legitimizing sentiments. This gives the Church a sort of “dialectical advantage” over the State—or would, if the Church could shake off its own confusion. The Enlightenment had hoped to wrest not only political sovereignty but dialectical advantage from the Church by philosophizing its way out of Christian doctrines; today, the democratic state, in its moral and intellectual egalitarianism or relativism, can no longer command itself, although it does not hesitate to command others. “No one knows what will happen when democracy and the Church become aware of this reversal.”

Seaton next causes Manent to get down to the particulars. NATO’s 1999 war on Serbia, which had attempted to quash an independence movement in what had been the Serbian province of Kosovo. NATO characterized its military action as a “humanitarian intervention”—a novel concept at the time. While “the notion of humanity conceived as universal” dates to the Roman Empire, an empire presupposes an emperor; “it therefore was a universal that remained political.” It also was not universal in fact, making it necessarily political in its foreign relations. As for the Catholic or universal Church, it remained universal in principle but, being spiritual, not as a political fact. Indeed, it soon “produced divisions and separations in the world,” between believers and unbelievers and between the several denominations of those who thought of themselves as Christians. What makes Christian charity realistic, however, is that centers on the love of God and of God’s image in one’s neighbor, who is as intrinsically unlovable as oneself. When, in anticipation of the Religion of Humanity, Rousseau’s notion of compassion replaced the Christian principle of caritas, the ground was tilled for the field of humanitarianism. Unlike charity, which is so difficult for human beings that it requires God’s grace to aid us in feeling it, humanitarianism comes naturally to most, easily to many. This also distinguishes it from humanism, which requires arduous self-development whereby the soul aims at becoming fully human. [1] Unlike Christianity, which retains the Biblical sense of politics, of friends and enemies, those in the Church or Assembly of God and those outside it, humanitarianism pretends that nothing human is foreign to me. 

Being at once sentimental and active, humanitarianism “habituate[s] people to disdain political reflection, politics themselves and their concrete conditions of existence, as if the affirmation of humanity sufficed itself.” While NATO was right to intervene (“it was dangerous and dishonorable for Europe to allow a regime that institutionalized the oppression of a minority to continue to act”), in “refus[ing] to call ‘war’ the massive bombardment of a country, week after week,” the NATO countries lied to themselves and to the world, including the Serbs, who were not dignified with the title, ‘enemy.’ Consistent with this inhumane humanitarianism, NATO also adopted a policy of ‘zero fatalities’ for itself, obviating the idea of self-sacrifice, whereby “war “in a certain way ‘redeems’ itself own immorality” by risking the lives of the warriors. Finally, NATO evaded the political question of what Winston Churchill called the aftermath of war: What to do with Kosovo, after victory.

To think of the aftermath of war, to think politically, requires more than mere sentiment, however pure. It requires prudential reasoning. And even Rousseau, the founder of the demi-politics of compassion, sees that “human beings are not capable of a disinterested sentiment,” a morally pure sentiment, but “only natural sentiments, that is to say, they necessarily seek their interest and their pleasure,” experiencing compassion because “the visible suffering of another person tells me that I too could experience it, that I am as venerable as the other.” “There is nothing in pity that is heroic or impossible, since its wellspring is the selfishness of each person,” yielding “the society of the Goodwill soup kitchen.” The soup kitchen attends to the needs of the body, its organizers feeling compassion for nothing specifically human. This “tends to weaken the consciousness and sentiment of what is specifically human,” of reason, albeit in the name of humanitarianism. This is why animals too are now said to have a ‘right’ not to suffer physical pain, as per the morality of Peter Singer, who defends abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia so long as they cause no pain.

The apolitical character of the humanitarian military intervention obviates the sovereignty of states. Humanitarian action is indeed a Christian and humanistic duty, but it isn’t the same as humanitarian military intervention. The aim of military action is victory; victory entails responsibility for ruling the defeated. That is, “to modify the political circumstances of a humanitarian crisis”—to bomb Serbia—results in “political consequences,” and “the one who takes the initiative thus immediately assumes new political responsibilities.”  If prompted to intervene solely by sentiment, the humanitarian statesman will likely “engage in a political and military action in conditions that he does not know well, with inappropriate instruments, and for vague political objectives.” To so “falsify the conditions of political judgment” has “a profoundly demoralizing effect, “plac[ing] political life under an exigency that is impossible to honor and which contributes to the delegitimation of the normal political life of democratic nations.” To be genuinely political, the Religion of Humanity would need to animate some political institution that rules humanity as a whole. But “humanity as such does not have a political existence.” How, then, can national governments pretend to be agents of humanity, especially since the sentiment of humanitarianism isn’t shared by non-Western nations? In so pretending, and by doing so without reference to a standard outside themselves, beyond their own sentiments, they confuse themselves with God. This does not mean, Manent pertinently insists, that to make moral judgments and act on them amounts to ‘playing God.’ On the contrary, it is to be human. But to be human, guidance must come from that inside us that is distinctively human, which is thoughtful, and operation of logos, the distinctive feature of human nature that, in Christian terms, bespeaks the Image of God.

Manent elaborates on this new religion, the Religion of Humanity, beginning by citing Tocqueville on ‘democracy’ or social equality and its intellectual and moral effects. Tocqueville observes that aristocratic societies have a weak sense of “humanity in general.” The idea of the human species is strongly present in the minds of the very few, the philosophers. Democratic societies, however, consist of individuals who readily see other individuals as their semblables, their ‘similars,’ their fellows. This seeing is at least as much a feeling as it is an insight, and so finds its highest expression in poetry. Victor Hugo was the poet of the nineteenth century—the ‘democratizing’ century—the writer “who expressed most amply and insistently, almost systematically, the idea and sentiment of Humanity.” Although “Hugo’s poetic style no longer suits our taste,” we still “share the poet’s religious or quasi-religious sentiment.” The sentiment is so powerful that it governs even rationalists, even an Auguste Comte, whose positivism complements his humanitarianism—so much so, that he invents a sort of social (if not truly civic) religion of humanitarianism, complete with rituals and symbols imitating those of the French Catholic Church. 

Why does Manent object to this kinder, gentler historicism, surely a thing preferable to the harsh practices of Marxism and Social Darwinists? Because even if, per impossibile, “the principal evils of society will have been healed by altruism,” will human beings find some new object for their striving or will they rather cease to strive at all? Manent predicts that humanity living under ‘Comteian’ conditions “will be a humanity closed in on itself, one that is prey to an immense, or sublime, selfishness,” home to the contemptible being Nietzsche derides as the Last Man. “The religion of Humanity is Christianity and specifically Catholicism, with all the vices Nietzsche sees in it, but without the grandeur that a belief in God entails, that is, in a Being greater than humanity.” Christianity becomes Christianism, an ideology. Depending on how one translates Nietzsche’s German, the Last Man either blinks, toadlike and uncomprehendingly, at “the Roman roads, the medieval cathedrals, the Renaissance palaces,” “strangers to the motives that produced these works,” or he winks at them, feeling himself superior to the supposedly benighted folk who made them, superstitious ignoramuses who lacked the “historical perspective” of modern man. But this perspective, Nietzsche complains, “produces the flattest disposition of the soul, that of the tourist”; “the effectual truth of the modern religion of Human is tourism,” seen today in the public television programs ‘hosted’ by that cheerful bland twit, Rick Steves. “Just when present-day humanity aims to include and congratulate itself on excluding nothing that is currently human, it excludes its entire past, all past generations, from itself”—as remarked by the aristocratic Mr. Burke. “It is at the moment when it embraces itself wholly that it ceases to understand itself,” ceases to exercise its distinctively human capacity to know itself. 

Unlike human self-understanding in terms of the Image of God and of human nature, both of which respect the political character of human persons and thus the limits of human sentiments and actions, the complacent universalism fostered by the Religion of Humanity rejects “all mediation and concretization” of the human ways of life—such political institutions as nation-states and their attendant borders, with provinces and cities within those borders, and with the political responsibilities which human self-government possible. Contemporary Europeans have been able to imagine themselves “natural citizens of humanity” because the United States has taken responsibility for their military defense. Writing in 2010, a decade before Russian soldiers rolled into Ukraine, Manent warns that “this does not constitute a vigorous political order, or one likely to last.” “Sooner or later, Europeans will have to remember the political conditions of humanity.” This realization won’t come readily, as the Religion of Humanity invites us to enjoy “the certainty of doing good as well as the feeling of being good, all the more so because in the world of fellow-feeling, most of the doing lies in the feeling,” consisting primarily if not exclusively of “acknowledging and appreciating the similitude of the ‘other.'” “This way of thinking entails the inglorious death of civic virtue, as well as of serious attention to the Christian proposition.”

The central section of the book as Seaton has carefully designed it consists of a sequence of considerations on the Christian proposition. Like Jesus, the Son who mediates between the Father and Man, the Church mediates, or should mediate, between “real humanity and a dreamed-of ‘Humanity,'” between human beings as they are and human beings as they should be, at least as envisioned by the secular prophets and priests of the Religion of Humanity. Since the founding of the Church, pseudo-religions have arisen, religions that distort “this-or-that aspect of Christianity” and attempt to impose it upon men—Communism yesterday, Nazism the day before yesterday. The Religion of Humanity shares in their attempt to fuse theory and practice in “a powerful enterprise of great extent to regulate the human world by means of international rules and institutions, so that nations, losing their character as sovereign political bodies, would henceforth be nothing but ‘regions’ of a world en route to globalization, i.e., unification.” Although the Church has always been distrustful, even critical, of sovereign states, often regarding them as loci of the libido dominandi, such states also “prevented imperial stagnation” and, in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, often protected small nations from the big ones. States are not simply fields of ‘power’; they also serve as fields of politics rightly understood, there being “no more powerful source of the moral development of each person than concern for the common good or the ‘common thing,’ the res publica.” “The formation and then the deployment of the human virtues require the participation in a collective ‘unit of action’ before the members of which we feel ourselves responsible, and whose praise and blame we experience.” ‘Humanity’ constitutes no such field of action. “There is, to be sure, a human race, but it is only actualized in the plurality of human communities” in which the political nature of human beings can flourish, a nature which is the Image of God. The Catholic Church would be better advised to treat with friendship the other real communities, the nations, which, whether Christian or not, at least form a cadre of education and action in which human beings can truly engage in a search for the common good.”

There are those who argue that multinational corporations can replace nation-states as intermediaries, ultimately providing the institutional structures for world government. But commerce alone hasn’t prevented wars; commercial republican regimes have prevented wars amongst themselves, but corporations are oligarchies, not republics. And as commercial and industrial enterprises, corporations lack a full understanding of human nature. Corporations undertake exchange, an activity that “only needs very limited agreements that bear upon the characteristics of the object in question and its price”; corporate agents need not even know one another personally, as “commerce demands but little of ‘the common’ and therefore only produces a little of ‘the common.'” Commerce is a res without a publica. As such, corporations can distribute goods and services without thinking much about the distribution of honors, which requires knowledge of persons, not things. Corporations have done very poorly in managing their relations with China and with the more seriously religious elements among Muslims, even as they often blundered their way through relations with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. “China, Islam, the Jewish people, the Christian world, these are not the different colors of a rainbow humanity, these are ‘grandeurs,’ they are ‘political and spiritual quantities,’ which come to sight as proposals and affirmations of humanity and which need to be made compatible.” Manent regards the Catholic Church as likely more capable of serving as a mediator among these grandeurs than corporations will ever be, as “the only completely established real universal community, the sole ‘perfect spiritual republic.'” Its spirituality makes it a physical threat to no one; its republican character registers its political dimension, beyond mere economics.

In doing so, it can uphold the distinction between charity and compassion. [2] Com-passion is “indeed a passion,” prompting us to aid those who suffer or are in danger. “If we didn’t have this sentiment, human life would be much crueler than it is, and it would lose a good deal of its sweetness.” As a passion, however, compassion shares the weaknesses of all passions: “it is weak,” often fleeting, and “it is largely blind,” lacking the guidance of reason. “One cannot found or govern any community by means of compassion alone” since communities require virtues to sustain them—courage, justice, moderation, prudence—not passions, or at least not passion alone.

So, for example, the migration of suffering populations inspires compassion but “does not include the duty to make fellow citizens of those whom we aid.” It provides a spur to action but does not tell us what to do. By contrast, “charity is clearly a virtue, and even the culminating virtue, of the human being and the Christian,” directing us to love with the prudence of serpents and the innocence of doves. Agapic love “characterizes not certain acts, but the tenor of a life.”

This is why Seaton places Manent’s article, “Who Is ‘The Good Samaritan’?” in the center of the book, tenth among nineteen chapters. [3] Manent wrote the article in answer to Pope Francis’s encyclical, Fratelli tutti, in which the pope deploys the Gospel parable to illustrate “fraternity and social friendship.” Fraternity and social friendship are admirable, yet human-all-too-human. To interpret the parable in such terms is to ignore its centering in the things of God, not of Man. Even the Jewish priest and the Levite, who see the injured man and pass him by are thinking of God—more specifically, of His law, which bars men who are ritually clean from touching what appears to them to be a corpse. The Samaritan is under no such legal restriction. More, and supremely, “the amplitude to his deeds,” the “liberty of his conduct,” the “competence in his care for all wounds,” the “competence in his care for all wounds,” the “authority to his word,” and the “ability to make promises worthy of belief,” all point to his more than human character. “The Church Fathers were right: the Samaritan is none other than Jesus himself.” We humans lack God’s charity, strength, “reparative virtue,” patience, hope or faith “to be like the Samaritan.” “There is no Christianity outside of Jesus Christ,” and we humans need to recognize that. 

God needs no boundaries. We humans do. Among those boundaries are national borders. The migrations which have given the question of charity and compassion an inescapably political dimension in our time “oblige all citizens to take a clear and precise view of the political community that they wish to form, and they force Christians to define the meaning and significance of the virtue of charity that is the center of the Christian life.” Traditionally, the Catholic Church “put the social and political nature of man at the fore, or on the first plane,” recognizing that “the development of a person’s humanity passes by the mediation of his or her civic and social association.” To speak of the rights of migrants is to define rights in exclusively ‘individual’ terms, but whatever rights inhere in individuals as such do not translate simply into citizen rights. Manent here goes too far, denying that rights “can be attached to the isolated human individual” at all. This confuses human being as potential with human being as more fully actualized within a political community. Human being as potential, seen in individuals born and unborn, in and of itself implies no civil right, although the political nature of human beings implies a right to civility, to the membership in a regime that both protects individuals from harm and assists in their development as mature citizens. [4]

Be this as it may, “borders are the condition of existence of a political association capable of assisting” migrants.” And political borders make human approximation of Christ’s charity possible in reality. Love God and neighbor, not neighbor alone, recognizing that while God is limitless neighborliness implies the limit of propinquity, the limit that human persons must respect when they consider their own nature as undivine beings defined by the Image of God but not by godliness itself. “No one can claim to know to what point a political body can accept a growing heterogeneity without falling apart,” thereby becoming a ‘failed state’ of the sort the migrants themselves have fled. Respect for immigration laws expresses “concern for the stability and viability of the civic body of which we are a part,” of “preserving and, if possible, of improving the conditions of a ‘good way of life’ or a ‘good life'”—a good regime. And as to the Church, its charity, centering on God, identifies the good way of life as God’s way of life, expressing agapic love by tending to the souls of those who suffer primarily, their bodily needs and even their moral rights secondarily. Humanitarian care “is precious but is spiritually empty because it does not bring the Word and does not show the Way.” Meeting the displaced person who is a Muslim, can a Christian not care first and foremost for the conversion of the Muslim’s soul to that Way, by means of that Word? [5]

Political and Christian prudence alike call republican citizens and members of the City of God alike to understand their obligations to migrants as conditional, not all-encompassing. Migrants “impose themselves on us by the strength of their numbers and their aggression,” having been “encouraged, even directed, by foreign states who have unfriendly, even hostile aims toward us.” Acts of war are not limited to bombings and tank sorties. In us, in ‘We Europeans,’ “It is a major political and moral fault to yield to force hiding itself behind misery.” Further, in agreeing to accept a measured quantity of migrants, we “cannot agree to abandon the principles of our political regime.” In the republics, “we are the sole judges of this possibility, as is fitting for political bodies that govern themselves democratically.” The same goes for the Church, which consists of discrete churches, none of which has unlimited physical resources, even if their members could command unlimited spiritual resources—which, being human, they cannot do, either, although they can pray for as many of them as God chooses to grant. It therefore makes no sense, politically or Christianly, to renounce our sovereignty in our own communities or to “weaken what remains of Christian dispositions and Catholic habits, for the sake of a religion of Humanity that delivers us over to the strongest.” Under that religion, “‘Christianity’ now only presented the general idea of humanity under the form of a particular opinion,” an ‘ideal’ in the Hegelian sense, an instantiation of a particular moment in the history of the Absolute Spirit, an entity very far from the Holy Spirit. Even as modern political philosophers from Machiavelli on denigrated Christianity as unrealistic, a belief in an “imaginary principality,” even such sympathetic observers as Chateaubriand inclined to accept that categorization, albeit with friendly feelings, an ideal which inspires noble sentiments. 

Why do so few persons today recognize this transformation? Manent suggests that the reconfiguration of Christianity as an ‘ideal’ forms part of a much larger moral and intellectual framework. As a result of modern philosophy, we no longer think politically. This seems paradoxical, because Machiavelli and his followers called for the construction of the modern state, a vast political task. But the size of the modern state establishes a distinction between ‘the state’ understood as a government apparatus and ‘civil society’ located inside the territory ruled by the state. (Christianity anticipated some of this, in its separation of the things of God from the things of Caesar, thereby “having broken apart the ‘beautiful whole’ of the pagan city.”) This, along with the ‘state of nature’ doctrine, has inclined many thinkers to locate the fundamental elements of politics in pre-political and sub-political places, which are said to have generated the state. To think so is to think that sociology deserves intellectual primacy over political science. Moreover, sociology partakes of the aspirations of modern science, especially its tendency to abstract ’causes’ from the phenomena in the form of mathematical formulae, in order to propound ‘theories’ of society. “While Aristotle’s point of view” in his political science “is a practical perspective, the point of view of the sociologist is a theoretical point of view.” Theory so conceives ‘objectifies’ the phenomena it studies; “it is difficult to know what the sociologist shares with the human beings he studies,” separated as he is “from his object by his scientific instruments themselves.” Europeans now think of religion ‘sociologically.’ If they think scientifically, they regard it as objectively empty, except as a social fact, more or (increasingly) less prevalent. If they think religiously, they assume there is “nothing objective and shareable to say about it to those who are outside of it.” 

Manent resists. It is true that the ancient city no longer exists, that the historical context of classical political science has been discarded. But politics remains, even in the modern state. “I propose preserving and affirming the ‘architectonic’ character of political science among the social sciences,” which Aristotle affirmed. True, modern states have brought on an attenuated civil life, leaving the intimacy of self-government in the small poleis far behind, at least on the level of nations. But can anyone doubt that modern states actually do rule? Or that tyrannical regimes of modern states have aped the compactness of the poleis in pursuing ‘totalitarianism,’ always with a malignant form of personalism rightly derided as a ‘personality cult.’ 

“I therefore propose to study religion first of all politically—as a human association and as a government.” After all (one might add), every religion consists of a regime, a way of ruling. Given that European democrats “define ourselves by two ideals,” the “practical ideal of sincerity and the theoretical ideal of objectivity,” we handicap ourselves when we think about religion by consigning it to the realm of subjectivity in practice and scientific, even mathematical criteria when we consider it theoretically. That is, when we ask, “How is one to talk politically about religion?” “The way the question is posed renders it even more opaque and practically insoluble.” Muslims don’t think that way. In their opinion, “the divine Law is immediately positive and manifestly rational,” and “obedience to it constitutes the umma,” the Muslim religio-political community, a community that occupies territory. On that territory, Muslims are objectively at war with non-Muslims—spiritually at all times, physically when that is advantageous. Since the best political regime existed only under Muhammad’s monarchy, “no one regime characterizes Islam” in other times; Muslims ready themselves to make war within them all. They tend to be disadvantaged by democratic republicanism, whose way of life that consists of give and take, ruling and being ruled, scarcely comports with strict obedience to Islamic law.

Empire is “the political form,” as distinguished from the political regime, “closest to Islam.” Islam’s last empire was the Ottoman caliphate, gone now for more than a century, replaced by Mustafa Kemal’s nation-state, Turkey. This abrupt transition contrasts with the decades it took to replace the Holy Roman Empire and the Christendom it embodied with the modern state. “We therefore find ourselves in the presence of an immense empire, or at least an immense imperial imprint, without an emperor”—religiously powerful but politically weak, its subjects indignant at their own weakness. When they go so far as to call Europeans and Americans ‘crusaders,” we think the charge an absurd anachronism. The language may be antique but were we to understand our own regimes better we might see the point. In our regimes, states guarantee equal rights, “especially freedom of conscience, to everyone, believer and unbeliever alike. This can only be so in a regime founded upon no one established religion. For that to happen, a people must derive their rights either from nature or nationhood, or both. If it is from nationhood, then the nation becomes a new form of the sacred community. Nationality replaces Christianity without necessarily abandon crusading or imperialism. This is what Muslims are talking about. In contemporary Europe, elites want nationality to go the way of Christianity, but the elites have their own religion, the Religion of Humanity. That religion commands ‘openness to the other,” but if the ‘other’ is Islam, a religion that prohibits openness, how will the Religion of Humanity deal with it and remain openness? Without Christianity or the nation-state, it cannot. “Let us, therefore, return to and ‘reenter’ the real Europe that we are trying in vain to leave.”

As a preliminary to this return, Manent commends the writings of Charles Péguy, “one of the most penetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modem consciousness.” In Péguy’s lifetime, the preeminent event that raised the religio-political question was the Dreyfus Affair, the twelve-year-long ordeal that wracked French politics, beginning in 1894 with the false accusation and wrongful conviction of the Jewish French Army captain Albert Dreyfus on charges of treason. The Affair brought out the worst of French anti-Semitism, implicating the Army and involving the French Catholic Church hierarchy, while reviving antagonism against the republican regime. A fervent Catholic himself, Péguy sided with Dreyfus against the ultra-nationalist monarchist Right, but also came to oppose the Dreyfusard socialists, whom he charged with “wanting to control thought and word” every bit as much as the Catholic Church and the Old Regime had done in previous centuries. 

Crucially for and in anticipation of Manent’s own argument, Péguy “saw the Dreyfus Affair as the event par excellence, the event which is unforeseeable, which neither historians nor sociologists could understand, because they try to find general laws of history, because they make and deal in general categories.” The affair wasn’t ‘historical’ in that sense (the sense most doggedly pursued in France by the ‘historicist’ historian, Hippolyte Taine) but personal, first of all concerning a person, Alfred Dreyfus, and his identity as a Jew, his status as a French army officer, the relations of his Jewishness and his membership in the Army to the republican regime and, more broadly of both Jews as such and republicans as such to the Catholic Church. This unpredictable coincidence of ’causes,’ all centering on a person, raised “what was to become the central mediation of [Péguy’s] life: what is a people? What is a city? And indissolubly linked to these two: what is Christianity?” 

In his meditations, Péguy came to see the “radical conflict” not merely between those who believed Dreyfus guilty and those who understood him to be innocent—there were anti-Dreyfusards and Dreyfusards among republicans, monarchists, army men, civilians, Catholics and non-Catholics—but between the ancients and the moderns. Among the Dreyfusards, the socialists were resolute ‘moderns,’ not genuine republicans at all but statist, would-be oligarchs, ready to suppress their opponents and to rule without dissent. They shared this tendency with the modern or Hobbesian-Bodinian, monarchists, seeking to level civil society while centralizing political power in their own hands. The true republicans (contra their Catholic accusers, remembering Jacobin depredations of a century back) shared with the ancient world the sense of politics as ruling and being ruled, in turn. We Dreyfusards, Péguy wrote, “demand that science, art, and philosophy be left unsocialized”—free, personal, not reduced to matter. “What struck him most was that this materialism, this atheism, lived only on what they rejected, that is, on the Christian, or perhaps the ancient, idea of the world.” the secularist Dreyfusards admired the after-shine of Christian charity and Roman civic virtue while perverting both. “History is not socialist,” Péguy wrote. “It is historical. Philosophy is not socialist. It is philosophical.” Philosophers love wisdom; the socialists claimed to have achieved it, parodying God. But for a human being to take on the role of God is to become incapable of “achieving consciousness of himself,” the self-knowledge Socrates prized. And the familiar trope invoking ‘the judgment of History’ in an attempt to end political debate amounts to “a parody of the Last judgment.” It divinizes ‘History’ or the course of events, dismissing the original meaning of history as inquiry, not humanly-conceived revelation. As a result, “freedom and the risk inseparable from genuine human action…are hunted down by modern intellectualism.”

Risk implies a sort of wager, which in turn reminds one of Pascal. It was here that Péguy began to see the worth of the Christianity that he had previously rejected. He saw that “humanity as implied by Christianity is also that which is revealed in the precise observation of human nature.” Christians were on to something. Even the terrifying Christian teaching on eternal damnation began to make sense. As Péguy writes, if men must choose, “there must be a total risk,” and Christianity extended the Roman virtue of gravitas, of seriousness, ‘all the way down’—quite literally! It is true that Hell is inhumane. But that is the point.

Where does Christianity leave citizenship in the earthly city, and specifically in France? To be a citizen or rather subject in the Kingdom of God, loving its Ruler, in no way precludes citizenship in France, loving one’s neighbor as “a citizen of a given city.” For this reason, Péguy departed from Pascal’s inclination to denigrate ‘the World,’ although this surely did not imply indulgence of the flesh and the Devil. Rather, “the eternal is the dwelling place of the temporal.” Where Manent in his turn departs from Péguy is seen in his refusal to follow Péguy’s hope of reuniting the pagan sense of civic holiness with Christian holiness, “the city of nature with the city of grace.” No: creation and Creator remain distinct, even if intimately related in love. Manent rejects “some absurd sentence in which [Péguy] suggested that a ‘French’ saint and a ‘French’ sinner would form a community from which a ‘German’ saint would by his essence be excluded.” Saintliness is a category within Christianity, and its claims remain universal. Every country is ‘God’s country.’ Sinners abound and saints are martyred in all of them, even as Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards could be found among all social, political, and religious groupings in France. It is likely that there were saints and sinners among both Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, too.

With this book, Pierre Manent’s considerations on the greatness of political and Christian life have been introduced to Americans by an expert arranger and translator of these writings, Paul Seaton, and by Daniel J. Mahoney, author of an introduction that gets readers right on track. 

 

Notes

1. This is true of the Renaissance humanists and also of later figures—for example, André Malraux, whose “tragic humanism” clearly implies struggle and indeed sacrifice.
2. For the reader of the Bible in English, this distinction is often obscured by the translation of the word for Christian love, agape, as ‘compassion’; for example, the King James Bible does this, perhaps to avoid the Latin-based (and therefore Roman Catholic) translation, ‘charity.’
3. Nineteen is also the number of chapters in Machiavelli’s The Prince, the book in which Machiavelli proposes to replace a prince of war with the Prince of Peace. Aristotle, however, considers peace the object of war, and in Christ Christians fight spiritual warfare for the sake of spiritual peace; both understand politics in a way Machiavellians cannot.
4. This is the answer to Manent’s question, “How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of right presupposes an already instituted community or society?” That is, contra Manent, individual natural rights need not assume the ‘state of nature’ propounded by modern political philosophers, as he argues in his 1988 article, “Some Remarks on the Notion of ‘Secularization,'” reprinted in this volume.
5. In Europe, the question of non-Christians living within civil societies must always recall the ‘Jewish question.’ That question differs from the ‘Muslim question’ in several ways, one of them being the sheer size of the Muslim population; Jewish Europeans hardly threaten, and have never threatened, to overwhelm European Christians by their sheer numbers. The radical depopulation of European Jewry, first by the Holocaust and then by emigration to Israel, has caused a very different problem. “The destruction of Europe’s Jews put the Shoah at the center of Jewish consciousness, but also of European consciousness, or of Western consciousness in general,” but “this center cannot suffice to provide the spiritual coordinates we need to orient themselves,” as it is a ‘negative’ bond, sure to weaken as memories of the Shoah recede. The relations between Jews and Europeans require “a positive principle, a principle of friendship.” There is indeed such a common bond: “To express the meaning of Jerusalem in the language of Athens, since man is by nature a political animal, God can only make himself known to human beings by forming in their midst, or out of their midst, a people that can be His people.” To recall this, both political Europe and Catholic Europe should understand that while nation and Church have their important roles to play, neither role requires the assumption “that Israel is only left with blindness and hardness of heart,” as the Church wrongly taught for centuries and as some nations taught not only to the peril of Jews but ultimately to the peril of themselves.