LEO XIII and the MODERN QUEST for FRATERNITY Dissertation

THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:

LEO XIII AND THE MODERN QUEST FOR FRATERNITY

Dissertation

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Theology

By

Jason A. Heron

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton, OH

December, 2016

THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:

LEO XIII AND THE MODERN QUEST FOR FRATERNITY

Name: Heron, Jason Andrew

APPROVED BY:

______Kelly Johnson, Ph.D. Committee Chair

______Jana M. Bennett, Ph.D. Faculty Reader

______Michael Carter, Ph.D. Faculty Reader

______William L. Portier, Ph.D. Faculty Reader

______F. Russell Hittinger, Ph.D. Outside Faculty Reader

ii ABSTRACT

THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:

LEO XIII AND THE MODERN QUEST FOR FRATERNITY

Name: Heron, Jason Andrew University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. Kelly Johnson

This dissertation examines the social magisterium of Pope Leo XIII as it is developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the nationalizing process of the liberal Italian state. The thesis of the dissertation is that Leo XIII provides Catholic social teaching with a proper vision of human relationship as a mode of analogical participation in the Lord’s goodness. In his own historical context, Leo’s analogical vision of social relations is developed in tension with the nation-state’s proposal of political citizenship as the social relation that relativizes every other relation – most especially one’s ecclesial relation. In our own context, Leo’s analogical vision of social relations stands in tension with the late-modern proposal of consumerism as the social reality that relativizes every other relation – including one’s matrimonial, familial, social, and ecclesial relations.

iii

In dedication to Hannah, Joan, Margot, Eloise, James, Thomas, Frances, and Lily

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a great deal to my teachers, especially Jana Bennett, Michael Carter, and

William Portier. Professors Russell Hittinger, Thomas Kohler, and Matthew Levering deserve special mention for their commitment to my scholarly formation and their decisive influence on my research and my interpretive stance. Without their instruction, encouragement, and friendship, I would not have been able to complete this project.

Four dear friends, Andrew Courter, Ty Monroe, Alan Mostrom, and Anthony

Roselli, worked closely with me during the writing process, and I am forever in their debt.

My scholarship more broadly has benefitted from conversations, arguments, questions, and friendship with Matthew Archer, John Badley, Andrew Beauchamp, Joshua Brown,

Benjamin Heidgerken, Andrew Henrick, Colin McGuigan, Sarah Mostrom, Robert Parks,

Mac Sandlin, Katherine Schmidt, Adam Sheridan, and Joshua Wopata. Chris Tangeman was instrumental in helping me with securing valuable research materials.

My director, Kelly Johnson, deserves the highest praise for her divine patience with me in both the seminar setting and in the writing process. If I can grow up to be like Kelly, even other people will consider my life a success.

My wife, mother-in-law, and children deserve special recognition. Each of you contributed directly to my ability to finish this project in a timely manner, without harming myself. My heart is full of you, and I dedicate this work to you.

All glory and honor is due to the Most Holy Trinity.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

DEDICATION ...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

INTRODUCTION: POPE LEO XIII, MODERN CITIZENSHIP, AND ANALOGY ...... 1

PART I: CITIZENSHIPS ...... 36

CHAPTER 1.1 UNIVOCAL AND EQUIVOCAL COMMUNITATES: THEORIZING CITIZENSHIP AFTER 1789 ...... 37

CHAPTER 1.2: ESCHATOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: MAZZINI’S COMMUNITATES AND THE FAILURE OF ANALOGY ...... 75

CHAPTER 2 THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS: CITIZENSHIP WITHIN LEO XIII’S SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY ...... 101

PART II: INSTITUTIONS...... 137

CHAPTER 3 ECCLESIAL MUNERA AND THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS: LEONINE ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE PROPER CARE OF HUMAN PERSONS ...... 138

CHAPTER 4 THE ORIGINAL COMMUNITAS AND THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS: LEONINE MATRIMONIAL THEOLOGY AND LIBERAL PEDAGOGY ...... 182

CHAPTER 5 THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS, CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY ...... 229

CONCLUSION ...... 265

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 268

vi INTRODUCTION:

POPE LEO XIII, MODERN CITIZENSHIP, AND ANALOGY

Not long ago I watched as two theologians tried to give a theological account of the beauty they observed in a viral internet video of a thousand Italian musicians playing a single song in unison. After quipping about contemporary anxieties surrounding the sight of large crowds of Italians doing things in unison, the theologians set to work to answer what they, as Catholics, would say to the musicians in response to both the beauty of their performance and the evident pleasure the musicians took in performing as one. Given that the group was not a religious one, the theologians shied away from identifying in the performance a species of Christian unity. But given that the theologians had grave concerns about modern individualism and consumerism, they also shied away from identifying in the performance nothing more than a group of isolated individuals who happened to be together in the same place at the same time. They were concerned that ultimately theology has nothing to say to the group of musicians aside from a caution about the simultaneous lure of fascism and individualism.

We have here an enduring problem that occupies a great deal of attention within the tradition of Catholic social teaching. The problem can be stated theologically and historically as follows. From a theological perspective, given that the Christian doctrine of humanity’s creation in the imago Dei contributes to a vision of the unrepeatable, irreducible dignity of

1 each individual human person, and given that Christ has redeemed individual souls, not some abstract humanity, how do we affirm the value of social relations in a way that does not utterly subordinate them to the individuality of each person? From an historical perspective, given that the promotion of the dignity of the human person now takes place in a social, economic, and political context characterized by methodical individualism, how do we affirm the value of social relations in a way that does not reduce them to aggregations of individuals?

In the anxiety of the theologians counseling against fascism and individualism alike, the problem is simply acknowledged. Catholic theology, knowing what it knows about the unity of the Church and the dignity of the human person, can offer sage advice to human animals. But fearing the charge of imperialism, the theologians avoided suggesting they knew anything about the animals’ supposedly “natural” desire to play music together. Fearing the charge of triumphalism, they similarly avoided suggesting that the unity the animals were enjoying is to be found in its purest historical form in the Catholic Church, and that there, it is foretaste of beatitude. And fearing the possibility of further underwriting the hypertrophied individualism of late modernity, the theologians were unwilling to chalk it all up to the preference of these few people who desired to unite, for only the length of a single rock song, to accomplish a common goal. After the conversation between the two theologians, I noticed th at neither of them had suggested that perhaps a perfectly theological and perfectly Catholic response would be to simply ask the musicians when it would be possible to play together again.

This is a strange way to introduce the social magisterium of Pope Leo XIII (1810-

1903; reigned 1878-1903). Leo would have little to say about tightly coordinated musical performances available on the internet. But Leo has much to say on the underlying question

2 about the individual person’s transcendent dignity and that same individual person’s relations to others. Moreover, he would have much to say in terms that remain relevant to us. That is,

Leo is not relevant to addressing the question about individual and relation because he has developed an abstract treatise on the one and the many; or because he has left to us a systematic articulation of the nature of the ecclesial mark of unity; or because he has extended the Thomistic teaching that the human animal is possessed of an inclination to life in society. Rather, Leo is relevant to addressing the question because he is attuned to the social, political, economic, and historical reality that the transcendent dignity of the human person is now affirmed in a context concerned less and less with relations and duties and more and more with preferences and rights.

Leo’s relevance in this regard was first brought to my attention by the Catholic philosopher, Russell Hittinger. His work on the “social aspects of the imago Dei,” introduced me to a very specific way of looking at Leo’s magisterium, Catholic social teaching more broadly, and the historical context of both in the 19th century. In an article on Catholic social anthropology, Hittinger writes of the new “anthropological and political creed” exported to the West after the French Revolution of 1789. This creed, summed up in the revolutionary ideals of liberté, egalité, et fraternité, made a startling promise. On Hittinger’s read of the history, citizenship was proposed as the form of human relationship that would reconstitute “the broken relations of nature and history.” There will be much to say about this phrase below. But for now, I only ask the reader to discern with me in that phrase a profound hope that is interpretable from at least two perspectives.

What I mean is that from one primarily philosophical perspective we can discern here the hope that overcoming violence, injustice, suffering, exploitation, domination, neglect, and the like among humans will not terminate in the complete isolation of

3 individuals, one from another. It is reasonable and good to hope that we can avoid an anthropology that views relation qua relation as a threat to the self. But from another more theological perspective, we can discern here the hope that reconstituting the broken relations of nature and history is in fact a part of the human vocation to participate in a moral order on which humans are utterly dependent. When we see our desire for unity and our failure to achieve unity from both perspectives, we are squarely in the realm of Leo’s social anthropology.

I. Why Leo?

Leo is the first pontiff to address in a systematic way and from the perspective of the

Roman Catholic Church, the great social, economic, and political questions posed by the modern nation-state. Though Pius VII and Cardinal Consalvi negotiated with Napoleon

Bonaparte a momentous and novel agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and

France with the Concordat of 1801, and though Pius IX made known the modern Catholic critique of liberalism to risorgimento Italy, it is not until Leo XIII’s magisterium that we see the

Vatican systematically countering an encroaching liberalism while simultaneously trying to find ways to work within liberal structures in order to defend the liberty of the Church.

Because this is the case, Leo’s long pontificate is one of the most significant in modern history. From 1878 to 1903, Leo and his staff transformed the Pian polemic of 1864’s Quanta cura and the Syllabus errorum into a twofold strategy designed to call liberal regimes to account.

The first part of the strategy was to critique the errors of liberalism. Here, Leo was most indebted to the thought and posture of Pius IX, whose social polemic was constituted by a consistent rehearsal and critique of the errors of liberalism. At every opportunity, Leo decried the social ills wrought by liberalism, most especially as they impacted the lives of

4 individual political subjects, families, intermediate social bodies (economic associations, unions, the press, schools, and religious orders and confraternities/sodalities), and the public, legal presence of the Roman Catholic Church. Based in philosophical and moral error, liberalism as Leo encountered and critiqued it expressed a surprising blend of hubris and lack of imagination that left the old pope, by the early years of the 20th century, worried about what was to come for European nations.

The second part of the strategy was to work for the restoration of social and political confidence in the Roman Catholic Church as the pillar and bulwark of truth that could contribute to the healing of a society fallen into error. The distinctive Leonine tack here was to use philosophy to argue for the liberty and autonomy of the Church in all things that come under her jurisdiction. Following on this insistence on the liberty of the Church was

Leo’s expansive account of the Church’s traditional jurisdiction, which always already and necessarily comprehends both spiritual and temporal realities. Leo’s ecclesiology was one that liberal regimes, ultimately, could not countenance.

It followed naturally from the insistence on this expansive jurisdiction that Leo would consistently claim ecclesial rights and duties in spheres where liberal regimes supposedly feared to tread: the human conscience and intellect, the human will, the human family, and non-political human relations or associations. Because of his insistence on the

Church’s rights and duties here over against the liberal regime’s, Leo was engaged for twenty-five years in jurisdictional debates regarding education, matrimonial law, family rights, wages, and more generally the legislation of “modern liberties” like freedom of the press, of speech, of worship, of conscience/opinion, and of association.

Leo’s undergirding assumption is that the Church, on account of her spiritual mission in history, necessarily possesses a unique authority to care for the human person,

5 who is the preeminent res sacra in temporalibus. That is, the human person is that animal whom the Lord has created just a little lower than the angels, that animal who is irreducibly spiritual and corporeal, and so that animal who lives in a history with a spiritual and not solely material telos. Throughout his pontificate, Leo works with an understanding that he teaches in a modern world that has reimagined human teloi in only material terms.1 Were this actually an adequate anthropology, Leo would have no case against the pretensions of the liberal regime that must envision the human person in solely material terms in order to finally secure what the civil power had never been able to wrest from the Church: universal jurisdiction. But because liberal anthropology is founded on a silence regarding human nature, Leo is able to attack the liberal regime at a fatally weak point in its otherwise formidable armor.2

1 It now seems generally accepted among critics of liberalism that we live and work in a world that reimagines the human person as without teloi at all. Perhaps the better way to say it would be that contemporary socio- political discourse presupposes a human person who can imagine infinite teloi based on the caprice of the will. Put either way, it is not clear that Leo imagines modern socio-political discourse in such terms. The transition to this later reimagining of the human person was certainly underway in Leo’s time. But his concern was with a materialism born out of Western, progressive confidence in human reason, science, economic innovation, and capitalist production. Our post-20th century context is deeply jaded and has replaced this progressive confidence with a ban on normative anthropological claims. Pope John Paul II called this “negative anthropology.” Leo did not foresee this, but I suspect he would not be surprised by it. 2 By “liberal anthropology” and “silence,” I mean to follow Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Marc A. LePain, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), especially his work on the “hidden man,” at 112-55. There, Manent tells the story of the deliberate destruction of the Aristotelian doctrine of “substance” (the Carthago delenda of modern philosophy). According to Manent, Hobbes attempts to destroy substance by homogenizing all human faculties and passions and naming them all species of the one truly human desire for power. Locke receives this tradition and as “soon as power provides the universal idiom capable of giving an account of what previously had been interpreted by recourse to the idea of substance, the question of human substance or essence, of what is proper to man, can be left aside or at least loses something of its urgency and necessity. We can know nothing but powers, that refer in a certain sense to a je ne sais quoi as their support, in the case of man to an ‘agent,’ to a ‘substance’ if one wishes, but this substance is inaccessible and unknowable. It makes no sense to inquire into it” (116). The power we can observe is the human power to cause effects. Beyond this, we know nothing. And so human “artistic” character “devours” the human “natural” character such that the human person becomes an effect of the human person. Manent puts it this way: “What was considered as the human ‘given,’ as that particular man, now appears as an effect produced by man. Or, more precisely, that particular man understands himself only as a product resulting from the transformation of a prehuman matter by … by what? By whom? Shall we say yet again by man, when ‘man’ is the result of this production process or perhaps rather merges with the process itself” (116-17)? When the rules governing the labor that is man’s production of himself come to be described solely in terms of utility, we see completed all at once the destruction of substance, the simultaneous-continuous presupposition of it, and the deliberate silence regarding this presupposition.

6 Leo’s social anthropology, rooted in scripture, natural law, and Christian doctrine, is the animating principle of his entire social doctrine. The Church’s doctrine of and care for the human person, created in the imago Dei, is the coordinating device that makes Leo’s strategy a coherent one in his milieu. First, the human person is the site that brings to light the modern errors and social ills central to Pian jeremiads and Leonine arguments. Second, the human person is the spiritual and social reality that calls for a support that transcends what the civil power is able to provide. And third, the human person is the subjective source and objective end of all the duties and rights possessed by every social sphere: domestic, civil, economic, political, and ecclesial. In sum, then, the Pian-Leonine criticism of the liberal regime and defense of ecclesial liberty have for their deepest rationale a conviction that the

Church has been founded by Christ, in history, to bring the rational animal into communion with her Lord. The providential ordering of that animal’s nature to the goods of flourishing, family, society, and truth requires that the Church do everything in her power to protect the human person from any claimant that would denigrate human dignity in any way.

John Courtney Murray’s assessment of Leo’s tactic here is accurate. He writes in a

1953 article on Leo’s conception of the separation of Church and state: “The totalitarian state can never destroy the Church; but it does destroy men and their freedom. [...] Hence

[Leo’s] emphasis on the ultimate bulwark of the freedom of man and society. This bulwark is not offered by parchment declarations of the rights of man, however useful they may be. It consists in the living reality of the freedom of the Church.”3 Murray goes on to describe

Leo’s “rather full articulation” throughout his corpus of the res sacras in temporalibus that

3 John Courtney Murray, “Leo XIII: Separation of Church and State,” Theological Studies 14, no. 2 (1953): 209. I am highlighting here an important but less significant feature of Murray’s interest in Leo’s social doctrine. Murray’s main concern is to differentiate the U.S. vision of disestablishment and separation from the “Continental” vision criticized by Leo in Immortale Dei, Diuturnum, and most significantly for U.S. Catholics, Longinqua oceani. Michael J. Schuck has given a convincing criticism of Murray’s selective reading of Leo’s teaching and of the thought of America’s founding fathers. Cf. “John Courtney Murray’s Problematic Interpretations of Leo XIII and the American Founders,” The Thomist 55, no. 4 (1991): 595-612.

7 justify the Church’s care for even what the temporal power would reserve to itself. The chief res in Murray’s estimation of Leo’s work are: the matrimonial bond, the parental bond, the parent’s responsibility to educate, the human person’s political obligation, the dignity of workers, human equality rooted in the image of God, the inherent value of economic life, the natural and supernatural works of charity and justice, and “the patrimony of ideas which are the foundation of human society.” These ideas include law, freedom, justice, property, moral obligation, civic obedience, legitimate rule, etc. “But the chiefly sacred thing in the temporal order, in Leo’s eyes, is the inner unity, integrity, and peace of man, who is both

Christian and citizen.”4

Murray captures the varied concerns of Leo’s entire body of social doctrine and notes that the human person, Christian and citizen at once, is “the earthly pivot of the

Leonine doctrine of concordia.”5 This doctrine pervades Leonine thought. Out of concern for the souls under the Church’s care, Leo teaches in order to foster harmonious relations between all spheres of society. Though the theologico-political doctrine of the two spheres has a venerable history in Catholic thought, the Pian-Leonine project demonstrates the doctrine’s inadequacy in the face of liberalism’s 19th century development. In the Syllabus errorum, Pius IX implies in sections 65-74 that at least a third sphere - th e matrimonial- familial as a society in its own right - requires the special attention and protection of the

Church over against the de-sacramentalizing and secularizing influence of the liberal regime.

Concordia is thus essential not only for the thriving of the Church in its relations to various regimes, but for the flourishing of human society imagined in its proliferating variety. Strictly speaking then, Murray’s understanding of concordia as a doctrine pertaining to the “two societies” unfairly houses Leonine thought within a reductive obsession with the

4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

8 Church/state issue. Though no one could suggest that Church/state issues are unimportant in the 19th century, the prudential creativity and elegance of Leo’s thought on social orders are not exhausted by imagining concordia in terms of a duality between the civil and spiritual powers. Rather, concordia refers more fundamentally to the coordination of all of the human person’s faculties, powers, and accidents - including domestic, social, civic, and ecclesial relations and bodies - toward beatitude.

Leo believes such a coordination is possible on theological grounds. The matrimonial-familial unit, society, the political body, and of course the Church all have their origin in the Divine Wisdom who has furnished human living with such social bonds as are necessary for the perfection of human nature. The number of social spheres, on Leo’s reasoning, must proliferate beyond the dyad of Church/state. That the number of spheres may not proliferate indiscriminately in Leo’s thought is a feature of his stable anthropology.

The human person, being the kind of animal she is, requires a limited number of spheres in which to flourish socially. Liberalism seeks to reduce the number of spheres to two: the State and the individual citizen’s will. In a more classical vision of the social order, the number of spheres might proliferate as follows: 1) autonomous moral agent responsible for acts; 2) matrimonial unit; 3) family unit; 4) intermediate associational bodies; 5) society at large; 6) the civic body; and 7) the religious body. The Leonine perspective distills this proliferation down to three necessary societies, or institutions, each of which exists and acts in history in a manner that should complement and support the others. The three institutions are the family, the state, and the Church. These three stand as unique institutions within a proliferated vision of society on account of their relation to the human will. That is, these three institutions are not solely dependent on the wills of their members in the way that other intermediate associations are. One may imagine a variety of associations arising from

9 the voluntary membership of humans. Indeed, one may find it difficult to put a limit on the number and type of associations that may arise from the human will.6 But these three primary institutions do not rely solely on the agency of the human will for their existence in history. Rather, they rely principally on the Divine Will.7

The family, the state, and the Church are each given by the Creator for the flourishing of his human creation. And because that flourishing is ultimately the return of all things to the Creator, Leo would consider the origin and end of these three principal institutions to be identical. Because of this identity of origin and end, disorder among these institutions is no small matter. Rather such a disorder betrays a fundamental misunderstanding not only of the natures and relations of the institutions, but also of the human nature that is both anterior and posterior to those institutions. Thus, in the development of Catholic social teaching in the modern context, Leo’s teaching is important in a number of ways. Against the reductive liberal vision of the social order, Leo affirms a simple and commonsensical vision of the pluriformity of human society. Against the monism of the liberal regime’s conception of sovereignty rooted in the will of sovereign, Leo affirms a plurality of hierarchical sovereignties, each with its own proper jurisdiction, duties, rights, and gifts to offer human persons on their way to beatitude. And against the silence of

6 I will return to the issue of civil society at the end of the dissertation, when I will have more to say about social membership based on the will of the member, imagined under the aspect of the consumer. 7 It falls beyond the scope of the project here to elaborate on the participatory relationship of free human wills and the sovereign Divine Will. Suffice it to say here, however, that I am in no way suggesting that a marriage, a family, a political community, or a Christian community has nothing to do with the voluntary agency of the members comprising the community. Rather, I am only suggesting that when it comes to the family, the state, and the Church, members must acknowledge that they are entering an institution that has preceded them and that will outlast them. Membership in these institutions without such an acknowledgment makes little to no sense. Entrance into, contribution to, and benefit from these three institutions differs qualitatively from the same experiences of membership in teams, businesses, clubs, and other partnerships comprising civil society. We can verify the uniqueness of this reality by considering what happens to humans who are harmed by or neglected in these three institutions. Considering the family alone, the profound impact that comes from the experience of abuse or neglect testifies not only to the social utility of the family, but also to the plain sense that the family ought to live up to certain expectations. When and where the family fails to do so, lives are damaged. It is normal to form expectations of associations. But when the Chicago Cubs or Starbucks fail to live up to the expectations of their members, lives do not unravel.

10 liberal anthropology, Leo affirms the rational animal, created in the imago Dei, made for life in friendship with the Lord, angels, and others. To the extent that we are still living in a world shaped by the failures of liberalism, Leo thus proves enduringly significant as an historical commentator and even a contemporary interlocutor.

II. Why citizenship?

My original interest in the category of citizenship was inspired by Leo’s 1880 encyclical, Sapientiae Christianae, on the duties of Christian citizens. As many Catholics have known in different ways throughout history, the relationship between the duties following on one’s political and ecclesial memberships can prove difficult to manage. And so, Leo’s encyclical seemed to me to be a useful place to begin examining his thought with an eye toward his enduring relevance to the social and political vocations of Catholics. Sapientiae

Christianae, while it examines the duties of a Christian citizen, is principally an argument regarding the proper relations between the social and political bodies of which the citizen is a part - especially the ecclesial, political, and domestic relations. The encyclical does not offer a definition of citizenship, a challenge to the existence of citizenship, or any other theoretical intervention in the category as a piece of political philosophy. Instead, the encyclical is one of Leo’s efforts to shape the social and political imaginations of Catholics. That is, within the notion that Christian citizens are required to negotiate their various duties to the social bodies of which they a part is a series of questions about the relationship between those social bodies within a given polity; the life of human persons within the memberships indexed to those bodies; and the relative utility of those bodies vis-a-vis the many needs of human flourishing.

As I considered the imbrication of these various bodies, I began to recognize more clearly what my teacher, Russell Hittinger, has emphasized in his work on papal social

11 teaching. Leo’s estimation of the relationship of these social bodies to each other relies on a definite ordering that corresponds, not to the preferences of the members or the contingencies of history, but to a supposed order in creation, available to the rational mind and given by the Divine Wisdom for the flourishing of both individual persons and the social whole. This ordering is straightforward enough. Leo teaches that the Church, as the universal body of Christ, exists “above” all political regimes and social bodies. The marital union and the family, as the fundamental cells of society, exist “below” all political regimes and other social bodies. And in between the Church and the domestic sphere, one finds a variety of political and social relations that constitute the array of memberships that occasions our continual interest in human officiis, or duties.

The striking thing to me about Leo’s teaching in this regard was that though he treats this ordering as a gift of the Divine Wisdom, his own historical milieu was the site of intense contest regarding exactly this ordering. That is, human persons living within Leo’s harmoniously ordered social spheres did not experience that ordering as harmonious.

Indeed, this historical fact is one of the principal concerns of papal social teaching. What was

Leo doing? How could he look back on the 19th century, of all centuries, and suggest that the many social bodies comprising the human experience of relationship and moral obligation are in fact a divinely ordered and harmonious array of complementary spheres?

Why would he?

Kristin Heyer suggests that this aspect of papal social teaching “reflects a Thomistic understanding of Christians and the political order, based on (considerable) trust in human reason and on optimism concerning the potential of natural humanity to establish a just and

12 peaceful political order governed by law.”8 Emphasizing the prominent place of natural law reasoning in Catholic social teaching, Heyer also highlights the central place of the imago Dei in the Church’s social anthropology, suggesting that this mode of doing social ethics should be styled, following John Courtney Murray’s typology, as “incarnational humanism.”9 Murray identifies another mode of doing social ethics, however: “eschatological humanism.”10 This latter mode is rooted in scripture rather than natural law and emphasizes “the permanence of sin and the discontinuities between grace and human effort.”11 Heyer suggests this is a more

“Augustinian approach” that “remains suspicious of human reason or of any secular efforts.”12

By way of reinforcing Heyer’s assessment of these two modes or approaches to interpreting the Church’s relationship to the world, we can proliferate the descriptors and practitioners that correspond to the twofold division. First, the Thomistic mode. Within

Catholic social teaching, Heyer identifies this as the pre-conciliar mode of papal social teaching. The mode is fundamentally conservative and philosophical. It is rooted in a confidence that the reality of the natural law makes possible a “public” form of discourse that emphasizes cooperation, analogical relations between differing perspectives and social spheres, and a “public square” where Church and world may peacefully reason together about the common good. Nature and grace, in this mode, and so human effort and divine initiative, are intimately related to one another. And when differences between the two must

8 Kristin E. Heyer, Prophetic and Public: The Social Witness of U.S. Catholicism, (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006), 34-5. 9 Ibid., 38, 29. 10 Cf., ibid., 29. 11 Ibid., 29. 12 Ibid., 38. The reader will note here and below that Heyer and I continue to use the terms Augustinian and Thomistic. And in our treatment of these modes or tendencies, we do not actually speak of the work of Augustine and Thomas directly. This is illuminating in its own right. Heyer’s valuable topography of the Catholic theology’s relationship to society is a topography of styles born out of theological training and tendencies.

13 be overcome, a Thomistic mode points to the participatory nature of the human intellect.

Caricatured negatively, this mode dilutes the distinctive nature of Christian thought and practice for the sake of a supposed moral minimalism that supposedly facilitates broader agreement among human communities. Were we to attach names to this perspective, we would include with the pre-conciliar popes such theologians as J. Brian Hehir, the Himes brothers, John Courtney Murray, and neo-liberal and neo-conservative Catholics interested in dialogue with and conversion of state and society.

Second, the Augustinian mode. Within Catholic social teaching, Heyer identifies this mode with conciliar and post-conciliar papal social teaching. The mode is fundamentally radical and theological. Rooted in a scriptural approach to the Church’s relationship to “the times,” this mode takes a prophetic stance that does not necessarily hope for intelligibility or commensurability across the various lines that separate Church and world. Rather than a public or political theology, we might identify here a “theological politics” that does not bother to search for cooperation or analogy. Lacking confidence in the human intellect’s ability to overcome the will’s corruption, this mode emphasizes more the infinite distance between human fallenness and divine grace rather than the fundamental dependence of human nature on that same grace. Caricatured negatively, this mode dilutes the intelligibility of human inclinations and their goodness, suggesting that human hope should be placed only in membership within the unique tradition of the Christian community, where persons learn the liturgical and moral practices necessary for authentic human life. Were we to attach names to this perspective, we would include with certain strains of post-conciliar papal teaching such theologians as Paul Hanley Furfey, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Baxter, and the

“post-liberal” school of Protestants and Catholics who are interested in what they have taken

14 Alasdair MacIntyre to mean when he cryptically referred to waiting for “a new and no doubt very different Benedict.”

Leo, being a committed Thomist, does indeed work in the “incarnational” mode. His account of society, its errors, and the requisite remedies is, moreover, usually intellectualist more so than it is voluntarist. One can trace the line, throughout his entire corpus, that connects intellectual, philosophical error to social upheaval and suffering. A contemporary critic of neo-Thomism once told me that the neo-Thomists believe that if Catholic theology could just get the metaphysics right, everything else would fall into place in society. Leo, it seems to me, does not necessarily believe this. Though one does have a harder time finding the line that would connect the corruption of the human will to the origin of philosophical error and the corresponding social upheavals, I believe the line is there in Leo’s magisterium.

One must consult his many encyclicals on prayer, his enduring interest in Francis of Assisi, and his recommendation of lay membership in the Franciscan Third Order to develop a well-rounded account of what he thought was necessary for overcoming human suffering and error. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Leo enjoys a pronounced confidence in

Thomism as a philosophical purifier.

But of all the historical epochs in Christian history, the long 19th century would seem to cry out for a Christian ethical assessment in the mode of the “eschatological humanism” of Augustinianism. Furthermore, the presence of an Augustinian mode is obvious in Leo’s own description of his milieu. He is the modern pope who catalogues in a pessimistic, Augustinian mode the social consequences of disordered loves. So Leo is no stranger to the corrupt human will and the infinite gap between the heavenly and earthly cities. Leo’s knowledge of the Doctor Gratiae was certainly not thorough or direct. He received what he knew of Augustine through the mediations of his training in a more

15 scholastic mode of theology and philosophy. But in light of Murray’s typology and Heyer’s interpretation, it is illuminating to note that Leo opens his encyclical, Humanum genus, with a reflection on Augustine’s two cities and their divergent loves. This encyclical, furthermore, is a trenchant critique of Freemasonry and its implication in a variety of social issues that Leo examines throughout his long pontificate. Not least among these issues are the degradations being suffered by the laboring poor, the social ramifications (especially for women and children) of divorce, and the freedom of the Catholic Church to exercise its unique ministry in public. In other words, Leo suffers no shortage of examples that could understandably lead a Christian ethicist to mute the scriptural themes of the Divine Wisdom, the imago Dei, and the rational availability of the natural law. Leo’s own catalogue of the “ills” or “errors” or “tempests” besetting persons and society suggests that the 19th century is the social setting par excellence - perhaps second only to Augustine’s in the fifth century - for a Christian ethicist’s emphasis on the vanity of this passing life, the sufferings endured by Christ and his disciples, and the Lord’s final triumph over evil in the eschaton.

I began to wonder what to do with the fact that we could criticize Leo and the presuppositions of his social thought in a variety of interesting but potentially confusing ways. Leo - and indeed the bulk of 19th century social Catholicism - is often criticized for taking a paternalistic approach to the sufferings of this life. That is, Leo continues the medieval and early modern approach to the degradations suffered by humans in society in that he imagines life as a vale of tears through which we (read: the poor) suffer patiently as we await in hope the coming of our savior, Christ. But this emphasis on the temporary nature of suffering and its pale fire when it is compared to the glory that will be revealed seems to correspond tidily to the Augustinian mode of an “eschatological humanism.” That is, we live in a world corrupted by sin and characterized by a battle between the heavenly

16 city, ordered around love of the Lord, and the earthly city, ordered around love of the self.

Our lot in time is to struggle through this war-torn land, patiently persevering until the end.

When it comes to addressing his flock - and especially the poor among them - Leo’s

Augustinianism is too paternalistic, too pessimistic, too cynical about the enduring reality of human suffering. It appears to give persons and communities a pass on addressing systemic injustices.

On the other hand, we may easily criticize Leo for being insufficiently Augustinian.

His dependence on Thomistic conceptions of creation, natural law, and the imago Dei supposedly prevents him from appreciating the ways in which this world is fundamentally disordered by sin. When he speaks of the ordered harmony of the social spheres and of the complementary nature of a human person’s many duties, he seems to consciously neglect his own historical location, where harmony and complementarity have given way to strife and division. Wouldn’t it be better if his social magisterium were more explicitly attuned to the realities of life in this vale of tears?

But then again it seems that a Thomistic, “incarnational” mode would better serve as an approach to the sufferings of this life. Rather than counseling the poor and suffering to bear their cross patiently in anticipation of future reward after their miserable sojourn, the

Christian working in an incarnational mode could join with the suffering, incarnating the love of Christ in time and place, in full, loving recognition of the imago Dei of each person.

Furthermore, the Christian working in this incarnational mode could partner with non-

Christians based on their shared understanding that overcoming this suffering via love is a matter of the deepest justice and a task to be taken seriously by all persons of good will.

Put more formally then, the Thomistic, incarnational mode may seem a more attractive way of bringing the Gospel to the world when it comes to social issues and the

17 Christian commitment to live out the Lord’s justice in history. And the Augustinian, eschatological mode may seem a more attractive way of bringing the Gospel to the world when it comes to political issues and the Christian negotiation of cooperation between the two cities. But attraction to the reverse of these modes appears to us to be the mistake of

Christendom, or at least the absolutisms of the ancien régime. My project here is, in part, an effort to overcome some of the difficulties inherent to approaching Catholic social teaching and Christian political philosophy from within the context Heyer describes so accurately.

Leo works in a mode that does not tidily correspond to the divisions we have set up lately.

A part of the problem is that the Christian response to suffering, commitment to justice, or cooperative pursuit of the good is not a matter of tweaking the levels of one’s incarnational or eschatological sensibilities, let alone one’s Augustinian or Thomistic commitments. It is instead a matter of loving the Lord and the divine image borne by every neighbor in the midst of immense and complex challenges. If there were such a thing as a purely incarnational, Thomistic mode of doing Christian social ethics, the task of negotiating the relationship between one’s ecclesial membership and one’s political citizenship would be easy to describe. And if there were a way to actually live according to this mode, the task of carrying out the corresponding duties would be similarly easy. Likewise, if there were such a thing as a purely eschatological, Augustinian mode. In either case, the historical phenomena of overlapping social jurisdictions, competing social memberships, conflicting social duties, and so on would resolve into tidy descriptions of complementarity or contrast, justice or suffering, cooperation or perseverance, etc. But neither Augustine nor Aquinas offers us anything so resolvable.13

13 The best description of Augustine’s unwillingness to finally endorse or totally abandon the earthly city is Rowan Williams’ important article, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55-72. Arguing against Hannah Arendt’s accusation that Augustine undermines the “public realm” of

18 The first thing to say regarding Leo’s relationship to these two modes is that he would never have thought to pit Augustinianism against Thomism any more than Aquinas himself would have thought that he was offering his students an alternative to

Augustinianism. This relatively recent conceit does indeed explain much about our contemporary milieu. But it also obscures much about Leo’s own method, his understanding of his own sources, and his historical location.

Considering Leo’s method, it is illuminating to note that Leo relies on Augustine in order to focus, not solely on the contrast between the two cities, but also on another element in Augustine’s social and political thought that does not fit conveniently into the description we have developed of an “Augustinian mode:” the notion that the Church, in reality, forms human persons who are uniquely suited for leading a deeply political form of life characterized by virtue, obedience, and devotion to the supreme human good. As I will discuss further in the conclusion, this is perhaps the most Augustinian aspect of Leo’s thought, and it conditions the way he envisions Christian citizenship and the nature of the political as such. By emphasizing this element of Augustine’s thought, Leo suggests that within the historical context of the battle raging between the two cities, the Church remains essential for a more authentic human sociality and politics. This is the case not only because a robust doctrine of creation and the natural law leads us to affirm that humans are political animals made for cooperation in justice toward the good, but also because a robust doctrine

ancient politics and introduces instead the community organized around caritas, which latter community is essentially a-political, Williams suggests that Augustine is actually the one who calls the public/political to account, accusing every regime from Athens to Babylon to Rome of being insufficiently political. Rather than extracting persons from the pursuit of excellence in the polis in order to insert those persons in an egalitarian, privatized communion of charity, Williams suggests Augustine is recommending a politics that accounts for our humility, and even the “awkwardness and provisionality, the endlessly revisable character (morally speaking) of our social and political relationships [...]” (69). This latter emphasis on the endless revisability of social and political relations can also serve as a cue to how Aquinas would avoid finally endorsing or totally abandoning the earthly city. His treatment of political prudence and the historical contingencies of determining the natural law in a particular way are both suggestive in this direction.

19 of the Lord’s cross leads us to affirm that humans are loving animals made for sacrifice for the good of our neighbors. Leo’s 1880 encyclical on the duties of Christian citizens is best interpreted from both of these perspectives, for such an interpretation enables us to appreciate why the historical, political category of citizenship retains significance for Leo and for Catholic social teaching after him. Working from both perspectives prevents a contingency like citizenship from disappearing into irrelevance, which is what would happen to it if we could catalogue it away as one more feature of an endlessly harmonious creation, or if we could dismiss it as one more feature of the failed imperialism of the sinful human will. Instead, citizenship, like all other memberships, including those inaugurated by the bloody waters of both birth and baptism, is a matter of love. And as Aquinas learned from

Augustine, our loves must be ordered if we are to live in harmony with our created nature and in a manner befitting a disciple of the Crucified.14

Considering Leo’s historical location, it is always necessary to remember his proximity to the Holy See’s temporal sovereignty. It was only during the reign of his immediate predecessor, Pius IX, that an upstart national movement in Italy had deprived the

Holy See of its historical, temporal jurisdiction over the Papal States. This deprivation resulted in the “Roman Question” - the Italian problem of relating the Holy See’s local temporal sovereignty and universal spiritual jurisdiction to a geographically bound nation.

After the creation of Italy, was the pope to be an Italian? A Roman? Or something else entirely? Within the categories necessary for nationalization, it is unclear how to categorize, accommodate, or manage a social and political entity like the Holy See.

14 As Williams puts it: “For Augustine, the problem of the life of the two cities is, like every other question presented to the theologian, inextricably linked with the fundamental issue of what it is to be a creature animated by desire, whose characteristic marks are lack and hunger, who is made to be this kind of creature by a central and unforgettable absence, by lack and hunger. On such a basis there is no possibility of building a theory that would allow final security and ‘finishedness’ to any form of political life. The claims of such a theory would be, ultimately, anti-political because anti-human: denials of death.” Cf. “Politics and the Soul,” 69. Leo would have appreciated this estimation of life in the two cities. In the chapters below, I hope to show why.

20 This Roman Question is essential for understanding Leo’s relationship to the two modes we are discussing here. In the first place, and as I will examine more closely in chapter two, Leo receives from Pius IX’s social magisterium a very specific mandate.

Following on the elimination of the temporal sovereignty and on the pope’s “imprisonment” in the Vatican, Leo’s task is not to restyle papal sovereignty in spiritual terms now that the

Holy See has finally been relieved of the burden of temporal sovereignty. Rather, Leo’s task is to argue for the restoration of the temporal sovereignty in the most spiritual terms possible.

To restyle papal sovereignty solely in spiritual terms, as we will see in chapter three below, would be to play directly into the hands of liberalizing and nationalizing governments throughout Europe. Indeed, such a restyling would contribute to the construction of a decidedly un-Augustinian and un-Thomistic political situation in which the Church’s social role is neither prophetic nor public, neither radical nor reasonable. Instead, the Church’s social role is relegated to the privacy of the individual believer’s conscience. In Leo’s milieu, spiritualizing the Church’s authority means depriving the Church of every vestige of social and political authority.

In light of this situation, it is easier to see why every pope from Pius IX to at least

Pius XI envisions the work of restoring the temporal sovereignty as a reasonable goal. Given that the history of Church-state relations in Europe provided the modern papacy with no scriptural, theological, philosophical, or canonical category for speaking of the papacy in purely spiritual terms, working for the restoration of the Holy See’s temporal sovereignty was bound to seem like a duty. And given that Italy, and indeed many states throughout

Europe, did not appear to the Holy See to be founded on stable, enduring principles or structures, the restoration of the temporal sovereignty could appear to be not only beneficial to the Holy See, but beneficial to social order throughout the continent. Thus, Leo’s is not

21 the social or political context in which the Holy See would speak in a prophetic, sectarian mode about the fundamental contrast between the Church and the world. A supposedly

“Augustinian mode” would simply reify the separations and exclusions the liberal nations were trying to effect through legislation and diplomatic policy. Neither is Leo’s the social or political context in which the Holy See would speak placidly about the fundamental compatibility of the Church and the world. The effort to separate the Church from society and politics was not a peaceful, amicable activity. Rather, Leo’s is the social and political context in which the Holy See seeks to address the historical reality of incompatibility in light of the Christian confidence that sin and disorder are not willed by the Creator. The

Lord does indeed assume flesh in order to bring fire and a sword to our disordered loves.

But he nevertheless assumes flesh.

In my estimation, citizenship, though it is not the only or the most important topic of Leo’s social magisterium, serves as an important sign that he thought deeply about the

Gospel’s relationship not only to the human soul, but to human society. Citizenship is one of those sites where Church and world meet for better and for worse. But Leo approaches the topic with admirably theological perspicacity. Not even political citizenship, which seems so forgettably abstract in light of the proximity and gravity of kinship ties, which seems so pathetically temporary in light of the transcendence and finality of ecclesial ties - not even this contingent, imperfect relation escapes the attention of the Lord’s provision for our flourishing. The way I will describe it in this project is that in Leo’s handling of the political nature of the human animal, we are never allowed to forget that human sociality expresses something beyond itself – that it participates in an order not of human creation. Christians are accustomed to speaking in terms of participation like this when it comes to matrimony as a sacrament of the union enjoyed between Christ and his Body. Similarly, we are accustomed

22 to speaking this way about ecclesial membership as an anticipation of beatitude. But what would it mean to speak of other forms of human relation as signifying our participation in the divine economy?

One way of approaching the question could be to consider the contemporary

Canadian political philosopher, Ronald Beiner’s sensible and indeed stirring description of why we should continue to be interested in citizenship. In the introduction to his collection of essays on “the problem of political community,” Beiner writes:

It is easy to see why the civic-republican vision of politics is normatively attractive, and why, having enjoyed a long and illustrious tradition of articulations within the history of political philosophy, it continues to find defenders today, or at least those reluctant to close the door on its ideals: citizens motivated by the apprehension of a common good rather than by merely private interests; civic unity rather than an aggregate of subcommunities at cross- purposes to each other; engaged citizens rather than passive and indifferent ones; citizens who treat each other as co-citizens rather than as strangers, competitors, or parties to a contractual arrangement - in short, an ideal of civic friendship played out within a shared public forum about which all the participants care deeply and genuinely. It is easy to see why all of this would be desirable as a theoretical ideal. The question is whether it’s a meaningful option, given the conditions of modern life and the constraints of modern politics. Is it just a pipe dream?15

The challenge to this theoretical ideal is significant, as it consists of the obvious and complex pluralism of our social lives. Leo observed this pluralism and its sometimes violent contradictions in his own day. The challenge then and now is a pragmatic one and not some theoretical contest between “isms.” Beiner notes how the complex pluralism of our lives is, practically speaking, a matter of our being embedded in commitments that deprive us of the

“leisure and disinterestedness that a fully committed civic-mindedness would require.”16

Furthermore, these commitments create a wide array of experiences and “life horizons” that are not easily or evenly situated within broader, “polity-wide interests.” And finally, even if

15 Ronald Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, (Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), 6. 16 Ibid.

23 we were able to somehow coordinate the variety of social claims on our lives, most of us lack the expertise necessary for the tasks of politics.

People living in modern circumstances are unlikely to view politics and public deliberation as the core meaning of their lives, since endless conversation about the public good would generate not ‘public happiness’ (Hannah Arendt’s phrase) but frustration with ‘too many meetings’ (Oscar Wilde’s phrase). Instead, we settle for arbitration of sectional interests delegated to politicians who we assume work for the interests of the constituents who elect them and the lobbyists who court them rather than genuinely debate a common good.17

In light of these practical considerations, Beiner considers it justifiable to describe this ideal of the civic-minded citizen as openly utopian. Beiner states that the “utopianism of the civic-republican ideal is not something for which we should apologize, for political theory would fall short of its mission if it failed to supply utopian ideals. But it would also fall short of its mission if it failed to own up to them as utopian.”18 According to Beiner, it is our job to “salvage a bit of civicness in the context of a political world where the odds tend to be stacked against citizenship.”19 Beiner’s estimation of the causes that “dilute” citizenship in the contemporary social imagination of affluent westerners is likely to be different from a

Catholic’s estimation. Beiner’s estimation would most certainly be different from Leo’s. But consider the hope Beiner voices in his description of the “civic-republican” ideal. Among other things, it is a hope that human politics will amount to more than the maintenance of security and personal interest. It is a hope that human politics will facilitate cooperation and unity and so that politics could become intelligible as a species of friendship.

If there were such a thing as a purely eschatological, Augustinian mode of doing

Christian ethics, we might say from this perspective that Beiner is right to call this hope utopian, or perhaps even idolatrous. We might also suggest that what he is hoping for is really nothing more than Christian unity with Christ, and to the extent that he

17 Ibid., 6-7. 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Ibid.

24 misunderstands the true nature of his hope, his vision of citizenship is simply a simulacrum of baptism. And if there were such a thing as a purely incarnational, Thomistic mode of doing Christian ethics, we might say from this perspective that Beiner is right to commit himself to this hope, for it corresponds to a fundamental human inclination to social unity.

We might also suggest that what he is hoping for is something Christians and all persons of good will should hope for, and so work for in history.

But Beiner’s characterization of citizenship in terms of utopian ideals useful for political philosophy’s moral tasks is not the only way to account for how social and political relations might be said to participate in something beyond themselves. Leo, for his part, is not interested in citizenship because he sees membership in the nation-state as idolatrous or demonic mimicry of baptism. And he is not interested in citizenship because he sees membership in the nation-state as an unproblematic determination of human reason’s natural goodness and power. His interest in citizenship does not fall easily onto an

Augustinian-Thomistic spectrum.

It will be essential for understanding the work below for me to spell out what I have in mind here and to acknowledge an important debt I owe to Russell Hittinger’s work on a rather arresting question: can or do social bodies image the Lord in any way analogous to the manner in which individual human persons are said to image the Lord?20 Hittinger asks this question because Christian theology and philosophy traditionally describe the human person as a unique animal, created in the “image and likeness” of the Triune Lord. But in the late modern context, a certain methodical individualism has made social membership appear to

20 In what follows, I am summarizing Hittinger’s “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 39-78.

25 persons either as a voluntary, contractual partnership, or as the domination of external forces. As Hittinger puts it,

Genesis 1:26 teaches that the individual member of the species is a sacrament [making an invisible reality visible] [...]. In the visible order of the hexaemeron, it is the individual man, male and female, who is made unto the image and likeness of God, and thus the individual member of the species is a locus of sacrality in the visible world. This idea, so familiar to Jewish and Christian theology, is much contested, even detested, in the secular world of late modernity. Our culture separates the value of the individual as self-determining from the individual’s membership in a certain natural species or kind. A “person” is a pure thisness [...] in his liberty, and is counted as a “member” only by his own choice or consent.21

According to the social imagination flowing from a suspicion of the doctrine of the imago

Dei, “membership without consent” is suspicioned as a sort of “servitude.”22 Thus

Hittinger’s question. We are accustomed to placing social membership in a place subordinate to the interests and preferences of the individual person. But can we dismiss the dignity of being a member in favor of aggrandizing the liberty of the human substance? Upon such a dismissal of human sociality, are we performing an act that could be described using the language of sin?

Though citizenship is only one relation in the array of possible human memberships, the connection of Hittinger’s question to citizenship remains important both for a Christian estimation of politics and for a more adequate grasp of the history of Catholic social teaching. Is citizenship something of inherent worth, participating in a created order that makes visible an invisible reality? Is citizenship’s worth in any manner analogous to the worth of my substantial unity, and my participation in a created order that makes visible the invisible reality of the Lord’s truth and goodness? If the answer is no, then at best citizenship and the complex political reality it signifies simply represent one more damned thing I have

21 Ibid., 42. 22 Cf., ibid.

26 to do in this life. At worst, citizenship and politics represent a form of ideology that fosters delusions that actually stand in the way of my self-realization.

Over against these undesirable alternatives, Hittinger draws out the social ontology at work in Leo’s anthropology. By “social ontology,” Hittinger refers to a philosophical account of the nature of “social unities of order.” A “social unity of order” is not a substantial unity, like a human person, or a horse, or an angel. Neither is it an aggregation of substantial unities, like a group of human persons in line at a box office or a cafeteria.

Rather, we find a “social unity of order” in a marriage, a family, a college, an orchestra, a sports team, a theater troupe, or a church. In these unities, “each individual retains his own identity and operations; yet the social whole is more than the sum of its parts. It counts as a subject, person, and agent in its own right.”23 Were we to ask what these various bodies have in common, we could say they all embody the same form. Whether we are speaking of spouses, infielders and outfielders, winds and strings, in every case we are affirming that the body’s form is defined by a certain order that makes a common action possible. The end of this common action is a twofold good: internal and external. That is, social unities of order accomplish discrete goods in time and place (children, wins, performances), and their common action itself is a good (procreation, cooperation, harmony).24 Both internal and external goods are indivisible (hopefully!). One cannot own percentages of these goods. One cannot consume these goods such that there is not enough for others. And so the more the individual gives to the common action of the whole, the more the good of the whole redounds to the individual.

So, we ask again, do “social unities of order” make visible an invisible, divine reality in a manner analogous to the human substance’s imaging of the Lord? According to

23 Ibid., 51. 24 Cf. Ibid., 51-2.

27 Hittinger’s reading of the theological and philosophical sources informing Catholic social teaching, the fact that “social unities of order” are formed so as to accomplish common goods provides us with the answer:

Following Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII and his successors took this Aristotelian rubric of a social unity of order and grafted it onto Pseudo-Dionysius. Dionysius held that creatures imitate God in a twofold manner: first insofar as each creature has its own perfection in the order of substance; second insofar as creatures cause good in others. Thus the famous dictum: bonum sui diffusivum est, the good is diffusive of itself. The greater the good, the more it is communicable and shareable.25

Hittinger’s interpretation of this twofold imitation sheds a great deal of light on why citizenship would matter to Leo and to us. The key verb in the quote is “to imitate.” The affirmation that human persons are created in the imago Dei is not simply a bare acknowledgement of human dignity. It is instead an acknowledgement that the human vocation is imitative. We image the Lord in creation, like the Law, or the Temple, or Christ himself, in order to represent or manifest in creation the Lord’s truth and goodness.

Hittinger puts it this way:

What exists simply in God is communicated to creatures in a multiform manner. Thus, a double imitation or portrayal. First, a diversity of created things, each having a good according to its participated being. Second, a diversity of created things imitating God insofar as they cause goodness in others - insofar as they bring into existence, through secondary causality, additional modes of participation among themselves and others. The superabundance of what exists in God simply is, in creation, most perfectly expressed in a varied manifold. Charity perfects a social principle embedded in the creation of angels and men: namely, one loves the good not only as it is possessed and owned, but even more as it is poured forth and communicated to many. [...] The creature possesses (imperfectly and from afar) a likeness of image in the order of substantial form (the unity of the soul’s operations), as well as an additional perfection or similitude insofar as he or she communicates with others in a social form.26

According to this reading of the imago Dei, citizenship is one among many social forms in and through which persons live out the human vocation: they communicate and share with others, not only for pragmatic social and political ends, but in order to bring

25 Ibid., 53. 26 Ibid., 54, 56, emphasis original.

28 about goodness. As Hittinger’s analysis suggests, the first aspect of the imago Dei is substantial and stable (hopefully!): the human person is always already created in the imago

Dei. But the second aspect of the imago Dei is accidental and contingent: the human person is engaged in an act of causation, and so she is engaged in something perfectible. As I will describe it below, in and through their relations with others, human persons both acknowledge and cultivate the imago Dei.27 Society, comprised of its many relations, is an array of acts that may cause or corrode goodness. Throughout this project, we are interested in reading Leo as a critic of modern liberal democracies who engages their undergirding social and political theories precisely in these terms. Can such regimes contribute to the human vocation to cause goodness and so cultivate the imago Dei? If they can, we can describe them in terms of authentic sociality and politics. But if they cannot, then such sociality and politics as are practiced in them are so insufficient as to be described as privative. The temptations in such circumstances are banality and violence. Leo confronts these again and again in his magisterium.

In response, then, to the question of why citizenship should matter as part of a project on Leo’s social magisterium, I would simply point to this juxtaposition of Beiner and

Hittinger. Beiner is unwilling to abandon the hopes expressed in the civic-republican ideal of citizenship, for they seem to speak to him of a great human vocation that is only realizable in concert with others. Hittinger’s analysis of the substantial and social aspects of the imago Dei is a provocative Catholic response to Beiner’s adamant hope. Citizenship is indeed one of those res sacras in temporalibus that, if it is to remain expressive of human hope, must be seen as participating in a goodness that precedes it.

27 The Cappadocians spoke of this dual aspect of imaging in terms of the human person’s being an “artisan” of the image. The accidental, active nature of this imaging is critical.

29 III. Why analogy?

The human person is one of the res sacras in as much as she is an animal ordered to beatitude. But she is one of the res sacras in temporalibus in as much as the pilgrimage to beatitude is lived in history. And of course, human historical existence always occurs in a place and under regimes of authority. These regimes need not be imagined solely in political terms, however. As I noted above, an array of spheres comprises the context in which human persons communicate with each other and so cultivate their likeness to the Lord.

Leo’s predominant concern in his social magisterium is to identify and defend the integrity of the social unities comprising this pluriformity. He is mindful of many different levels and activities of society. But his attention is trained throughout his pontificate on three principal bodies in society: the Catholic Church, the state, and the domestic society. As I have suggested already, the addition of the domestic society is essential, for it extends Leo’s scope of concern past the question of Church-state relations.

An analogical social anthropology is essential to respecting the simultaneity of two important realities. First, analogy allows us to appreciate the fundamental similarity of all social bodies as contexts in which human persons cultivate the imago Dei. Second, analogy allows us to appreciate the fundamental distinction of all social bodies from each other as contexts that possess a native integrity resistant to collapse or resolution into each other.

This latter emphasis on distinction and integrity is important, for it expresses the conditions for the pluriform imaging of the Lord’s one goodness.

As we encounter analogy below then, we will have to be sensitive to the ways in which it works in both directions. Analogy in Leo’s social thought is just as much about the relation and distinction of differing social bodies one to another as it is about the relation of human sociality to the Lord’s goodness. Indeed, the analogical pluriformity of social bodies

30 is the given condition in which human sociality can image the Lord’s goodness in creation.

Were we to focus solely on the analogy of social bodies, we would obscure the moral gravity of Leo’s insistence on social pluriformity as a gift of the Divine Wisdom, given to humans for their flourishing. Were we to focus solely on the analogy of sociality to the Lord’s goodness, we would obscure the temporal and material reality of the vocation to image the

Lord.

Leo develops a social teaching that situates the human person within a participatory and analogical context that is actually adequated to her flourishing as a spiritual and social animal. Chapter one will begin at 1789 with the Revolution’s effort to make citizenship an expansive category fitted to both the exclusive logic of the state and the universal nature of the human person. But Leonine social doctrine aims precisely at this desire. Proliferating relationality was presupposed by traditional social visions characterizing society prior to the absolutisms of the 17th century. In order to depart from this former social vision and to transfer the absolute power of the monarch to liberal state, it was necessary to destroy proliferating, hierarchized relationality. Historians and social theorists often call this the flattening out of society in the modern period. Such flattening corresponds to the desire of nascent nation-states to be absolute and monistic, even as their monarchical forebears were absolute and monistic.

IV. Plan of the work

Leo XIII’s relevance as the “father of Catholic social teaching” lies in his development of a social anthropology that exposes liberalism’s failure to achieve one of modernity’s most important goals: more humane social and political relations among persons. Whereas liberal nation states in the 19th century promised to finally “restore the broken relationships of nature and history” by annulling relationships competing with

31 citizenship, Leo develops a theological account of how citizenship can thrive only in an analogical array of other anterior and posterior memberships. This analogical array is the only sufficient condition of the promised restoration, for the analogy liberates ecclesial, political, social, and domestic memberships to exist in both the unity and the distinction necessary for them to exercise their properly human office of imaging the Lord. Leo’s social magisterium thus provides us with critical resources for overcoming the inadequate social anthropologies that undermine liberalism’s own best intentions.

The work will be organized as follows:

Part I: Citizenships:

Chapter 1.1 - “Univocal and Equivocal Communitas: Theorizing citizenship after 1789”

The thesis of this chapter is that the social restoration promised by 1789’s legislative efforts is undermined by univocal and equivocal, instead of analogical, social anthropology. The social anthropology undergirding revolutionary accounts of citizenship is inadequate to the task of linking French citizenship in the new regime to the other memberships that properly express natural human sociality in history. The result of this inadequacy and failure is a contradictory concept of citizenship and its relationship to human sociality. The contradictions express the need for an analogical conception of sociality that would allow citizenship to exist in unity with and distinction from other social forms.

Chapter 1.2 - “Eschatological Citizenship: Mazzini’s communitates and the failure of analogy”

The thesis of this chapter is that Mazzini eloquently expresses the liberal hope that citizenship will restore the broken relations of nature and history by developing an historical- idealist account of the nation’s mediational role in uniting all humans into one family. This

32 translation of 1789’s ideals into a later, Italian context is undermined by a univocal account of citizenship hidden within what appears to be an analogical rendering of human sociality.

Mazzini’s historical idealism eliminates the possibility of an analogical rendering by placing all being, including the divinity, on the same ontological and historical continuum.

Chapter 2 - “Analogia Communitatis: Citizenship within Leo XIII’s doctrine of social membership”

The thesis of this chapter is that Leo’s social anthropology rests on an analogical social anthropology that does not fall into the univocal or equivocal errors exported from 1789.

By situating historical social forms like citizenship in analogical relationship to a social human nature given at creation, Leo is able to simultaneously distinguish these forms from each other even while he unites them into a single array we can recognize as natural to the human. Situating citizenship within the analogical social anthropology in this way accomplishes at least two things: it recognizes citizenship as constitutive of human flourishing without asking citizenship to restore the broken relations of nature and history; and it avoids mistaking citizenship’s incompetence with regard to this restoration as a sign of citizenship’s artificiality. In this way, Leo frees citizenship to participate in the human vocation to cause good in society.

Part II: Institutions:

Chapter 3 - “Ecclesial Munera and the Analogia Communitatis: Leonine ecclesiology and the proper care of human persons”

The thesis of this chapter is that Leo’s ecclesiology is an indictment of the state’s inability to care for the human person in a mode appropriate to the state’s limited political vocation. Leo thus identifies enduring theological-political concerns within liberal democratic regimes, where citizens and social bodies are forced to be free in a very particular

33 way if they are to enjoy the care promised to them by the state. By investigating Leo’s ecclesiology, we are considering his analogical vision of the proper social and political conditions in which rational animals in history may live together, not simply for mutual benefit, security, or efficient action, but for both natural and supernatural beatitude.

Chapter 4 - “The Original Communitas and the Analogia Communitatis:

Leonine matrimonial theology and liberal pedagogy”

The thesis of this chapter is that Leo’s matrimonial teaching in the 1880 encyclical,

Arcanum Divinae, offers us an eloquent demonstration of how liberal matrimonial theory enables a de-socialized and de-politicized formation of citizens. What I will call “liberal pedagogy” or “liberal matrimonial morality” in this chapter signifies a social anthropology that competes with the Church’s sacramental theology and tradition of canon law. The objective of this competition is to make over the image of the domestic sphere into the image of the state. Leo argues that this makeover is sacrilegious in that it extracts the domestic from its participation in the analogical social array flowing from the Divine

Wisdom.

Chapter 5 - “The Analogia Communitatis, Catholic Theology, and Social

Anthropology”

The thesis of this chapter is that an analogical social anthropology remains necessary for a suitable Catholic response to the social and political challenges we face today. I argue that only via an analogical conception of human sociality will we be able to avoid the temptations to finalize the political task. Leonine analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain incarnationally committed to the enduring task of promoting humane society and politics. Leonine analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain so committed in light of the eschatological hope that the broken relations of nature and history will be restored only

34 at the end of all things. Indeed, this eschatological hope funds the incarnational commitment and makes it intelligible in the first place.

35

PART I: CITIZENSHIPS

36 CHAPTER 1.1

UNIVOCAL AND EQUIVOCAL COMMUNITATES:

THEORIZING CITIZENSHIP AFTER 1789

Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Two of these words have become synonymous with everything that is right about liberal democracy. In contemporary Western politics, liberty and equality remain key words in elections, party platforms, reforms, legislative proposals, and judicial decisions. The ideal of fraternity, however, is usually spoken of indirectly, using either an inflated rhetoric of unity, or a measured exhortation to tolerate the actions and commitments of other free and equal persons. Liberty and equality stand out to us as fundamental human properties because affirming them, protecting them, and promoting them facilitates the hard work of contending with natural and conventional differences among persons. But we can discern a question regarding fraternity and its place in the great triumvirate. What is it doing there? We are not opposed to it. But how is it to be numbered with liberty and equality? Not so long ago, fraternity possessed a range of meaning which now seems strange. Though we currently think in individualized terms of the many differences managed by liberty and equality, the historical development of liberty, equality, and fraternity begins in a context where the individual had not been as thoroughly atomized as she is today.

37 Consider for example the Romantic Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini and his criticism of the French Revolution’s ultimate inadequacy as a liberator of persons and society. He said of the Revolution that

[it] tried to introduce into political matters the liberty, equality, fraternity of men. Its theory of rights gave the political formula of the individual; it did not go beyond that. It did not found a new Society; it prepared the old one for liberty and equality. Liberty - even when it is given to all, and called Equality - cannot found a new Society; Association alone can do that. Liberty is no more than an element of social life. It provides the materials: it does not breathe into them the breath of life.1

For Mazzini fraternity is not simply an activity enjoyed by liberated, equal persons. Instead, for Mazzini, liberty and equality exist for the sake of fraternity. Mazzini suggests that there is something provisional or preparatory at best, lifeless at worst, about liberty and equality if they are not inspired by and ordered to fraternity. I will return to Mazzini later. For now, I note that Mazzini presents the three great ideals as if they work as a mutually augmenting crescendo, proposing fraternity to the social imagination of a people as the final cause of all society and politics. Put negatively, Mazzini’s criticism of the Revolution is that it gave

European society a social anthropology with no end in mind, and so, truly, no beginning.

The Revolution pronounced human persons as liberated, but from what and for what? As equal, but to whom?

But what does this matter? We could very rationally and persuasively interpret the story of social and political life after 1789, precisely because of this insistence on liberty and equality, in terms of our progression toward more humane social and political relations.

Mazzini’s criticism of the Revolution and its incarnation of only two of these three beautiful ideals can seem pointless given the level of liberty and equality we enjoy compared to our forebears. From a certain perspective, couldn’t we say that fraternity ought to remain an

1 Mazzini, “Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789,” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co Inc, 1961), 257, emphasis original.

38 historical curiosity, somehow a concern of those tasked with dismantling the ancien régime, but anyhow no longer a concern of ours? Though such a perspective seems perfectly in sync with the ideals of contemporary democratic liberalism, it may be that we have lost something important in allowing fraternity to remain obscured behind liberty and equality. Indeed, as we saw in the introduction, lamenting such a loss would seem to be the animating principle of Beiner’s insistence that the civic-republican ideal remain a utopian directive for political theory.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Russell Hittinger has provided us with an insightful description of the revolutionary hopes attached to the three great ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Hittinger notes that the revolutionary

creed of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” considered the human person in two ways: first, as a being of nature, having natural liberties and rights which had been obscured or broken by the historical social order; second, as a citizen, standing equally among other citizens before the state. On this model, fraternity was associated preeminently if not exclusively with citizenship, for as Rousseau among others had argued, membership in the state reconstitutes the broken relations of nature and history. Other social memberships claiming their origins in nature, history, or divine revelation were deemed legitimate only insofar as they were either the private choice of individuals, or insofar as they were permitted or “conceded” by the state.2

This description of the three ideals is illuminating for a number of reasons. On the one hand, you have the human person, possessed of a nature that is endowed from the beginning with a most fundamental property: liberty. Every human substance, according to nature, is free. But on the other hand, you have human relations, variously affected and conditioned by the actions of these fundamentally free individuals. Every human substance, according to nature, is free, but is not alone. Thus a second fundamental property: equality.

But is it meaningful at all to look back on human history and affirm that human persons are

2 Russell Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 39-78, at 40 (emphasis mine).

39 fundamentally free and equal? As Hittinger notes, it seemed to the proponents of these revolutionary ideals that history is not the story of human liberty and equality. Rather, history is the story of the obscuring of these properties, even the breaking of human relations. In this way of reading society’s history, society itself becomes corrosive of liberty and equality to the extent that society is the place where I am forced to sacrifice my liberty and my equality for the goods of the community. Fraternity, or relationship, or sociality, or community then seems to be the problem that free, equal humans must overcome. The desire to overcome this history cannot, however, erase the reality of society. Even on the barest physical level, it is an historical fact that humans live and act in social forms. So the way to mend this problem - the way to reconstitute “the broken relations of nature and history” - will inevitably be a social mending. Overcoming the abuses of living in society is the work of a society. Thus citizenship, Hittinger suggests. It is put forward as the social context - the relationship - in which free, equal humans may work to overcome the obscurities and abuses of society’s history.

Citizenship becomes a standard. In the social imagination Hittinger is describing, all other social forms are measured against it. Whatever social forms promote citizenship and contribute indirectly to society’s ability to overcome its own degradations are claimed by the civil power. Whatever social forms may remain neutral or ambiguously related to society’s self-restoration are housed within the private choice of the persons constituting the forms.

Should the matrimonial unit, the family, a labor union, a club, a political party, a newspaper staff, a school, a religious order, or especially an entire faith prove resistant to these two forms of management, deep conflict follows. So, the long 19th century debate about liberty, equality, and fraternity is obscured if we read it only as the story of historical progress toward greater legal protection and social recognition of human liberty and equality.

40 Hittinger’s description of the three ideals suggests that a larger social feat was taking place: the identification of the state with the form of human relationship that could finally humanize society.

The story of this great social feat is one so large and complex, no one has been able to complete it. Accordingly, I am not promising anything so grand. My interest is in the

Catholic response to the forms of management implied in Hittinger’s assessment of the social valences of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That response itself is an enormous topic, but it is always embroiled in two social and historical phenomena: the aftermath of 1789 and the local incarnations of that aftermath in the rising nation-states of Europe. In this chapter,

I am arguing that the social restoration promised by 1789’s legislative efforts is undermined by univocal and equivocal, instead of analogical, accounts of citizenship. The social anthropology undergirding revolutionary accounts of citizenship is inadequate to the task of linking French citizenship in the new regime to the other memberships that properly express natural human sociality in history. The result of this inadequacy and failure is a contradictory concept of citizenship and its relationship to human sociality. The contradictions express the need for an analogical conception of sociality that would allow citizenship to exist in unity with and distinction from other social forms.

In chapter 1.1, I contend that the revolutionary debates of 1789 about liberty, equality, and fraternity make it impossible for the Revolution to develop a coherent vision of political citizenship and its relationship to human nature. So, rather than the promised citizenship that would restore the broken relations of nature and history, the Revolution exports to the rest of Europe a strange hybrid of national and universal memberships that do not correspond to the sociality of human persons. In order to make this contention, I first give an analytical account of citizenship within what I am here calling univocal, equivocal, and

41 analogical habits of predication. A univocal habit would reify the connection between a created, given human nature and historically contingent aspects of social relations such as citizenship. An equivocal habit would disassociate human nature and the contingent, leaving them both squarely within the realm of convention, separated from any knowledge of a created, given nature. In light of this analytical work, I will then examine the ambiguous status of citizenship in the context of the French Revolution’s work on liberty and equality.

The revolutionary lawyers and theorists attempted to both univocate and equivocate when it came to citizenship, national membership, and human nature. This work will prepare us to understand the importance of Leo’s analogical habit of predication in his social magisterium.

In chapter 1.2, I show how the romantic patriotism of Giuseppe Mazzini modulates the ideals of 1789 into an idealist key for the Italian nationalizing movement. My argument is that Mazzini’s concept of citizenship within an eschatological society provides the Italian national cause with a provocative criticism of 1789’s univocations and equivocations.

Nevertheless, Mazzini’s is a deeply univocal account of citizenship that ultimately fails as a critique of 1789. In chapter 1.2, I offer an analytical summary of Mazzini’s masterpiece of

Italian patriotism, The Duties of Man, which is an exquisite account of fraternity’s proper place as the human reality orienting liberty and equality.

1789 sets the stage for the protracted battle between the Holy See and European nation states. Mazzini sets the stage for the particular incarnation of that battle on the Italian peninsula. When put together, these portraits of 1789’s inadequacy and Mazzini’s rehabilitative efforts provide us with a rich historical, social, philosophical, and theological context in which to engage Leo’s social magisterium on the topic of citizenship and its relationship to all other forms of human relationship. From within this context, we can better appreciate the startling claim that something as limited and variable as citizenship

42 could ever restore the broken relations of nature and history. We can also better appreciate the Catholic effort - embodied in Leo’s social magisterium - to question this claim and to offer a social anthropology truly adequated to the restorative project.

I. Univocal and Equivocal Communitates

In order to disassociate ourselves from deficient definitions of fraternity, I will work with the term communitas. By communitas, I refer to the multi-dimensional concept of human sociality denoted by the Latin. The communitas can be described in terms of a variety of relationships that are lost with the English terms, fraternity, society, and community. Below, when

I use communitas, I intend to signify both the pluriformity of human relations within which a single person may find himself, and the act of participating in those relations. For example, I may enter partnerships with others for a wide array of personal and public purposes; I may enjoy joint possession or use of many different personal and public goods; I may participate in the corporate actions of sports teams, universities, protest and advocacy groups, unions, and the like; I may join many different kinds of fellowships, from business clubs to historical religions; and of course, my kinship ties proliferate in both directions in time. If social and political theorists in the 19th century were concerned with defining the liberty, equality, and fraternal relations proper to such communitates and with delineating the rights and duties following from these careful definitions, I argue that the most successful efforts to develop such definitions are rooted in an analogia communitatis. Less successful efforts express the pitfalls associated with univocal and equivocal habits of predication regarding the character of human communitates.

What would it mean to call communitas univocal, equivocal, or analogical? Typically, we employ these three terms in order to characterize habits of predication regarding human and divine attributes. The classic example is goodness: “The Lord is good. Paul is good.” A

43 univocal habit of predication would suggest that the goodnesses of these two statements are ontologically, and so semantically, identical. I mean the same thing about goodness in both cases and sentences. So, in a univocal account of goodness, the predicate is a spectrum concept. The Lord’s goodness may be greater in every way than Paul’s, but they exist on the same ontological continuum. An equivocal habit of predication, on the other hand, would suggest that the goodnesses of these two sentences are ontologically, and so semantically, incommensurable. I mean two totally different, perhaps even contradictory, things about goodness in both cases and sentences. So, in an equivocal account of goodness, the predicate cannot be placed in a continual relationship with the two subjects. Rather, there is absolutely no relationship. But an analogical habit of predication would suggest that despite the real and profound ontological, and so semantic, incommensurability of the two, a real relation of participation exists such that Paul’s goodness exists within the Lord’s and is only possible because of the Lord’s. An analogical habit of predication makes it possible for two dissimilar things to maintain an essential relationship without becoming greater or lesser examples of one another (univocity) or becoming totally sundered from one another (equivocity). Indeed, in the theological mode of speaking analogically about predicates of being, this habit even joins together the priority of the Lord’s own life and the givenness of being with the real integrity of our utterly dependent creaturehood. What is given by the Creator is the Creator’s to give, but in light of the origin and utter gratuity of the gift, our participation in it can truly be our own. The hierarchical nature of this participatory relationship is fundamental to maintaining this relationship of non-competition. “Below” and “within” the Creator’s gift do we live and move and have our being. In the case of goodness, the Lord’s is not simply a continually greater version of Paul’s. And the Lord’s is not alien to Paul’s. Rather, an analogical account of goodness is a way of acknowledging that Paul’s goodness exists with a

44 real, human integrity, and that real integrity is completely dependent on the Lord’s donation of goodness to creaturely participants.

In speaking of communitas in this way, I have no intention of referring to the Lord’s membership within a whole of which the Lord is but one part. Rather, I am suggesting that communitas - the various social unities of order we inhabit and even the act of inhabiting them

- can be rendered in various ways vis-a-vis its ontological and semantic relationship to a created, given human nature on the one hand, and to a conventional, historical contingency of that nature on the other. As we will see below in our treatment of Mazzini, it is tempting to place the various communitates on a continual spectrum stretching, say, from the family, through civil society, to the state, and then on to the Church or the human species or whatever universal communitas you please. But I contend that it is more useful to imagine the ontological and semantic signification of communitas in terms of its analogical multivalence.

Why? First, communitas is fundamentally related to human sociality. It is a word that expresses the universal and natural human inclination to social relationship. But second, communitas is also fundamentally related to the historically conventional realities of particular social relationships. It is a word that expresses the full complement of our family, social, political, and religious memberships as they actually exist in time and place. The task, as in the classic case of goodness, is to determine our habits of predication. In this chapter, we focus primarily on univocal and equivocal predication, reserving analogical predication for chapter two.

What would it be like to speak univocally about communitas? A univocal account of communitas would suggest that a particular, historical form of communitas (or constellation of forms) is perfectly identical to the communitas we see in the human social inclination. One can deploy historical language in order to support the univocal habit of predication. That is,

45 social and political theory may point backward in human history in order to propose membership in social form X as original, pristine, natural, and even primal or primordial.

Recovering the primordial form is thus the only authentic way to restore the broken relations of nature and history. But social and political theory may also point forward in human history in order to prophesy that form X is truly the ultimate, the destined, the foreordained, and even the eschatologically complete. Progress toward this future is thus the only authentic way to perform the restorations. From either “direction,” this univocal habit of predication collapses any ontological difference between forms, suggesting that all forms are in reality either derivative of form X, privative iterations of form X, temporary props to form X, or harmful fetters to form X. Because my interest is in the communitas signified by the political category, citizenship, we are focused on efforts to make that political form the historical ultimate, the first and final cause of human communitas. That is, we are focused on efforts to make citizenship the historical communitas that will call all other communitates to account. From our perspective in history, this will be the more difficult habit of predication to understand.

From the perspective of our taken-for-granted membership in Western, liberal democracies, nothing could be stranger than suggesting that political citizenship is actually the perfection of human communitas. But this univocal equation is in fact an important historical and theoretical source of the liberal social imagination that has made it possible to take citizenship for granted at all.

In contrast to a univocal predication of communitas, we could say that an equivocal predication allows for an indeterminate relationship between particular, historical forms of communitas - like citizenship - and the communitas expressed by human sociality. Citizenship would be relatable to the human social inclination solely via the mode of human convention.

Citizenship could then be one among many relational terms connoting a person’s

46 participation in groups larger than herself. Its usage would not necessarily illuminate anything about human sociality other than the datum that humans are the sort of animal that appears to like to do things in groups. Rather than pointing back to a pristine origin or forward to an eschaton, we would analyze the historical relationship between citizenship and a given regime’s contingent concept about human sociality. For example, historical knowledge of Spartan citizenship would give us knowledge of Sparta, of what Spartans thought of citizenship, and what Spartans may have thought about citizenship’s participation in broader concepts of human sociality. We would know what Spartans thought about themselves, about their laws and institutions, and about human persons and relationships.

We could even develop a Spartan conception of communitas. But we would not, through inductive examination of Sparta, consider it possible to gain insight into the nature either of the communitas signified by citizenship, or citizenship’s relationship to a human social inclination. In other words, if we develop an equivocal habit of predication, knowledge of an historical regime gives us insight into that regime, but not into the way a particular relation like citizenship relates to the human inclination to live and act in society. Historically,

Western political theory has certainly proceeded as though precisely this sort of induction was valuable for learning about the political nature of the human animal. Aristotle’s inductive approach in the Politics is the preeminent example of this. But it remains to be seen whether modern habits of predication regarding communitas can serve us in the same way.3

3 The description of equivocal citizenship and the question of whether or not it is an intelligible description of modern language usage both sit somewhat uncomfortably here. The cause of our discomfort in accommodating the notion of equivocal citizenship can be discerned in the gradual modern work of depriving the political - and so the category citizenship - of its connection to nature and the good life. Hobbes’s De Cive expresses this effort to sever the political from its connection to nature. Hobbes writes: “Closer observation of the causes why men seek each other’s company and enjoy associating with each other, will easily reach the conclusion that it does not happen because by nature it could not be otherwise, but by chance. For if man naturally loved his fellow man, loved him, I mean, as his fellow man, there is no reason why everyone would not love everyone equally as equally men; or why every man would rather seek the company of men whose society is more prestigious and useful to him than to others. By nature, then, we are not looking for friends but

47 Indeed, this is a lamentable point in our own day. But it gives us insight into why the equivocal habit is the more easily understood from our perspective in history. The human act of communitas is currently difficult to imagine as somehow related to citizenship; and it has become even more difficult to imagine a communitas expressing a natural, universal sociality.4

Though we hear much of the duty and privilege of citizens to participate in the democratic process, local participation in democracy is situated simultaneously within two social contexts that seem to relativize citizenship into irrelevance. On the one hand, modern persons are parts of a breathtaking and complex system of globalizing social and economic communitates. On the other hand, modern persons are parts of more proximate and voluntary identity communitates that provide persons with venues of individual expression and moral formation impossible via the democratic process.5 When we add to the significant authoritative power of these global and proximate communitates the contradictory conviction that each human person is by natural right impervious to being defined, disciplined, or for honour or advantage [commodum] from them.” Cf. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), at 22. Hobbes’s cynicism is given a romantic turn by the Rousseauian portrait of the state of nature, populated by independent individuals. All cynicism and romance are gone, however, if we consider the equivocal habit in terms of a Positivist account of history and society, wherein all truly scientific and historical knowledge is nothing more than relative appreciation of how things worked in past societies. A Positivist never fears equivocation, for insight into causes and ends is a fool’s errand. How such a perspective would help us to evaluate the relative goodness or wickedness of different institutions and regimes is a difficult question and one that seems unanswerable if we habitually equivocate regarding communitas or if we dismiss equivocation for a Positivist, historicist mode of inquiry. 4This is a fair way to describe the late- or post-modern experience of being a citizen in Western regimes. The content of the category citizenship is so thin that one’s status as citizen only reveals itself, because it is only pertinent, in specific, brief, and forgettable moments of active passivity - taxpaying, voting, observing national actions as somehow related to oneself. But one need not be so cynical about this vacuity. Late- and post- modern visions of cosmopolitanism and globalization also help us to evacuate the content of citizenship understood in traditionally political terms. Such globalizing, boundary-transgressing visions contribute to startling cultural creativity and various forms of activism even as they corrode the individual’s sense of belonging to a piece of ground, a people, and a tradition. 5 Ronald Beiner has described this same phenomenon in terms of “localism” and “globalism,” noting that both tendencies exist in dialectical relationship with one another and work to “undercut the authority of the state, and the civic relationship it defines.” From Beiner’s perspective, which differs from my own in certain respects, these tendencies work together because localism is resurgent whenever identity is threatened, as is the case when globalism dilutes local differentiation. Beiner suggests nationalism and universal humanism thus always go together, constantly calling into question liberalism’s ability to create the conditions necessary for a truly civic life. Cf. Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, (Vancouver/Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), at 23.

48 coerced by external authority, it seems that any enduringly meaningful account of communitas is difficult, if not ultimately pointless. It follows from this difficulty that the only purpose in examining the category citizenship is to collect the historical and social data that confirm for us that in our current social form, we have accomplished a final victory over old social orders, old political regimes, and old hierarchical mediations. While these old forms falsely promised us a more humane communitas via the mechanisms of docility, virtue, obedience, and humility, we now apparently know that only individual persons can form humane communitates. An equivocal account of communitas thus eventually replaces the authoritative conviction that the human person is a social being and a political animal subject to various duties with another authoritative conviction: that the human person is a self-constituting animal by right, and that she possesses this right by virtue of her membership within only one communitas: humanity. If we cultivate an equivocal habit, the project of restoring the broken relationships of nature and history is left in an ambiguous state. By equivocating about the connection between the historically contingent and the universally stable, we have made all our relations intelligible only as artifacts of individual wills. And underwriting this voluntaristic artificializing is the simultaneous claim that we have a right to do so by virtue of a membership that would seem to be prior to the individual will: humanity.

II. 1789 and Citizenship

The story of 1789 and citizenship is, in part, the story of the braiding together of these univocal and equivocal habits of predication such that after the revolution it became possible to speak strangely about liberty, equality, and fraternity. Talk of liberty masked grave abuses of human liberty. Talk of equality obscured the maintenance of drastic inequalities.

And talk of human fraternity started to take on strangely nationalistic and tribal connotations. How can this abuse of language happen?

49 Any analysis of the relationship between the French Revolution and the desire to envision citizenship as a restorative agent for the broken relations of nature and history requires that we recognize the extent to which the Revolution was deliberately structured to militate against outdated and oppressive social structures.6 According to revolutionary literature and subsequent historical analysis of the Revolution, the ostensibly irrational character of these structures expressed itself in elaborate and complex systems of privilege that rooted political, civil, and social rights, not in a national or universal membership, but in seemingly arbitrary categories of pedigree and tradition. Given that liberty was denied those outside power, and that equality was seen as corrosive of a preordained, hierarchical order, these systems were in fact the broken relations in need of restoration. These systems are collectively identified as the ancien régime, which is the deliberate object of the Revolution’s destructive relationship to the past.7

6 In what follows, I am indebted to the following useful works on the ancien régime and the Revolution: Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), especially 5-84 on Catholicism prior to the restoration; Roger Aubert, et al, The Church Between Revolution and Restoration, trans. Peter Becker, (New York: Crossroad, 1981), especially 3-84; G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850, (New York: MacMillan, 1953), especially 11-22; Sidney Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall, Church and State Through the Centuries, (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1954), especially 234-54; François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988), especially 3-40 on the ancien régime and 41-210, which is Furet’s magisterial treatment of the Revolution and its various governments; François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1989); Lynn Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996); Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Nineteenth Century in Europe: Background and the Roman Catholic Phase, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), especially chapters III-VI; J. F. Maclear, ed., Church and State in the Modern Age: A Documentary History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), especially 3-34 for the ancien régime throughout Europe and 75-105 for the Revolution; Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, (New York: Pantheon, 1981); John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Joseph N. Moody, ed., Church and Society: Catholic Social and Political Thought and Movements 1789-1950, (New York: Arts, Inc., 1953), especially 93-118; John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, (New York: Macmillan, 1951). 7 Cf. Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, 3: “The French revolutionaries gave a name to what they had abolished. They christened it the ancien régime. In doing so they were defining not so much what they had suppressed, but more what they wanted to create - a complete break with the past, which was to be cast into the shadows of barbarism. [...] Sieyès [...] had already made a sweeping condemnation of that ‘night’, as opposed to the day which was just dawning.”

50 In the ancien régime, an obvious and, according to some theorists of the time, natural inequality among orders of society was ingredient to healthy communitas. But the central goal of the Revolution - at least on paper - was to destroy precisely this feature of the old order and its social vision. A theory of the supposed naturalness of social inequality seemed obviously implicated in obscuring the true nature of human relations. Revolutionary conceptions of the rights of citizens had to follow on the dismantling of this defunct order of inequality. These citizenship rights were developed through ambiguous but fecund debate that was never satisfactorily resolved. On the one hand, revolutionary social and political engineering proceeded by the conviction that all humans are by nature equal. But on the other hand, revolutionary social and political engineering had to account for how actual equality could be practically established in a world where society continually contends with a variety of inequalities, tensions, and imbalances.

Thus the Revolution’s central document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Over against the “ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man” that have corrupted societies and governments in the ancien régime, the Constituent Assembly set out to found the “demands of the citizens [...] henceforth upon simple and incontestable principles.”8 The human person’s rights and duties are not expressible in terms of his status as a member of domestic, economic, social, or ecclesial communitates. Among the seventeen rights enumerated in the Declaration, economic, social, and religious relations are notably muted or absent and so are obscured as relations that may legitimately place one’s citizenship in relative position to the wide array of one’s other commitments. Gone are relational strata that comprised the old order. Rather, the human person is imagined by the Constituent

8 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), 113.

51 Assembly as an animal with a single relation that sufficiently expresses his rights and duties - and so his sociality - as a person. This single relation is his political citizenship.

In place of this plurality of communitates and the rights and duties incumbent on a person as a member of these institutions, the Declaration asserts the only relation necessary for a society’s flourishing: a fundamental connection between two hierarchically arranged nodes. At the lower node, the Declaration describes the individual human person who by nature is a free and equal monad distinguished from his fellows only when the “general usefulness” requires such a distinction. At the upper node, the Declaration describes the law and government that are the expressions of the “general will” of these agglomerated monads. The Declaration then builds a simple legal edifice through which the will of the monads may be expressed in governing and by which the ostensibly absolute liberty and equality of the monads may be maintained. Robespierre’s proposal of a new declaration of rights on April 24, 1793 expresses with greater metaphysical flair the monistic sensibility of the legislators at work in the various National Conventions. According to Robespierre, as the citizen-monad is beneath the law alone, so the National Convention is “in the presence of the Universe, and before the eyes of the Immortal Legislator [...] which is nature.”9

From the ultimate clarity of this position in the new regime, under the eyes of the immortal law alone, Robespierre offers his national and universal vision of communitas: “The men of all countries are brothers, and the different peoples must help one another, according to their power, as citizens of the same State.” The social, cultural, economic, political, and religious differentiations of all humans everywhere come to naught in the eyes of the one law finally discerned by the revolutionary lawyers. The collapse of all this difference in the ill-fated Constitution of 1793/Year I enables the Revolution to declare itself

9 “Robespierre’s Proposed Declaration of Rights,” in Stewart, 431, 434.

52 universally competent. So, after rehearsing the original Declaration’s rights and doubling their number, 1793’s Constitution simultaneously declares France a republic and extends citizenship to “every foreigner who is considered by the legislative body to have deserved well of humanity.”10 The French legislature has finally found a voice with which to address all persons everywhere at once, and so early 19th century France still suggests to us that in order to speak truthfully about l’humanite, one must do so with the properly revolutionary - that is, French - inflection. Mazzini will question this suggestion.11

In order to speak of 1789 as a decisive moment in the history of citizenship, and in order to reconstruct a revolutionary export12 of modern citizenship, it is helpful to see how the revolutionary reimagining of the category citizenship primarily in terms of liberty and equality resulted in deep confusion regarding a variety of fraternal communitates. This

10 François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988), 101. The Constituent Assembly, in François Furet’s words, was “led gradually to proclaim a new international law extending the liberty of citizens to other nations. The concepts of democracy and nation, which had come together in 1789, forged around the war which began in 1792 a body of very strong feelings, welding together classes and the Revolution itself in a common passion. The philosophy of the Enlightenment, so cosmopolitan and European, had won over only a limited public, aristocratic and bourgeois, and almost entirely urban. Here, in its most democratic form, it was penetrating the mass of the people in both town and country through an unexpected channel: national sentiment. It thereby simplified and radicalized to a point where very soon the Europe of the Enlightenment no longer recognized ‘its’ philosophy” (104). 11 I say deliberately that France suggests “to us” that we should speak of humanity in terms of French- revolutionary ideals. Over the past few years, as terrorists have attacked France on multiple occasions, we are always pointed to the stark contrast between France’s liberal legacy and its pivotal role in spreading democracy throughout the world on the one hand, and the violence and oppression of the terrorists on the other. France’s own illiberal treatment of various populations within its borders is necessarily muted at such contrastive moments. We absolutely must keep up the appearance that Western, liberal democracies - France and the U.S. as preeminent examples - are solely competent to speak for humanity. All threats to Western, liberal democracy must be misanthropic errands in one way or another. Questioning this contrastive work is difficult when it comes to terrorism, for the violence and oppression of terror are real. But the rightful condemnation of terror, at least for now, seems to consistently abet a despicably myopic condemnation of non-Western, non-liberal social forms. In the 19th century context, the Roman Catholic Church is the focus of this condemnation. Now, Islam faces an analogous situation. 12 I use the word deliberately. Though we will examine his thought more thoroughly below, Mazzini can help us get a sense of the reception of the Revolution as an export. Cf. Joseph Mazzini, “Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co Inc, 1961), 252: “[T]he idea of France, mistress of the destinies of Europe and hastening to unfold them for the good of all, ploughs to-day like lightning through the soul of the young Italian generation, even as, when I faced the first battles and sorrows of life, it dominated the soul of the generation that is now dead or in lethargic old age. [...] Any thought that takes shape for few days [sic] in Paris [...] finds among us thoughtless and indiscriminating applause. And at every fresh disillusioning, Italian lips utter, or Italian faces show, the cowardly thought: how should we attempt what France attempted and failed to do? What! are we condemned to crawl for ever behind man-king or people-king? Is Italy doomed to be the satellite of a greater planet?”

53 confusion is evident in four important antinomies that bring into stark relief Mazzini’s criticism of the Revolution’s inadequate attention to fraternity. These four antinomies characterize both 1789’s avowed departure from the ancien régime’s abuse and neglect of human liberty and equality, and 1789’s fundamental inability to make a complete break with the past in order to establish a new order of fraternal relations. As a result of this confusion, citizenship ultimately becomes a divisive rather than a unifying reality after 1789.

IIa. The liberal suspension of liberty

The first antinomy glares with the sort of light that can only be reflected from the guillotine’s blade. Despite the inalienability of the rights of the free human person, achieving revolutionary goals sometimes necessitated the suspension of the citizen’s liberty in order to

“recreate” an equally liberated citizenry. Though citizenship expressed the native and universal right of persons to be free from the tyrannies of history, that same citizenship simultaneously served as a weapon against those who somehow did not possess the same native, universal right. The equivocation at work here cost lives, and the pursuit of a more humane communitas was put on hold.

Regarding this suspension of liberty in favor of ensuring equality, much has been said in the extensive scholarly treatment of Robespierre, the Terror, and the Jacobin republic more generally. Here, we need only point to the well-known Tocquevillian characterization of the French Revolution: that it routinely sacrificed liberty for the sake of equality.13 In this willing sacrifice to equality, we see the shifting conception of liberty as the concept departs its former home in the ancien régime and takes up an uncomfortable residence in the post-

13 In what follows, I am indebted to Mona Ozouf’s excellent treatment of “Liberty,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 716-27.

54 revolutionary era. Whereas in the ancien régime a positive concept of liberties had referred to the privileges, duties, and immunities enjoyed by a plurality of communitates, in the post- revolutionary era, such privileges, duties, and immunities were anathema.14 The diversity of liberties enjoyed by the pluriform body politic was deliberately replaced by a monistic and negative conception of liberty rooted in the individual citizen and his right to freedom from intrusions (from wherever).

The problem with this negative, monistic conception of liberty immediately arose as the revolutionary governments attempted to legislate for a newly constituted nation. What reliable social stability can obtain when the sole principle of social organization is the protection of individual independence? Thus the utility of the critical modern distinction between the “man of nature” and the “man of the civil state.” The former person is unambiguously and completely free and has a right to dispense with himself and his property as he sees fit. And it is to this person first and primarily that 1789’s Declaration is addressed.

The latter person, however, upon entering civil society lives a more ambiguous and partial liberty depending on the exigencies of the society of which he is a part. He is subject to the requirements of order and the sacrifices necessary for peace.15 1789’s Declaration addresses this second man as well, but without due consideration of all the ways in which liberty is conditioned and mitigated by the ideal of equality and the duties shared by all for the sake of common harmony. Addressing these shortcomings of 1789’s Declaration becomes an important task for Robespierre in 1793 and for the more conservative declaration of 1795

Thermidor. And as we will see below, navigating the possible forms of relationship between

14 Cf. François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988), at 72: “What disappeared in August 1789 - and forever - was a society of corporate bodies defined by shared privilege. What came into being was a modern society of individuals, in its most radical conception, since everything which might come between the public sphere and each actor on the stage of social life was not only suppressed but also roundly condemned.” 15 Cf., Rousseau, The Social Contract, I.5-8; II.6.

55 the man of nature and the man of the civil state creates a great deal of confusion when 1789 tries to characterize modern citizenship and export it to the international community.

By the time the Jacobins were able to say “no liberty for the enemies of liberty,”16 and made such hypocrisy policy, the natural liberty of the Revolution’s enemies - rooted in their human nature - was not simply limited. It was sacrificed for the life of a chimera: “a united people wholly at one with its government.”17 Robespierre could not countenance a people divided by opposition to and support for the regime. Such division in the nation was a sign of corruption and intrigue, a failure of patriotism, an irruption of private interests, the resurgence of privilege, and the reappearance of social strata. And so the opposition had to be eliminated.18 The history of the Terror is the story of an equivocation between the man of nature and the man of the civil state. Citizenship was to be the communitas overcoming every abuse of human liberty and equality. And yet here that same communitas was being used to deprive the citizen not just of his liberty or his property or his equality, but of his life. That is, the Terror’s equivocation regarding citizenship’s connection to human nature expresses

16 Cf. Ozouf, “Liberty,” 721, where Ozouf notes how the distinction is key for debates surrounding the confiscation of clerical property (a natural, inalienable right), the freedom of the press (only free when it was pro-Revolution), and the freedom to emigrate (which during extraordinary times might be suspended, especially when the émigré is the king’s aunt). Cf. Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, at 72: “Within the modern individual there are two legitimate sides: the private one, which keeps him apart from other sin enjoyment of himself, his family and his private interests, and that of the citizen, which he shares with all other citizens and which, in aggregate, forms public sovereignty. But the third side, that of the social individual who tends to create inter-social coalitions on the basis of particular interests, must be ruthlessly excluded from the state.” 17 Cf. Ozouf, “Liberty,” 724. 18 Cf. Ibid.: “Opposition to this unified people could come, Chabot explained, from ‘only one party, the party of intrigue,’ and any explicit opposition was necessarily criminal (not only from parties but also from groups of friends, the principal charge against the Girondins having been defined as friendly conspiracy). Even implicit opposition - including mental reservations, a form of liberty-independence of which the Constituent Assembly had said no one could be deprived - was condemned as a challenge to the priority of public life over private life. Hence there was no more private sphere, no zone about which the law was silent. Even voting was public, since anyone who wished for the good of all had nothing to hide. Gone were Sundays and holidays, henceforth to be devoted to the exercise of citizenship. Gone was the possibility of retreating into privacy; as Robespierre said in his last, dramatic speech, the minute the people returned to its private abodes, ‘intriguers reemerged, and charlatans resumed their roles’” (724).

56 eloquently all that a state may convince itself to do to the man of nature in the name of preserving itself.

IIb. The equality of unequals

Despite the revolutionary rhetoric of universal human rights and the destruction of the ancien régime’s irrational and arbitrary inequalities, talk of equality maintains or even abets inequality. The revolutionary communitas signified by citizenship was promised as the weapon suited to the final victory of universal human communitas over the abuses of history. But this univocal collapsing of the two could not be accomplished, for just as more humane communitas was forced to wait on the final arrival of a more perfect liberty, so was it required to wait on the creation of an impossible equality.

Regarding the rhetoric of equality and the maintenance of inequality. Mona Ozouf has shown how 18th century discussions of merit were important for shaping the revolutionary imagination.19 In the century leading up to 1789, political thought was preoccupied with the rationality of the human person, and so every person’s capacity to render certain services to the political body. Montesquieu recognized that from this equality of capacity would arise inequality of exercise in that certain “active” persons would distinguish themselves in their service of the larger body, while other “passive” persons would fail, or be unable, to do so. Some form of meritocracy was attractive, however, in that it worked directly against the privileges that defined the stratified inequalities of the ancien régime. Nevertheless, 18th century figures like Mably and especially Rousseau were careful to aim their “new egalitarianism” not at inequality of birth, but rather inequality of wealth as the

19 Cf. Mona Ozouf, “Equality,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989) 669-83. My discussion of meritocracy and equality is indebted to Ozouf’s essay, especially at 670-3.

57 main cause of social disharmony. The hope was to find an “equal distribution of happiness among citizens” based on their need rather than on their status or their contribution.

Privilege and the inequalities arising from a purely legal conception of equality were perhaps on their way to destruction.

The Constituent Assembly tried to combine the homogenous citizenry of rational human persons with the proportional consideration of the various needs of that citizenry.

That is, the Assembly proceeded with an “obsession” for the “just proportion” of each person’s capacity to be an active citizen to each person’s needs and general happiness.20 The

Assembly’s work for French socio-political equality, in Tocqueville’s analysis, should have proceeded through three stages: equalization of legal status, of political rights, and of material conditions. According to Ozouf, however, the Assembly never got much past the first equalization, avoided the issue of political equality, and could not bring itself to abandon the principle of property.21 After equalizing the legal status of the French person in terms of a universal human nature, various factions of the Assembly were left with trying to manage, engineer, mask, or discourage the ambiguous transition from formal to real equality. The central problem with the Assembly’s work for formal legal equality is as follows:

it is all well and good to base social distinctions on ‘social utility’ from now on, but who will be the judge of that utility, which will be used to justify inequalities? [I]t was [...] Clermont-Tonnerre who, well before the socialists, gave the best definition of formal equality: “To say that equality of rights comes down to possessing a right equal to the very unequal portion of liberty and property that belongs to each individual is [to utter] an abstraction so tenuous, so foolish, as to be absolutely pointless.”22

20 Cf. Ibid., 675. 21 Cf. Ibid., 674-7. 22 Ibid., 677. Ozouf continues: “So whether they denounced, like Clermont-Tonnerre, the illusion of legal equality when material equality does not exist, or feared, like Delandine, that the people, taking the concept of original equality literally might forget that it was just a ‘philosophical fiction’ or thought, like Talleyrand, that education as the way in which the two forms of equality could be brought closer together until the differences between them vanished, the deputies of the Constituent Assembly always believed that material equality,

58 Formal, legal equality of rights could not answer critical questions of actual inequality in the material lives of the citizens that such equality supposedly protected. “Unlike liberty, which could be defined in negative terms [...] equality required a positive answer to pressing questions: Equal to whom? Equal to what? Equal in what respect?”23 To work to bring about material equality while affirming the absolute right to property would terminate almost directly in bourgeois success.24 The Assembly remained divided, and so simply could not answer, the question of whether or not force could be used to correct the inequalities that would come from this “free and absolute right of property.”25 As a result of this impasse, the explicit work for material equality through the mechanism of property became a way to further foster social inequalities in terms of wealth, even while these inequalities were masked by the legal equality established in a universal human nature.26 So, though 1789 dismantled the old, arbitrary inequalities in the name of a new, rational form of citizenship, by replacing those arbitrary inequalities with a form of meritocracy the Revolutionary lawyers failed compromised their own dismantling. Citizenship was to univocally represent the communitas that was to overcome the broken relations of the ancien régime, but the insistence on property turned citizenship into yet another feature of material inequality.

whether they feared it or devoutly desired it, was a possible and indeed an imminent extension of formal equality” (677). 23 Ozouf, “Equality,” 682. 24 Cf. Michael D. Biddiss, The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe since 1870, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), 36-8 regarding the replacement of one social stratification based on aristocratic values with another social stratification based on bourgeois values. 25 The story of Robespierre, the Jacobins, and the sans-culotte agitation cannot detain us here. But in their various ways, these revolutionary forces all employed coercive measures against the propertied. Sans-culotte agitation was particularly poignant: looting groceries, redistributing food, dressing identically, hosting banquets where the rich would stand and serve the seated poor, destroying bell towers (on account of their verticality), and developing pedagogical ditties (Tous à la même hauteur, voilà le vrai bonheur - Everyone at the same level, that is true happiness). Cf. Ibid., 680. 26 Cf. Hunt’s introductory essay in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, 16-31, especially at 19-20 for property rights and poverty, 23-26 for ethnic minorities, and 26-29 for women. Cf. Cole, Socialist Thought, 14-17.

59 IIb. Universal human rights and limited citizenship

Despite the universal scope of the revolution’s vision of human political participation, rooted in the natural liberty and equality of human persons, citizenship and its exercise remained the reserve of a certain portion of the population, definable chiefly in economic and utilitarian terms. The revolutionary communitas signified by citizenship was described as a natural feature of human sociality. But the legislators equivocated, ultimately basing citizenship in socially, historically, and economically contingent factors that mimicked the old order. Authentic communitas was again made to wait for a liberation that the upper classes were not willing to grant.

Patrice Gueniffey has given a useful portrait of political participation in terms of the franchise and how French suffrage was deliberately limited in direct contradiction to the universal scope of 1789’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.27 The Constituent

Assembly in 1789-90 limited suffrage to elections of representatives and gave electors no agency regarding legislation or the powers exercised by the representatives they elected. The

Assembly also required that a voter be a “full-fledged citizen” who could not be impaired by bankruptcy or legal trouble, a person of independent mind, and a person with an “interest in the public establishment.”28 Minors, women, and domestic servants were considered to be dependent and so could not meet the second requirement. In the Constitution of 1793, domestics were granted certain rights, though minors and women remained excluded from the franchise.

27 In what follows I am indebted to Gueniffey, “Suffrage,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 571-81 and Pierre Rosanvallon, “Physiocrats,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 763-9. 28 Cf., Gueniffey, “Suffrage,” 572-3.

60 Throughout the pre-Napoleonic period, the revolutionary governments were anxiously divided on how to extend suffrage beyond this limited scope. Their anxiety was understandable. After all, the representative government supposedly put in place by universal suffrage secured in the legislation of 1789-90 had, in 1792, been surrounded in the Tuilieres and overthrown by the direct democratic agitation of the sansculottes. It was almost impossible to quantify the “sovereign” power of the citizenry as the citizenry itself understood it. And it was accordingly difficult to legally qualify that power. There were those who followed the physiocratic doctrines that actual land ownership was essential if citizens were to have a true interest in public life, but there were others who rightly noted that this requirement created the same problem we encountered above: namely, the construction of another aristocracy, barring merchants, workers, artisans, and manufacturers from active citizenship.29

Furthermore, factions within the Convention could not agree on what the franchise was for: were citizens simply to elect representatives, or, as Condorcet proposed, were citizens’ votes to play a deliberative role regarding legislation, constitutional articles, amendments, and referenda? The Assembly thus felt itself caught between weighting the constitutional conception of suffrage one way or another: toward institutional stability, or toward popular sovereignty. In the Constitution of 1795, fearful of the power the “popular sovereign” was able to wield during the Jacobin republic, the Assembly repeated the earliest voting legislation of the Revolution, giving to male, tax-paying citizens the power only to elect

29 Cf., Rosanvallon, “Physiocrats,” especially at 765: “For the physiocrats, social involvement was governed by the relation to land. A physical bond to the soil, an obligatory and permanent residence were for them the tokens of true social integration. ‘Farmers,’ Condorcet concluded [...], ‘are more interested than others to make sure that the country, which they cannot leave, is governed by good laws. They should be favored in political laws by regarding them as more truly citizens than others…. The interest of the various classes in the general prosperity of society is inversely proportional to the ease with which they can change homeland.’”

61 affluent representatives, and thereby relieving suffrage of its potential as a mechanism for radical participation.30

We may read the Assembly’s decision in 1795 as a pragmatic equivocation regarding the revolutionary communitas of citizenship. Though citizenship was meant to liberate and equalize persons in accordance with their native properties, the consequences for society were too radical, and the Assembly opted for something like a status quo ante . As Alastair

Davidson suggests,

The majority of the men, mostly of the upper class and progressive nobility, who drafted the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen were at most constitutional monarchists. They believed and stated that the new rights were for all humans and self- evident, but where politics were concerned, they intended to rule for the people and on their behalf. [...] They regarded the [people] as unfit to rule themselves without a long education. [...] The moderates wanted a rule of law that protected the people from power and everyone from even an elected power. They were concerned that the rights established in 1789, especially that of the rule of law, might be obliterated if the people really took power directly. [...] They would not countenance the inclusion of the most terrifying little people in formal power.31

So, rather than expressing the social and political nature of the human animal, citizenship became in the hands of the Assembly something more akin to a mechanism designed to keep order among lower classes that were too keen on participating in power.

IId. Universalism and nationalism

The universal pretensions of the French Revolution awakened national rivalries that contributed in various ways to perverting 1789’s ideals, paving the way for Napoleon, and

30 Alastair Davidson identifies this tension as one of the central challenges of the Revolution and its various efforts at forming declarations of rights and constitutions throughout the period leading up to Napoleon’s rise. 31 Alastair Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind: The Struggle for Universal Human Rights, (New York: Springer, 2012), 185-6.

62 ultimately nullifying the effort to destroy the ancien régime. The univocation became unsustainable. French citizenship could not express communitas in the same manner as human nature itself. And so equivocation became a way to again differentiate communitates and even to pit them against each other when they refused the liberations of 1789. In this contentious, nationalizing milieu, authentic communitas could wait indefinitely.

Alastair Davidson has thoroughly catalogued the ways in which the revolutionaries attempted to eliminate all signs of contradiction between “democratic national-populism and universal rights.”32 Both the nationalized and the universalized ideals expressed in 1789’s

Declaration were tackled in 1791’s constitutional directives regarding citizenship:

The following are French citizens: Those born in France of a French father; Those who, born in France of a foreign father, have established their residence in the kingdom; Those who, born in a foreign country of a French father, have established themselves in France and have taken the civic oath; Finally, those who, born in a foreign country and descended in any degree whatsoever from a French man or a French woman expatriated because of religion, come to reside in France and take the civic oath. Those who, born outside the kingdom, of foreign parents, reside in France become French citizens after five years of continuous domicile in the kingdom if, in addition, they have acquired real estate, married a French woman, or founded an agricultural or commercial establishment, and if they have taken the civic oath. The legislative power may, for important reasons, bestow naturalization upon a foreigner, without other qualifications than establishment of a domicile in France and taking of the civic oath therein.33 The National Assembly thus attempted to create a simple space - ultimately untenable - in which “foreigners wanting rights just sought refuge in France and French citizenship and

French rights could be legally obtained almost at will.”34 The solution to the potential contradiction between universal human rights and national citizenship rights was, for a brief

32 Cf., Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind, 188. 33 Cf. “The Constitution of 1791” in Stewart, A Documentary History of the French Revolution, (New York: Macmillan Company, 1951), 233. 34 Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind, 189.

63 moment, solved by making the borders of France “porous” so that “those who wished to enjoy [France’s] new human rights could simply have them.”35

According to Davidson, the tension that undermines this “open republicanism” comes to light in the European response to 1789’s Declaration and subsequent political innovations in France. Despite the universal36 pretensions of the revolutionaries, the response of Europe was often hostile to the “new human rights,” and various nations vowed to destroy the rights and their supporters.37 In response to European opposition, the

Girondin faction of the Revolution proposed the first “French” war of the revolution,

“vaunting their right to carry the new principles of the declaration to any other people who wanted them. [...] France became ultra-nationalist and the defence of the declaration of rights became the slogan of French nationalism. [...] Thenceforth, the new human rights would be exported at the end of bayonets despite earlier statements that this would never be done.”38 This coupling of the revolutionary competence in speaking for a universal human nature available to the rational mind, with a national response to those who questioned that competence contributed to deep national antipathy for the Other and even terminated in the eventual mitigation or suspension of British39 and French40 rights in the early part of the 19th

35 Ibid. Davidson continues, “Clearly, most of the national leaders appear to have thought that the new rights would be so attractive that everyone would want to emulate the innovations. Great numbers of progressives did flood into France. [...] Equally, up to half of the nobility, depending on the region, fled the new regime.” 36 Rooted, as we will see below, in a rationalistic account of a “natural law.” 37 Cf., ibid., 191, where Davidson treats both official and popular rejection of 1789 and the “new human rights” in various locales. 38 Ibid., 192, relying on the Arno J. Mayer’s treatment of “vengeance” and “re-vengeance” in Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), at 171ff. Robespierre, for his part, was consistently opposed to exporting the Revolution via the bayonet. In Davidson’s description, Robespierre was a “little man” who “thought that improvements should begin at home, and with little matters such as a decent life for little people” (Davidson, 192). 39 Cf., ibid., 204: “The new principles were seen by the state as a threat to British traditions of law and order, and popular hostility towards the French and, therefore, towards “rights”, was used to roll back all the gains in public rights for nationals that had been won in 1688. So nationalism and national-popular policies, this time those of the British, showed themselves a reactionary force, destroying those human rights that had already been won for national citizens.”

64 century. Following the work of Ronald Beiner on citizenship and nationalism, we can interpret this antinomy as symptomatic of a problem inherent to liberalism itself. Beiner writes that “particularistic identities assert themselves most forcefully just when globalist tendencies present real threats to such identities. [...] Hence there is an unsuspected correlation between liberalism and nationalism.”41

The revolutionary crusade to bring 1789 to the rest of Europe was the supreme joining of univocation and equivocation. First, the Girondins univocate: this communitas - revolutionary citizenship - would be the fraternal relation that would secure liberty and equality for all peoples everywhere. But upon the unexpected rejection of this export, the

Republic must equivocate: this communitas - French citizenship - is ours and not theirs. What was meant to bind European society together according to a common human nature could simply become a national battle cry.

Given these four antinomies, it is most accurate, then, to characterize revolutionary conceptions of citizenship in terms that retain the actual befuddlement of the historical debates that shaped the concept itself. As the revolutionaries had no idea what they were doing in dismantling an ancient monarchy in the space of three months, so they had no idea what they were doing in redefining human communitas in the shifting terms of natural and civic liberty, legal and material equality, inalienable rights, or the nationalist defense of universal human rights. To the extent that this befuddlement is a reality, the citizen living with or through the liberations of the French Revolution was not in any thoroughgoing sense relieved of the sense of being a subject. Talk of active participation, legislative responsibilities,

40 Cf., ibid., 213: In France, by the time of Napoleon’s reign, the nation itself - and not the “Immortal Legislator” nature - had become “an insuperable premise for rights.” “After Napoleon, even in France, the notion that rights should go only to those who would fight for the nation became a universal principle. [...] This posed logical problems for universal rights since the notion of merit or worthiness had entered the calculation.” 41 Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, 23.

65 patriotic and national sentiment, and the arrival of universal human rights - as positive as these modern developments are - does not relieve the tensions expressed by the vacillations of the revolutionary theorists. Is citizenship finally now, here going to become univocally identical with human sociality such that all persons everywhere may, through political membership and participation, overcome the tyrannies of the past and so restore what has been broken by long centuries of tradition and absolutism? Or is citizenship going to become equivocally relatable to whatever a given regime - even one self-consciously and publicly committed to universal liberty, equality, and fraternity - may decide about how human sociality and political participation should be conducted? The answer is unclear.

Regardless of the lack of clarity, the category citizenship has a divisive utility that contributes to political precision and the manufacture and maintenance of social order.

During and after 1789, despite the tensions and confusions regarding citizenship’s relationship to human nature, or perhaps because of these tensions and confusions, citizenship became prominent as a device useful for controlling political discourse concerning rights and duties. Over against the arbitrary privileges of the ancien régime, the

Revolution proclaimed the rationalization of privilege in terms of legal and universal human and citizen rights. Despite the rhetoric of the various declarations attached to the

Revolution’s three major constitutions, it was obvious enough at the guillotine that the rationalization and simplification of citizenship could be quite irrational and complex. But the rhetoric of universal human rights, citizenship, the nature of human persons, and the sanctity of the nation are not easily deflated. Citizenship is not only useful in this context for maintaining the state’s competence to manage rights discourse. It is also a useful contextual prophylactic. The citizen as he is described in the Revolution’s declarations, though he may be jealously protected from other possible nationalities, is also left untouched by a wide array

66 of more proximate communitates that do actually contact the lives and actions of human persons. The citizen as he is described by the Revolution is nearly decontextualized, existing only as nature has intended him and as the law protects him.

The prophylactic function of citizenship serves an important purpose for the young nation post-1789. It is a device perfectly designed to allow a nation - in this case, France - to speak coherently and simultaneously at a local, national, and international level to citizens everywhere. Robespierre knew this perfectly when he made the following condemnations in his proposed declaration of rights: “Whoever oppresses a single nation declares himself the enemy of all. Whoever makes war on a people in order to check the progress of liberty and annihilate the rights of man must be prosecuted by all, not as ordinary enemies, but as assassins and rebellious brigands.”42 The high-octane blend of universal with national rights here is critical. These condemnations reveal that the revolutionary conception of citizenship names local subjects in a legal, inviolable manner that makes them the regime’s own. But the

Revolution’s deep conviction of its own righteousness suggests that France’s process of rationalizing citizenship is natural, true, and good. The sanctity of the bond between the citizen and the regime may be exported to other nations, putting all modernized polities on an equal footing - even banding them together against the retrograde forces of the ancien régime. E pluribus unum!43 And the one here is decidedly not the One Church spread throughout the whole. Rather, the guaranteeing of rights according to the transcendental principles of

1789 can itself become something like an international spiritual authority. Citizenship

42 “Robespierre’s Proposed Declaration of Rights,” in Stewart, 433. 43 Cf. Davidson, Immutable Laws of Mankind, 191: “[B]oth Girondins and Jacobins, misled by tiny groups of supporters’ letters from London, at first thought that nations like Britain and the US could get together with them in a sort of unity like that proposed by the abbé de St Pierre, because all were progressive. Even when it became clear that both the British state and the British people wanted nothing of the new rights, the moderates were quick to distinguish between the evil rulers, notably Pitt, and a population duped into forgetting that it was the source of the liberties newly won in France.”

67 according to the principles of 1789 can be the perfect concrete universal, even the incarnation of the logos that is the mind of the “Immortal Legislator,” nature.

Thus, the revolution uses universal citizenship rights to replace the arbitrary, bloated, and byzantine hierarchy of the ancien régime with the slim, efficient, and rational hierarchy of the nation-state and its citizen. The Committee for General Security attempts to discern the presence of the virtues of citizenship in certain persons and their absence in others in order to maintain the security of liberty and equality in the new regime. The Revolution declares its absolute competence in matters of citizenship in order to restore ordered fraternity after the fall of the Estates General. And by using citizenship as a device for creating distinctions between political authority and all other institutions, the Revolution exports to the rest of

Europe a vision of a new kind of society. This new kind of society is no longer intelligible as a constellation of communitates that determine rights and duties by virtue of the overlapping and complementary authorities of their jurisdictions. Rather, this new kind of society is intelligible in the light of a single star, the most glorious legal fiction there is: equality.

III. 1789’s Univocity and Equivocity

So, we might ask, if this citizenship was worthy of bloodshed, why not liberté, egalité, et citoyonneté? Smoldering within the effort to construct a citizenship that would restore the broken social relations were two critical principles of the Revolution: the nation and humanity. Had the events of 1789 and their aftermath been solely directed toward reimagining French fraternity and promoting and securing the rights of French citizens within French borders, things would perhaps have been different. The Revolution could have attended more deliberately to the various communitates that made up historic French life.

But within this national crucible, another communitas was being reimagined based on an alloy of French political citizenship and something larger than the polis, the municipality,

68 the national regime, the country, the empire, and even the Catholic Church. Note the first two rights of the Declaration. The revolutionary lawyers speak not only to le citoyen, but also to l’humanité.

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights; social distinctions may be based only upon general usefulness. 2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.44

The Revolution, from its exalted height in the eye of nature alone, speaks directly to the individual person, and indeed to all individual persons wherever on the map and whenever in history they may be. The political innovations to follow from this Declaration are not first embedded within communitates. So, whereas Aristotle’s Politics begins with a discussion of the household, and so by implication the broader social context in which the political is formed, the Declaration begins politics with an address to isolable monads. Any polity anywhere in the world at any given time opposed to this latter politics the Revolution could consider insufficiently political. It was a short step from accusing such polities of political insufficiency to declaring such polities worthy of the bayonet.

The problem is the univocal habit at work here. If citizenship is to be sufficiently political and so restore the broken relations of nature and history, the Revolution requires that it be seen as the seamless joining of the local and the universal. In other words, citizenship must become the local mode by which human persons participate in a more authentic human communitas. As we will see below, Mazzini recognized the tremendous moral energy in this vision of citizenship and made it the central aspect of his social thought. But performing such a univocation between citizenship and authentic communitas carries with it certain problems. Consider the local valence first. Univocating between citizenship and communitas within a national political regime is somewhat intelligible. That is, we can look at a

44 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in Stewart, A Documentary Survey, 114.

69 particular polis, municipality, a kingdom, or an empire in history and understand how political theory could attach authentic human communitas to membership in that particular. This is relatively straightforward jingoism. These are all physical political forms interpretable as such, even if they vary in size, in conceptions of sovereignty, in notions of participation, and/or in relative adequacy to the various forms of regime. Furthermore, these are all political forms that are understandably titillated by the hegemonic lure of univocity. If the communitas of the nation is the historical expression of the communitas of humanity itself, perhaps these regimes could be like gods, creating humans.

But consider the universal valence. What could a universal political form be? Can the human species itself express a common will describable in political terms? The Catholic

Church in 1789 France is the nearest contender for an archetype of the universal-political form. But as we will see below in treating Leo XIII’s ecclesiology, such a description is incompatible with the Church’s self-understanding, no matter what one might assume regarding the Holy See’s desire for temporal authority. Indeed, the Catholic Church’s universality is described in the 19th century in increasingly social terms directly in response to a politicization of the Church that degrades the universal body of Christ to the level of one more external authority absorbable by the state. Thus the possibility of describing a human community in social or political terms is critical, for it speaks to orders of human relations and how we imagine their authority. In section 1.2 of this chapter, we will see how

Mazzini’s eschatological vision of citizenship, within his romantic and idealist patriotism, posits a universal political form in the shape of a future humanity. Provocatively, for Mazzini this is the historical replacement of the Catholic Church, which failed, according to Mazzini, to truly associate humans with each other. For Mazzini, it will be up to the nation to create

70 the universal political communtias that will ultimately absorb the nation’s own identity in an unknown future.

1789’s first Declaration proclaims the Revolution competent as an interpreter of both the human communitas embodied in political citizenship, and the human person’s sociality, rooted in a universal, inviolable nature bound to be respected by all. The Declaration links the meanings of the words citizen and social to a highly differentiated social imagination rooted in the political form expressed by these first two rights.45 Less than four years later, in

Robespierre’s proposed declaration of the rights of man and citizen, the rhetoric became metaphysical, placing the category citizenship directly before the eyes of the Immortal

Legislator’s “eternal laws of justice and of reason.”46 In Robespierre’s hands, the category citizenship becomes a relation no longer describable in the humbler, more limited political lexicon. That is, if the rights of citizens exist on account of the Immortal Legislator’s

“eternal laws of justice and of reason,” then are we not affirming a pre-political givenness, perhaps even a created goodness, underwriting those same rights? According to Davidson, the revolutionaries wanted “a statement of rights for all humans everywhere based on the US model but updated in terms of natural law.”47 The natural law was, moreover, the mechanism by which the revolutionary lawyers would establish a legal edifice that would liberate modern citizens from responsibility to any “higher” legal regime such as comprised

45 It falls beyond the scope of my project to treat the many ways in which 1789 is an expression of central tenets of political theory originating in the mid-17th century and then developing throughout the 18th century. This intellectual ferment building up to 1789 is what the journalist Emmet John Hughes has called the foundation work of the “liberal faith,” which rests on the social philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Condillac, Helvetius, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Smith. “The Enlightened [...] believed they had found [...] a new instrument by which they might prove that their philosophy could make more good men than sufficient or efficacious grace. [...] The social gospel of these men was a protest and a promise - a protest against a rigidified social organization built on dead religious and social premises, and constricting the naturally and, they believed, justly dynamic forces of the day; a promise that once those forces were released a new and better life for mankind would follow.” Cf. Emmet John Hughes, The Church and Liberal Society, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), 87, 88. 46 “Robespierre’s Proposed Declaration of Rights,” in Stewart, 430. 47 Davidson, The Immutable Laws of Mankind, 175.

71 the ancien régime.48 But Siéyès quickly disabuses us of any notion that revolutionary citizenship is replacing the hierarchies of the ancien régime with hierarchies that signify human participation in the Eternal Law of the Triune Lord. Whatever the “natural law” is to which the revolutionary lawyers appealed, it is not a natural law recognizable to the Christian tradition. Siéyès demanded that a

Declaration of Rights must change totally in spirit and nature. It ceases to be a concession, a transaction, a treaty condition or a contract between authority and authority. There is only one power, one authority. It is a human being, Man, who commits his business to an agent (proxy), he gives his instructions; he declares to him the agent, what his duties are; he does not amuse himself by saying: and I want to conserve intact this or that of my rights. That would be cowardly, ridiculous, miserable, and I defy anyone to list them completely and satisfactorily.49

The interpretation, in chapter two below, of Leo XIII’s social magisterium, his doctrine of citizenship, and the analogia communitatis at work in his thought is an effort at discerning a Catholic response to Siéyès, especially regarding the state’s competence to locate the origin and end of political communitas in the singular power of l’humanité. Leo XIII is engaged in a protracted debate with various forms of liberalism in his day, and this debate centers on a fundamental question about our ability to discern the connection between the

Christian doctrine of creation, the attendant conception of nature, and the relation of these two to human society - especially politics. In Leo’s approach to this thicket of issues, we will see that the stability of any peaceful account of the social or the political will depend on some metaphysics of creation. Without such a metaphysics, the social and the political become privative and intelligible only as power and its hidden exercise as coercion.

48 Cf., ibid., 177-8: “Unlike all British declarations [of rights] and documents to [1789], this was no treaty with what already existed. In this regard, the distance between the British tradition and the French declaration is not bridgeable. All the British documents are explicit or implicit treaties with monarchs or other authorities. They fall inside the powers of those authorities whether narrow, as with the monarch’s prerogative powers, or wide, as with the claims of the British people’s ‘time-immemorial’ customs. The French goal was a declaration that consciously created rights that had no correlative duties. They were rights created against the notion of duty to some legal regime which was higher. [...] The clear object was to destroy all connection with past systems of power and the community/ies that expressed them.” 49 Quoted in ibid., 177.

72 Throughout Leo’s social magisterium, he is anxious that the social activity of politics is becoming nothing more than the coercive exertion of the “one power, one authority

[...Man].” His anxiety was well founded. In asking whether or not politics without a doctrine of creation ultimately terminates in coercion, Leo’s social magisterium is probing 1789’s univocations and equivocations and their implicit violence. For in univocating and setting up citizenship as the communitas, the Revolution sets the stage for the long 19th century effort to force all non-state communitates into one of the two bureaucratic canals I mentioned above: either the state department or the private conscience. If citizenship is the medicine that will restore the broken relations of nature and history, no other relation may stand in the way.

But within this great promise of restoration is the corrosive equivocation that continually undermines. The Revolution seeks the metaphysical origins of human communitas in the mind of a god of its own creation. And this god is content to allow liberty and equality to abet oppression and inequality.

Had the Revolution stopped short of such rare elevations, we may have remembered it in terms of the struggle for liberté, egalité, et citoyenneté. But as it happened, citoyenneté was allowed to morph into fraternité. And so, despite making some effort to separate in the

Declarations and Constitutions themselves the rights of man from the rights of citizens, and despite the historical reality in 1789 and following of limiting citizenship and suspending rights, 1789 now represents a pivotal moment in the dominant process of the 19th century: the gathering of all communitates into one and naming it the state. Whatever other mechanisms contributed to this process - and they are legion - central to the successful homogenization and politicization of society is precisely this linguistic mash-up of fraternité et citoyenneté. If citizenship and brotherhood can be held so closely together in the revolutionary imagination as they are in the Declaration and in the motto of the Republic, then both

73 citizenship and brotherhood - or the fundamental political relation and all other communitates

- can finally be collapsed into one. If this collapse can be intelligibly commended to the public, then the deepest motivation of the Revolution - equality - and the liberalism it expresses can finally be imagined and described in terms of the achievable. And if this collapse can be accomplished, the ancien régime is left finally in the barbaric night.

74 CHAPTER 1.2:

ESCHATOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: MAZZINI’S

COMMUNITATES AND THE FAILURE OF ANALOGY

I see the people pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the intoxication of brutal, angry, savage joy; and I remember that those brutalized faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows in beauty, ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and duties. And in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish for the present and glories for the future.1

This is a distillation of the social anthropology of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872),

Italy’s greatest interpreter of 1789 and the young country’s Romantic prophet of national unity and European cooperation.2 Though he spent the majority of his life in exile from the

Italian peninsula, evading a sentence of death, Mazzini’s writings from Marseilles, Geneva,

1 Giuseppe Mazzini, quoted in N. Gangulee, ed., Giuseppe Mazzini: Selected Writings, (London: Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1945), 12 2 It is beyond the scope of my project here to examine the sources of Mazzini’s thought. But this work need not be done anyway. Without question, Mazzini’s entire system of thought is rooted in, even taken from, the St. Simonian school of socialist thought, adjusted for the Italian context as Mazzini saw fit. Even the apocalyptic rhetoric of the school’s founder, the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), is adopted by Mazzini. Both St. Simon and Mazzini claim to speak prophetically about the coming age of duty, cooperation, and international association. Mazzini is more certainly indebted to the St. Simonians, however, and their cultivation, after the founder’s death, of a completely new religion. Cf. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners, 37-61. We know that Mazzini read Hegel as well and was shocked when he moved to London that Hegel was not more popular there. Though Mazzini’s vision of historical progress appears Hegelian at moments, Mazzini’s thought does not rely on dialectical resolution. Association for Mazzini is so fundamental to human nature that the resolution of subordinate communitates into the universal State is unattractive to him.

75 and London inspired either admiration or enmity in every major figure of the risorgimento.1

His thought animates Gioberti and Balboa, even if they tried to distance themselves from him as a matter of political expediency. Cavour fruitfully disagreed with him over key elements of unification. His thought hounds Charles Albert’s conscience in Piedmont, and threatens Metternich’s authority throughout the peninsula. Pius IX named him as a serious threat to the Catholic Church, and the Vatican was even involved in intercepting Mazzini’s correspondence. He inspires rebellion on the peninsula and admiration among Europe’s liberal intelligentsia. The governments of Europe almost universally agreed to surveill him and report back to Austria, which hoped to see him executed. And while the governments of

Europe cooperated with Austria, the national movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia,

Hungary, and Greece were fired by his eschatological rhetoric. These movements perceived in Mazzini’s work a startling vision of citizenship and its relationship to authentic communitas.

My argument in this section of the chapter is that Mazzini’s concept of citizenship within an eschatological communitas provides the Italian national cause with what appears to be - but ultimately is not - an analogical account of communitas. Though the Mazzinian concept of communitas often works as an insightful critique of the univocities and equivocities exported from 1789, in this section I show through an analytical summary of his thought several important ways Mazzini’s thought falls into univocal trouble. In short, Mazzini offers us a spectrum concept of communitas that ultimately leaves every communitas within the

1 Cf. Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 229, where Smith quotes a eulogy to Mazzini: “For forty-five years his name had been a watchword. When he began his course, Italy was a geographical expression, when he finished his course it was the sixth great power….He was that rare character a practical idealogue, who swayed men by the force of his ideas, the holiness of his life and the unique loftiness of his character….This influence, rising in some cases to an ascendancy such as has hardly been given to the greatest religious teachers, was employed unswervingly for a single end and it was employed successfully. Cavour made Italy, but it was due to Mazzini, not Cavour, that such making was possible [...]. It is among the greater popes that we must seek for the analogue of Joseph Mazzini [...]. Joseph Mazzini was what in the Roman Catholic ideal every pope should be….He was as incapable of compromise as the Church whose greater chiefs he in mind so closely resembled.”

76 spectrum on an identical ontological footing. In doing so, Mazzini deprives the Italian national cause of a more nuanced understanding of the way communitates are related to each other simultaneously in terms of difference and similarity. Though Italy’s inability to appreciate society in this mode is certainly not due solely to Mazzini’s error here, his eschatological patriotism is a key factor in appreciating the character of Italian nationalism and its extended conflict with its most significant competitor for social authority: the

Catholic Church.2

Mazzini’s gift to the Italian national cause is his articulation of a vision of communitas that should be read in both continuity and contrast with 1789’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.3 In continuity with the Revolution, Mazzini prophesies that citizenship in the new Italian nation will restore the broken relations of nature and history by eliminating all mediations and hierarchies that obstruct the relationship between humanity and the divine law and thus stand in the way of the final liberation of the Italian people and eventually of all humanity. Those revolutionaries of 1789 intent on destroying the ancien régime would have

2 There is close coherence between Mazzini and Catholic social thought, and this is not surprising, given the decisive influence Lamennais’ writings had on Mazzini. Cf. Ibid., 80, where Mazzini quotes from Lamennais’ Livre du Peuple to summarize his own project: “Your task is to form the universal family, to build the City of God, and by a continuous labour gradually to translate His work in Humanity into fact. When you love one another as brothers and treat each other reciprocally as such, and each one, seeking his own good in the good of all, shall identify his own life with the life of all, his own interests with the interests of all, and shall be always ready to sacrifice himself for all the members of the common family, and they equally ready to sacrifice themselves for him, most of the ills which weigh to-day upon the human race will vanish like the thick mists gathered upon the horizon vanish at the rising of the sun; since it is His will that Love shall unite little by little, and ever more closely, the scattered elements of Humanity and order them in a single body, and Humanity be one, as He is one.” 3 We must recognize that the architects of the Revolution are working to draft a bill of rights and a new constitution, while Mazzini is penning something like a manifesto. We might rightly judge the pragmatism and feasibility of their respective projects according to genre. But such caveats only take us so far when it comes to Mazzini, for he was consistently critical of the accusation that his romantic patriotism is too idealistic and that martyrdom could “never become the religion of a whole party.” His entire project is designed to overcome the inertia created by a capitalism and a liberalism focused solely on efficiency and individual liberty. In such a social milieu, martyrdom is largely unintelligible. Cf. Mazzini, “Interests and Principles,” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, 125-38; Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, 58-82

77 understood Mazzini’s objectives perfectly.4 But we can see the contrast between 1789’s principles and Mazzini’s own in the title of his most popular work, The Duties of Man. In this collection of every major piece of his thought, Mazzini recognized that Italy’s method of restoring those relationships by combating tyranny and inequality could not be a simple replication of 1789’s. The fifty year interim between the Revolution and the writing of the materials that would eventually comprise The Duties of Man had proven to Mazzini that the enemies of tyranny were divided among themselves regarding sovereignty and the purpose of society. Some emphasized the sovereignty of the individual and focused almost exclusively on rights, while others emphasized the sovereignty of society and focused almost exclusively on duty within associational structures.5 Mazzini’s project is designed to overcome this impasse. In doing so, he implicitly and explicitly addresses the four closely related antinomies I highlighted in section 1.1 of this chapter.

I. The Duties of Man: The Work as a Whole

Whereas the architects of the French Revolution set about defining the rights of human persons and citizens according to the primordial human properties of liberty and equality, Mazzini defines the rights of human persons and citizens according to a romantic- idealist concept of fraternal duty carried out in domestic, national, international, and universal communitates. Writing to the “Italian working-men,” Mazzini shows his hand immediately: “I want to speak to you of your duties. I want to speak to you, as my heart dictates to me, of the most sacred things which we know - of God, of Humanity, of the

4 Mazzini seems to understand this, suggesting that his own project of prophetic or eschatological patriotism is in fundamental continuity with an historical process begun in 1789. “Hitherto France has been in the lead. In ‘89 France assumed full direction of the process of civilizing Europe. [...] Now the time has come when the exclusive supremacy of a single poeple must disappear through the rehabilitation of all peoples, through the specification of new missions. Each people will have its mission and that mission will constitute its test of nationality. From the harmonious interplay of these special missions will derive the general mission of all peoples: Progress toward Humanity!” Cf. Ignazio Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 55. 5 Cf. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, 84-5.

78 Fatherland, of the Family. Listen to me with love, even as I shall speak to you with love.”6

What follows in Mazzini’s work is an extended meditation on the proper order between duties and rights as they pertain to the maintenance of these different communitates. After

1789, Mazzini correctly notes, “whatever has been done for the cause of progress and of good against absolute governments and hereditary aristocracies has been done in the name of the Rights of Man; in the name of liberty as the means, and of well-being as the object of existence.”7 But this approach to the liberation of the peoples has not worked and must now give way to a new epoch.8

Granted, material progress has been impressive. And human rights are, as never before in history, respected in word, even if not in deed. But the maniacal focus on rights after the Revolution has, on Mazzini’s read, only led to more conflict between the classes.

Citizenship in the revolutionary communitas has not lived up to the great hope of 1789: that citizenship could finally restore the broken relations. Furthermore, the focus on rights has reduced the citizen’s ability to imagine sacrifice for anything beyond himself. The consequence of this historical trend in Italy is that the peoples have remained under the authority of foreigners (read: Austria). Liberation has not - because it cannot - arrived via the exclusive focus on rights. In the “holy social war” being waged, “the old French ideas” must be translated.9 These old ideas may indeed allow Italians “to rise and overthrow obstacles,”

6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 8, emphasis original. 8 I use the word epoch deliberately. Mazzini is convinced that the French Revolution signals the end of one epoch of history and the transition to a new epoch. The Italian national movement must rise to the challenge of this new epoch by recognizing that the French Revolution was not the beginning of something new, but the end of something old. Cf. Mazzini, “Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789,” 255-8. 9 Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 14. Cf. Silone, The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, 55. Mazzini writes regarding the national “tactic” for Switzerland: “The age that has just passed, the age that ended with the French Revolution, performed a mission, the mission of emancipating man as an individual, providing him with three dogmas, the dogmas of liberty, equality and fraternity. The era that is now dawning will have the task of organizing humanity, in other words, socialism, not only in its individual applications but as between people and people - it will have the task of organizing a Europe of free peoples, independent as regards their domestic functioning,

79 but more is required if Italy is to “found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation.”10

The Mazzinian solution to this critical translation of the old French ideas is education based on the principle of duty.11 Italian nationalists

must convince men that they, sons of one only God, must obey one only law, here on earth; that each one of them must live, not for himself, but for others; that the object of their life is not to be more or less happy, but to make themselves and others better; that to fight against injustice and error for the benefit of their brothers is not only a right, but a duty; a duty not to be neglected without sin, - the duty of their whole life.12

Mazzinian duty is meant to move the Italian national cause past material considerations of security, comfort, and wealth and toward a new “epoch like Christ’s.”13 Whereas previously

Italians have lived in a “society rotten as that of the Roman Empire,” the patriotic duty of

Italian citizens will revive and transform society, “associating all its members and its workers in one single faith, under one single law, and for one purpose; the free and progressive development of all the faculties which God has planted in His creatures. We seek the reign of God upon earth as in heaven [...].”14 Society, precisely in its Italian identity and in the realization of the people’s liberation is to become “an endeavour towards a progressive approach to the Divine Idea.”15

Mazzini thus introduces in The Duties of Man two fundamental principles decidedly absent from 1789’s effort to replace the old order through its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The first is a principle of human liberty and equality conveniently unencumbered mutually associated with one another as regards their common outlook - and the motto will be: ‘Liberty, Equality, Humanity.’” 10 Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 15. 11 Cf. Ibid., 83-9. For Mazzini, education is distinct from instruction. The former is principally moral, while the latter is principally intellectual. Education cultivates a sense of duty while instruction makes the fulfillment of duty possible. 12 Ibid., 15-16, emphasis original. 13 Cf. Ibid., 19. 14 Ibid., 19. 15 Ibid.

80 by questions of material property and natural difference. This tidy estimation of liberty and equality is then taken up into an idealist account of the human person’s vocation to devote herself to the social whole - even to humanity itself. The second principle is an account of the social relationships between parts and wholes whereby both exist for the sake of the other on their progressive journey through history. The structure of this project is simple and elegant. But we must not miss the pivotal phrase Mazzini uses to describe the mutuality between part and whole. Mazzini suggests that the object of this mutuality is not simply to make individual persons “more or less happy, but to make themselves and others better

[...].” This is the foundation on which duty rests, and it is richly implicated in the competing social anthropologies of the 19th century. As we will see below, Leo XIII is sympathetic to precisely this claim, and it makes every bit of difference in his social magisterium. What

Mazzini and the Pope have in common is a conviction that society is not only a functional apparatus artificially designed by humans to help them manage property, maintain security, and otherwise foster orderly relations among different persons and communitates. Instead,

Mazzini and the Pope both consider society as a natural context in which human persons and communitates cause good. It seems that instead of imagining society as a place where transactions are able to happen relatively peacefully and reliably, for Mazzini and Leo, society is a moral activity whereby humans participate in the divine gift of bringing about goodness in the lives of beings beyond the self. I would argue that Mazzini’s insight here is the deeper source of his immediate appeal to the Italian nationalist movement. It is also the source of his enduring appeal outside Italy.

After introducing the concept of duty in this way as the fundamental divergence from 1789, Mazzini devotes chapters to God and the Law. In doing so, he describes the metaphysical principles of his thought - truly, his new religion of humanity - and the binding

81 nature of the principles’ authority. He then proceeds to describe the human person’s duty to

Humanity, Country, Family, and Self, providing the reader an extended account of his vision communitas, both in its historically contingent form and in its relation to human nature. He addresses key social topics in light of his concept of duty: the nature of liberty, the role of education, the necessity of association, the concept of historical progress, and the economic question. As a whole, The Duties of Man thus stands as one of the most significant commentaries on 19th century society.

II. God and the Divine Law

One of the broken relations of history, according to Mazzini, is humanity’s access to

God, which has become mired in a variety of mediations and obfuscations that separate the

Divine from its work in the peoples of earth.16 Overcoming these interruptions is the purpose of awakening the national consciousness of Italians, Poles, Russians, etc. In so awakening these peoples, Europeans and eventually humanity will become the royal priesthood and holy nation that bears “God’s image upon earth.”17 Humanity’s vocation to bear and even incarnate the “Divine Idea” in history is critical for understanding Mazzini’s eschatological vision of citizenship and national patriotism. The stakes of national liberation could not be greater: “The origin of your duties is in God. The definition of your duties is found in His law. The progressive discovery and application of His law is the task of

Humanity.”18 And in the modern context, two forces stand in the way of this “discovery and application:” liberal rationalism and Catholicism. His criticism of these forces is rooted in his estimation of the theological presuppositions underwriting them.

16 Cf. Ibid., 71-2, where Mazzini criticizes Christianity for setting up the most interruptive mediation: the historical Incarnation of Christ. This singular historical event was designed, according to Mazzini, to help Christians of the past bridge the gap between “the immensity of the ideal of perfectibility which they had conceived, and the sense of the brief miserable life of the individual [...].” 17 Cf. Ibid., 22. 18 Ibid., 21.

82 On the one hand, Italians and nationalist movements throughout the rest of Europe face the limitations and abuses of liberalism’s faux religiosity, which claims to know and even to prove the existence of God, but also promises to separate religion from politics in order to liberate individuals to follow their own consciences.19 According to Mazzini, liberal rationalism, in treating religion as a private phenomenon, prevents two fundamental forms of human communitas. On the other hand, liberal rationalism prevents national peoples from approaching God in humans’ properly social form. And so it prevents humans from enjoying communitas with the Divine itself. From Mazzini’s perspective though, when all the

“lies and corruption pass away, as tyrannies pass away: God remains, and the People remains, God’s image upon the earth. Even as the People, through slavery, suffering, and poverty, conquers, step by step, conscience, strength, emancipation, so out of the ruins of corrupt systems of religion the holy name of God arises resplendent, surrounded by a purer, a more fervent, and more rational worship.”20

In response to liberal rationalism, which knows God, but does not love God,21

Mazzini calls on Italians and Europeans to work for associational life through education and the development of national consciousness. Only through these mechanisms can national peoples develop the sense of duty required to form a human unity worthy of bearing God’s image on earth. In this way, citizenship in a national unity becomes the new priesthood shared by all persons, united in their common endeavor to progress further and further toward the fuller incarnation of God in history. It seems that Mazzini accomplishes the final

19 Cf. Ibid., 23. 20 Ibid., 22. Cf. Ibid., 69: “You are, then, created for association. It multiplies your strength a hundredfold; makes the ideas of others yours, and the progress of others yours; and raises, improves, and sanctifies your nature through the affections and the growing sentiment of the unity of the human family.” 21 Cf. Ibid., 24.

83 univocation: the communitas expressed locally in national citizenship is ontologically identical to the communitas that characterizes human sociality. Liberal individualism could not see this.

But in addition to liberal rationalism, Italians and national movements throughout

Europe face the central plank in the foundation of the ancien régime: Roman Catholicism. If liberal rationalism claims to liberate human persons and their pursuit of the Divine by severing social connection and relegating religiosity to the privacy of the conscience, then

Roman Catholicism severs humanity’s relation to God by preaching his transcendent inaccessibility and the fleeting suffering of this life. Mazzini characterizes Catholicism as nothing more than the careful, byzantine maintenance of God’s inaccessibility and the paternal insistence that humans should suffer the degradations of the vale of tears in hopes of a world to come.22 Mazzini clearly has in mind not only the hierarchical, mediational structure of Catholicism, but also the unique communitates growing out of this vision of nature and history: the religious orders. These communitates, according to Mazzini, misunderstand fundamentally human communitas in that the orders emphasize poverty and contemplation over against action. To the Church, Mazzini writes, “Yours is not a religion; it is a sect of men who have forgotten their origin, forgotten the battle which their fathers kept up against a rotten society, and the victories which they won, transforming this world which you, O men of contemplation, despise to-day.”23

The maintenance of this inactive contemplation and patient suffering is made possible by a particular interpretation of Christ’s command to render to Caesar what is

Caesar’s. On this interpretation, the world may be divided up according to nature and grace, where some things are reserved for the former and some for the latter. But Mazzini will ask

22 Cf. Ibid., 23. 23 Ibid., 27.

84 baldly, “Can they tell you anything which is not God’s?”24 Like liberal rationalists, Catholic social and political thinkers sever the relationship between religion and society/politics, making religion a matter of virtuous endurance through the sufferings of social and political life. But if humans are serious when they pray, “Thy kingdom come on earth, O Lord, as it is in heaven,” then they should be busy working to bring about the more perfect union of humanity that Christianity itself proclaimed.25

In the case of both liberal rationalism and Catholicism, according to Mazzini, the problem is inactivity, a loss of “spirit” in an age of the sovereignty of “facts.”26 But the spirit

“never departed from Italy as long as she remained, in spite of her divisions, great and active

[...].”27 True, for a time in the medieval and early modern period, Italians lost their religious spirit when they were absorbed into Christendom, lost their national character, and tried to

“live as if [they] were Spaniards, Germans, and French.”28 The ancien régime was formed, and the people were “despised by the learned, deceived and fleeced by the priests,” and otherwise left abject and impotent.29 But it is Mazzini’s unique and prophetic task to call Italy and the rest of the European nations to “rise again, great and honoured,” in order to recover the “national tradition” and to awake the “religious sentiment” asleep in the peoples:

Preach in the name of God. The learned will smile; ask the learned what they have done for their country. The priests will excommunicate you; say to the priests that you know God better than all of them together do, and that between God and His law you have no need of any intermediary. The people will understand you, and

24 Ibid., 28. 25 Cf. Ibid., 27-8. 26 Cf. Ibid., 29. 27 Ibid., 30. 28 Cf. Ibid. 29 Cf. Ibid. See also 70-1: Mazzini has no patience for this inertia. He likens it later to the belief in fate and chance that caused “old Oriental and Pagan religions” to imagine the human person as “condemned to move for ever in the circle described by individuals here below [...].” Interestingly, Mazzini suggests that both liberal rationalism and ancient paganism are slavishly devoted to “facts,” incapable of “troubling or hoping to change them.”

85 repeat with you: We believe in God the Father, who is Intelligence and Love, Creator and Teacher of Humanity. And in this saying you and the People will conquer.30

If Mazzini is correct in his estimation of rationalism and Catholicism as essentially obstacles to true human liberty31 in relationship with fellow humans and the Creator, then the natural question to ask is how awakening the “religious sentiment” of a national people will heal the relations broken by the history of human tyranny. Mazzini’s answer is an idealist conception of Divine Law incarnate in Humanity itself. Comprised by individual consciences and the “general opinion of [one’s] fellow-men,” this law enables humanity to “soar towards” God.32 Mazzini understands the two wings of conscience and opinion on which we make our ascent in contrast to the liberal rationalist advocacy of “universal opinion” and the

Catholic advocacy of “a code or a book.”33 Rationalism and Catholicism are not the only threats, however. Mazzini also separates his thought from other social gospels on offer in the

19th century. For Mazzini, capitalism leads to anarchy; socialism to tyranny; liberalism to inequality and oppression; and communism to “petrification.”34 These social gospels all seek some organizing principle whereby human action may be coordinated for some discrete end, but none of them can accomplish the truly human task of furthering “God’s design in creation.”35

30 Ibid., 31, emphasis original. 31 Cf. Ibid., 67-8. Mazzini writes of human liberty that persons possess the “right to be absolutely unfettered and to be aided, within certain limits, in the fulfilment of your duties.” At 76-82, he describes more carefully his doctrine of liberty, making it the root of morality, association, and right. “You ought to have liberty and everything that is indispensable for the moral and material nourishment of life. Personal liberty; liberty of locomotion; liberty of religious belief; liberty of opinion on all subjects; liberty of expressing opinion through the press or by any other peaceful method; liberty of association so as to be able to cultivate your own minds by contact with the minds of others; liberty of trade in all the productions of your brains and hands: these are all things which no one may take from you - except on certain rare occasions which it is not necessary to mention now - without grave injustice, without arousing in you the duty to protest” (79). It is unclear what this latter, massive caveat signifies. But given the story of 1789 and its export, it is not difficult to imagine conditions in which the liberty so vaunted by liberalism must be checked for the sake of temporary exigencies. 32 Cf. Ibid., 35. 33 Cf. Ibid., 33. 34 Cf. Ibid., 34-5. 35 Cf. Ibid., 35.

86 Progress in this human vocation is accomplished only through education under the guidance of a “light” and a “rule” that transcends all religions and social constructs. “And this rule is Intellect and Humanity.”36 Mazzini’s description of this rule is worth quoting at length:

God has given intellect to each of you that you may educate it to know His law. Today poverty, the rooted errors of centuries, and the will of your masters withhold from you even the possibility of educating it; and for this reason it is necessary for you to overthrow these obstacles by force. But even when those obstacles are removed your individual intellect will not be enough to teach you the law of God, if it is not supported by the intellect of Humanity. Your life is short, your individual faculties are weak, uncertain, and need a support. Now, God has placed beside you a Being whose life is continuous, whose faculties are the sum of all the individual faculties that have been exercised for perhaps four hundred centuries; a being which amid the errors and the faults of individuals ever advances in wisdom and morality; a being whose development God has written and writes in every epoch a line of His law. This being is Humanity.37

Instead of Christ and instead of a Church as the body of Christ and faithful teacher of humanity, humanity itself becomes for Mazzini the “living word of God,” and indeed is the incarnation of God Himself “successively” accomplished in history.38 Via humanity’s incarnation of God, human- human communitas is restored along with human-divine communitas. Society is thus the ongoing context of its own salvific work.

We must note how Mazzini imagines history. In the extended quote above, he states that “now” we have beside us a “Being” who will teach us God’s law. Furthermore, God is incarnate successively. That is, God becomes. And so all things, from the individual human

36 Ibid., 37. 37 Ibid., emphasis original. 38 Cf. Ibid., 71-2: “The men who founded upon the words of Jesus a religion superior to all the beliefs of the ancient East and of Paganism, dimly foresaw, but did not grasp the holy idea contained in this word, Progress. They understood the unity of the human race, the unity of the law, and the perfectibility of man; but they did not understand the power of accomplishing it which God has given to man, nor the way in which it must be accomplished. They limited themselves also to deducing the rule of life from the contemplation of the individual. Humanity as a collective body remained unknown to them. [...] Their mental position between the immensity of the ideal of perfectibility which they had conceived, and the sense of the brief miserable life of the individual, created a need for an intermediary term between the two, between God and man; and not having grasped the idea of a collective humanity, they had recourse to that of a divine incarnation; they declared that faith in this incarnation was the only source of salvation, of strength, of grace for me. Not suspecting the continuous revelation which descends from God upon man through Humanity, they believed in an immediate and single revelation give at one fixed moment, and by the special favour of God” (emphasis original).

87 person to the Divinity are subject to at least one principal that dominates their being: the inexorable progress of history. So though Mazzini’s theism is a critical aspect of his patriotic thought on the nation and the citizen, it is important to note that he sees this theism as a movement past Christianity - especially as it is embodied in Catholicism.39 Put differently,

Mazzini does not imagine his prophetic patriotism to be a deepening of Christianity if by

“deepening” we are to understand a return to the particular genius of Christ or some inner kernel of historic Christianity. Instead, his prophetic patriotism is an aspect of the progressive revelation of human morality, which surpasses Christianities of the interval since

Christ, as the original Christianity itself surpassed paganism.40

III. Duties

The exercise of this law, incarnate lately in humanity - or perhaps about to be incarnate, as Mazzini often speaks of the imminent arrival of a new age - is expressed most perfectly in the commission of one’s duty. The order of Mazzini’s treatment of human duty is significant. He constructs the following hierarchical structure of communitates: humanity, country, family, self. Each station of the hierarchy is indexed to the needs of the human person destined for ever more perfect communion with God and neighbor. Moreover, each station of the hierarchy is related to the others as so many arenas in which human persons are educated and trained in the virtues necessary to live out God’s law in time. No one station can do without the others, and every lower station on the hierarchy is designed by

God to contribute to the fuller and fuller manifestation of God’s law, incarnate in

39 Cf. Ibid., 24. Mazzini associates Protestantism with the individualism that plagues liberal thought. In this, he sounds strikingly similar to Catholic social and political thinkers in the 19th century. Cf. Ibid., 72. Mazzini suggests that only Jesus himself had a “sublime intuition” of what Mazzini is now proclaiming when Jesus teaches his disciples in John 14-16 that there is much more to be revealed by the Spirit who is to come. 40 Cf. Ibid., 38. At 70, he writes, “This word Progress, unknown to antiquity, will be from henceforth a sacred word for Humanity. It comprehends a whole social, political, and religious transformation.”

88 humanity.41 Put differently, one’s duties to the self as a rational, social creature, to the family as a domestic creature, and to the country as a social and political creature are subject to

God’s will “that the Idea of perfectibility and of love which He has given to the world should reveal itself in ever-increasing glory, ever more adored and better manifested.”42 The hierarchy of relations, then, is designed to harness the human inclination to moral perfection and to turn that energy toward quantitatively greater instantiations of the Divine Idea in history.

The communitas signified by citizenship would seem, then, to exist within the hierarchical structure of communitates here such that it would be contextualized and relativized in something like an analogical scheme, where the communitas of the family would be proportionally related to the communitas of the nation, etc. But it is important to note that in

Mazzini’s thought, the stations of this hierarchy exist on something more like a continuum or spectrum.43 We have already seen that this is the case with Mazzini’s notion of incarnation. All being is subject to the progressive march of history. And so every communitas on this spectrum occupies the same ontological space: each one, even the Divinity, is devoted to becoming the incarnation of the Divine Law. So what appears to be analogical

41 Cf. Ibid., 41-2. Cf. Charles Vaughan’s estimation of this analogical aspect of Mazzini’s thought, quoted in Smith, Mazzini, 220: Mazzini “does not exalt the individual at the expense of the nation, like the disciples of Rousseau; nor the nation at the expense of the individual, as wa the tendency of Hegel; nor humanity at the expense of both, as was the incurable aberration of Comte. Recognising that each of these has its peculiar function, he recognises no less fully that no one of them can put forth its energies without the others; that each of them is conditioned absolutely by the others; and that only to the most limited extent is it possible to mark off the sphere in which each operates….At the same time he marks out the limits beyond which the instinct of nationality becomes dangerous, or even harmful. He denies that it is a final and absolute principle. He persistently subordinates it to the larger claims of humanity...He declares the free development of the national spirit to be essential to the true life of humanity. So far as it serves that end, it is nothing but good. AS soon as it throws itself athwart that end, it becomes an enormous evil.” 42 Ibid., 42. At 76-7, Mazzini notes that the Idea of perfectibility surpasses human understanding. Humanity cannot know its final end. “The important thing for us to be convinced of is, that whatever the end may be for which we are destined, we can only discover and attain it by the progressive development and the exercise of our intellectual faculties” (emphasis original). 43 Cf. Ibid., 61-2.

89 relation, relativizing each sphere of social life with regard to every other, is actually underneath it all pure univocity.

Duties to humanity

Mazzini feels he lives at an extraordinary moment. With the dawning of national consciousness in the 19th century, Europeans are uniquely situated to understand history in its truest light. Europeans are watching each other with great admiration as national peoples raise “the banner of the Fatherland and of Independence,” fighting, conquering, and dying for their countries.44 In addition to this burgeoning national consciousness, Europeans stand at one of the pivotal linkages in the history of religions. Mazzini sketches this history as a journey progressing from animism to polytheism to monotheism to Christ, who finally reveals to us that all humanity is a family under God. The Pauline teaching on the unity of the Body of Christ, and the Johannine teaching on the Good Shepherd’s single fold have since been “ill understood or disregarded by the successors of the Apostles,” but now, after

eighteen centuries of study and experience and toil, the time has come for the development of these germs, for the application of these truths not only to every individual, but to that whole sum of human faculties and powers, past and present, which is called Humanity; for the promulgation of the truth not only that Humanity is a single body and ought to be governed by a single Law, but that the first article of this Law is Progress, progress here upon earth, where we have to accomplish God’s design as much as in us lies, and to educate ourselves for better destinies.45

The Mazzinian concept of duty to humanity is actually, for him, a “new faith” of which national peoples are called to be “apostles.”46 Mazzini has borrowed from Christianity

44 Cf. Ibid., 43. 45 Ibid., 47. Cf. Ibid., 90-1: “The word communion, [...] was spoken to you by that Christianity which men proclaimed in the past as the immutable truth, but which is in fact one step only in the ascending series of the religious manifestations of Humanity. And it is a holy word. It taught men that they were a single family of equals in God, and it united master and slave in the same thought of salvation, in the same hope, and the same love of heaven. It was an immense advance on earlier times when people and philosophers believed the souls of citizens and of slaves to be of different nature. This mission was enough for Christianity. The communion was the symbol of the equality and the brotherhood of souls; it remained for Humanity to expand and develop the truth hidden in that symbol. The Church could not and did not do it” (emphasis original). 46 Cf. Ibid., 50.

90 the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and the Church, turning each to his own purposes.

We see this most clearly with the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Church. Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism is a new faith in the Incarnation of the Creator, not in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in humanity as a whole. His patriotism is also a faith in the

Church as the presence or even tabernacle of God on the earth. But this Church is no longer a Church of the baptized, and certainly not a Church comprised by any sacerdotal hierarchy.

Instead, the Church of Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism is humanity itself, instantiated like so many denominations or synagogues or dioceses in the various national peoples that comprise the human family.47

Mazzini has also co-opted the Christian doctrine of salvation and immanentized it for the sake of the most downtrodden of society. Human persons do not actually suffer under the weight of sin and ignorance and so are not meant to live through the vale of tears in hope of the resurrection. Instead, they suffer under the weight of individualism and tyranny, and so they are meant to perfect themselves by incarnating God’s law in their relationships with their family members, neighbors, and fellow citizens in a gradually resounding chorus of praise for the Divine Law they have discovered within themselves.

Fraternity, and not liberty or equality alone, heals the broken relations. Salvation is then most certainly liberation in this life, the ushering in of the kingdom of Heaven in Italy, in Russia, in Poland, and throughout the earth. The communitas of national citizenship, then, cannot

47 Cf. Ibid., 91-2. The Catholic Church could not accomplish this unification of the human family: “Timid and uncertain in its beginning, allied with princes and temporal powers later, and imbued by self-interest with an aristocratic tendency alien to the spirit of its Founder, it wandered from the right way and retrograded so far as to diminish the value of the communion by limiting it for laymen to communion in bread alone and reserving for priests communion in the two kinds. Thenceforward the cry of all who felt the right of the whole human family to an unrestricted communion, without distinction between ecclesiastics and laymen, was, Communion in both kinds for the people; the chalice for the people!” Mazzini proceeds to speak of Jan Hus as a martyr who witnessed to the truth Mazzini is proclaiming for Italy: “that there is no privileged class between God and man; that the best among us in virtue and in knowledge of divine and human things may and ought to counsel and direct us on the right path, but without a monopoly of power or any class supremacy; and that the right of communion is equal for all” (emphasis original).

91 exist in analogical relation to other forms of communitas. Instead, national citizenship for

Mazzini names a recently developed sacerdotal ministry that is now liberated to mediate between the self and all of humanity, the Incarnate God.

Duties to country

The restorative or even healing function of citizenship becomes clearer when we consider Mazzini’s conception of one’s patriotic duties. In the great nationalizing trend so pivotal to the events of the 19th century in Europe, Mazzini’s thoughts on the nature of a country and its role in his new religion of humanity are a critical inspirational factor, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe and beyond.48 Though liberal Italy in the latter half of the

19th century never lived up to the eschatological and romantic idealism of Mazzini’s thought, even her middling attempts to liberalize after unification in 1860 are inspired by an incorrigible Mazzinianism.49 Any examination of Mazzini’s thought on the nature of countries and the place of patriotism in the order of human communitates must account for everything we have described above, however. Mazzini was not a nationalist as we have come to understand the term after the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.50 His patriotism, as I have already suggested, must be seen in relationship to other communitates. That is, love of one’s patria should not totalize one’s vision of sociality or moral duty any more than one’s love of self should.

Nevertheless, Mazzini’s vision of the country and membership within it are a critical aspect of his thought. We have seen why this is the case: he felt he was living at a pivotal

48 Cf. N. Gangulee, ed., Giuseppe Mazzini: Selected Writings, (London: Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1945), 37, where Gangulee describes the impact Mazzini’s writings had on the national movement in India. 49 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 1-3. I will return to Mazzini’s influence on Italian unity in chapter four below. 50 For this reason, I will use the word country rather than nation. One further distinction is useful for understanding Mazzini’s thought as patriotic rather than nationalist: Mazzini names the state/government “an institution legitimate only when founded upon a mission of education and of progress not yet understood. Cf. Cf. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 115.

92 transition or linkage in history, where the old order of Christianity’s mediational structures was giving way to a new order of participation in the incarnation of God in time, mediated now via membership in the nation. The question is what does one’s country and one’s citizenship therein have to do with this incarnation? The answer is important for understanding Mazzini’s thought on how to live out the new religion of humanity, but it is also important for understanding how Mazzini translates the ideals of 1789 into the Italian context. As I will discuss at length in chapters two through four, the young Italian nation was continually contending with another authoritative mediator between persons, society, and God: the Roman Catholic Church. If we can understand more clearly Mazzini’s patriotic vision of Italy’s eschatological role in incarnating God in history, then we can better appreciate the gravity of the contest between Italy and the Holy See for the hearts and minds of the peoples throughout the peninsula.

Though a human person’s principal duty is to humanity in Mazzini’s faith, we are left with the inevitable question of how to accomplish this duty. How indeed does an individual person follow through on the vocation to serve humanity with all the piety and devotion

Mazzini requires? In the ancien régime, as Mazzini notes, the only way to serve humanity was through the Christian mechanism of charity. This was the way the Church taught a person to give “sterile expression” to the belief that all humans are one family under the Father.51 In this way, Christian charity is an expression of the faux-communitas inevitably caused by

Christianity’s focus on the individual soul. But in Mazzini’s new faith, the way to serve humanity is through a more authentic communitas: association and cooperation toward a common aim.52 In the 19th century, perhaps especially in the Italian context, but also in the

German, Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian contexts, such association and cooperation was

51 Cf. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,”, 51. 52 Cf. Ibid.

93 threatened by divisions of language, history, custom, and culture. These divisions were exacerbated by the social question.53 And overcoming these divisions was inhibited, at least in the Italian context, by the ubiquitous and authoritative presence of Catholicism, which

Mazzini considered an outmoded attempt at human communitas. Mazzini’s faith thus has to contend with significant psychological, social, historical, and practical barriers that obstruct the realization of human unity. In such a world, how can association happen?

For Mazzini, the country is a gift from the Creator designed especially to address this critical social, political, economic, and historical problem. In other words, the country and membership within it are divinely ordained to heal the broken relations of history and society. From our perspective, this sort of rhetoric has already become nearly impossible to understand. As we have already asked of 1789, how can it possibly be the case that citizenship in a nation-state could overcome the divisions that prevent us from realizing true human unity? Mazzini suggests that the country possesses in the divine economy several munera designed exquisitely to promote the flourishing of both individual persons and humanity as a whole. That is, the country occupies a unique office or ministry (munus) in history. It exercises a specific function (munus) that cannot be outsourced to any other social body. And in so doing, it offers certain gifts (munera) to human persons, social communitates, and the human communitas itself that otherwise will never be offered. I will offer here a synopsis of several of these munera. Each munus should be read as Mazzini’s description of the office or function of a country, and as the gift a country gives to human persons and to communitates for the fuller flourishing of humanity.

1. The country physically expresses God’s distribution of peoples, historically destined to incarnate

God’s law.

53 Cf. Ibid., 48-9.

94 Though “bad governments” have distorted the divinely ordained distribution of peoples, the very geography of places is beginning in the 19th century to express the “divine design,” which “will infallibly be fulfilled.”54 The paradigmatic case for Mazzini is of course

Italy, which enjoys the natural boundaries of the Alps and the Mediterranean. As if

“favouring you specially,” God has given to the Italian people “the best-defined country in

Europe.”55

2. The country gives human persons a united voice in the international sphere.

“Without Country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection; none will be sureties for you.”56 Mazzini is not only thinking of national interests here, but of the plight of the classes that comprise the country. To have a country is to present a society as a corporate person to the rest of the international community. In light of the social question of Mazzini’s day, this is of great importance for those who do not enjoy social, political, or economic power. Only after national unification, Mazzini suggests, will Italian workers be able to effectively address economic and social problems via the appropriate mechanism of a national government, equal to other national governments.57

3. The country gives human persons a place to love as home and in which to work for the greater good of humanity.

54 Cf. Ibid., 52. 55 Ibid., 53. 56 Ibid. 57 Cf. Ibid., 53-4.

95 A country is one’s home and family, “with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others.”58 It is “the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the common good.”59

4. The country mediates to human persons a proximate, receivable, intelligible experience of incarnating a larger whole in their own lives, thereby facilitating the mission to which God has called humanity as a whole.

Mazzini suggests that humanity should be likened to “a great army moving to the conquest of unknown lands,” and all the countries “are different corps and divisions of that army.”60 This experience of hierarchical mediation is directly related to the moral formation of individual citizens:

And may the constant thought of your soul be for Italy, may all the acts of your life be worthy of her, and may the standard beneath which you range yourselves to work for Humanity be Italy’s. Do not say I; say we. Be every one of you an incarnation of your Country, and feel himself and make himself responsible for his fellow- countrymen; let each one of you learn to act in such a way that in him men shall respect and love his Country.61

5. The country brings persons together in communitas rather than mere aggregation.

Mazzini states that one of the marks of the country is its oneness, or indivisibility. It is a “fellowship of free and equal men bound together in a brotherly concord of labour towards a single end.” Given the concord that obtains between fellow citizens, a Country is more than an aggregation. It is instead a true association characterized by a “uniformity” incompatible with caste, privilege, and inequality. From this perspective, what we call the ancien régime was incapable of forming nations or peoples. In this way, 1789’s failure to accomplish true fraternity places it in fundamental continuity with the ancien régime. Both the

58 Ibid., 54. 59 Ibid., 55. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., emphasis original.

96 ancien régime and the Revolution that signaled its demise could only form “a multitude, a fortuitous agglomeration of men whom circumstances have brought together and different circumstances will separate.”62 Catholicism, with its insistence that charity is the source of authentic communitas only aided this privative form of association.

6. The country gives expression to the will and sentiments of the people.

In addition to legislating the will of the people, a country also gives expression to the love that binds the “sons of that territory.” For Mazzini, the country is the perfect expression of fraternité. “As the members of a family cannot rejoice at the common table if one of their number is far away, [...] so you should have no joy or repose as long as a portion of the territory upon which your language is spoken is separated from the Nation.”63 And further, as long as a “single one of your brothers is not represented by his own vote in the development of national life,” the love binding the territory together and the country itself are compromised.64

The country, in Mazzini’s estimation, is thus the supreme mediator between one’s proximate communitates and the ultimate communitas, God incarnating in humanity. Citizenship in the national communitas thus serves purposes that no other membership can: it links together all the forms of the human inclination to society and coordinates them to a singular end, which is nothing short of life with God: beatitude.

Duties to family

62 Ibid., 57. It is remarkable that Mazzini’s notion of true concord within a social unity of order demands uniformity. The 19th century Catholic conception of concord and social unities, on the other hand, emphasizes plurality and even natural inequality. Cf. Ibid., 88, where Mazzini follows closely the sensibility of 1789. After describing how liberalism advocates “arbitrary will” rather than authentic liberty, Mazzini states, “True Liberty cannot exist without equality, and there can be no equality among those who do not proceed from one basis, from a common principle, from a uniform sense of Duty. Liberty cannot be exercised outside that sense of Duty.” 63 Ibid., 55. 64 Cf. Ibid., 59.

97 Unsurprisingly, the vocation of the family in Mazzini’s new faith is to educate children for the virtues of citizenship in the country. Mazzini speaks romantically about the genius of “Woman,” who through the “divine mystery of reproduction” points the family toward eternity.65 Mazzini’s thoughts on “Woman” are meant to inspire families to take their sacred duty seriously. Indeed, Mazzini even wonders if one day the sacred country will

“disappear” and “every man shall reflect in his own conscience the moral laws of

Humanity.”66 Even in that day, when Mazzinian salvation has been accomplished, the family will endure, because it is the “cradle of Humanity.” Until that day, and especially in the national epoch, Mazzini calls Italians to “sanctify the Family more and more and to link it ever closer to the Country [...].”67 Mazzini’s spectral conception of the hierarchy of social bodies comes to the fore again here, and he suggests that as the task of a country is to educate persons in their humanity, so the task of the family is to educate persons in citizenship.68 For this reason, “Family and Country are the two extreme points of the same line.”69 It is thus only with the family that Mazzini approaches an analogia communitatis.

Though the country may one day resolve itself into a universal humanity, the family’s fate is apparently secure on account of its native integrity, rooted in the biological exigencies of the sexes and their propagation of the species.

Nevertheless, the family’s identity is not simply biological. The family also has a rational and social identity almost thoroughly characterized by the service it renders to the new priesthood of the citizen. The family’s vocation to raise citizens may be ever more fully realized in history as humanity approaches ever deeper unity. And so despite its integrity, the

65 Cf. Ibid., 61. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Cf. Ibid. 69 Ibid., 61-2.

98 family’s native form and function remain on ontologically identical footing with the rest of being, each aspect of which is journeying to the new age. I will return to these themes in chapter four, on matrimony and civil legislation under liberal Italy. There, we will encounter in more detail the ways in which Mazzini’s efforts to relate the person, the family, and the nation or state participate in a broader theoretical debate about the natural integrity of the family, the state’s jurisdiction over the family, and the ultimate destiny of the family in history.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion I would like to draw out some connections based on what we have said about univocal and equivocal accounts of communitas in light of 1789 and Mazzini’s thought. Mazzini illuminates the lure and the ultimate lunacy of both univocal and equivocal accounts of communitas. He is surely correct that liberty and equality are indeed the materials required for an authentic social life, but they do not heal the broken relations of nature and history. They are only materials - inert, capable of infinite manipulation, endless variation, etc. In Catholic philosophy we would call them human endowments or properties. The antinomies I identified above in discussing 1789’s befuddled vision of citizenship revolve around this problem as the revolutionary architects attempt to move toward fraternity, but get stuck on equality and then only unevenly address liberty, with violent contradictions. But as Mazzini recognizes, fraternity is the true life that makes liberty and equality capable of participating in the restoration of communitas.

As we have seen, Mazzini recognizes this for good reason. Though we will have more to say about in chapter two, we can say at this point that Mazzini insightfully exposes one of the primary reasons a social and political relation like citizenship can be outfitted with human hopes about the restoration of broken relations in nature and history. Mazzini

99 recognizes that human relationality is not simply a piece of anthropological data. Rather, communitas is a moral activity that signals the priority of the vocation to participate in the divine. Though Mazzini’s idealism ultimately trades on a heterodox notion of divine becoming in history, he nevertheless demonstrates an important lack in 1789’s ability to thematize fraternity.

Mazzini’s univocations are distinct from those of 1789. And in being so, they illuminate 1789’s attractiveness to us. But Mazzini’s univocal troubles also expose the need for analogical predication. How so? By placing all communitas - even human-divine communitas

- on the same ontological continuum, Mazzini simultaneously obscures the priority of the

Creator’s gratuitous gift of communitas, and deprives human communitates of their native integrity. There is ultimately nothing unique about human communitas because they all resolve into a future incarnation of human-divine identity. Even though he hopes family will remain, the desire for undifferentiated union with humanity and with the Divine Idea is the engine running Mazzini’s patriotic faith. In this respect, he cannot avoid 1789’s troubles, for

Mazzini simply repeats 1789’s great flattening of the social hierarchy and places it in the eschaton. All communitas is thus only the practical means in history of achieving a final, historical end. If this is the case, buried within the univocal ontology of Mazzini’s social anthropology is yet another equivocation whereby all differentiated fraternal relations are historicized and relativized into artifacts of humanity’s progress toward a fuller version of itself. Without an analogical account of communitas, it is difficult to see how this univocal ontology and this historical equivocation does not terminate in an ironic distance from the various communitates of which one is a part and to which one has a duty. What are they, after all? This question is the preoccupation of Leo XIII’s entire social magisterium, which is founded on a thoroughly analogical account of communitas.

100 CHAPTER 2

THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:

CITIZENSHIP WITHIN LEO XIII’S SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

John Milbank has aptly described Leo XIII’s social magisterium as a response to the

“chronotope of enlightenment.” That is, Leo advances a social anthropology that counters an implicit claim made in 1789 and throughout Europe thereafter: only now, here in these blessed modern days, has it become “apparent, after the decay of complex and exotic mythical hierarchies, that political reality is a ‘simple space’ suspended between the mass of atomic individuals on the one hand, and an absolutely sovereign centre on the other.”1 We have seen in the first chapter how this “simple space” is imagined as nothing less than the operating theater in which the broken relations of nature and history are restored to their proper condition. Milbank’s characterization of this “chronotope” as the final condition for the construction of an artificial communitas between citizens and state throws into stark relief

Leo’s social anthropology. Milbank states that the modern papacy’s counter to this simplification was to advocate for “complex space” that could “variegate the monotonous harmony of sovereign state and sovereign individual.”2

In this chapter, I will show how Leo’s teaching on political citizenship avoids the pitfalls of univocal and equivocal conceptions of communitas by situating the category of

1 Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 275. 2 Ibid., 271.

101 citizenship within the “complex space” of an analogical account of social membership. This analogia communitatis is the anthropological mechanism by which Leo’s social magisterium argues for the legitimacy of a plurality of communitates adequated to the human person and necessary for her flourishing as a creature destined to image the Lord through both her substantial unity and through causing good in her social relations. The communitates of moment for Leo are the Catholic Church, the state, and the family. Leo’s critique of the

“simple space” of political monism exposes and seeks to counteract liberalism’s desire for the social and political munera1 traditionally reserved to these social institutions that transcend

(as in the case of the Catholic Church) and/or undergird (as in the case of the family) the political regime’s proper range. Furthermore, Leo’s criticism deals more explicitly with the underlying rationale of Mazzini’s insights into the deficiencies and failures of 1789. That is,

Leo exposes the anthropological deficits in the social and political imaginations undergirding liberalism inasmuch as he exposes the ways modern “simple space” makes human fraternity less intelligible as a good. By illuminating his analogical account of human communitas, we gain important insight into Leo’s incisive criticism of the nation-state’s failure to minister to the socially embedded persons under its care and authority. In short, the analogia communitatis developed here is an historical and theoretical account of how a Catholic social anthropology must see the “simple space” created by the modern nation-state as ultimately insufficiently political. As Mazzini understood so well, the maniacal inflation of equality and liberty is not itself politics. It is rather so much gas. Without communitas as the final cause of the state’s

1 Throughout the remainder of the project, I will leave the Latin munus, muneris untranslated on account of its rich power of signification. For my purposes, the word is consistently used to describe the coherence of two realities fundamental to Catholic social thought: the office or duty or ministry possessed by a social body, and the gift or offering that social body as a part gives to society as the whole. Though the parallel is not perfectly strict, one sees in munus, muneris an analogy with the twofold imaging that is the vocation of the human person. On the one hand, the human person occupies a unique office in the created order by virtue of the sort of substantial unity she is. On the other hand, the human person performs a unique action in the created order by virtue of the sort of relational being she is.

102 interest in equality and liberty, politics cannot function as one of the contexts in which humans communicate good to others in imitation of the Lord. Without the proper ordering of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the political space must remain empty of political action. I will leave further consideration of this last contention until chapter five below. The current chapter will simply lay the groundwork for substantiating the claim.

Given the work I have done to establish accounts of univocal and equivocal communitas in chapter one, this second chapter is organized as follows. In the first section of the chapter, I will situate Leo within the nationalizing context inspired by Mazzini in Italy in order to show how Leo receives from Pius IX the task of arguing for the temporal power of the papacy in a context where the restoration of temporal power is an impossibility. In the second section of the chapter, I will look at two pivotal moments in Leo’s social magisterium where he offers a distilled articulation of the analogia communitatis. These two distillations adequately express the constant vision of social membership operative throughout Leo’s thought. By examining these two distillations, we will see how the analogia communitatis enables Leo to speak coherently within the contradictions created by the “chronotope of the enlightenment” as it is embodied in the Italian nationalizing movements. Once these foundations are laid, we will be in a better position to understand what is at stake socially and politically in the third and fourth chapters. There, we will observe how the analogia communitatis functions as an indispensable tool in Leo’s criticism of monistic liberalism and in his defense of the integrity, autonomy, and liberty of the Church and the family.

I. Leo XIII and the Risorgimento after Pius IX

In 1848, Italian nationalists were agitating for war against Metternich’s Austria in the hopes that the Italian peninsula could finally become an autonomous national unity. The nationalist faction was hopeful that the recently-crowned Pius IX would bless their political

103 sentiments and their efforts. After all, his first year as pope was characterized by energetic reforms and signs that the Papal States were finally to be modernized.2 The situation thus seemed ripe for a papal-blessed (even if not papal-led) campaign for Italian national unity and autonomy. With the entrance of Piedmont into war with Austria, the nationalists thought that Pius would send papal troops to fight. Here, early on in Pius’s long pontificate, with Piedmont’s forces and Pius’s spiritual leadership seemingly on the cusp of a more perfect unification, the neo-guelph hopes articulated in Vincenzo Gioberti’s classic, Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani, seemed justified, and the ideal of a federally unified Italy governed under a constitution by a modern, liberalizing pope seemed attainable.3

The Roman Curia, on the other hand, advocated neutrality in the international conflict given the pope’s spiritual authority over both Austrian and Italian Catholics. As

Roger Aubert has noted in his study of the redacted versions of Pius’s famous April 29, 1848 speech, the pope was deeply conflicted regarding his duty as a spiritual father and as an

Italian son. In the first version of the April 29 speech, Pius said two things: that he could not intervene against his children in Austria and that he fully sympathized with the Italian

2 One need only catalogue Pius’s famous reforms begun in the first year of his pontificate: the controversial but widely popular amnesty granted to political prisoners; the schematics for a railway; inquiry into the connection between crime and unemployment; plans for an educational/trade institute in Rome to address unemployment; the abolition of some criminal law courts and the consolidation of others; setting firmer criteria for the training of the personnel of the criminal courts; improvement of the prison system; reforming the Code of Law; establishment of an Agricultural Institute for the improvement of cultivation and raising livestock; establishment of a gas distillery outside Rome; granting freedom to the Press (along with a Council of Censors consisting of four laymen and an ecclesiastical presider); and the regulation of grain tariffs. Given this energetic spirit, it is little wonder that by September of 1846, just months after his election, Romans in the Piazza del Popolo placed an inscription on the triumphal arch: “He conquered discord by clemency; he conceded public audiences; he made preparations for railways; he disclosed a fount of civilisation and riches; Applaud, ye nations. Pius is the beloved name which will be blessed by all centuries.” Cf. G.F.-H & J Berkeley, Italy in the Making, Volume II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 54-71. 3 For my purposes here, it does not matter that after the publication of Del primato in the 40’s, Gioberti in the 50’s came to advocate for a more liberal understanding of the relations between Church and state in Italy. His Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia in 1851 expresses the following: “In our day times have changed; civilization has grown; public opinion is master; and the absolute separation of the spiritual from the temporal is about to be established among the most civilized peoples. These are the best guarantees and the most efficacious safeguards of ecclesiastical autonomy.” Cf. S. William Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought from Cavour to Mussolini, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1937), 4.

104 nationalists. It is likely that Pius’s secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, edited this text so that the second draft of the speech actually delivered that day emphasized Pius’s spiritual duty to Austria and virtually eliminated Pius’s national empathy with Italy. Aubert suggests that it is at this moment that the “liberal pope” became the “antinational pope.”4

While “liberal pope” may never have been the most precise description of Pius IX, from our vantage in history “antinational pope” too easily papers over the great hopes

Mastai-Ferretti inspired even in reform-minded friends who knew him well. Prior to his unexpected election, Mastai-Ferretti had become friends with the liberal Pasolini family - especially the young Conte, Giuseppe and Contessa, Antonietta. The three friends spent long evenings discussing current events. And over the course of a year or so, the Pasolinis introduced Mastai-Ferretti to Gioberti’s Del primato and to other key texts of the risorgimento movement. Evidently, Gioberti’s work had a profound impact on Mastai-Ferretti. G.F.-H.

Berkeley suggests that through the influence of the Pasolinis liberal and reforming ideas became more and more attractive to the “broad-minded and patriotic” cardinal.5 Though these developments prior to his pontificate directly contributed to his national popularity in his first years as Pius IX, they also raise an impossible question from our position: was

Mastai-Ferretti the proper replacement for Gregory XVI? Mastai-Ferretti

was a man whose guiding principle would be duty; but supposing he were called upon to carry out two contradictory duties - that of the Italian patriot and that of the steadfast Pope - would he not be torn in two between his patriotism and his religion? Moreover, he was a good man; but had he enough hard shrewdness to hold his own among the worldly? Had he enough stored up experience to cope with so great a crisis as that of 1846?6

4 Cf. Roger Aubert, “The First Years of the Pontificate of Pius IX: From the Neoguelf Mythos to the Roman Revolution,” in Roger Aubert, et al., The Church in the Age of Liberalism, trans. Peter Becker, (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 61-2. 5 Cf. G.F.-H. Berkeley, Italy in the Making, Volume I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 263. The Mastai-Ferretti/Pasolini friendship and its importance in the formation of Pius IX’s political views is detailed on pp. 257-66. 6 Ibid., 260.

105 Mastai-Ferretti’s own estimation of himself inspires this fundamental question. Remarking on recent excesses of Cardinal Bernetti’s Centurioni - the volunteer police force serving the

Pontifical government - Mastai-Ferretti said not long before his election,

I do not understand the provocative attitude of our government, which mortifies and persecutes our young men because they breathe the air of their own century. It would take so little to make them happy and to win their affection! And I cannot imagine why it opposes railroads, gaslighting, suspension bridges and scientific congresses. Theology is not opposed, so far as I am aware, to the growth of science, art and industry. But there! I know nothing about politics, so perhaps I am mistaken.7 It is unclear that Mastai-Ferretti was prepared - even in his own estimation - for the Roman

Question as it would develop over the course of his pontificate.

The idea that his temporal power could in any manner prevent young Italy from breathing the air of its own century was understandably anathema to him. He had developed this conviction not only out of loyalty to the Church and in line with his duty to his historic office. He had developed this conviction from studying the risorgimento movement itself - most especially Gioberti.8 From the Vatican’s perspective at mid-century, the temporal power of the papacy was not only essential to the free exercise of the Church’s spiritual mission. It was essential to the social and political well being of Italy and Europe. Because of the gravity of these twin convictions - expressed negatively at almost every point in Pius’s

Syllabus errorum - we can only interpret the Roman Question at the level of competing principles.9 Two seemingly immovable forces confront each other here and provide us with the most exquisite portrait of the Catholic Church’s difficult position in 19th century

7 Ibid., 263-4, quoting Pasolini’s recollection of an evening spent with Mastai-Ferretti and a Count from Ravenna. 8 Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 3: Gioberti “had maintained that the state, in subordinating itself to the moral authority of the church, would not lose its freedom. Indeed, the state, in acknowledging the spiritual supremacy of the Roman hierarchy, would not be accepting a position of inferiority at all. It would only be doing belated justice to its own essentially ethical character.” 9 Cf. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., The Pope and Italy, (No Location: The America Press, 1929), 16-23, 29-41. Parsons brief and illuminating account has the advantage of being written as an immediate response to Pius XI’s treaty and settlement with Mussolini.

106 Europe. On the one side, liberal “Italy,” intent on continuing the rationalization and modernization idealized by 1789 and translated by Mazzini; intent on consolidating political power and unifying the disparate cultures, languages, economies, and geographies of the peninsula; intent on making “Italians.” On the other side, the Roman Catholic Church, intent on continuing its temporal authority in the Papal States from its historic seat in the

Eternal City; intent on remaining a visible reality in that City while extending its spiritual authority throughout the whole of the world; intent on making Catholics.

But by the time Pius proclaimed himself a “prisoner of the Vatican,” his reforming zeal - so clear and energetic in 1846-7 - had become immovable protest.10 1871’s Law of

Guarantees,11 despite whatever good intentions we might discern in the Italian parliament’s efforts, was a unilaterally promulgated law - rather than a treaty or concordat - concerning an affair supposedly internal to Italy. But from Pius’s perspective, the Roman Question could not be interpreted within the national valence. In political terms, the Roman Question had an international valence improperly disregarded by the Italian parliament’s unilateral law. But even this international valence was further situated within the divine mission of the Catholic

10 Cf. Parsons, The Pope and Italy, 35-7: By refusing the Law of Guarantees, Pius IX created an “entirely novel situation” for the papacy. Parsons notes that there are three means by which an independent sovereignty might safeguard that sovereignty: possession of force to repel invasion, international agreement to protect sovereignty, and/or “free, juridical status before international law. Here was the Pope possessing none of these, and yet remaining a sovereign. The explanation of the anomaly is that a fourth mode of national existence had come into being, that of protest. For by protest, and not by any other means, did the Popes protect their precious sovereignty for fifty-nine years. That they did protect it, is evidenced by the fact that in the year 1928, twenty-seven countries had full-fledged diplomatic representatives, ambassadors or ministers plenipotentiary, at the court of the Holy See. Since the Pope could not be called a plenary subject of international law, the lawyers invented a new and exclusive term for his status: they denominated him a subject sui generis of international law, and as such he was entitled to entertain diplomatic relations” (emphasis original). 11 The law included the following stipulations: that the pope’s person is sacred and inviolable, akin to the person of a king; that the pope be given an annual endowment of over 3 million lire; that papal property consist of the Vatican and Lateran palaces and Castel Gandolfo; that the pope and cardinals enjoy liberty in exercising their spiritual government in these properties; that clergy may assemble freely; that the Italian government adjust its role - even in terms of renunciation - in nominations of bishops and in relation to other ecclesiastical affairs, including spiritual and civil matters in the courts. Cf. J.F. Maclear, ed., Church and State in the Modern Age: A Documentary History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 256-9.

107 Church, set for her by the will of her founder. Pius’s letter, Ubi nos, promulgated two days after the Law of Guarantees, is explicit on both these points.

Regarding the properly international scope of the Roman Question, Pius writes:

“[D]ivine providence has willed this civil rule to be protection and strength for the Apostolic

See; [...] For if the Roman Pontiff were subject to the sway of another ruler, but no longer possessed civil power, neither his position nor the acts of the Apostolic ministry would be exempt from the authority of the other ruler. This ruler could be either a heretic or a persecutor of the Church or constantly at war with other rulers.”12 The Law of Guarantees implicitly denies the pope’s temporal sovereignty by asking Pius to abide by the parliament’s decision. Despite language ostensibly to the contrary, the parliament speaks to Pius as to an

Italian citizen.13

But this is not all. Quite distinct from the matter of the Church’s liberty and autonomy in its temporal relations with other sovereign nations, Pius must also consider the vocation of Christ’s Church, founded and guided in history by the Lord, and steward of

Christ’s perpetual mission to redeem humanity:

We, as the representative of blessed Peter, have received directly from God Himself all the prerogatives and all rights of authority which are necessary for ruling the universal Church; those prerogatives and rights, as well as the liberty of the Church, were produced and acquired by the blood of Jesus Christ and must be valued in accordance with the infinite value of His divine blood. So We would not be valuing the divine blood of Our Redeemer if We borrowed Our rights from the rulers of the earth, especially in the curtailed and defiled condition in which they now want to present them.14

12 Pius IX, Ubi nos, §7. 13 In this respect, the Law of Guarantees is thoroughly Cavourian and in line with his famous ideal, “a free church in a free state.” According to Halperin, Cavour envisaged “the conferment upon the church of the same juridical status enjoyed by all other associations within the state - a status which allowed the maximum freedom consistent with the requirements of public order.” Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 13, 19-22. 14 Ibid., §8.

108 From Pius’s perspective then, the highest stakes are involved in the Roman Question (and by extension other Church/state contests in the nationalizing processes of the 19th century).

None of this would be lost on Leo XIII. It would fall to him to address in a more systematic and nuanced manner the ways in which liberalism’s desire to deprive the Church of temporal power expressed more profound disorders in modern social and political imaginations. What was required for a successful extension of Pius’s arguments in Ubi nos was a rational justification for the following claim: If the Church’s spiritual authority is truly implicated in temporal matters, then the Church’s temporal authority is a property of her essentially spiritual mission.15 Put differently, Pius’s arguments must be developed to show how the autonomy, sovereignty, and liberty of Christ’s Church are actually the very conditions in which persons of a given epoch can become truly liberated to breathe the air of their own times.

These Pian convictions - the proper unity of the temporal and spiritual powers, and the Church’s jurisdiction in social and political interests - are forged throughout the repeated articulations of the Roman Question, and they remain at the heart of much later Leonine teaching. Indeed, Leo develops a systematic and nuanced way of speaking about the concordia that ought to obtain among the various communitates that constitute the theater of human action and flourishing. Leo can argue for this concordia from several distinct but related directions:

15 I note here that Pius’s vision of Church/state relations is distinct from Cavour’s concept of a “free church in a free state,” where the latter phrase refers to a carefully calibrated program of sphere sovereignty that provides civil immunity from ecclesiastical influence, but that does not completely return the favor in terms of ecclesiastical immunity. Halperin’s summary of Cavour’s doctrine is useful. Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, at 1-17; and 18-39 for the post-Cavourian separatist movement. I will treat Cavour and his followers more carefully in chapter 3 below.

109 1. He can point to historical examples of concordia between religious and civil authorities

during times when the temporal and spiritual powers of the Church were well-

established and duly reverenced by civil authority. Accordingly, we see Leo

repeatedly engage in a particular historical argument regarding the medieval period as

a healthy synthesis of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, and civil and

religious authority.

2. He can provide a philosophical argument for subsidiary relations in which

communitates complement one another for the sake of an efficient and humane

organization of society. Leo is especially adept at such argumentation when he is

speaking about the office of the family in society. And most famously, he engages

this argument to significant effect in Rerum novarum as he advocates for associational

ties and organizations that would promote labor.

3. He can provide a theological argument rooted in sacred scripture and tradition:

namely that Christianity is good for polities and creates docile citizens who pursue

the common good for the glory of the Lord and for the welfare of even the poorest

and weakest. Leo repeatedly uses Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2-3 for these purposes. He

also depends explicitly and implicitly throughout his corpus on the famous

Augustinian claim that Christians make the best citizens. In this way, he defends a

claim that the Church contributes directly and by native right to the conditions for

authentic politics.

4. He can provide a natural law argument that social plurality proceeds from the eternal

law that is the Divine Wisdom of the Creator, ordered to the flourishing of human

creatures. This is perhaps Leo’s favorite strategy for extending Pius’s argument

110 against the Law of Guarantees and all it signifies. But it is seldom found in isolation

from the other arguments.

Shifting emphasis one way or another changes the inflection of the argument. And throughout Leo’s social doctrine, these arguments are inflected variously and for a wide array of purposes. But two threads bind all four arguments together and allow them to function coherently. First, and most obviously, are the Christian doctrines of creation and providential governance. Second, and somewhat more muted within all the language of social unities and authorities, is a Christian social anthropology. Together, these binding factors strengthen the four arguments so that with Leo’s nimble treatment, these arguments become sophisticated attacks on the political monism undergirding modern liberalism.

By placing his defense of the Pian convictions within the realm of a created and providentially sustained order, Leo allows the eternal and natural law to illuminate his case.

In one way, instead of hectoring his liberal interlocutors, he becomes a fellow spectator with them as he invites them to marvel at the beautiful complexity of human sociality as an effect of the Creator’s Wisdom. This posture of marvel before the Creator’s Wisdom comes naturally to Leo as a Thomist. But the posture also subtly mutes the tones of Pius’s social doctrine and places the Church, society, the state, and the family in a common theater where concordia is again possible.

By placing his defense of the Pian convictions within the realm of Christian social anthropology, Leo becomes more aggressive. As we will see in what follows, Leo’s anthropology describes a human person and human communitates that require an analogical account of social membership in order to account for the properly “complex space” of human society and politics. Within this complex of communitates, all social unities exist in both

111 unity and distinction for the array of goods that comprise the flourishing of the rational animal, created in the image of the Lord, and destined for communion with the Blessed

Trinity. Without explicitly saying so, Leo has proclaimed the Church an “expert in humanity,” natively competent to restore the broken relations of nature and history. And he has challenged liberal polities accordingly. This is a more aggressive maneuver because it challenges the modern nation-state precisely where the nation-state seeks to exercise its control most subtly and so, most powerfully: in the management of fraternity.

II. The Analogia Communitatis

Leo’s conception of communitas, and his teaching on citizenship in light of that conception, is neither univocal nor equivocal. That is, Leo never collapses human sociality into political citizenship, and so he successfully avoids the modern promise that citizenship will restore the broken relations of nature and history. But while he avoids such univocal accounts of the political, he nevertheless situates political life as a natural good possessing integrity within a given cosmological order. Because of its position within this order, citizenship is never allowed to become an equivocal category of human will and convention.

Pace Mazzini, for Leo, political participation is a natural part of human life that cannot disappear into new historical expressions of universal communitas with humanity or with the

Lord. Put differently, neither membership in the nation-state, nor membership in universal humanity, nor even membership in the Divine Idea provides the person with the ultimate context of her action, her duties, or her rights. Instead, it is membership in the great communitas of communitates cascading from the Divine Wisdom that provides the human person with this ultimate context. The analogia communitatis is thus not simply a way of describing the relations that obtain between the many human communitates in history. It is

112 always also for Leo a way of describing the nature of the relationship between the Lord and human sociality.

In the introduction, I summarized Russell Hittinger’s work on the social aspect of the doctrine of the imago Dei in Catholic social teaching, noting how this social aspect provides us with the lens necessary for perceiving Leo’s interpretation of communitas and citizenship. Now, after encountering the univocal and equivocal accounts flowing from 1789 and from Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism, and after observing the Italian effort to simplify the social and political space of the young nation, we are prepared for Leo’s analogical doctrine.16 According to Hittinger, 19th century Catholic thinkers were preoccupied with identifying “social domains having a sacred solidarity not reducible to state citizenship.”17 Leo’s social magisterium stands as the paradigmatic example of this preoccupation, for it is in Leo’s work that we see the first systematic effort on the part of the magisterium to ‘limit’ and ‘contextualize’ citizenship after 1789 within a hierarchical order of communitates that included the Church above and the family below the state. Chief among the conceptual tools Leo used to accomplish this limiting and contextualizing of citizenship were the works of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius as they were received through Aquinas.

Hittinger describes this constellation of authorities in terms of a philosophical anthropology and a natural theology enabling Leo to counteract the methodical individualism that constantly extracts the modern human person from her properly social context.18

16 In what follows, I rely on Hittinger’s “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 39-78. 17 Ibid., 40-1. 18 As we have already noticed, this extraction from society does not leave the modern human person in solitude but rather places her elsewhere, beyond the reach of the family, the Church, and other social relations. The extracted person is typically found in a pre-social state of nature followed by a contracted political milieu - that is, in a nation - or she is found in the human family by virtue of her species kinship and her natural rights. Only after we find her here can we reinsert her into a family, a Church, or any other social relations.

113 Recall from the introduction that Hittinger suggests that Leo’s conception of social membership - and so of citizenship - is best understood in terms, first, of the Aristotelian notion of a “social unity of order,” or what I am here leaving untranslated as a communitas.

This social unity is not a substantial one such as we find in an individual being, whether a horse, a human person, or an angel.19 But neither is a social unity reducible to aggregation such as we find in a chance cluster of persons or items.20 Rather, in “a social unity of order (a marriage, family, college, or church) each individual retains his own identity and operations; yet the social whole is more than the sum of its parts. It counts as a subject, person, and agent in its own right. Lawyers and philosophers call this kind of entity a ‘moral person’ or a

‘legal person,’ or even a ‘mystical body.’”21 The key here is the emphasis of these latter legal and philosophical descriptions on the real integrity of these social unities of order. If social unities of order are not reducible to legal fictions useful for various matters of taxation and representation, and if social unities of order exist independent of a larger social authority’s permission, delegation, deputization, or concession, then the real existence of social unities of order is the proper context for considering the structure of the analogia communitatis.22

If social unities of order are real, the “simple space” created during the “chronotope of the enlightenment” is not simply a mistake. It is more like the perversion or even the destruction of a social reality human persons require if they are to live out their vocation.

The social anthropology following from the reality of social unities of order will recognize

19 It may be that the best way to read Mazzini’s social anthropology is to see him as searching for a way to make relations substantial. His desire to see the individualism supposedly endemic to Christianity overcome by a resolution of all communitates into a universal communitas that is God himself suggests to me that, at root, his project is about defeating traditional accounts of substance and accident. If humanity is the incarnation of God, then relation as an accident of the human substance is essentially meaningless. 20 As Mazzini noticed, this is where 1789 leaves us. 21 Ibid., 51. 22 Hittinger’s work draws in important ways from the works of Maitland and Gierke. For a remarkable and influential introduction to the place of ‘legal persons’ or ‘mystical bodies’ in western political theory, see Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age. Trans. Frederic William Maitland. (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1958). See especially Maitland’s introduction at pp. xviii-xliii; and Gierke’s text proper at pp. 22-30 and 61-73.

114 political citizenship as meaningful and practicable only in analogical proportion to the broader context of human sociality. This is terrible news for the Italian separatist who sought to resolve the Roman Question by resolve all non-state social unities into a “simple space” for the sake of “public order.”23 Such a leveling of natural social plurality fails for three principal reasons. First, the “simple space” created by this leveling does not correspond to the differentiated integrity we plainly recognize in the family, the college, the union, the corporation, the Church, and so on. Second, the “simple space” created by this leveling cannot minister to the array of needs to which these differentiated communitates are indexed.

And finally, the “simple space” no longer participates in the manifold imaging of the Lord’s goodness. The social relations that would have borne his image in creation are made into so many images of the state.

It was Leo’s great insight to recognize the reality of social unities, to appreciate the gravity of the state’s failure of recognition with regard to these unities, and to address the situation by developing an analogically proportional account of social membership. The upshot of his analogical account is twofold. First, analogical proportionality between communitates depends on a social anthropology capable of sustaining the proportions that make up the analogy. The human person in all her sociality is unknowable solely in terms of the domestic, or the economic, or the political, or the religious, etc. Imagining that she is knowable in singular terms is the univocal problem expressed in the modern inflation of citizenship as the communitas capable of restoring the broken relations of nature and history.

Second, the analogical proportionality between communitates requires that this social anthropology precede politics in order to give politics its proper place in human living. The political communitas is not a fabrication subject solely to the will of the persons constituting

23 Cf. Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 13, 22.

115 the communitas. Instead, the political communitas exists as part of a given array of communitates that express first the wisdom of the Creator, who provides for the conditions in which humans may work in every “chronotope” in order to cause good on their journey toward beatitude. By recognizing the priority of the social to the political and by ordering communitates accordingly, an analogia communitatis avoids equivocating regarding human social endeavor. We can observe this analogical proportionality between communitates - including the citizenship communitas - at decisive moments in Leo’s corpus.

IIa. Quod apostolici muneris

Promulgated eight months after Leo’s inaugural encyclical, Inscrutabili Dei consilio,

1878’s Quod apostolici muneris is Leo’s programmatic statement against the manifold errors of socialism. As a whole, the encyclical is critical for understanding the entire Leonine social magisterium. In the letter, we observe the expansive scope of Leo’s social anthropology wherein human nature is contextualized within a vision of divine communitas of communitates comprehending all rational beings. For Leo, the chief error of socialism is that it works to eliminate the natural hierarchy of this divinely ordained sociality.24 Socialism stands in deep continuity with what we have seen above regarding 1789 and Mazzini’s efforts to contrive a society that could restore society’s own broken relations. In the first place, socialism

24 John Milbank is perhaps correct in criticizing Leo for caricaturing socialism. Milbank writes, “The caricatures of socialism presented by Rerum Novarum - that it abolishes all private property and threatens the institution of the family - are indeed caricatures even in the case of German social democracy, yet could be applied to the latter with somewhat more plausibility. (It should be added that much papal suspicion of socialism had the character of dislike of a quasi-religious grouping - which socialism was, as much as a political organization - outside the aegis of the official Church; hence the desire for explicitly Catholic trade unions etc. more subject to hierarchical control).” For all of Milbank’s dependence on Gierke in his analysis of Catholic Social Teaching, it is remarkable that his criticisms of Leo’s caricatures in Rerum novarum rest themselves on caricatures of Leo’s social vision. If my interpretation of Leo is correct here, Leo’s criticisms of socialism are not firstly concerned with the abolition of private property or the escape of quasi-religious groups from the aegis of the Vatican. Instead, Leo’s criticisms of socialism are principally that it exempts a fundamental human social form (polity) from the pluriform society donated to rational creatures by the Creator. Oddly enough, this reading of Leo would only strengthen Milbank’s case, as he seeks to reinsert the social and political into a richly Christian metaphysical context. Cf. Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 272-3.

116 proposes a revitalized sociality by undermining authority and refusing “obedience to higher powers, to whom, according to the admonition of the Apostle, every soul ought to be subject, and who derive the right of governing from God [...].”25 In the second place, socialism promises authentic fraternity through the elimination of social distinctions between members of a society, proclaiming “the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties.”26

Finally, socialism works on the original communitas: the spousal union. According to Leo, socialism “debase[s] the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, [socialists] weaken, or even deliver up to lust.”27

For my purposes, it is instructive to note that in Quod apostolici muneris, Leo moves quickly to the ostensible source of these errors: the “deadly war which from the sixteenth century down has been waged by innovators against the Catholic faith [...]” who seek “to subvert all revelation, and overthrow the supernatural order, that thus the way might be

25 Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris, §1. Leo is referring to Romans 13:1-4: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” All references to Leonine encyclicals are from the Vatican website http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals.index.html. Critical passages have been cross referenced with the Acta Sancta Sedis (A.S.S.) available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ass/index_sp.htm. 26 Ibid. As we see repeatedly throughout Leo’s social magisterium, this emphasis on the natural inequality of rights and duties in society is chiefly imagined in terms of protection for the weak, poor, and laboring. Leo is very aware that a leveling or equalizing of social duties will be of more benefit to the rich and powerful than it will be to the poor and weak. Laissez-faire capitalism ensures this inequality of benefit from the great equalizing of duty. Socialism seeks to overcome this, but Leo’s concern is that the redistribution of property will only damage social relations rather than harmonize them. Leo is thus left between a rock and a hard place in his negotiation of equality, duty, and socio-economic participation. If he sides with the socialists, property and human labor are denigrated, breeding resentment between the classes of society. If he sides with laissez-faire capitalism, property and human labor may be respected, but Leo correctly suspicions that material benefit will not trickle down. More importantly, Leo is sensitive to the ways laissez-faire capitalism too easily leads to exploitation. And so he opts for a crucial feature of the ancien régime: the maintenance of social hierarchies and indexed duties through which the rich and powerful were to care for the poor and weak. Leo’s desire to maintain this hierarchy does not necessarily amount to a sanction of the manifold abuses associated with this hierarchy. But Leo does not appear to see a way out of his situation. Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we still feel this pinch. Cf. §5 of Quod apostolici muneris for Leo’s conception of created equality and social inequality, which I will discuss below. 27 Ibid. Matrimony and the family springing therefrom will be treated more fully in chapter four below.

117 opened for the discoveries, or rather the hallucinations, of reason alone.”28 The results of this encroaching rationalism occupy Leo’s mind for the better part of his pontificate. In Quod apostolici muneris, they are summarized in outline: political voluntarism, secret societies, false definitions of liberty as license, hatred of the Catholic Church, and distortion or even cooptation of the Gospel.29

After this brief tour through the consequences of socialism and rationalism, Leo arrives at his description of the Christian conception of sociality based on a reading of

Romans 13. I will quote Leo at length, for this section of the letter constitutes Leo’s out- narration of the modern theories of communitas represented 1789 and Mazzini:

For, He who created and governs all things has, in His wise providence, appointed that the things which are lowest should attain their ends by those which are intermediate, and these again by the highest. Thus, as even in the kingdom of heaven He hath willed that the choirs of angels be distinct and some subject to others, and also in the Church has instituted various orders and a diversity of offices, so that all are not apostles or doctors or pastors, so also has He appointed that there should be various orders in civil society, differing in dignity, rights, and power, whereby the State, like the Church, should be one body, consisting of many members, some nobler than others, but all necessary to each other and solicitous for the common good.30

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this passage for interpreting Leo’s social magisterium. Through his use of Paul’s most important theological statements regarding the Christian political imagination, Leo makes one thing abundantly clear: his criticism is principally designed to expose the corrosive effects of liberal rationalism on the human ability to imagine society as participating in an order beyond the one created by human will and convention. The passage contains several elements that are essential to our

28 Ibid., §2. 29 Cf., ibid., §§2-5. The litany of errors catalogued in Quod apostolici muneris and in 1878’s previous encyclical, Inscrutabili Dei consilio, should be read as Leo’s distillation of Pius IX’s Syllabus errorum (1864). Along with 1879’s Aeterni Patris, these three encyclicals should be understood as the charter for Leo’s pontificate. The entire social magisterium is contained in summary form in these three encyclicals, and portions of each of these three encyclicals are later expanded to become full-throated articulations of foundational elements in Leo’s social thought. 30 Ibid., §6.

118 appreciation of the analogia communitatis and citizenship’s contextualized position within the analogy:

1. Human sociality is an effect of the Divine Wisdom created in creatures for the proper ordering of

their flourishing.

If we track Leo’s reference to the Christian doctrine of creation throughout his corpus, we find that Leo’s use of Aquinas facilitates a sophisticated negotiation of what we would now call the nature/grace debate. This debate does not tidily map onto questions of the Church’s relationship to the state or to society. Nevertheless, the Christian negotiation of the several jurisdictions traced out by the authoritative social spheres does require an ability to articulate the relationship between the Lord’s creating and sustaining of a providentially ordered world and the presence of morally culpable agents and societies enjoying a participated integrity that is truly their own, even as it is gift. In describing the essential office of the Catholic Church, Leo is ever insistent that grace perfects nature and that the presence of the absolute voice31 of the Lord articulated by the Church in society is not a threat to that society’s flourishing, but is rather its very condition.

31 The notion is Pierre Manent’s. In his work on the triumph of modern voluntarism over Aristotelian metaphysics, Manent asks, “But what does one do once the city itself becomes divided, when there is no longer one but two cities, the human city and the city of God? The political and philosophical dialogue on justice is interrupted and in fact prohibited by the eruption of […] certain religious claims. The pretensions of the Catholic church […] that […] proclaim themselves the holiest or the only holy ones, are by definition absolutely incommensurable with any other claim, just as eternal salvation is incommensurable with temporal salvation and eternity is incommensurable with time. Aristotle had foreseen the case of an absolutely disproportionate superiority […]. He then proposed, as the only solution in conformity with justice, to grant him all power, but not without first giving serious consideration to the solution of ostracism.” According to Manent, the Catholic Church of the medieval period opted for the first Aristotelian option (all power) over the second (ostracism). But as the temporal power came under fire, modern political theorists “employed all the resources of their imagination to work out the most honorable and rigorous form of ostracism by setting up the whole human world as a self-sufficient universal body politic under the power of the emperor. […] Since among the candidates for power in the Christian world there is at least one who is always so to speak outside the game, a player who always has the trump card in hand, an interlocutor whose speech comes from God himself, the configuration of power can no longer arise, as in Aristotle’s city, from the natural play of the political community, the spontaneous and then developed dialogue on justice and the good. Power must be created wholly from scratch, it must be fabricated artificially, that is, voluntarily, by the purely voluntary act that is the contract.” Cf. Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans., Marc A. LePain, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 170.

119 Modern political philosophies inaccurately describe human sociality as a concession made by previously/primordially individual or isolated humans. But from Leo’s perspective, human sociality is more accurately described as an endowment or a power or an activity that corresponds to the Creator’s providential governing and sustaining of all things. Sociality per se thus escapes human deliberation. The human person does not choose to be social, but rather engages in this activity as he engages in all other properly human activities: as a rational agent who can be nothing more or less.

2. Human communitas and the flourishing that redounds therefrom is naturally or inherently

hierarchical.

As sociality is properly an activity rather than a pragmatic provision for orderly human transactions, so is communitas properly a participated activity. This participatory structure expresses itself hierarchically in angelic, human, and non-human creation. Leo’s preferred hierarchical schema is the Church - State - family hierarchy. In such a scheme - especially as Leo handles it - the participatory nature of communitas is readily apparent in terms of the munera occupied by every station within the hierarchy and in terms of the interdependence of these munera for the complete care of human persons. But even within the communitates that constitute the hierarchy, hierarchical participation is the norm. Given that hierarchy is the principal mechanism by which a communitas reconstitutes itself from generation to generation in history, and given that hierarchy is the principal mechanism by which a communitas forms the social imagination of its members, the normativity of hierarchy resists even the most strident dismissals of hierarchy as pure hegemony. As Leo notes in his discussion of intermediaries and of the choirs of angels, hierarchy is the structural complement of natural difference, or in his terms, “inequality.” The poet would simply say,

“You gotta serve somebody.”

120 3. Hierarchical order is present even among the innocent angels of heaven.

Leo refers to the angelic hierarchy precious few times in his social magisterium. But we should not miss the theological gravity of this characterization of the angels. Leo is on the receiving end of a confrontation between varying conceptions of politics and its relationship to fallen human nature. One tradition, often labeled the Augustinian, typically characterize politics - and so hierarchical order and the presence of authority in a society - as concessions to a fallen human nature. Were humans to have remained in paradise, no political authority would be necessary. But since humans have become disordered, they require the strictures of order and authority.32 Distinct from this line of reasoning is what is typically labeled the Thomistic tradition of characterizing politics as a natural good corresponding to the exigencies of created human nature - fallen or not. If hierarchy, order, and authority obtain among the perfect angels, then what hierarchy, order, and authority we observe among fallen humans cannot be described solely in terms of a concession to our sinfulness. Instead, it must be imagined as a created good providentially ordered to the flourishing of rational creatures.33

4. Hierarchical order is a necessary feature of Christ’s body in history.

As in heaven, so on earth. The Church is not accidentally hierarchical, but is necessarily so. St. Paul’s analogy of the body eliminates any doubt that hierarchical order

32 Given the introduction to my project, it is worth noting that Rowan Williams questions this presentation of Augustinian politics as purely concession to human fallenness. Williams’s read of De civitate Dei is in fact an argument against Hannah Arendt that Augustine does not repudiate politics, but rather introduces us to a more authentic politics that proceeds according to truth, justice, and most of all, humility, rather than according to the superbia that characterized ancient politics. On Williams’s read, politics for Augustine is a natural good corresponding to the exigencies of human nature inasmuch as politics is supposed to be a school of virtue. That politics is corrupted in history by the libido dominandi does not exempt it from its high calling to minister to humans. 33 For one among many useful introductions to these two streams of thought in the Christian tradition Cf. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J.’s two articles: “The Influence of Romans XIII on Pre-Augustinian Christian Political Thought,” Theological Studies I/4 (December 1940): 337-364; and “The Influence of Romans XIII on Christian Political Thought II,” Theological Studies II/3 (July 1942): 325-346.

121 within an historical community of humans is somehow an artifact of our fallenness. Again,

Leo is making his argument in the strongest manner possible. Hierarchy, order, and authority are here conceived as essential to human salvation, to the accomplishment of the final end of human nature.34

5. Hierarchical order in civil society and in the state is analogously related to the hierarchical order that

obtains in heaven and in the Church.35

As the hierarchy of the heavenly choirs is distinct from but related to the hierarchy of ecclesial offices, so are civil and political hierarchies distinct from but related to heavenly and ecclesial hierarchies. In a world where society is dominated by a political imagination that would see all distinctions leveled to the lone State/citizen dyad, Leo sees society as constituted by a plurality of hierarchical institutions, “differing in dignity, rights, and power.”

This trio of properties is designed to emphasize the natural integrity and irreducible necessity of these institutions - their reality in other words. That is, when he imagines human communitates, he does not imagine a group of individual human persons who happen to be coordinating their activities in a given location or time. Instead Leo sees society as peopled by social dignities - by actual social unities within which individual human persons live and act to image the Lord. Again, his preferred focus is the triumvirate of dignities embodied in the

Church - State - family hierarchy. But a complete study of Leo would not limit attention to these three dignities, especially when Leo is so attentive throughout his pontificate to

34 Gierke’s Political Theories of the Middle Age, 22-30 is again the place to turn to see how the corporeal metaphor of Pauline thought is at work in medieval concepts of social organization. The influence of Paul’s ecclesiology on western social forms cannot be overestimated. 35 Cf. Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris, A.S.S. 11 (1878), 375: “Sicut igitur in ipso regno caelesti Angelorum choros voluit esse distinctos aliosque aliis subiectos; sicut etiam in Ecclesia varios instituit ordinum gradus, officiorumque diversitatem, ut non omnes essent Apostoli, non omnes Doctores, non omnes Pastores; ita etiam constituit in civili societate plures esse ordines, dignitate, iuribus, potestate diversos; quo scilicet civitas, quemadmodum Ecclesia, unum esset corpus, multa membra complectens, alia aliis nobiliora, sed cuncta sibi invicem necessaria et de communi bono sollicita.”

122 educational institutions, workers’ guilds and unions, religious orders, and a variety of other non-state, non-Church, non-family institutions.36

6. The proper metaphor for hierarchical order is the bodily metaphor in which parts of the whole are

considered members of the organically unified body.

Though it is our predisposition to conceive of hierarchy-language in terms of stratification, power exertion, dominance, and subversion, and of contractual relationships as the condition of human liberation from such abuses, Leo’s predisposition is almost thoroughly conditioned by the Pauline notion of an organic unity. We must say “almost,” for

Leo’s deployment of Paul’s ecclesiology in speaking of social bodies is not simply an application of Christian scripture to institutional forms. Rather, Leo’s use of an organic/corporeal metaphor for all institutions hearkens back not only to Paul, but to the medieval reception of Pseudo-Dionysius and the effort to develop a doctrine of human sociality that comprehended both the Church and the civil power. Leo’s vision of hierarchical order is the product of centuries of Christian legal philosophy using scripture, patristic thought, Augustine, Aristotle, local custom, Canon Law, and Roman Law.37

36 A complete study of Leo would also have to incorporate the work of Gierke on the fate of social unities of order in western political theory, and of Hittinger on whether or not it is possible to speak coherently of social orders as real unities capable of imitating the Lord. My work depends, in part, on Hittinger’s persuasive analysis of the social ontology developed by the modern popes. It falls beyond my purview in this work to demonstrate the validity of the claim that social orders are real unities capable of moral action - even imitation of the Lord. Three works of Hittinger’s are critical for understanding his treatment of the neglected scriptural, theological, and philosophical underpinnings of this social ontology. They are also critical for recognizing the gravity of one of Gierke’s fundamental questions: why did western political theorists opt for a contractual vision of society rather than an organic/corporate vision? I have already mentioned above Hittinger’s 2013 chapter, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology.” See also “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 7 No. 4 (2009): 791-838; and “Social Roles and Ruling Virtues in Catholic Social Doctrine,” Annales Theologici, Vol. 16 (2002): 295-318. 37 Cf. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 1-2. Gierke writes, “And then to all that was obtained from these various sources Jurisprudence added the enormous mass of legal matter that was enshrined in Roman and Canon Law, and, to a smaller degree, in the ordinances of the medieval Emperors, for Jurisprudence regarded what these texts had to say of Church and State, as being not merely the positive statutes of some one age, but rules of eternal validity flowing from the very nature of things” (2).

123 This work of philosophy creates interesting opportunities and challenges in developing a social ontology. On the one hand, the emphasis on organic unity is a suitable antidote to the “simple space” created by modern political monism. And Leo deploys the idea of organic unity with just this sort of antidotal work in mind. On the other hand, for

Christians organic unity par excellence is found in the supernatural body of Christ. The translation of ecclesial unity into terms that may apply to other forms of social unity is not impossible, but neither is it the simple task undertaken by Mazzini. In other words, the human sociality being completed or perfected by the Church is itself a created, natural good possessing a dignity rooted in the Divine Wisdom. It is not an incidental part of the shuttle bringing us to complete resolution into the Divine Idea. So, for Leo the mediation of salvation to society through the sacramental ministry of the Church is not the introduction of sociality to an aggregate of beasts who have decided to contract a polity with each other.

Neither is it the introduction of a sociality that is provisional and destined for eventual nullity. Rather, the mediation of salvation to society perfects natural sociality in a manner that surpasses the human imagination.

7. Human dignity has a twofold aspect indexed to the twofold aspect of the human person as individual

human substance and as social member.

We have already encountered this idea in the introduction and in the examination of

Mazzini’s notion of duty. For Mazzini, society is the condition in which human persons bring about good and work to perfect each other. This aspect of the duty to cooperate with others is the source of great energy in Mazzini’s thought. It is no less important in Leo’s social anthropology and deserves sustained attention.

By way of appreciating the twofold aspect of human dignity, it is helpful to turn to

Michael Rosen’s work on human dignity. Rosen illuminates, to a certain extent, the way Leo

124 imagines the social concepts of hierarchy and function and how they relate to human dignity.

Rosen’s insight is that when Leo speaks of human “dignity,” he does not mean it in the modern, egalitarian sense of the dignity of individual human persons. Rather, Leo uses the word to signify the “value” of “subordination itself.” In treating the same critical passage of

Quod apostolici muneris we are examining here, Rosen identifies an

Aquinian [sic!] conception of ‘dignity’ as the value something has in virtue of occupying its proper place within a divine order [...]. [...] For the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, all members of society have dignity, but their dignity consists in their playing the role that is appropriate to their station within a hierarchical social order, one in which some are ‘nobler than others.’ Instead of sharing in equal dignity, the orders of society should differ in ‘dignity, rights and power.’38

In this description of the Leonine doctrine, the phrase “members of society” refers to principally to orders, not to individual human persons. Rosen pays no attention to Leo’s doctrine of the individual human substance. Referring to Rerum novarum, Rosen writes:

“[T]he idea of the ‘dignity of labor’ [...] should be understood less as an assertion of equality

[of persons] than an expression of the view that labor should be given its proper place within a social order, all of whose members are ‘necessary to each other, and solicitous of the common good.’”39 In this way, Rosen gives the impression that Leo imagines human dignity as relative to the function or office one occupies with others in the social body. This is a valuable insight that only goes so far. Rosen’s description of a Leonine human dignity illuminates the necessity of appreciating the ways Leo conceives of the human person considered in her social relations. Given Leo’s concerns about institutional plurality and modern individualism, it is no wonder that his attention is often trained on these relations.

But we must not miss Leo’s constant attention to the individual human substance as well.

38 Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 47-9. 39 Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning, 49.

125 Elsewhere in Quod Apostolici muneris, Leo is careful to sound this more personal note of Christian anthropology:

[T]he equality of men consists in this: that all, having inherited the same nature, are called to the same most high dignity of the sons of God, and that, as one and the same end is set before all, each one is to be judged by the same law and will receive punishment or reward according to his deserts. The inequality of rights and power proceeds from the very Author of nature, from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named. But the minds of princes and their subjects are, according to Catholic doctrine and precepts, bound up one with the other in such a manner, by mutual duties and rights, that the thirst for power is restrained and the rational ground of obedience made easy, firm, and noble.40

Human dignity, then, is not solely rooted in participation in the communitates that constitute the body of society. Rather, human dignity is rooted both in social participation and in the creation, by the Blessed Persons, of individual human persons called to communion with the

Lord. Indeed, as we will see below in Sapientiae Christianae, social participation is a source of human dignity precisely because it is the irreducible context in which human persons respond to the call to Divine communion. We could express this twofold aspect in a variety of ways that would extend our insight into Leo’s social anthropology well beyond Rosen’s contribution. To put the matter in Mazzinian terms, to make ourselves and others better, to work for the good and the perfection of one’s self and of others, is to incarnate the Divine

Idea in history. To put the matter in Johannine terms, whoever does not love the brother he can see is incapable of loving the Lord he cannot see.41 And to put the matter in the starkest terms, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength; and the second is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself. The entire Law and the whole vocation of the prophet hangs on this twofold commandment.42 Every human substance stands before the Creator as an individual, rational animal capable of personal response to the truth and goodness of the Lord. Every human substance lives this response

40 Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris §5. Cf. also Humanum genus §26. 41 Cf. 1 John 4:20. 42 Cf. Matthew 22:36-40.

126 in the mode of the animate, participating image of that same truth and goodness. And every human response is simultaneously a reception and a cultivation of that same truth and goodness in all of created reality. As John expresses most exquisitely in his letter, the Lord himself teaches that the principal site of this reception and cultivation is the neighbor. It turns out that even human dignity is a “complex space” where relations are analogous. Only in their proper proportion to one another can human-human and human-divine relations take on their full intelligibility.

It is instructive to note that even the ordering of these several elements of Leo’s teaching in Quod apostolici muneris works in a hierarchical and even cascading mode whereby the wisdom of the Creator is donated to human communitates and finally to human persons who then through their membership participate repeatedly in this same donation. Within this hierarchical order, we note that every communitas, including the citizen communitas, is contextualized within a vision of communitates that begins with the eternal law and terminates not solely in the individual human will, but in the human activity of imaging the Lord for the sake of the neighbor. The restoration of the broken relations of nature and history cannot be the task of citizenship alone. But neither is citizenship simply artifice. Instead, the created goodness of political participation originates in the eternal law of the Creator and then is donated to the societies of angels and humans as one among many social modes of responding to and cultivating the image of the Lord’s own truth and goodness in creation. In other words, the citizenship communitas uniquely expresses one aspect of the flourishing of the rational animal. Outside of this theological context, citizenship and human sociality appear schizophrenically Janus-faced. They are either our totally unfathomable context, or they are conventional labels human persons use to describe the machinations of corporate activity.

127 IIb. Sapientiae Christianae

In 1890’s Sapientiae Christianae, on the duties of Christians as citizens, we encounter the analogia communitatis contextualized within a vision of the concordia that ought to obtain between one’s memberships in both the Catholic Church and the nation-state. If, in Quod apostolici muneris we were left wondering what exactly is meant by contextualizing citizenship within Leo’s expansive, analogical social hierarchy, Sapientiae Christianae is Leo’s responses to this question. Though much of the content of the encyclical can be found here and there throughout Leo’s body of work, the structure of Sapientiae Christianae’s argument itself illuminates the way Leo understands the historical phenomenon of citizenship in relation to human communitates more generally and to humanity’s social nature.

Sapientiae Christianae begins with a distinction between modern progress in matters of security and material well-being on the one hand, and modern neglect of the “higher and more glorious things” for which the human soul was created on the other. Acknowledging both the natural and supernatural vocations of the human person, Leo echoes Augustine’s

De civitate Dei by turning our attention to the possibilities of false societies springing from inordinate love of purely material ends. Wherever society ministers solely to the material needs of its members, without any reference to God, we find false society. However, the shortcomings of such a materialist society do not suggest for Leo that true society is purely spiritual, or that society must become somehow ecclesial, or that the material ends of the human person are to be wholly disregarded or occluded by her spiritual ends. Rather, true society in its natural, created integrity ought to function as the historical milieu in which persons accomplish material flourishing on their journey to their final, supernatural end.

Thus, as we saw above in Quod apostolici muneris, the dignity of the human animal is twofold,

128 reflected in both social acts of causing good and in the created integrity of the individual human substance.

Throughout the rest of the encyclical, Leo justifies this reasoning by attending closely to the duties of human persons vis-a-vis their memberships in both ecclesial and socio- political communitates. It is illuminating to note that the bulk of the encyclical is taken up with a description of the duties of Catholics qua Catholics and a description of the Catholic

Church as a true society according to the will of her Founder. When Leo arrives late in the encyclical at the topic of political participation - what one would expect from a letter on the duties of Christians as citizens - it is apparent that defining citizenship solely in terms of political participation or political membership is not the principal motivation of the encyclical. Instead, the purpose of the encyclical is to identify the social conditions in which political participation can be fully realized in terms of its proper place within the hierarchy of sociality ordained by the Creator.

As Leo puts it, “Nature did not form society in order that man should seek in it his last end, but in order that in it and through it he should find suitable aids whereby to attain to his own perfection.”43 We must pause over this line if we are to appreciate the way Leo confronts the vexed problem of competing sovereignties by teaching that the works of social authorities - especially the Church, state, and family - are by their very nature complementary and conducive to the supernatural end of the person. It is one thing to affirm that the Lord formed the supernatural society of the Church in order that human persons should find suitable aids whereby to attain beatitude. This is a fundamental Christian doctrine. But it is another thing altogether to affirm that “nature” formed society in order that human persons should find suitable aids whereby to attain beatitude. Such a claim is perennially

43 Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §2. Cf. A.S.S. 22 (1889-90), at p. 385: “Non enim ob hanc caussam genuit natura societatem ut ipsam homo sequeretur tamquam finem, sed ut in ea et per eam adiumenta ad perfectionem sui apta reperiret.”

129 controversial, and perhaps never more so than during the 19th century, especially in the ongoing effort to separate the civil and religious spheres. Indeed, Italian doctrines of separation leading to the development of the Roman Question are diametrically opposed to such a claim.

Consider the loaded language of this statement about nature’s formation of society for our perfection. Pace modern theories of “states of nature,” society is not solely an artifact of the human will. Instead, it is something given to the human person by “nature,” which is

Leo’s way of acknowledging society’s origin in the Divine Wisdom.44 Leo is not only combatting modern notions about society’s origin, however. He is also attacking modern notions about society’s form and function. If in the 19th century citizenship was seen as reconstituting the broken relations of nature and history, then membership in the state is the preeminent, even salvific, form of communitas. Citizenship has finally purified human sociality itself of the historical and theological accretions. In finally accomplishing this inevitable task, the state has secured the competence to legitimize sociality as the state sees fit. And so other

“social memberships claiming their origins in nature, history, or divine revelation” are legitimized only insofar as they are “either the private choice of individuals, or insofar as they

[are] permitted or ‘conceded’ by the state.”45 By absorbing human sociality into itself and by inventing ministries of legitimation and concession, the modern state does not simply

44 This is not the only place Leo attacks Rousseau’s social contract or his pre-social state of nature. For example, almost a decade earlier, Leo writes in Diuturnum (on the origin of civil power): “Those who believe civil society to have risen from the free consent of men, looking for the origin of its authority from the same source, say that each individual has given up something of his right, and that voluntarily every person has put himself into the power of the one man in whose person the whole of those rights has been centered. But it is a great error not to see, what is manifest, that men, as they are not a nomad race, have been created, without their own free will, for a natural community of life. It is plain, moreover, that the pact which they allege is openly a falsehood and a fiction, and that it has no authority to confer on political power such great force, dignity, and firmness as the safety of the State and the common good of the citizens require. Then only will the government have all those ornaments and guarantees, when it is understood to emanate from God as its august and most sacred source” (§12). 45 Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology,” 40. It is noteworthy that the modern nation-state’s desire to take over the social office of concessions is a reversal of certain medieval conceptions of the Church’s own stewardship over all social and political authority. Cf. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 11-13

130 compete with the Catholic Church or seek to replace her. Instead, the modern state eliminates the social context of the human person’s participation in the Lord’s goodness.

Instead of promoting and defending the communitates that would manifest the Lord’s one goodness through their pluriformity and integrity, the modern state requires these same communitates to be images of itself.

But Leo will not countenance the hubris of this modern social ontology. In the introduction to Sapientiae Christianae he writes:

To contemplate God, and to tend to Him, is the supreme law of the life of man. For we were created in the divine image and likeness, and are impelled, by our very nature, to the enjoyment of our Creator. But not by bodily motion or effort do we make advance toward God, but through acts of the soul, that is, through knowledge and love. For indeed, God is the first and supreme truth, and the mind alone feeds on truth. God is perfect holiness and sovereign goodness, to which only the will can desire and attain, when virtue is its guide. But what applies to individual men applies equally to society - domestic alike and civil.46

We are not misunderstanding Leo when we hear him suggesting that society is a natural aid to the supernatural task of knowing and loving the Lord. Instead, we are observing his placing of the natural, social life of the human person in its created context, which for Leo can never be disengaged from its properly dependent relation to the Creator. There is nowhere one can go to get away from the Creator’s calling his creatures to beatitude - even beatitude in its natural elements. And so citizenship, if it is to take on its properly social and political aspect - that is to say, if it is to truly articulate human dignity in terms of the social cultivation of the imago Dei - must stand in relation to the many memberships that constitute the life and action of the human person called by the Creator. In order for citizenship to find its proper place within the analogia communitatis, it cannot fulfill the liberal hope that it alone will restore human sociality to its pristine conditions. Such a repristination of human sociality would depend on a univocal predication inappropriate to the relationship between a limited

46 Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §2.

131 social relationship like citizenship and the full complement of communitates comprising human sociality per se. But Leo’s account of a citizen’s duties in Sapientiae Christianae is never a dismissal or denigration of the importance of those duties. Just because citizenship cannot fulfill the liberal hope does not mean that citizenship does not image the Lord. Were Leo to denigrate citizenship because of its failures to heal society, he would have to equivocate and detach the communitas expressed by citizenship from the communitates that express humanity’s natural inclination to social life.

In electing to devote an encyclical to Christian citizenship in political regimes, in devoting the bulk of that encyclical to a description of the social nature of the Catholic

Church, and in describing citizenship as flowing therefrom, Leo is engaging in a protracted and subtle negotiation of the theological-political problem as he has received it. In Leo’s hands, this negotiation is not primarily about making the political more theologically attentive. Neither is it primarily about making the theological more politically relevant.

Consider the following passage from the latter portion of Sapientiae Christianae:

The Church alike and the State, doubtless, both possess individual sovereignty; hence, in the carrying out of public affairs, neither obeys the other within the limits to which each is restricted by its constitution. It does not hence follow, however, that Church and State are in any manner severed, and still less antagonistic. Nature, in fact, has given us not only physical existence, but moral life likewise. Hence, from the tranquility of public order, which is the immediate purpose of civil society, man expects to derive his well-being, and still more the sheltering care necessary to his moral life, which consists exclusively in the knowledge and practice of virtue.47

Leo is identifying the conditions in which the political life of human persons may function as it was created to. In Leo’s mind, naming these conditions is the task of philosophy rooted in the doctrine of creation and guided by faith in the Triune Lord who

47 Ibid., §30.

132 has given humans in history the perfect example of society in the Catholic Church.48 But this perfect example is not a family, it is not civil society, and it is not a polis. Rather it is a sui generis mystical body bearing analogical relationship to all other mystical bodies: the choirs of angels, the political state, civil society, the family, the matrimonial unit, and even the human body.49 A social ontology that does not properly regard the pluriformity and incommensurability characterizing this complement of mystical bodies will necessarily fall short when it seeks to contextualize the human person within those bodies. As Leo is indicating here in Sapientiae Christianae, this shortfall has grave consequences for human persons: tranquil order amid the plural bodies of society is the very condition of rational flourishing. It is the place and activity whereby humans bring about good. The 19th century error Leo responds to is the politicization and bureaucratization of these bodies such that they become nothing more than concessions from the sovereign state to human persons rather than natural expressions of human sociality itself.

48 Leo never tires of identifying the task of Catholic philosophy, and it is precisely this connection of philosophy to the revealed doctrine of the Triune Creator that makes 1879’s Aeterni Patris on the restoration of Christian philosophy a constitutive part of Leo’s social magisterium. Leo does not think Catholic theologians should become political activists in order to make the Gospel relevant to contemporary society. Neither does he think political theorists/scientists should simply regurgitate Scholastic philosophy. Instead, he thinks there is such a thing as Catholic philosophy that enjoys a simultaneous dependence on the revelation of the Triune Lord and a mode of rational inquiry that differentiates it from dogmatic theology. Whatever we think of this position now, it seems clear to me that Leo’s focus on the Catholic philosopher and his high hopes for Catholic philosophy’s social utility are symptomatic of his more fundamental commitment to the simultaneous integrity, intelligibility, and utter contingency of creation. 49 As far as I know, Leo never suggests that human communitas is analogous to the relations that are the Triune Lord. This may be attributed to his Thomism, from which he would have understood that only the Triune Lord is his relations. In the created order, no such statement is possible. Whatever analogies might be proper and helpful when speaking of the Creator and creatures, it would have seemed obvious to Leo, from a Thomistic perspective, that having relations to others is not easily analogous to being relation. This is distinct, I would think, from the analogy of divine and human goodness. A creature can become good, even if a creature’s goodness is always already participatory and infinitely distant from the Divine Goodness. But a creature cannot become relation. Certainly, a creature cannot become its relation to the Creator. But in time, creatures cannot become their relations to others. Neither can they become others. The difficulty of speaking of relations as either substantial or accidental has occupied several recent theological debates. For all of the analogy’s prominence in our own context, it is notable that Leo never makes the analogy, despite his intense focus on human relations and participation in the Eternal Law of the Divine Wisdom.

133 Conclusion

Whereas after 1789 citizenship and its rights color all conceptions of social membership, Leo teaches that citizenship and its rights are part of a much richer order of participation in which the human person with all her needs and perfections is enabled to realize herself in harmony with others. Leo’s teaching cannot be separated from this context.

He does not imagine human sociality in an ideal form that does not exist. Instead, he attends rather closely to the theological valence of what is in fact a mundane reality for the human person who has grown up in a family and in a religious community, practiced certain arts and crafts, joined business ventures, played sports, worked at some labor, pooled resources, and otherwise cooperated with a variety of discrete social bodies for the realization of necessary human goods. For Leo, it is simply and obviously the case that political citizenship is not a category that provides the human person with an archetype of social membership. But this is precisely what modern political theory implies when it teaches that society begins with a contract that binds a polity together.

The binding of a polity was precisely the issue Pius IX and Leo XIII confronted as the tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the Roman Question with Italy’s liberals. From the

Vatican’s perspective, the risorgimento ceased to be a problem - and indeed could have been a natural boon - to the Catholics on the Italian peninsula if the Church’s temporal power had been duly reverenced and allowed to play its historic role in the social and political life of the region. But from the Italian perspective, the Roman Question necessitated a strict separation of the Church from the social and political life of the young nation. Both Pius and Leo appreciated that this separation would easily abet the total relativization of papal sovereignty.

134 From their vantage, such a relativization was too great a threat to the divine mission of

Christ’s Body. Thus, Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus:

So, then, if anyone says that the Roman pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.50

In the next chapter, we will encounter the liberal logic that occasioned the Council’s forceful restatement of papal sovereignty.

While Leo maintained his sovereignty and defended the conciliar teaching via the protest of the pontiff’s “imprisonment” in the Vatican, he also sought to ameliorate the difficulty posed by the Roman Question by advancing a philosophically and theologically rich account of what it means for humans to be social creatures. In doing so, he extended

Pius’s conviction that the Roman Question touched on vast and mysterious implications for the Church, for Italy, and for the world. It was Leo’s great insight to see that the Roman

Question pointedly expressed a trend in modern social and political thought whereby human persons and their social relations were no longer imagined as participating in an order beyond the one created by human will and convention. By situating human membership in a participated order, Leo develops an analogia communitatis. And by using this doctrine, Leo exposes the ways in which liberalism tries to create subjects freed from membership in other social unities.

Thus, within the post-Risorgimento development of the Roman Question is one of the most exquisite expressions of the liberal state’s fundamental desires regarding the Catholic

Church and her position in 19th century society. That is, the Roman Question perfectly

50 Quoted in Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two Trent to Vatican II, (Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1990), 814-15.

135 encapsulates the liberal state’s need, not only to reduce or blunt the social authority of other, non-state institution, but to actually reconceptualize non-state institutions as state institutions that operate by the legal permission of the regime. This is the unacceptable logic of the Law of Guarantees. It is also a proximate historical cause for Leo’s argument that precisely this sort of reconceptualization of social authority and the communitates that wield that authority is inadequate to the human persons who live under that same authority. In

Leo’s response, we see a response equal to the task of addressing the theological, philosophical, and anthropological errors animating the liberal state’s desire to become omnicompetent. In chapters three and four below, we will observe the subtlety and utility of the analogia communitatis as Leo works to counter this desire for omnicompetence. Remaining within the enduring conundrums of the Roman Question, we will see Leo articulate the

Church’s philosophical and theological rationale for the social competence and proper integrity of the two communitates that transcend and undergird the state and its authority: the

Church (chapter three) and the family (chapter four). By turning to these non-state communitates with the analogia communitatis in mind, we will be addressing the Catholic response to the profound hope that modern, liberal citizenship can in fact restore the broken relationships that have come to characterize our memory of our history and our understanding of our own nature.

136

PART II: INSTITUTIONS

137 CHAPTER 3

ECCLESIAL MUNERA AND THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS: LEONINE

ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE PROPER CARE OF HUMAN PERSONS

In this chapter, I want to transition from considering the habits of predication regarding communitas to two actual communitates of which human persons may be a part. The first communitas is the Catholic Church and will occupy our attention here in chapter three.

The second communitas is the matrimonial unit and the family arising therefrom. These I reserve for chapter four. Thus far, we have been considering how we might speak of communitas in relation to a given, created human nature and in relation to historically contingent conventions. I have suggested that an analogical conception of communitas is the only sufficient way to speak of the human phenomenon of sociality in all of its created givenness and in all of its historical contingency. Furthermore, I have provided historical examples of what may happen when we attempt to work for unity with others - as through the political artifact of citizenship - without this analogical habit of predication. The first pitfall I have identified is the univocal habit of predicating communitas, which involves totalizing our vision of human sociality in terms of one social form. In Leo’s historical context, nations do this with citizenship, proposing it as the purification of all older forms of membership. But in other contexts, tribes may do this with membership; and families may

138 do this with kinship. The second pitfall I have identified is the equivocal habit of predicating communitas, which involves fragmenting our vision of human sociality in terms of the plurality and contingency of historical forms. This is a more abstract form of predication that seems mostly to rely in history on the development of transnational processes like economic globalization and on supposedly universal concepts like human rights. I argued in the first chapter that even within the profound univocations of 1789 and Mazzinian patriotism, we can observe an equivocation with regard to citizenship. Today, if univocal citizenship seems a distant, nationalist dream to many people (though not all!), then this is likely because we have become accustomed to equivocating about the role political participation and citizenship can play in human flourishing. This equivocation is the source of Beiner’s melancholy regarding the civic-republican ideal.

In this chapter, I am interested in the consequences of our habits of predication. Is there a way to maintain the hope that our social relations - even citizenship - are implicated in healing the broken relations of nature and history? Is there a way to affirm with Hittinger that the imago Dei is not only an affirmation of personal human dignity, but also a sign of the social vocation of the rational animal? I want to approach these consequences from the vantage of Leo’s ecclesiology and how his analogical habit of predication impacts the way he describes the Church as a communitas occupying a unique munus within the analogia communitatis. In doing so, we encounter Leo’s own hope that human communitas could participate in the restoration of our broken relations. But we also encounter the ways in which Leo’s hope is radically divergent from the one expressed in 1789 and exported throughout Europe during the 19th century.

In examining the Church as a social body comprising an important part of the analogia communitatis, we are not interested in two things:

139 1. We are not interested principally in how the Church functions as a communitas that

performs some prior task that has been conceded to it.1

2. We are not interested principally in how the Church functions as a moral educator

that benefits society indirectly through the members of the Church.

Why is this the case? First of all, in order to be faithful to Leo’s thought, we must note that his promotion of the Church’s social authority is not a pragmatic argument about how the Church happens to efficiently accomplish certain things human societies happen to require. The connection between the Church on the one hand and the munera that redound to society on the other hand is not accidental. It is, instead, necessary.2 Put in the strongest language, the connection is metaphysical due to the nature of creation and its origin in the

Divine Wisdom. When Leo speaks about how the Church benefits society, contributes to its health and security, works for its peace, promotes its activity, and all the rest, Leo is not pointing to a record of successful initiatives undertaken by the Church. Neither is he listing functions the state has somehow defined and developed on its own and is willing to outsource to other social bodies. Either of these perspectives would place the state in the

1 By using the verb, to concede, and its variants, I am referring to one of the modern answers to the question of how to “reconcile the state’s monopoly over public authority and power with the myriad of other groups claiming authority, rights, and liberties according to custom, natural law, and ecclesiastical law.” According to the concession model, resolving this question involves making societies legitimate by law. “Concession can remain open to the reality of the group prior to the state’s award of jural capacities. Until then, they are regarded either as so unimportant as to receive no notice, or they are regarded as illegitimate. The real group simply moves from being not officially recognized to being publicly capacitated. [...] The state regards and treats all group-persons as out-sourced instruments of its own group-personality.” Cf. Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2009): 791-838, at 811, 813. For a summary treatment in the paradigmatic historical context of the French Revolution, cf. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49-50. 2 Leo is pushing upstream by the latter half of the 19th century. The age of concordats, by Leo’s time, had largely been conducted under the fundamentally modern doctrine that Catholicism can be politically useful and its dismantling or negating can be politically harmful. Much hangs on how one defines “politically useful” however. From the Catholic perspective, Catholicism is indeed useful in human life, given that human life is destined to beatitude and that political action and relation are fundamental aspects of that living toward beatitude. But from the liberal perspective, Catholicism is useful for partisan purposes. Napoleon Bonaparte’s sense of Catholicism’s utility is well-known. In the Italian context, separatism was never ignorant of the fact that Catholicism could be politically useful. I will discuss this issue in terms of the non expedit below.

140 position of having “priority of access to society,”3 and these perspectives would relegate all other communitates to conceded ground as bureaucratic agents of the state’s principality.4

But the state has not - because it cannot - defined and developed on its own a series of necessary social functions that constitute human flourishing. Neither has the state - because it cannot - used the mechanism of concession to dole out these necessary social functions to other social bodies that are more proximate to human persons. Instead, according to Leo’s way of thinking, the Church occupies divinely revealed munera in society by which she communicates munera that otherwise will not be communicated. From Leo’s perspective, there are no surrogates for the Church. Human persons and communitates may contrive surrogates, but they will remain human artifacts, subject to human limitations. The

Church on the other hand is divinely contrived, instituted by the Incarnate Lord himself.

This chapter is devoted in part to showing why the Church’s sui generis social munus is necessary for a proper relationship between the ecclesial communitas and the political communitas.

Second, and intimately related to this first consideration, Leo does not speak of the

Church simply as an educator or inspirer of human persons. Though the Church surely does educate and inspire, the Church may not be reduced to a private dispenser of spiritual resources that help human persons go about their public business more efficiently or

3 The language is Russell Hittinger’s. Cf. Hittinger, “Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, 50 Years Later,” public lecture Nov. 1, 2012, University of Chicago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zMOH3k8qpQ. Accessed Jun. 15, 2016. 4 In Leo’s context, the concession theory would emphasize the role of non-state institutions in assisting the state to more efficiently accomplish the state’s given tasks. In our own context, this focus on efficiency has incorporated a revitalized conception of civil society, which is thought to check the power of the state and otherwise provide for more efficient social action and more perfect liberty. Hittinger calls this contemporary focus on civil society’s role in increasing efficiency and liberty an “intermediate powers model” that has taken over for the “concession model” in the latter half of the 20th century. From the perspective of my analysis in what follows, Leonine thought on the Church’s social munus is relevant in either model, for it depends on a Catholic version of subsidiary relations that should not be confused with either liberal model. Cf. Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles,” 817-21.

141 humanely. The Church is not a therapist or life coach or mentor or any other purveyor of motivation. Put differently, membership in and formation by the Church may not be reduced to personal, spiritual capital that human persons then use in their social and political lives out in public. Neither does the Church simply provide refuge for persons who need to escape from the rigors of public life.

Because we are not principally interested in such deficient interpretations of the social nature of the Church, our attention is turned elsewhere. Not discounting Leo’s significant attention to the pragmatic and spiritual benefits the Church gives to society, we will attend to the public, social nature of the Church in order to understand more clearly how Leo conceives of the munera she uniquely occupies. We will be interested in the way the

Church’s munera are non-transferrable, uniquely capacitating the Church to heal the broken relations of human nature and history.

The chapter is organized as follows.

First, I examine the Italian historical and political context in which liberal spiritualization and privatization of the Catholic Church serve to mold the Church’s social character into something more palatable to the young nation-state. Second, I examine Leo’s ecclesiology in terms of the social nature of the Church. This examination will draw from his

1890 encyclical, Sapientiae Christianae, on the duties of the Christian citizen. In examining these historical and conceptual elements, I argue that Leo’s ecclesiology is an indictment of the state’s inability to care for the human person in a mode appropriate to human nature and in accordance with the state’s political vocation. Placing this indictment within his ecclesiology is significant, for it expresses the anthropological concerns that undergird his advocacy for the Catholic Church’s social authroity. This ecclesiological teaching is thus a significant contribution to enduring theological-political concerns as they develop within

142 liberal democratic regimes, where citizens and social bodies are forced to be free in a very particular way if they are to enjoy the care promised to them by the state. By investigating

Leo’s ecclesiology, we are considering his analogical vision of the proper social and political conditions in which rational animals in history may live together, not simply for mutual benefit, security, or efficient action, but for both natural and supernatural beatitude. Leo’s ecclesiology is thus essential for understanding the Catholic response to the hope that a form of communitas - political citizenship - is capable of healing the broken relations of nature and history.

I. Italian Separatism and the Spiritualization of the Ecclesial Munera

Some time before mid-century, the philosopher and jurist, Gian Domenico

Romagnosi, issued a very Mazzinian warning to the Italian nationalist movement: “The I, the family, and one’s own paese are three levels of human affection in society. The fatherland, in the sense of a nation, is a term that evokes a phantasm that scarcely touches the imagination.”5 Romagnosi’s warning signals that, for the Italian nationalists who desired to see Italy’s vibrant local life enlarged into a unified national life, much work had to be done to cultivate a national imagination that could ultimately receive the phantasm of the fatherland.

The task for those intent on nationalizing the peninsula was to make “Italians” via a process of civic education. The difficulty of this task is apparent when one considers that this education had to proceed in an historical context where a rich local civic life on the peninsula long preceded the national political life of something called “Italy.”6 In this nationalizing context, local civic life was a threat to national unity precisely because of its vitality. And so, from the vantage of burgeoning Italian liberal ideologies, this plurality of

5 Quoted in Raymond Grew, “Italy’s Nineteenth-Century Political Culture,” in Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996): 212-45, at 236. 6 Cf., ibid., 236-8.

143 local communitates had to be addressed in a manner that facilitated a stronger sense of national communitas among the various populations excluded from the ruling elite and unaccustomed to thinking of themselves as Italians.

As I noted in the first chapter, Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism and sense of national vocation provides the most romantically expansive and rhetorically powerful context of this effort to draw local civic life into a national context. But Mazzinian patriotism is not the sole factor to be considered. In addition to Mazzini’s prophetic doctrine, one must account for the more mundane political realities of Italian politics, including the exclusion from national politics of all those who would have seriously questioned the nationalist project: peasants, artisans, reactionaries, socialists, and of course, Catholics.7 With the relegation of these populations to local civic life, the national conversation could take place on a political spectrum that disproportionately represented moderate to radical liberalism.

This is precisely the place where the debate about the relationship between liberal Italy and the Holy See had to happen. Haunted by Count Cavour’s famous doctrine of “a free church in a free state,”8 Italian liberals throughout the latter half of the century struggled to define not only the status of the Church’s former territories, but also the Church’s liberty, especially with regard to her exercise of authority in Italian civil society, national legislation, and politics. Despite the liberal revolution in Italy, everywhere throughout the peninsula the

Catholic Church remained a constant institutional force, responsible for or deeply implicated in education, entertainment, welfare, economic infrastructure, and moral formation.9 As we will see in chapter four, the contest over the Church’s authority in these social domains is

7 Cf., Ibid., 242-3. 8 The phrase is Montalembert’s. Cavour was a lifelong devotee of French liberal Catholics. For a helpful and concise historical introduction to the ideal expressed in this phrase, cf. Ernst C. Helmreich, ed., A Free Church in a Free State? The Catholic Church, Italy, Germany, France, 1864-1914, (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1964), especially at 36-57 for the Italian context. 9 Cf., John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 40-1.

144 synecdochically represented in the legislative battles concerning civil matrimony and divorce.10 In a nationalizing movement, the temporal, visible, external presence of Roman

Catholicism is a thorn not easily removed.

Cavour’s doctrine of a free church in a free state became the critical effort to accomplish this very removal, however. The ideal expressed in the doctrine was that the

Church and the state would both achieve a more perfect liberty by remaining completely and securely within their separated jurisdictional spheres. All indications suggest that Cavour himself believed that this was good both for the Church and for Italy. Indeed, Cavour’s separatism, in theory, was designed to decrease state influence in society and to augment religious liberty.11 Nevertheless, as the Statuo of 1848 announced, Catholicism remained the official state religion. Furthermore, despite the principle of separatism active as an ideal during Cavour’s tenure and following, civil legislation regarding the Church throughout Italy remained practically wedded to 18th century modes of jurisdictionalism whereby the civil authority gradually crowded the Church out of a variety of social spheres and claimed the

Church’s prerogatives as the state’s own.12 So, despite the Cavourian emphasis on the liberty of the Church, Italy’s various attempts to negotiate features of the Roman Question demonstrated that Cavourian freedom for the Holy See was an entirely spiritual freedom separated from all matters of temporal sovereignty, which sovereignty was increasingly

10 Cf. Mark Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 16: “[...] Italy was unified and became a nation in a way that was fairly easily made to appear as if it had been an ineluctable affair during which progress had triumphed over centuries of stasis. What was to prove much less easy was the sustaining of this myth over the coming years, as the new state struggled to conquer the loyalties of citizens, to establish its legitimacy, and to develop a national secular culture. The first step in this process was to remove the legal traces of disunity by making the laws of the land uniform. The law of the land that would most clearly symbolize the departure from the past was a law on civil marriage.” 11 Cf., Halperin, The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought, 7-8. This speaks to Cavour’s sensitivity to the actual local, civic situation on the peninsula. Of the liberals, Cavour’s moderation is notable. Cf. Pier Carlo Boggio, La chiesa e lo stato in Piemonte: sposizione storico-critica dei rapporti fra la S. Sede e la corte di Sardegna dal 1000 al 1854, 2 vols, (Torino: S. Franco e figli, 1854), especially at volume I, book IV where Boggio treats his own context and gives the Cavourian doctrine its fullest exposition. 12 Cf., ibid., 10, n. 26.

145 imagined as the sole province of the civil authority. In other words, Cavourian separatism liberated the Church to be precisely the sort of Church liberalism required it to be: one separated from the social and political implications of its own existence as a true society, a real communitas in time.

The development of the Roman Question itself met with various 19th century currents of thought that created a welter of voices in the debate over how to manage Italian relations with the Vatican.13 The Cavourian doctrine established in the 1850’s and enduring throughout the 60’s inspired adherents to Cavour’s diplomacy, reformers of it, and of course, its detractors.14 On the moderate left, one finds Cavour and his disciples in the 60’s.15

Moving leftward, one finds Cavourians who were not only interested in the liberty of the

Church within Italian society, but also in liberty within Catholicism itself. One might even describe them as proto-modernists because of their emphasis on the personal freedom of the individual Catholic, their promotion of the autonomy of local religious communities, and their faith in modern science and human rationality.16 At some point, however, on the leftward span of the continuum, one observes the Cavourian commitment to ecclesial liberty dropping out of the Church-state scheme of relations. Francesco Crispi (1818-1901), who would become Prime Minister for two separate tenures during Leo XIII’s pontificate, and

13 In what follows, I am indebted to Jemolo’s classic, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, especially 28-52, where Jemolo mines parliamentary speeches and political essays by major Italian political theorists working during the 1860’s and 70’s. Like Cavour, the politicians described below are obsessed with resolving the developing Roman Question. 14 On the far right, of course, there were the pro-papacy clericals who sought to maintain the Church’s position in Italy in terms of both the temporal and the spiritual sovereignty of the pope. The notable philosopher, Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855) represents a more moderate clerical position that encouraged the Church to come to terms with some aspects of modern life under a liberal regime. However, because of the inherent position of these conservative forces, and because of the non expedit, these voices are excluded from the legislative conversation. For Rosmini’s contribution to the national question, cf. Antonio Rosmini, The Constitution Under Social Justice, trans. Alberto Mingardi, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), at 11-20 for Rosmini’s own constitution, and at 30-5 for Rosmini’s teaching on the place of Catholicism in Italy. 15 Marco Minghetti (1818-1886), Carlo Boncompagni (1804-1880), and Quintino Sella (1827-1884). 16 Bettino Ricasoli (1809-1880) and Ruggero Bonghi (1826-1895).

146 others17 may be labeled “neo-jurisdictionalists” who conceived of the Church as a purely human social institution.18 The neo-jurisdictionalists considered Cavour’s separatism to be a mistake in Italian politics and jurisprudence, for it allowed the liberated Church to escape the civil authority that was trying to unify the peninsula.19 During Leo’s pontificate, the Italian government eliminated church tithes, limited access to religious education in state primary schools, and censored clergy for preaching and/or speaking against the regime. Finally, in

1889, Crispi passed a law on the Church’s opere pie, the large financial network that funded religious and charitable works:

In the 1880s there were an estimated 22,000 charitable bodies in Italy, spending 96 million lire a year, of which 31 million lire were subsidies from local government. Welfare provision differed markedly between different regions. Most of the charities were run by ‘congregations of charity’, normally laymen appoined by each municipality and subject to a vague supervision by the provincial authorities. Crispi’s new law strengthened this lay control, and specifically excluded all priests from membership of the ‘congregations’. The more old-fashioned charities were suppressed altogether; and many others were ‘merged’ together - nearly 6,000 by 1908. Yet others were ‘transformed’, i.e. their funds diverted to quite different purposes from the founders’ original intentions - this happened to 1,193 charities by 1903, mainly those which had provided retreats, hospices for pilgrims and dowries for novice nuns.20

The Italian state thus continued its participation - this time in a more open and obvious manner - in a species of kulturkampf that had really begun during Pius IX’s reign. As with the very structure of the Law of Guarantees proposed to Pius, so with the state’s

17 Giuseppe Piola (1826-1904), and Guido Padelletti (1843-1878) 18 For an introduction to Italian jurisdictionalism and separatism within the context of la laicità, cf. Lorena Forni, La Laicità nel Pensiero dei Giuristi Italiani: Tra Traditione e Ennovazione, (Milan, Giuffrè Editore, 2010), especially at 8-18. 19 Cf., Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 39-43 for a summary of anti-clerical animus under the ministries of Agostino Depretis and Crispi (whom Pollard calls a “fire-eating anti-clerical” and a “mangia prete” [‘priest eater’]) during Leo’s pontificate. As Pollard puts it, “Governments of the Sinistra [left] pursued their legislative campaigns against the Church for two main reasons: first, they were afraid of being outflanked by the Estrema [radical left]; and second, especially under Crispi who became prime minister for the first time in 1886, they sought to reduce the influence of Catholicism in Italian society and politics, which they judged to be dangerously excessive” (40). Cf. also David I. Kertzer, “Religion and Society, 1789-1892,” in Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796-1900, ed. John A. Davis, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181-205, especially at 191-203. 20 Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871-1982, (New York: Longman, 1984), 105.

147 commandeering the opere pie. The state’s desire was to bring under its own, supposedly more rational and efficient, jurisdiction the Catholic Church and her proper munera.21

While the neo-jurisdictionalists considered separatism a political error that would deprive the civil authority of its rightful power, there were still other anti-separatist contributions to the Roman Question that do not fit neatly onto a left-right continuum.

They might even be said to hover above it. The most enduring contribution is from Mazzini.

As we have already observed in the first chapter, Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism would most certainly see separatism of any kind as a liberal and a Catholic mistake. The human person and her associational life, for Mazzini, are fundamentally political and religious, and the separation of politics and religion only stands in the way of their creative fusion in the new age. To be sure, Mazzini’s argument for the fusion of the two powers is not an argument for the establishment of Catholicism - far from it. Rather, it is an argument that liberal rationalism and Catholicism alike have contributed to false conceptions of the relationship between the two powers, that they have dampened the “religious spirit” proper to the truly political and social nature of humans, and that the future will be characterized by an identification of the two powers. This future identification, for Mazzini, is meant to transcend both the secularism of liberal rationalism and the the outmoded authoritarianism of Catholicism.

But Mazzini is not the only theorist who considers separatism more than a political error. Hegelianism had made its presence known elsewhere in Italian politics. Bertrando

Spaventa (1817-1883) and Augusto Vera (1813-1885) both typify a philosophical approach

21 For more on the 1889 law reorganizing the opera pie within the context of anticlerical legislation during Crispi’s tenures, cf. Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, 66-70; Humphrey J.T. Johnson, The Papacy and the Kingdom of Italy, (London: Sheed and Ward, 1926), 60-9; Alice A. Kelikian, “The Church and Catholicism,” in Liberal and Fascist Italy 1900-1945, ed. Adrian Lyttelton, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47-9; Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 41-2; and Eduardo Soderini, Leo XIII Italy and France, trans. Barbara Barclay Carter, (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, LTD., 1935), 82-92. For the Italian legislation as a species of Bismarck’s kulturkampf, cf. Atkin and Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People, 141-59.

148 to the Roman Question that sees the dialectical struggle between the Catholic Church and

Italy as the condition in which the state could finally cultivate its sense of the divine, even of its own infinity.22 Commenting on Cavour’s famous formula, Vera considered separation impossible. From the Italian neo-Hegelian perspective,

conciliation can exist only in the midst of conflict; freedom thrives on struggle. Religion is a social institution, not a mere relationship between Man and God. Religion and the State constitute two exalted spheres of reason, above which - though not outside them - there is only philosophy. They are grounded in nature or reason that is absolute, determining their relationship and embodying at one and the same time their conflicts, their virtues and their objective reality.23

The arguments against Cavourian separatism from both a Mazzinian and a neo-Hegelian perspective similarly emphasize the emptiness of the liberal approach to the relationship between the ecclesial and political communitates.

The ideological battle between the positivist-leaning neo-jurisdictionalists and the idealist Mazzinians and neo-Hegelians is a topic too large to be covered here. But a few comments are in order. Cavour’s sincere desire to see the Catholic Church enjoy a spiritual liberty separated from the temporal realm of Italian national politics did more than justify legislation designed to disentangle the Holy See from the Quirinal. It created for the Holy

See a manageable form of sovereignty that the Holy See never requested. It was a form of sovereignty whereby the pope could enjoy authority in the spiritual jurisdiction of the human conscience. This spiritualization of the Holy See’s sovereignty features a variety of implicit claims about the nature of the Church. As Italian liberals sought to unify a peninsula already richly textured with associational ties that facilitated local civic and political action, it became important to isolate and neutralize competitors for the state’s preeminent role in shaping the

22 Cf., Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, 47-8. Cf. Richard Bellamy, “Social and political thought, 1890- 1945,” in Liberal and Fascist Italy, 1900-1945, ed. Adrian Lyttelton, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 231-48, especially at 34-42, where Bellamy offers a helpful summary of the interaction between Italian neo- Hegelians and Italian positivists in the decades of the 1860’s-90’s. 23 Ibid., 48. The language is Jemolo’s, referring to Vera’s 1874 work, Cavour et l’église libre dans l’état libre.

149 social imagination of the people. If the state was to be the Italian’s most fundamental teacher regarding all things social, then the Church could not be. But if the Church could no longer occupy this munus, then a redefinition of religion was in order - one that would take

“religion” out of the public realm and hide it within the private. But if the Church could no longer occupy public space, then a redefinition of her nature was in order - one that would finally reduce her from a true and perfect communitas, necessary for the health of society, to a voluntary aggregation, necessary only for the moral and spiritual health of her members’ consciences.

Crispi himself, in an 1895 speech at the unveiling of a monument to Garibaldi, states the liberal position with spectacular condescension and a wild misrepresentation of both the

Holy See’s interests and the Catholic conception of religion:

Religion is not and should not be a function of the State. It comforts those who believe by offering them the hope of an eternal future. It nurtures the spirit of faith, and for that reason it is holy. [...] The autonomy of the spirit, which we defend and guarantee, is a fortress in which the Supreme Pontiff can take refuge, in which he will be immune from all attacks. Material power eludes him, and it will be to his credit if he can put it behind him; but the souls of men are his, and he rules them, to such effect that all the powers of Earth have cause to envy him. [...] The Pope is subject only to God, and no human power can touch him. Surrounded by all the honours and privileges of a monarch, freed from the embarrassment of the temporal power and from all the hatreds, resentments and anxieties that go with it, he exercises a sovereign authority over those who put their trust in him - and they are numbered in millions. No prince on earth resembles him or is his peer; he is unique. He has no territory under his jurisdiction - and, if he had, it would be narrow - but all the world forms part of his celestial empire; and with that he should be content. [...I]n virtue of the sovereignty that we have conferred upon him he transcends all the rest of mankind, and therein lies his power. He exercises his functions in complete independence, he communicates with all the world, he prays, he dominates men’s consciences, he protects others yet himself has no need of protection, because the territory of Italy serves him in the office of a shield.24

What follows should be considered an extended, Leonine commentary on Crispi’s speech, which is the latter’s way of saying there should be no such thing as a Catholic nation or

Catholic society in history. Note particularly that Crispi here characterizes the Church as

24 Given in the Italian Chamber, November 28th, 1895, quoted in Jemolo, Church and State in Italy 1850-1950, 69-70.

150 something of a republic. For though he mentions the pope’s “empire,” he nevertheless has in mind the individual consent of the persons who choose to put their trust in the pope.

Baptism is replaced by contract.

II. Ecclesial Munera and the Proper Care of the Human Person

We have encountered Sapientiae Christianae in previous chapters. I return to the letter here because the encyclical is pivotal for understanding how Leo envisions the Church and the state’s duties to care for the human person. In this second section of the chapter, I will briefly summarize the first part of the letter before examining more closely Leo’s ecclesiology.

The encyclical begins with the familiar Augustinian theme of the two cities (or societies in Leo’s terms), each attuned in their proper mode to the care of the two principal aspects of the res sacra in temporalibus: the temporal and the spiritual.25 Not wanting to discount the temporal at all, Leo only cautions that modern society is in danger of trading spiritual goods for material comforts in a way that causes persons and societies to become forgetful of humanity’s transcendent destiny. Leo darkly recalls the “memorable disasters” of his own century and looks forward with uncertainty to a time when “equally terrible”

25 The 1884 encyclical on Freemasonry, Humanum genus, also begins with the Augustinian theme. But there, as Leo mounts his case against secret societies, he emphasizes the contrast between the two cities: “The race of man, after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and the Giver of heavenly gifts, ‘through the envy of the devil,’ separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ [...]. The other is the kingdom of Satan [...]. This twofold kingdom St. Augustine keenly discerned and described after the manner of two cities, contrary in their laws because striving for contrary objects; and with a subtle brevity he expressed the efficient cause of each in these words: ‘Two loves formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an earthly city; and the love of God, reaching to contempt of self, a heavenly one’” (§§1-2). Leo’s use of Augustine is consistent and trades skillfully on the great doctor’s nuanced and complex analysis of nature, grace, anthropology, and salvation. In Immortale Dei, Leo’s use of Augustine’s two cities is closer to his use in Sapientiae Christianae. The natural enmity between the two cities is muted, and Augustine’s suggestion that Christians actually make the best citizens and that Christianity is a boon for civilization. Cf. Immortale Dei, §§2, 20.

151 disasters may be “impending.”26 The choice between the two communitates calls for a more careful delineation of the duties of those persons who live in both. This is the motivation for the encyclical: to hearten Catholics who are unsure of how to “contribute to the good of the commonwealth” in such ambiguous and potentially inhumane times.

We must note briefly here - though I will consider the issue more directly in the next chapter - that Leo significantly conditions the traditional duality of the two communitates by inserting the “family circle” into his consideration of the “whole range of society.” In other words, it is not quite accurate to see the contest and cooperation between the two communitates in terms of the traditional doctrine of the two spheres.27 Instead, contest and cooperation between the the temporal and the spiritual takes place throughout a variety of spheres - indeed, a “range.”28 Leo further conditions the traditional teaching on the two spheres by predicating all of his comments about the materialism of modern society on an analogy with the individual human substance. As I have noted above, Leo teaches that “what applies to individual men applies equally to society.”29 Human persons and their activities - including the activity of making and being in communitas - are only properly knowable in the light of the transcendent end of the person. The analogia communitatis is thus not principally a doctrine describing or prescribing the proper function of the two spheres of authority in society, though it is surely implicated in the theological-political problem. Instead, the analogia communitatis is a doctrine describing and prescribing the proper function of the whole of society. Charles Taylor would use the language of hermeneutics here, noting how medieval habits (on which Leo was dependent in important ways) of imagining society do

26 Cf. Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §3. 27 Leo understands that the theological-political problem is not reducible to a battle between Catholic philosophers and clerics on the one hand, and secular theorists and rulers on the other. Rather, the theological- political problem ramifies throughout the social whole. It is a testimony to Leo’s sensitivity and prescience that he does not treat the theological-political problem solely as a contest between concepts of sovereignty. 28 Cf. Ibid. 29 Ibid., §2.

152 not rely on eschatological forms, utopian ideals, or prescriptive norms. Rather, they rely on a conviction that the order of society “provides the hermeneutic clue to understanding the real.”30 I will return to this notion below in this chapter and again in chapter five.

Leo’s analogical vision of the complete social range - inclusive of Church, state, family, and human substance - is discernible in the first major section of Sapientiae Christianae, where he takes on the problem of rightly ordered loves in a world comprised by social pluriformity. Ideally the natural law would enjoin love of family and country, and these would be complemented by the Incarnation of the Son and the institution of his Church. As these loves all “proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause,” so it would be a sign of disorder if there were to be competition or inversion among all these loves.31 Competition between loves would thus be a privation of the real. Leo does not leave us in the ideal realm for long, however. History is replete with times when the “stress of public calamities” or the “perverse will of men” divide the human person’s loves and pit them against one another, asking the human person to serve two masters.32 The Christian citizen is that person in society who is outfitted with the virtues necessary to properly discern the identities of the various masters competing for her devotion. Acting from the conviction that the authority of every legitimate sovereignty and every just law originates in the “supreme Ruler and Lord of all,” the Christian is uniquely capable of two closely related, but radically distinct, duties. The first is the duty that follows

30 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 7. 31 Ibid., §6. Though Leo cites Luke 12 in this section of the letter, he does not consider the Lord’s words in Luke 14 regarding the disciple’s love for the Lord and the disciple’s hatred of family for the Lord’s sake. At first, this seems like a deficiency in Leo’s estimation of the ideal case of ordered loves. But when we consider the social ambit within which Leo is working, it becomes clear that Leo’s ideal case is one in which society, and not solely individual disciples, has been Christianized to such an extent that every person’s loves are so disciplined as to put the Lord above even the closest kinship ties. 32 Cf. Ibid., §§6-8.

153 from the legitimate authority of sovereignties and laws: obedience.33 The second is the duty that follows from life under any illegitimate sovereignty or law: disobedience.34 In both cases, the Christian is principally docile to the Divine Will who rules all things and who is Incarnate in history in order to “give testimony to the truth” and to “cast fire upon earth.”35 So, despite the clarity and beauty of the ideal case, the historical context of properly ordered loves is the social arena in which Christian virtue is constantly being “put to the proof,” and where Christians are “ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church.”36 The historical context of properly ordered loves then is a social arena, burned again and again by the Lord’s truth, wherein we live out our vocation to image the Lord by causing good. So, if the order of our social loves is to function as a key to understanding reality, then Leo is suggesting that this hermeneutical function is utterly dependent on the Divine Wisdom at work in both creation and the incarnation.

If these are the ideal and historical contexts of the analogia communitatis, then it is an injustice to accuse Christian citizens of sedition,37 and it is arrogance to detach social life from the “authority and empire of God.”38 Such characterizations of Christian citizens and of human sociality are ‘delusional’ because “they make over to human nature the dominion of which [liberal rationalists] think God has been despoiled.”39 This delusion is rooted in the claim that all truths, all duties, and indeed religion itself spring from nature rather than from the revelation of the Lord himself.40 This revelation of the Lord would be, for Leo, available

33 Leo cites Titus 3. 34 Leo cites Acts 5:29. 35 Cf., Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §11, citing John 18:37 and Luke 12:49. 36 Ibid., §§6-7. 37 Cf. Ibid., §8. 38 Ibid., §12. 39 Ibid. 40 Cf. Ibid.

154 in a natural mode according to creation and a supernatural mode according to the incarnation and the Church’s ongoing mission.

Hence [liberal rationalists] deny all revelation from on high, and all fealty due to the Christian teaching of morals as well as all obedience to the Church, and they go so far as to deny her power of making laws and exercising every other kind of right, even disallowing the Church any place among the civil institutions of the commonweal. These men aspire unjustly, and with their might strive, to gain control over public affairs and lay hands on the rudder of the State, in order that the legislation may the more easily be adapted to these principles, and the morals of the people influenced in accordance with them. Whence it comes to pass that in many countries Catholicism is either openly assailed or else secretly interfered with, full impunity being granted to the most pernicious doctrines, while the public profession of Christian truth is shackled oftentimes with manifold constraints.41

If in the past the contest and cooperation between the two communitates was negotiated with difficulty on account of competing loves and of divergent conceptions of the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal, this contest and cooperation nevertheless remained a matter of negotiation between analogically related spheres. Leo’s historical narratives suggest as much when he points back to the concordia that obtained in the medieval period.42 But in the modern period, especially the 19th century, the Church confronts something distinct from the difficulties of negotiating jurisdictional boundaries, which were and are always real.

In the modern, liberal context, Leo identifies a “delusion” where the negotiation at the heart of the relationship between the two communitates is recast in terms acceptable to only one of the them. One vision of communitas has been predicated of all historical communitates in the name of restoring the broken relations of nature and history. Witness Crispi’s speech regarding the pope’s “celestial empire.” Leo writes in a context where the terrestrial communitas has arrogated to itself the voice of revelation and has declared that analogical negotiations are finished. The celestial communitas has been put in its place, recessed and hushed alongside all other voluntary memberships within the consciences of individual

41 Ibid. 42 Cf. Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, §§27ff, Diuturnum, §§18-25, The entirety of 1885’s Immortale Dei, on the Christian constitution of states, is an extended analysis of the nature, history, and contemporary state of this concordia. See especially Immortale Dei, §§13, 21-4.

155 citizens. After this supreme univocation, the state may finally command the Church to remain there in private, like the wife of a politician.

In order to contend with this de-socialized vision of the civitate Dei, Leo devotes the remainder of Sapientiae Christianae to defining the munera of the Catholic Church, how her munera necessarily contribute to authentic human sociality in history, and what her contribution means for the political vocation of the state. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to focus on two important features of this ecclesiological work. First, I will examine

Leo’s teaching on the principle of unity that causes the Church to be an identifiable, enduring thing in the world. This principle of unity cannot be the same as the one supposedly binding the liberal communitas. That is, ecclesial unity is not contractual in nature, but is rooted rather in Christ. Second, I will examine the relation of the Church to other communitates, especially the state. Leo’s concern is not only a defense of the Church’s social authority. It is more fundamentally a promotion of the human person, whom the liberal communitas is in danger of neglecting.

IIa. Ecclesial Unity in Christ vs. Social Unity in Contract

The Church’s unity as a communitas, or “true society,” derives from the historical life and will of her founder, Jesus Christ, who

willed not only to train his disciples in His doctrine, but to unite them into one society, and closely conjoin them in one body, ‘which is the Church,’ whereof He would be the head. The life of Jesus Christ pervades, therefore, the entire framework of this body, cherishes and nourishes its every member, uniting each with each, and making all work together to the same end, albeit the action of each be not the same. Hence it follows that not only is the Church a perfect society far excelling every other, but it is enjoined by her Founder that for the salvation of mankind she is to contend ‘as an army drawn up in battle array.’43

The headship of Christ and the participation of the Church’s members in Christ’s life are the principle of the “union of minds and uniformity of action” that are “greatly feared by

43 Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §17, quoting Col. 1:24 and Song. 6:9.

156 the enemies of Catholicism.”44 In the communitas of the Church, a “perfect harmony of opinion should prevail” among the diverse members. Leo is sensitive to the relationship between this level of unity or harmony on the one hand, and the use of force or coercion we assume is necessary to maintain such unity on the other. He tackles the subject head-on, suggesting that liberal communitas provides us with an important contrast to Christian unity.

In a liberal communitas, where human reason is the sole guide, “means are often used to keep those together by force who cannot agree in their way of thinking.”45 Not so, however, with the Church of Christ. Christians “possess the saving principle whence proceed spontaneously one and the same will in all, and one and the same tenor of action.”46 This

“saving principle” is Christ himself.

Christian unity, therefore, does not exist in mind or speech alone, much less in any coercive power. Christian unity is not primarily dependent on the coordinated or coerced assent of individual minds to the “intrinsic evidence of the truth [of the faith] perceived by the natural light of our reason.”47 Neither is Christian unity partial or developing. It is not a

44 Ibid., §18. 45 Ibid., §20. Cf. §3 of Sapientiae Christianae where Leo associates the use of force with a society supposedly liberated from religion’s influence. His question is an enduring one throughout his pontificate: in a liberal society, what mechanism will be left to authorities to maintain unity? His consistent anxiety is that the answer will inevitably be force. Cf. Diuturnum, §24 on the role of coercion in the state and the insufficiency of fear as a motivating principle for unity and order. Cf. Immortale Dei, §36 specifically for the issue of religious coercion. Cf. Libertas praestantissimum, §16 on liberal society’s recourse to force in order to check the license liberal society has given persons. 46 Ibid., §21. Any account of Leonine and Catholic social teaching and their implication in the development of Italian fascism must take seriously Leo’s conviction that for Christians, unity is something spontaneous, rooted in the revelation of the Lord and not in a police force. For the historical context surrounding the relationship between Catholic social thought and fascism, cf. Christine Firer Hinze’s commentary on Quadragesimo Anno in Kenneth R. Himes, ed., Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004 ), 151-73. For a criticism of the Church’s relationship to fascism, cf. Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, 269ff. 47 Ibid., §22, quoting Dei Filius §3. Cf. Aquinas, ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 9. Here, Aquinas entertains the objection that a confession of faith or a symbol/creed is not suitable for Christians because such a confession would concern “all the faithful. Now the faithful are not all competent to believe in God, but only those who have living faith. Therefore it is unfitting for the symbol of faith to be expressed in the words: I believe in one God.” In response to this objection (ad. 3), Aquinas states, “The confession of faith is drawn up in a symbol, in the person, as it were, of the whole Church, which is united together by faith. Now the faith of the Church is living faith; since such is the faith to be found in all those who are of the Church not only outwardly but also by merit. Hence the

157 successively incarnating reality on its way to a future perfection it does not already possess.

Rather, it is already complete by virtue of its source: the Church’s one Lord, into whom all

Christians have been baptized. The fragile unity of a communitas originating in human reason alone is subject to the weakness of the human mind, the uncertainty of opinion, and the accidents of history.48 But Christian unity depends on the “authority of God revealing, who cannot be deceived nor Himself deceive.”49 On account of the divine authority, the Church is not the keeper of a divisible teaching subject to the scrutiny of those who would “deny that God has spoken to men, or who bring into doubt His infinite truth and wisdom.”50

Wherever discernment of and determination about revealed truth is a question, humans have recourse only to the “teaching Church, to whom God has entrusted the safekeeping and interpretation of His utterances.”51 At the head of this Church is a visible one, the Roman

Pontiff, who deserves “complete submission and obedience of will [...] as to God himself.”52

confession of faith is expressed in a symbol, in a manner that is in keeping with living faith, so that even if some of the faithful lack living faith, they should endeavor to acquire it.” 48 Leo’s appreciation, such as it is, of the Church’s own subjugation to the accidents of history, and the relationship of this subjugation to Christianity’s ability to perceive the truth of revelation, should be understood in terms of his teaching in Aeterni Patris, §24, 30-1. 49 Ibid., quoting Dei Filius §3. Cf. Aquinas, ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 1, resp.: “[I]f we consider, in faith, the formal aspect of the object, it is nothing else than the First Truth. For the faith of which we are speaking, does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God.” 50 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 4, ad. 3: “The light of faith makes us see what we believe. For just as, by the habits of the other virtues, man sees what is becoming to him in respect of that habit, so, by the habit of faith, the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to others.” In IIa IIae q. 1, a. 5, resp. Aquinas states that “[I]t may happen that what is an object of vision or scientific knowledge for one man, even in the state of a wayfarer, is, for another man, an object of faith, because he does not know it by demonstration. Nevertheless that which is proposed to be believed equally by all, is equally unknown by all as an object of science: such are the things which are of faith simply.” And at ad. 1, he writes, “Unbelievers are in ignorance of things that are of faith, for neither do they see or know them in themselves, nor do they know them to be credible. The faithful, on the other hand, know them, not as by demonstration, but by the light of faith which makes them see that they ought to believe them [...].” In ad. 2, Aquinas notes that for the faithful, matters of faith can be “as well proved [...] as a conclusion drawn from self- evident principles is in the eyes of all.” 51 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 9, sed contra: “The universal Church cannot err, since she is governed by the Holy Ghost, who is the Spirit of truth [...].” 52 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 1, a. 10, resp.: “Now this belongs to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff, to whom the more important and more difficult questions that arise in the Church are referred [...]. Hence our Lord said to Peter whom he made Sovereign Pontiff (Luke xxii. 32): I have prayed for thee, Peter, that thy faith fail not, and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren. The reason of this is that there should be but one faith of the whole Church, according to 1 Cor. i. 10: That you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you: and this could not

158 This absolute interpretation of the apostolic authority is for Leo necessary to the

Church’s vocation to witness to the faith’s unity against the privations of schism and heresy.

From the Christian perspective, schism and heresy are not simply religious terms for the healthy, vibrant dialogue that expresses the pluriformity of the Church through time. Rather, schism and heresy are signs of ill health in Christ’s body. They are signs that the body is hosting something incompatible with its very nature. But this means then that when

Christians speak of schism and heresy, they do not do so in the language we often use to describe the proper pluriformity of society. In other words, schism and heresy are privations of unity, not because the Church is incompatible with difference, variety, inequality, or disagreement, but because the Church is a body, united under Christ the Head. As a body cannot flourish if it is divided against itself or if it has incorporated alien life into itself, so the Church cannot be the Church if its bodily order under the Head becomes disorder.

The visible unity and order of the Church under Christ the Head, maintained by his authority and participated by the life of the members, thus expresses a Christian social imagination not seamlessly compatible with a social imagination that divides the world up into democratic, fascist, totalitarian, monarchic, and oligarchic regimes. The Church’s bodily unity under the Head is a sign of contradiction in various ways throughout history. This contradiction leads Augustine to suggest that Rome was never an authentic polity. And in the context of Italian separatism and laicism, Leo again sounds the deeper Augustinian theme. That is, in Leo’s Italy, political life has not finally come of age. Rather, it is in danger, compromised as it is by the rights to publish error, to believe and promulgate false and

be secured unless any question of faith that may arise be decided by him who presides over the whole Church, so that the whole Church may hold firmly to his decision.” Leo will extend the sovereignty of the Pontiff to include a general regulation of “the actions of Christian citizens that these may be in apt conformity to their hope of gaining eternal salvation. Whence it is clear that, in addition to the complete accordance of thought and deed, the faithful should follow the practical political wisdom of the ecclesiastical authority” (Sapientiae Christianae §37).

159 harmful ideas, to worship false gods, to idolize personal pleasures and comforts, to unjustly amass and squander wealth, and to disregard the duty to care for the weakest. Even in a liberal communitas as unsure of itself as Leo’s Italy was, these rights are considered fundamental human liberties that express the natural equality of all persons, goods, and communitates. In such a society, ecclesial unity under Christ the Head must be a sign of contradiction again. Why is this the case?

A Leonine analysis would suggest that such rights contribute directly to division within a communitas, thus making the communitas less and less intelligible as a body. But this must be the case because social unity within a liberal communitas can no longer be seen in bodily terms. A body is precisely what a liberal communitas is not and can never be. Instead, from a modern, liberal perspective the true nature of communitas is the primordial contract, made in nature for the protection of separated individuals and their property. The divisions that would threaten an organic, bodily whole are, in this way of imagining society, the sorts of barriers that must be constructed and maintained if the individuals comprising society are to remain at peace. Unity as the Church would imagine it can only look, from the liberal, contractual perspective, like fascism. This is the only way to imagine it and to name it.

The word fascist seems appropriate from a modern vantage. After all, the divine gifting of revelation, the unity of the faith deriving from this gift, and the faith’s stewardship by the one true Church with Christ’s vicar at its head - these principles of Christian faith demand according to Leo a total obedience that “cannot be given in shreds.”53 This total obedience sets Catholics apart in the world, according to Leo, for this level of obedience signals a part/whole relationship that is not easily describable in terms of the contract and of individual, consumptive preference. When contractual language is unavailable for usage in a

53 Cf. Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §22.

160 social scenario, what is left? Recall that Crispi could only envision the Church as a sort of republic rooted in the pietistic preferences of its members. Organic, bodily unity is anathema to the social imagination that creates liberal communitas. But the inverse is also true.

The language of contractual relations between severed or divided members is also anathema to the social imagination derived from Christ’s headship. Leo quotes Aquinas to establish this fundamental difference between Christian unity and the unity of wills that obtain in contractual communitates:

[H]e who does not adhere, as to an infallible divine rule, to the teaching of the Church, which proceeds from the primary truth manifested in the holy Scriptures, possesses not the habit of faith; but matters of faith he holds otherwise than true faith. Now, it is evident that he who clings to the doctrines of the Church as to an infallible rule yields his assent54 to everything the Church teaches; but otherwise, if with reference to what the Church teaches he holds what he likes but does not hold what he does not like, he adheres not to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule, but to his own will.55

An individualized adherence to one’s own will is what Leo repeatedly condemns throughout his social magisterium. Such voluntarism is the root of the ills or evils or tempests that Leo identifies as corrosive of authentic human sociality. I will return to an historical specification of this voluntarism in chapter four when we treat Italian matrimonial legislation. But for now it is only necessary to examine how Leo counters voluntarism: he teaches that, instead of a

54 Cf. Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 2, a. 1, resp. Here, Aquinas asks whether to believe is to “think with assent.” His response is that thinking can be taken in several ways. When we consider belief, we should start by considering to think as “that consideration of the intellect which is accompanied by some kind of inquiry, and which precedes the intellect’s arrival at the stage of perfection that comes with the certitude of sight.” If this is what we mean by “to think,” then we properly understand believing as “to think with assent.” He writes, “For among the acts belonging to the intellect, some have a firm assent without any such kind of thinking, as when a man considers the things that he knows by science, or understands, for this consideration is already formed. But some acts of the intellect have unformed thought devoid of a firm assent, whether they incline to neither side, as in one who doubts; or incline to one side rather than the other, but on account of some slight motive, as in one who suspects; or incline to one side yet with fear of the other, as in one who opines. But this act to believe, cleaves firmly to one side, in which respect belief has something in common with science and understanding; yet its knowledge does not attain the perfection of clear sight, wherein it agrees with doubt, suspicion and opinion.” In ad. 3, he gives more precision: “The intellect of the believer is determined to one object, not by the reason, but by the will, wherefore assent is taken here for an act of the intellect as determined to one object by the will.” By IIa IIae q. 2, a. 9, resp., he will provide the following definition of the act of believing: “an act of the intellect assenting to the Divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God, so that it is subject to the free-will in relation to God [...].” 55 Ibid. Cf. Aquinas, ST IIa IIae q. 5, a. 3, resp.

161 contractual relation, a proper or authentic communitas is a social unity of hierarchical order in which higher orders and lower orders, precisely through and because of their inequality, participate in and with each other. This complementary participation, furthermore, is not only ordered to the practical completion of tasks appropriate to the communitas. It is also ordered to the manifestation of the goodness of social participation itself. The Church exemplifies this participatory communitas in history, but it is neither the sole archetype nor the only example of such communitas. As we saw in chapter two above, the angels enjoy such communitas, and all other communitates are for Leo judged analogically by this same standard.

And as we will see in chapter four below, the biological and historical form of the family must also be judged in this way. Taken together, these various hierarchical bodies function for Leo in terms of Taylor’s “hermeneutic clue” that gives one a better “understanding of the real.” They further reveal to us the human vocation to cultivate the imago Dei by causing good in others.

One may contrast this vision of hierarchical communitas with modern, liberal communitas. We can imagine the latter, comprised by the sovereign wills of individuals contracting with one another for protection from each other, as a flatness or as a continual process of univocating. Rather than the analogical relations that comprise bodily, organic unity, the contract becomes the historical social form ontologized into a primordial truth about human communitas itself. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that in modern social and political theory, contract even possesses a hermeneutical value that supposedly clues us into the truest, most authentic structure of society. Contract is supposed to provide us with the language and concept and image necessary for insight into the various causes of society, especially in terms of origin and finality. This flattening of all parts to the plane of

162 the contract reduces the participation of the members to something extraneous to the communitas itself.

In a bodily, organic unity, participation is identical with membership as both the fact of membership and the act of participation constitute the context in which parts work together to cause good in each other and in the whole. But in a contractual communitas participation becomes a voluntary choice of individual members, even a matter of preference. In other words, one can imagine a contractual communitas as an aggregation of monads that have nothing to do with each other outside the dictates of preference and pragmatism.56 But as Leo, following Aquinas, makes clear above, the Christian who does adhere to the faith on account of preference and pragmatism is in fact dividing herself from the body in order to become something other than a member of the body. She is dividing herself from the body in order to become an isolated consumer of the goods of truth.

According to this way of imagining communitas, she is thus extracted from the hierarchical relations of dependence that are in fact the very condition for the reception of truth in its fullness.

Aquinas’s teaching on the virtue of faith further illuminates the contrast we are drawing here between a Leonine and a contractual vision of communitas. Asking whether or not all are equally bound to have explicit faith, Aquinas writes:

The unfolding of matters of faith is the result of Divine revelation: for matters of faith surpass natural reason. Now Divine revelation reaches those of lower degree through those who are over them, in a certain order; to men, for instance, through the angels, and to the

56 From our vantage, aggregation appears to be the only viable solution to the fascist absorption of individuals that constantly threatens my writing here. But it appears to me that Leo does not see these options in a strict binary. Put historically, for Leo the option is not simply between absolutism and liberalism, or between fascism and liberalism. Leo imagines the hierarchical participation of social orders he observes in the celestial and ecclesial hierarchies to be instead the proper home of true authority and true liberty, true sociality and true individuality, true corporatism and true personalism. The analogia communitatis is precisely what is necessary here. The only way to recognize the proper grounding of authority and liberty in the Divine Wisdom is to see their analogical relationship to one another. The same would go for sociality/individuality.

163 lower angels through the higher, as Dionysius explains. In like manner, therefore, the unfolding of faith must needs reach men of lower degree through those of higher degree.57

Why is this so? In the case of Divine revelation, hierarchical participation is necessary on account of the inadequacy of those who are lower (creatures) and their necessary inability to receive on their own that which is higher (Divinity). This is straightforward enough. We might even allow Leo, despite various contemporary allergies, to extend his account to include the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church. It is the case, after all, that the faith is handed on from one generation to the next. And within generations, the faith is taught by experts (more or less) to novices (more or less). Hierarchy does seem to obtain. But does

Leo’s emphasis on hierarchical participation within a communitas (i.e. the Church) and between communitates (i.e. society as a whole) provide us with anything other than a description of conventional mechanisms by which communities replicate and sustain themselves through time, passing down wisdom about how to live a good life? This is a very difficult question to answer, for we now live in a social world that envisions hierarchical participation as a feature of a dead past. And as we saw in chapter one, the modern West identifies this past as dead because the modern West killed it in 1789. In keeping with the spirit that animated that same kill, the liberal, contractual social imagination continually cultivates a pronounced distaste for hierarchy. We are taught to see in hierarchy the cause of everything that was broken in our relations to each other and to nature, throughout history.

57 Aquinas ST IIa IIae q. 2, a. 8, resp. Cf. Russell Hittinger, “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” in Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013): 39-78, especially at 53ff. Here, Hittinger shows how Leo XIII and his successors use Aquinas, Aristotle, and Pseudo-Dionysius to criticize a world where the “state reduced all dignities to individuals and to a single, homogenous social form of citizenship” (56). Hittinger has identified how important this mode of argument is in Leo’s social magisterium, extending all the way back from the 1890s to Quod Apostolici muneris in 1878. There, Leo makes a similar point to the one he makes implicitly here in Sapientiae Christianae: that a society reduced to “one dead level” lacks the pluralism that makes up true communitas.

164 Why is this not the case for Leo? After all, he is not insensitive to the plight of those on the lower ends of the social hierarchy. Indeed, his work in Rerum novarum is often enough the only reason we continue to revisit his thought. In his way of seeing society, hierarchical participation in that which is higher by that which is lower signals the analogical composition proper to true communitas. Hierarchy is a “key part of the normative order.”58 It is not the way things once were. Neither is it the way things should be or could be in some future. It is rather the way things are. It is the real. And going against hierarchy is the same as turning

“against reality itself. Society would be denatured in the attempt” to work against the givenness of this participatory structure.59 Recall that above, in chapter two, I referred to

Rosen’s work on Leo’s conception of social inequality among orders rather than among persons. Leo has in mind divisions of society such as the estates that comprised the ancien régime or, even further back, the orders of oratores, bellatores, and laboratores that comprised medieval society. Within the Church, hierarchical participation is not a reference to the subordination of individual laypersons to clerical persons. Rather, as Leo’s treatment of the office of the papacy demonstrates, or as his constant attention to religious orders indicates, he is again envisioning orders or munera within the body. And within the family, something analogous obtains between parents and children. Following St. Paul, who recognized that the eye is not the hand, Leo identifies the Church as a pluriform communitas ordered to a specific function. In this communitas, born of one faith in one Lord and his singular baptism, pluriformity is not the issue. Rather, disorder and division are. Pluriformity is, in fact, the proper description of the ecclesial body, comprised by all the parts. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for society at large. Just as within the Church there are various hierarchical orders

58 The language is Taylor’s. Cf., Modern Social Imaginaries, 11. 59 Ibid., 11.

165 participating with and in and through each other, so in human society, Leo suggests, there are various hierarchical orders participating with and in and through each other.

Were Leo to abandon hierarchical participation for a flattening of the ecclesial body in order to rid the Church of subordination, he would not simply be bringing the Church up to date with the modern deliverances of a contractual society. He would be drawing the life of the Head and the life of the members onto the same ontological continuum. At least two options present themselves for overhauling the Christian social imagination here and drawing the life of the Head and of the members into some form of identity. First, as we saw in the first chapter, a Mazzinian univocation could perform this task. After all, a Mazzinian ontology would allow us to falsely imagine the ecclesial communitas as identical to a successively incarnating god itself, not yet fully realized in history, journeying toward ever fuller manifestation in the new age. Second, as we have been considering here, a contractual univocation could perform this task. Free, voluntary membership, selective consumption of truth, and individual estimation of good could stand in for the hierarchical participation of that which is lower in that which is higher.

But neither of these options represents what Christians believe about the relationship between the Head’s divine life and the donated participation of creatures in that very same life. The necessary relation between the Head’s life and the participation of the members is not rooted in an ontologically identical journey toward unity in the future. Neither is the relation rooted in the individual person’s will to contract with Christ or his Church. Instead, the relation is rooted in the Lord’s own life, death, and resurrection, and in his invitation to creatures to be baptized into him. Christ is the principle of unity, and so the unity of the ecclesial communitas is unintelligible without an account of its participation in the incarnation.

Ecclesial unity, peculiar though it is in history, is nevertheless analogous to the unity of all

166 other communitates. Their unity is founded in something beyond themselves. Their unity is not exhausted solely in terms of the human preference for companionship or cooperation, much less in terms of the human artifact of the contract. Instead, their unity is most perfectly described as a gift of the Divine Wisdom, which has made the human person to image the divinity both in her rational personhood and in her sociality. In the case of the Church, but also in the case of all other communitates, the members are participating according to a principle that cannot be derived solely from the human will. In the case of all memberships, the members are participating in communitas - they are creating communitas - on account of a divine initiative to make the whole conducive to a necessity of human flourishing. In the case of the ecclesial body, the members are participating according to the divine initiative to save human persons through membership in Christ’s body, the Church. In the case of human society more generally, the members are participating according to the divine initiative to provide human persons with the context in which they may cultivate the social aspect of the imago Dei.

But within 19th century society, Leo’s commitment to this vision of communitas is an unacceptable contention. A social imagination that can countenance hierarchical participation after 1789 is antithetical to the social imagination that holds that all things - even liberty and fraternity - must be sacrificed on the altar of the equality. After all, it is only equality that finally freed us from the inequalities of the ancien régime and the oppressions that followed therefrom. It is only equality that allowed us to finally pursue fraternité and so restore the broken relations. The sacrifice of all things on an altar to equality ultimately depends on a univocal habit of predication that cannot imagine distinction and unity existing in complementary and even mutually reinforcing relationship. If the broken relationships of nature and history are to be restored, they must be restored by reducing all social

167 pluriformity to identity, all differential hierarchy to univocal flatness. This is the gospel of

1789, overcoming the distorted inequalities of the ancien régime. It is also the socialist gospel, overcoming the inequalities of laissez-faire capitalism. But then again, it is also the dark gospel undergirding laissez-faire capitalism itself, supposedly overcoming the arbitrary success and power of hereditary aristocracy. In every direction, Leo encounters an atomized account of the human person rooted in the univocal collapsing of all social relations into the singularity of the consumptive will. This voluntarism expresses itself most eloquently in history via the political communitas signified by citizenship in the liberal nation. So powerful is this model of citizenship that, according to Crispi, even the pope’s own “celestial empire” is ultimately founded on the preferences of those who choose to put their faith in him. Liberal citizenship is thus designed by the state not only to counteract the problem of local, historical sovereignties through the consolidation of national sovereignty. It is also designed by the state to refashion the Church in the state’s own image. Liberal citizenship thus demands a certain ecclesiology that de-socializes the Church.

IIb. Ecclesial Society, the Proper Care of Persons, and the Political Vocation

After treating of Christ as the principle of Christian unity, Leo continues in Sapientiae

Christianae to treat of the Church’s status as a perfect society in relation to other societies in history. In doing so, Leo is countering this de-socialization of the Church. Throughout Leo’s social magisterium, he examines the Church’s social relations with a variety of communitates, including the family, secret sects, economic associations, lay religious orders, and schools.

But in Sapientiae Christianae, his attention is trained solely on the Church’s relationship to the civil power.60 The Church, like the civil power, possesses particular munera that define her

“fixed laws, special spheres of action, and a certain method, fixed and conformable to her

60 At every key point in his treatment of Church/state relations in Sapientiae Christianae, he is drawing from his previous work in Immortale Dei (1885).

168 nature [...].”61 Both powers “have as their object to train men to perfection.”62 This anthropological territory shared by the overlapping jurisdictions of the two powers is the originating source of the most significant tensions between the Catholic Church and the modern nation-state, which are both tasked with ministering to the res sacra in temporalibus.

But the negotiation of this anthropological territory cannot be reduced to a pragmatic concern with jurisdictional overlap. We are no longer in the world of tense collaboration between the two spheres. Instead, we are in a world where the needs of human nature are being renegotiated.

As we noted above, in the ideal case, the work of the two powers within their given jurisdictions would be perfectly harmonious since both powers originate in the Divine

Wisdom of the Lord for the benefit of humans journeying toward beatitude. Furthermore, in this ideal case the two powers would be perfectly free within their jurisdictions to exercise their authority.

[I]t is plainly evident that the governing powers are wholly free to carry out the business of the State; and this not only not against the wish of the Church, but manifestly with her co- operation, inasmuch as she strongly urges to the practice of piety, which implies right feeling towards God, and by that very fact inspires a right-mindedness toward the rulers in the state. The spiritual power, however, has a far loftier purpose, the Church directing her aim to govern the minds of men in the defending of the “kingdom of God, and His justice,” a task she is wholly bent upon accomplishing.63

So, at a glance, Leo’s vision of the two powers’ relations and actions seems to fit comfortably enough within a Cavourian conception of a free church within a free state where separation would leave each power within its own sphere of influence. And Crispi may have been pleased to hear Leo speak in such spiritual, interior terms regarding piety, feeling, right-mindedness, and the like. Cavour, if not his more militantly anti-clerical

61 Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §25. Cf. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §§8-13. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., §26, quoting Matt. 6:33, emphasis added. Cf. Immortale Dei, §§3-6.

169 followers, would also likely applaud Leo when he writes that, “No one can, however, without risk to faith, foster any doubt as to the Church alone having been invested with such power of governing souls as to exclude altogether the civil authority. In truth, it was not to

Caesar but to Peter that Jesus Christ entrusted the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.”64 Leo seems to have set up a perfect justification for the separation of the powers, rooted firmly in the integrity of civil authority and the Gospel witness to the Lord’s mandate. But a separatist and spiritualized vision of the Church’s relationship to the civil power is not what Leo has in mind.

It seems that influence between the two powers is unilateral. According to Leo, the

Church may influence the civil power in myriad, albeit spiritual, ways in order to help the civil power in the commission of its duty to care for the humans under its charge. That is, the Church may exercise spiritual authority over temporal, political animals exactly in their temporality and in their politics. But the same is not true from the State’s end. The State may not influence the spiritual power in order to help the spiritual power in the commission of its duty to the humans under its charge. That is, the State may not exercise temporal authority over religious animals exactly in their religiosity.65 So whereas Cavour and Crispi desired to separate and spiritualize the Catholic Church in order to de-socialize it into the realm of private conscience, Leo separates and spiritualizes the Catholic Church precisely in order to socialize it within the public realm of institutions, authorities, and powers. In a way then,

64 Ibid., §27. 65 Thomas Pink has taken up the task of describing Leo’s relationship to past Catholic teaching regarding the Church’s use of the civil power as her own “secular arm” and, furthermore, the relationship of this tradition to Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae. Cf. Pink, “The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin Rhonheimer,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 77-121, especially at 82-7. After being significantly challenged by Martin Rhonheimer on his reading of Dignitatis Humanae, (Rhonheimer, “Dignitatis Humanae - Not a Mere Question of Church Policy: A Response to Thomas Pink,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2014): 445-70) Pink has recently revisited Leo’s thought on temporal power and its relationship to the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae in Pink, “Jacques Maritain and the Problem of Church and State,” The Thomist 79 (2015): 1-42.

170 Italian separatism operates on a half-truth: that the two powers are distinct and should remain so. But in Leo’s mind, this distinction between the two powers is not an occasion for separation, and certainly not for the relegation of the Church to any private realm.

Instead, Leo draws out the consequences of the analogical relationship between the two powers: “A notable difference exists between every kind of civil rule and that of the kingdom of Christ. If this latter bear a certain likeness and character to a civil kingdom, it is distinguished from it by its origin, principle, and essence.”66 Given that both the spiritual and the civil powers count as perfect societies, it is reasonable to affirm their obvious likenesses in terms of discipline, law, organization, etc. But to do so without further distinguishing the infinite gap between the Church and the State would be to immanentize the Church and to bring her down to the State’s level. Since the Church “not only is a perfect society in herself, but superior to every other society of human growth,67 she resolutely refuses, promoted alike by right and by duty, to link herself to any mere party and to subject herself to the fleeting exigencies of politics.”68

We see here the deeper justification for the non expedit reiterated to Italians during

Leo’s reign.69 It is not expedient for Catholics to participate in national politics not only because non-participation strengthens the Holy See’s protest against the legitimacy of the

Italian nation, but also because in certain circumstances Catholicism may be used for partisan purposes beneath the dignity of religion, which should “be accounted by everyone as holy and inviolate.”70 To implicate Catholicism in the interests of partisanship in national

66 Ibid., §28. 67 It is worth noting Leo’s dynamic vision of human sociality. Society is not a static reality one enters or exits, but rather is an activity of human rationality. 68 Ibid. 69 “Non expedit” her refers to both a lack of expediency and a curtailing of freedom. From the Holy See’s perspective at the time, it was not useful, and so it was not licit, to participate in Italian national politics. 70 Cf. Ibid., §29. Leo is quite obviously writing to his fellow Italians, urging them to abide by the non expedit until such time as it becomes obvious that national politics can “consult the interests of Catholicism.” Wherever the

171 politics is to trade such holy and inviolable things as are the Church’s for the mundane and mutable goods of this life. It is to take that which conducts us to our final end in beatitude and use it for the sake of finite ends of dubious value. Thus Leo works with a form of separation between Church and State that, first, ensures that the spiritual power of the

Church takes spiritual precedence over the temporal power of the State. This separation, second, ensures that the Church is able to exercise its influence in the temporal sphere of society and politics, but that the State is prevented from influencing the spiritual sphere of

Catholic religion. Finally, he has stated that the Church ought not get involved in partisan politics. Though Cavour and Crispi would certainly object to features of Leo’s thought so far, Leo again seems to have largely played into Crispi’s hand by setting up a celestial empire within the minds of those who choose to put their trust in him. Perhaps Leo recognizes this difficulty, for the next two paragraphs of the letter take a different tack.

Having established that the Church and the State are distinct and that “neither obeys the other within the limits to which each is restricted by its constitution,” Leo notes that it does not follow that “Church and State are in any manner severed, and still less antagonistic.”71 The analogue, again, is the human substance, for nature has given us “not only physical existence, but moral life likewise.”72 This is the heart of the matter, and we must pause here to interrogate Leo’s reasoning. Why is it the case that the Church and the

State are distinct, perhaps even “separated,” but not in any way severed or antagonistic? The answer lies in the human substance, the preeminent res sacra in temporalibus.

interests of Catholicism “appear by reason of the efforts of adversaries to be in danger, all differences of opinion among Catholics should forthwith cease, so that, like thoughts and counsels prevailing, they may hasten to the aid of religion, the general and supreme good, to which all else should be referred.” 71 Ibid., §30. 72 Ibid.

172 Leo places the human person at the heart of his consideration of the relationship between the two powers. The human person lives under the authority of these two powers and receives a variety of munera from both of them. From the political communitas, the human person may reasonably expect physical care, the tranquility of public order, and the

“sheltering care” necessary for the proper living of a moral life. This moral life “consists exclusively in the knowledge and practice of virtue.”73 From this brief description of the

State’s duty to the human persons under its charge, we can see that the civil authority is in no way severed from the spiritual interests of the Church. But the relation of the civil authority to the spiritual/moral nature of the human person is somewhat attenuated. We might say in more contemporary terms that, from Leo’s perspective, the civil authority is responsible for creating conditions in which the human animal may flourish. And such flourishing is necessarily flourishing that transcends the material. From Leo’s perspective, the State’s temporal authority is implicated in the spiritual care of human persons insofar as human persons cannot help but be spiritual animals. As we have seen above, Leo does not give the political communitas primary access to the “power of governing souls.” But neither does he allow the state to pretend it is disinterested in such governance.74

From the ecclesial communitas, on the other hand, the human person may reasonably expect moral care, aids toward “religious perfection,” and the knowledge and practice of true religion “which is the queen of virtues, because in binding these to God it completes them

73 Ibid. 74 It is worth recalling how Leo begins Sapientiae Christianae: “Progress, not inconsiderable indeed, has been made towards securing the well-being of the body and of material things, but the material world, with the possession of wealth, power, and resources, although it may well procure comforts and increase the enjoyment of life, is incapable of satisfying our soul created for higher and more glorious things. To contemplate God, and to tend to Him is the supreme law of the life of man. For we were created in the divine image and likeness, and are impelled, by our very nature, to the enjoyment of our Creator. But not by bodily motion or effort do we make advance toward God, but through acts of the soul [...]. But what applies to individual men applies equally to society - domestic alike and civil. Nature did not form society in order that man should seek in it his last end, but in order that in it and through it he should find suitable aids whereby to attain to his own perfection” (§§1,2).

173 all and perfects them.”75 From this description of the Church’s duty to the persons under its charge, and given what we have said about the State, we can also see that the Church is in no way severed from the temporal interests of the State. There is no moral care or religious perfection for humans that is not care or perfection worked out in a body in time. Pace

Crispi, there can be no “celestial empire” for the Pope. His is an empire in minds and in bodies just as much as the nation-state’s imperial desire comprehends the minds and bodies of the citizens.

In order to meet these expectations, the two communitates, according to Leo, are responsible for certain types of public work. For the State’s part, it must “neither [enjoin] nor [forbid] anything save what is reasonably consistent with civil as well as with religious requirements.”76 And as we have seen above, the State must remain out of the business of governing souls. For the Church’s part, it must be active in society, especially when State actions and legislation pass “beyond their due limits” and “trench upon the rights of the

Church.”77 But again, Leo takes one step beyond what could sound like Cavourian separatism, writing: “From God has the duty been assigned to the Church not only to interpose resistance, if at any time the State rule should run counter to religion, but, further,

75 Ibid. The phrase “true religion” requires some attention. In Libertas praestantissimum, §§18-21, Leo discusses the liberties of worship and conscience, making it abundantly clear that he is not working with a modern definition of religion as any sort of anthropological phenomenon. Instead, in Leo’s way of thinking, religion is a virtue - a perfection of the human will in this case, as religion is annexed to the virtue of justice - that pertains to the human person’s duty to worship the Creator. More specifically, religion is a virtue for Leo because religion “performs those actions which are directly and immediately ordained for the divine honor.” Because this is the case, religion is the condition of truly virtuous living. The implication is clear. If there is a doctrine and/or society and/or body of practices and/or historical tradition that claims to train humans to truly and properly worship the Creator, then it alone would qualify as true and proper religion. Thus there is no such thing as a genus, religion, with various species housed beneath it. Rather, for Leo, Catholicism is religion per se. For a later definition of Catholicism as religion per se, cf. Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. by Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sr. Elizabeth Englund, OCD, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), at 298, where de Lubac suggests that Catholicism is the “form that humanity must put on in order finally to be itself.” For a provocative discussion of how modern states are diametrically opposed to considering religion in this way, and how this opposition is implicated in the desire of the state to tame the Church, cf. William Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11:4 October, 1995: 397-420, especially at 414-16. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.

174 to make a strong endeavor that the power of the Gospel may pervade the law and institutions of the nations.”78

Recall that Leo has taught that neither the Church nor the State obeys the other within the respective limits of its jurisdiction. Recall also Leo’s earlier statement that the

Church exercises her influence in the temporal realm of politics, helping the State care for human persons spiritually. From a contemporary perspective, this would appear to be a bald contradiction. Isn’t it disingenuous to suggest that neither one sphere obeys the other and that the Church should work so that the Gospel pervades the laws and institutions of nation- states? But in Leo’s social magisterium, the coherence of these two apparently contradictory ideas is one of his most significant metaphysical contentions. It expresses perfectly the nature of the analogia communitates: that there are hierarchical orders of social organization indexed to the myriad needs of the human animal, that these orders possess munera unique to them in order to minister to the human animal, and that the orders participate in and through each other precisely for commission of these ministries. Leo refuses to imagine the

Church on the same level as the State, as though the Church were one more institution busy governing society. This would be to immanentize and bureacratize the Church, bringing her holy and inviolate laws, methods, disciplines, and ends down to the level of departmental protocols conceded to her by an omnicompetent state. But neither does Leo’s hierarchical vision of institutional plurality create a celestial realm for the Church, far and away above the sublunary realm of the State. This would be to spiritualize the Church and leave her holy and inviolate laws, methods, disciplines, and ends far away in an invisible heaven, or at least in a private conscience. Crispi called for this directly.

78 Ibid., §31.

175 Instead, the hierarchical ordering of the analogically related communitates expresses most adequately the deepest truths about human animals, and so about the communitates humans are always making - namely, that the human animal, and so also human society, is ordered to the perfection of a supernatural beatitude that transcends without destroying the natural beatitudes of this life. The human animal is at once spiritual and corporeal - the rational animal. And so, human societies bear both characters as well. The State can no more be a purely temporal bureaucracy than the Church can be a purely spiritual motivator. In every case, given the needs of the human, communitates are tasked with ministering to a sacred thing in time. Their structure, order, and relationship to each other reflects this critical ministry.

In either case, to bureaucratize or celestialize the Church would rely on an equivocation regarding communitas, for it would implicitly suggest that the historical and conventional ministries of religious and political communitates are nothing more than that: historical and conventional, severed from any given reality of human nature. If the munera unique to each communitas comprising the analogia communitatis are detached from a real human nature, the munera become negotiable, contractual, and malleable. Such an equivocation is dangerous because it deprives humans of any stable way of assessing the graces and abuses of their social lives. It is little wonder then that toward the end of his pontificate, Leo looks back over the 19th century and forward into the 20th and laments exactly this phenomenon. Detached from the sovereignty of the Creator and reattached to the sovereignty of the people, the proper munera of the political communitas have become nearly arbitrary. Rather than exercising true care for the persons under their authority, the nations have formulated laws that “are but the expression of the power of the greater number and the will of the predominant political party.”79 In the “popular passion” resulting

79 Leo XIII, Apostolic Letter, March 19, 1902.

176 from this form of rule, disorder can “only be quelled by violent measures and the shedding of blood.” And so now, after repudiating the “Christian principles” that had formerly joined political communitates into the “bonds of brotherhood,” and that had even worked toward bringing “all humanity into one great family,” another form of politics has “arisen little by little in the international order [...].”80 The worst abuses of 1789 have become policies in service of the worst fears of Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism and internationalism. The nations have contrived a “system of jealous egoism, in consequence of which [they] now watch each other, if not with hate, at least with the suspicion of rivals. Hence, in their great undertakings they lose sight of the lofty principles of morality and justice and forget the protection which the feeble and the oppressed have a right to demand.”81 Severed from the properly political task of caring for human persons, the nations have also severed the ontological and semantic connection between human sociality and the historical and social contingencies of their own communitas. From a Leonine perspective, the equivocation is so near completion that the nations are in danger of forgetting why they exist.

A further question presents itself: Does Leo’s hierarchical notion of the Church’s relation to the State, when combined with the idea that the Church can work to pervade the

State’s laws and institutions, violate the principle of subsidiarity? Noting that Leo does not use the term subsidiarity but only thinks “subsidiarily,” we can answer as follows. Leo’s analogical and hierarchical conception of social institutions does not violate the principle of subsidiarity if we remember that subsidiarity is not first and foremost an organizational mechanism whereby societies prevent higher orders from interfering in the prerogatives of lower orders. “To be sure, subsidiarity is often described and deployed in a defensive sense - as to what the state may not do or try to accomplish - but the principle is not so much a

80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.

177 theory about state institutions, nor of checks and balances, as it is an account of the pluralism and sociality of society.”82 That is, Leo’s conception actually articulates perfectly the principle of subsidiarity if we consider that it is a description of the proper or healthy exercising by social bodies of their unique munera. If it is in fact the Church’s munus to exercise her spiritual care in the temporal realm (and it is hard to see how this could not be the case), then subsidiarity demands that the Church work downward, as it were, and even

“pervade the law and institutions of the nations.” Though such language may be used to defend an integralist interpretation of the Church’s relationship to society and/or the state, it need not be so. Spiritual care in temporalibus need not entail the Church’s overriding the legitimate integrity of lower social orders. To work downward in this manner would be another violation of subsidiarity. Leo’s vision of the pervasive presence of the Church in a nation is not oriented to the violation of the integrity of the lower orders of the State or the family. Rather, Leo thinks of this pervasive presence as the very condition of their flourishing in their own, proper mode.83

We see this line of thinking again and again in Leo’s thought, whenever he gives an historical treatment of marriage or of the relationship between Christianity and paganism.84

Were the Church to cease to work for the pervasion of the Gospel throughout a society, then first, the Church would not be following the Lord’s mandate to love, to make disciples, and to teach, and second, the Church would be abandoning society to a variety of

82 Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles,” 825. 83 Cf. Ibid. “On [the Catholic] view, subsidiarity cannot be construed as judments, decisions, actions at the “lowest level.” The notion of a “lowest” level perverts the concept of subsidiarity. The better term is proper level. The term “proper” is taken from the Latin word proprium, denoting what belongs to, or what is possessed by, a thing or person. On the modern view of the state, there are only two persons having propria: the artificial person of the state, and natural, individual persons. The “lowest” level can only mean the individual, or, perhaps, partnerships. Subsidiarity, on the other hand, presupposes that there are plural authorities and agents having their “proper” (not necessarily, lowest) duties and rights with regard to the common good - immediately, the common good of the particular society, but also the common good of the body politic.” 84 Cf. for example Aeterni Patris §§10-12, Arcanum §§5-9, Diuturnum §§18-22, among others.

178 degradations. It is a function of social orders that they not only influence individuals, but other social orders as well. It would be impossible to limit the influence of a communitas to the private realm of each member’s personal life. Instead, just as each communitas is analogously related to every other, so the function of each communitas is analogously related to the human vocation to cause good. Indeed, the pluriform relations of persons and societies is the created context in which humans cultivate their likeness to the Lord’s goodness. And so Leo’s way of thinking exposes a certain tension in Crispi’s condescending praise of the Pope’s celestial empire. In Crispi’s mind, the State can make the Church what the State needs the Church to be. The State can give the Church her territory. The State can concede various jurisdictional responsibilities to the Church. And so the State can act, as a social body, on the Church. But the reverse cannot be true in the separatist, laicist vision of society. The Church may not tell the State what the State ought to be. The Church may not touch the State’s territory, and indeed she must give her territory to the State. The Church may not place the State’s jurisdiction under and within its own. And so the Church cannot act, as a social body, on the State, or any other social bodies, for that matter, whether they be marriages, families, schools, charitable organizations, fraternal associations, unions, or the like.

Conclusion

The centrality of Leo’s ecclesiology to the coherence and utility of the analogia communitatis is clear by now. By emphasizing the social nature of Christ’s Church, and by acknowledging its sui generis status as an authority in society, replete with unique munera essential for the flourishing of human animals, Leo has countered the liberal monism underwriting the separatism that determines much of the anticlerical legislation in Italy toward century’s end. Over against this monism, and for the sake of the flourishing of the

179 human person and human societies, Leo advances an elegant defense of the hierarchical pluriformity of true communitas. Comprehensive of both the material and spiritual, temporal and eternal ends of the human person, this social pluriformity is not simply a thought experiment advanced against Cavourian formulas or laicist theories. Instead, the Leonine conception of social pluriformity corresponds to the mundane experiences of the average human person, whose sociality is expressed by her membership in an array of social bodies, all variously implicated in her flourishing and her journey toward beatitude. To name the human person citizen and to envision the State as the primary access point to human sociality is to ignore this array. Granted, the desire to ignore this array is easily understandable. From the perspective of a young nation-state, such as Italy, the need to forge unity out of the bewildering variety of local customs, traditions, and languages would seem to require that a preeminent social body step in to begin to redefine communitas in terms of a national identity.

The competing loves signified by the family, the Church, and any number of other communitates can seem to be implicated in the cultivation of local vice over against the development of civic virtue.

But the Leonine teaching expressed in the ecclesiological matters we have discussed would take an opposite tack, focusing on the integrity of the munera communicated at every level of the social order. The Italian separatists are not wrong. This is a question of love. But as Leo teaches at the end of Sapientiae Christianae, the love of nation and the duty of the citizen are finally conditioned by a love that transcends without destroying them.

It is [...] urgent before all, that charity, which is the main foundation of the Christian life, and apart from which the other virtues exist not or remain barren, should be quickened and maintained. Therefore is it that the Apostle Paul, after having exhorted the Colossians to flee all vice and cultivate all virtue, adds: “Above all things, have charity, which is the bond of perfection.” Yea, truly, charity is the bond of perfection, for it binds intimately to God those whom it has embraced and with loving tenderness, causes them to draw their life from God, to act with God, to refer all to God. Howbeit, the love of God should not be severed from the love of our neighbor, since men have a share in the infinite goodness of God and bear in

180 themselves the impress of His image and likeness. [...] No one is unaware how deeply and from the very beginning the import of the [commandment to love God and neighbor] has been implanted in the breast of Christians, and what abundant fruits of concord, mutual benevolence, piety, patience, and fortitude it has produced.85

85 Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §§40,41.

181 CHAPTER 4

THE ORIGINAL COMMUNITAS AND THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS:

LEONINE MATRIMONIAL THEOLOGY AND LIBERAL PEDAGOGY

Just as modern social and political theories throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in

Europe made a concerted effort to liberate economies, educational institutions, and political regimes from the obstructive hierarchies and mediations of the ancien régime, so did they make a concerted effort to liberate matrimony and family from the same. In the case of both liberations, it seemed necessary to philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, and legislators to return to the origins of these institutions, which by modern standards had become overgrown and obstructive of human liberty in history. If citizenship in the modern regime was to restore the broken relationships of nature and history, then a more radical understanding of those relationships would surely contribute to the proper assessment of their brokenness and the appropriate remedy. Thus, there developed in the 18th and 19th centuries accounts of matrimony and the family that located them in theoretical realms sharply differentiated from the socio-historical milieux in which the theories themselves were developed. These theoretical efforts were translated into liberal matrimonial legislation in nation-states across Europe.

In this chapter, my goal is to further illuminate the analogia communitatis in light of this search for original forms of communitas and this legislative effort to bring these original forms

182 more directly within the sight of the state. I argue that Leo’s matrimonial teaching in the

1880 encyclical, Arcanum Divinae, offers us an eloquent demonstration of how liberal matrimonial theory enables a de-socialized and de-politicized formation of citizens. What I will call “liberal pedagogy” or “liberal matrimonial morality” in this chapter signifies a social anthropology that competes with the Church’s sacramental theology and tradition of canon law. The objective of this competition is to make over the image of the domestic communitas into the image of the state. Leo argues that this makeover is sacrilegious in that it extracts the domestic communitas from its participation in the analogia communitatis flowing from the Divine

Wisdom.

First, I will briefly summarize the modern, theoretical effort to reimagine matrimony and the family in terms of a liberation from social and historical accretions. Second, I will tell the vexed story of Italian matrimonial legislation during Pius IX and Leo XIII’s pontificates.

Liberal Italy, like many other nations in Europe, attempts to experiment with matrimonial legislation that will liberate human persons and their personal relationships from these same accretions. Third, I will investigate Leo’s careful and direct response to this theoretical and historical context. Arcanum Divinae is a sophisticated but contentious counter, not only to the legislative proposals being heard by the Italian Chamber of Deputies, but also to the modern thrill for origins and historical purifications expressed by liberal theory. Leo’s identification of matrimony as a sacrament from creation is aimed directly at these searches for the origins of matrimony. In this chapter we will see how the analogia communitatis enables Leo’s matrimonial teaching to expose the civil power’s appetite for social munera that do not properly belong to it. In the case of matrimony, the social and political stakes are rather high in that the civil power desires to consume its own foundations.

183 I. The Search for the Origin and End of Matrimony

The contemporary political scientist, Scott Yenor, has written an insightful account of the stories of matrimony and family as told by modern social and political theorists. From

Yenor’s invaluable work, we can summarize these modern stories as follows:

Locke sought to rescue the patriarchal family from its enabling relationship to political absolutism by restoring matrimony and family’s original form: a nuclear contract ordered principally to the biological munus of propagation.1 And like Locke, Rousseau sought a repristination of the conjugal family in a “new nature” that simultaneously acknowledged the social dependence signified by biological necessity, but respected the separated, equal spheres of the individuals comprising the family.2 Though Locke and Rousseau’s restorations of natural relations in the family were ordered to different purposes,3 their fundamental connection lay in the conviction that history had subjected the essential cells of society to various abuses, and that society had built up within and around marriage and family a complex and irrational array of munera that in fact belonged to other communitates. Only life and membership within modern, rational regimes would suffice to purify marriage and family of these accretions and so restore what had been broken.

This paleo-knowledge of the primary and final causality of both the human substance and human relationship was a sign of a certain competence with regard to all things social and political. Locke and Rousseau offer us some of the most famous and broadly influential examples of this expertise in origins and the corresponding intuition that liberalism may provide society with the chance to recover what has been lost. But this was

1 Cf. Scott Yenor, Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought, (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 19-37. 2 Cf. Ibid., 39-60. 3 Cf. Ibid., 29-33, for Locke’s correlation of the family’s educative role and society’s interest in teaching citizens how to properly possess private property, including human liberty. Cf. Ibid., 56-60, for Rousseau’s understanding of a “new nature” where romantic love and biological dependence are joined for the creation of virtuous republicans.

184 not the only tack to take in discerning the fundaments of human sociality and liberating them from the ancien régime. After Hegel, it became possible to speak, not only of the primal origins of marriage and family, but of their ultimate telos in a not-too-distant future. In addition to repristinating them, liberal society could shepherd their forward progress. The history of the fundamental cells of society, for Hegel, is not the story of society’s continuous departure from the family’s true origins so much as it is the story of the purifying development of the family’s rational form over time. Whereas once the family was an end in itself, in the resolution that is to come between the family and the state, the natural family will forfeit its social functions to the state. Matrimony and family will then achieve their purest form, serving as a means for forming citizens morally and spiritually for membership within a universal political community.4

For his part, Mill’s conceptualizations of matrimony and family work in an historical mode similar to Hegel’s. He suggests that the past forms of marriage and family have been corrupted by the subjugation of women and by social conventions mistaken for natural authenticity. The goal, though, is not to get back to the true origins of the family, prior to such human abuses and artifices. These origins are unknowable, shrouded in the mists of historical contingencies and conventions. The goal, rather, is a future form of marriage experienced primarily as deep friendship with one’s soul mate. In this future, personal choice will overcome what we have mistaken for “nature,” and we will arrive at the truly rational form of the family: a consensual relationship based solely on mutual love.5

4 Cf. Ibid., 63-85, especially at 84: “[M]arriage and family as such are, in a sense, turned into means, in Hegel’s analysis, so individuals can fulfill their ‘highest duty,’ which is ‘to be members of the state.’ The family is lower in dignity than participation as a citizen in the state; the family’s self-understanding is shaped by the state’s legal conceptions of the family.” Recall that in chapter 1.2 we saw how Mazzini envisioned the mediational munus of the state vis-a-vis the international community. Mazzini’s thought is notably different from Hegel, however, in that Mazzini speculated that no amount of historical progress could nullify the family’s fundamental munera. 5 Cf. Ibid., 115-35.

185 In the 19th century, the most explicit and radical synthesis of these themes is the materialist historicism of Marx and Engels, which claims primal, historical, and eschatological knowledge of every phase of matrimony and family history. Engels’ most famous work in this area is The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. His project in this seminal work is derived from Marx’s unpublished papers and from the discredited anthropological research of Lewis H. Morgan’s 1877 work, Ancient Society, or Researches in the

Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. From Engels’ perspective,

Morgan’s historical narrative finally gives modern society what it has been searching for at least since Locke’s efforts to repristinate patriarchy.6 That is, Morgan shows us that the family is an “active principle” that is “never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition.”7 Engels seeks to trace the dynamism of the family, from its earliest form(s) as it emerges from ape life, to its latter bourgeois form, which Engels believes to be in need of emancipation. In turning to

Morgan’s anthropology, Engels provides what Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Mill were incapable, hesitant, or opposed to providing: a thoroughly materialist account of matrimony and family finally divorced from any need to account for a creator or a nature.

Beginning in a primitive stage and developing into a barbaric or savage stage, matrimony and family were originally matriarchal, characterized by sexual liberty or even promiscuity, and rooted in a natural division of labor on account of the human subjection to nature. Unsurprisingly, Marx and Engels identify a “primitive communism” in these stages, accomplished by human communities untouched, as yet, by the social and economic

6 It falls outside the scope of my project here, but it is at least important to note with Leo that certain trends in modern rationalism and liberalism can be helpfully interpreted in terms of the Reformation. In the case of this desire for the pristine origins of matrimony and family, it would be possible to extend our analysis of the desire further back into Europe’s history: first, to a reforming impulse to cleanse the Catholic Church of various sacramental mediations; and second, to Trent’s response. 7 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), 60.

186 developments to come. Marx and Engels locate the origins of the next stage of the story in the invention and jealous cultivation of private property. The maintenance of property requires greater social and intergenerational control, so we observe in history the rise of conventional monogamous matrimony and the development of bourgeois family life. In sharp contrast to their primitive and barbaric beginnings, bourgeois matrimony and family are built on the domination of women by men and of the proletariat by capital. But the good news is that the time has finally arrived when marriages and families can be liberated from the dominations of the monogamous, civilized expression of conjugal life. The future is an era of personal choice, of “individual sex love,” and of open, communal marriages and families.8

These returns or future discoveries of the authentic form of matrimony and the family were designed to overcome what Scott Yenor calls the “most persistent problem in modern marriage,” which is the “conflict between the individual purposes of marriage and its transformative role” on the one hand, and the “communal purposes” on the other.9 Are marriages and families naturally ordered to personal fulfillment, moral development, and other forms of personal cultivation, or are they naturally ordered to social stability, legal efficiency, economic production, and other forms of institutional functionality? It is possible to see again the necessity of an analogia communitatis that does not require us to pit personal flourishing against social membership even as it does not require us to pit one type of social membership against others. Were we to employ the univocal/equivocal distinction I made in the first chapter, we could speak of univocal and equivocal accounts of communitas in relation to marriages and families.

8 Cf. Yenor, Family Politics, 137-56. 9 Ibid., 63.

187 A univocal account of the communitas of matrimony in this case might mistake matrimony and family’s constitutive role in society for the idea that all other communitates are privative or derivative forms of this nuclear human sociality. In other words, considering matrimony and family as antecedent to society and the state can terminate in a domestic individualism that disregards the authentic communitas embodied and fostered by other social realities. This is the temptation of certain conservative trends that seek to defend marriage and family from the state. Paleo-knowledge of matrimony then would supposedly signal a competence to totalize the communitas of matrimony. The univocal emphasis would be on privacy, property, and the protection of the domestic from the social and the political. Locke heads in this direction. Rousseau less so. Even Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism stands under the social primacy of the domestic. Recall his suggestion that national unification might one day give way to the total unity of the human family. But even in that future, the domestic would retain its primacy. Indeed, it would fund la famiglia umana of the eschaton with its primary analogate.

An equivocal account of the communitas of matrimony might mistake institutional functionality for historical-conventional malleability. In this way of thinking, matrimony especially, but also childbearing and rearing, could be imagined as platforms or mechanisms for the most efficient accomplishment of various social and personal goods that could very well be accomplished otherwise. The marital union especially could be recast as simply one more form of partnership, rooted in a voluntary loyalty that may or may not last, and ordered to ends determined by the wills of the partners. If the communitas of matrimony is equivocal, matrimony does not so much occupy a unique munus in the analogia communitatis as it expresses the human ability to organize an economy. In the cases of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Mill, we see an emphasis on the provisional status of traditional matrimonial forms, or

188 even “natural” matrimonial forms. The journey of these forms through history can be described variously. Hegel, for example, imagined that the form of matrimony and family was journeying toward resolution in the state. But Marx, Engels, and Mill each in his own way, imagined the form of matrimony and family as journeying toward deeper levels of personal satisfaction and liberation from social domination. In both cases, the domestic munera are destined for the political. This is their rational form.

In the case of those marriages that welcome children, equivocation is more difficult to sustain. The majority of parents, and more importantly, the majority of children, do not see their kinship with their immediate family as equivalent to team membership or commercial partnership. That is, we can recognize in kinship a sign that the biological realities usually housed within matrimony are resistant to this equivocation. Seeing matrimony and family as social artifacts in this way can terminate in a voluntaristic individualism that disregards the ways in which biological and social inclinations are prior to human will. Equivocation reconceptualizes the natural communitas embodied and fostered by the family as simply one more example of how the power of the human will shapes reality.

This is the temptation of certain liberal trends that seek to liberate human persons from biology, society, and history.

In the Italian context, we will see how univocal and equivocal habits of predication compromise the legal definition of matrimony. As we have seen in chapter three, after the official unification of the Italian peninsula in 1860, the task of creating a unified national culture was the central challenge facing the new country.10 La famiglia became a sort of ideal

10 My discussion of Italian matrimonial law relies on the following: Lesley Caldwell, Italian Family Matters: Women, Politics and Legal Reform, (New York: Macmillan, 1991), especially 1-27 and 51-68; Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A history of divorce in Western society, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially his discussion of canon law at 1-39 and of liberal legislation at 403-78; Mark Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860-1974, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially 1-134 for

189 model for the young nation’s conception of itself as a social and political unity. The family thus represents for the nationalist imagination a social archetype. A certain univocal habit thus undergirds this move to make the nation over into the image of a family. But there’s an equivocation within Italy’s legal treatment of matrimony. As we will see, Italy wants to make over the nation into a family, but in order to do so, the nation attempts to make the family into its own image: a unity founded on the contract of the individual will. In making over the family into its own image, Italy is ironically corroding its own ability to foster authentic political life.

II. Patria, Famiglia, Libertà!: Liberal Italy’s Divorce Legislation

In addition to the struggle to overcome the formerly fragmented socio-political geography of the peninsula, the new Italy faced the local-universal reality of the Roman

Catholic Church. Italy’s jurisdictional battle with the Church was always a contest over the lives of human persons, a contest over cultural allegiances, moral formation, and a consensus regarding human flourishing - in short, a contest over social anthropology.11 Within this contest, the status of matrimony was of central importance given its peculiar position within the analogia communitatis: it is a uniquely personal munus with a decidedly public valence.

Managing this munus has thus never been a matter solely of personal/private choice on the

the Pian and Leonine context; Giovanni B. Sgritta and Paolo Tufari, “Italy,” in Divorce in Europe, ed. Robert Chester, (Leiden, Belgium: Martinus Nijhoff Social Sciences Division, 1977), 253-81, especially at 253-59 for the 19th century context. 11 Cf. Caldwell, Italian Family Matters, 10: “In developing an argument for the importance of cultural unity as a necessary condition for national unity, Gramsci emphasises the centuries-long existence of identifiably Catholic traditions. Despite the lack of territorial, political and national unity, such traditions had been vital to the history of the area. This association with Catholicism was distinctive, and the loss of the Papal territories, far from contributing to the dissipation of its influence, appeared to draw upon it in establishing a different base of power for the Church. It was the Church’s strength in cultural terms that Gramsci argued was central, and in the discussion of Catholic Action, he described the fundamental inevitability once assigned to Catholicism by pointing to its traces in the language and ways of thinking of the peasantry, where to be a Christian was taken to be synonymous with being a human being: ‘I’m not a Christian’...’Well what are you, a beast?’”

190 one hand or public/institutional authority on the other.12 In the terms I have been using, on account of the peculiarly personal and public nature of matrimony, there’s something in the institution that is particularly resistant to efforts to univocate and equivocate concerning the type of communitas matrimony is. As such, the history of matrimonial law in the West is the uneven and conflicted story about how institutions (primarily the ecclesial and civil powers) have coordinated their aims with the personal choices, legal traditions, and local customs under their jurisdiction an d with the broader human conviction that matrimony is in some sense deeply natural, but also deeply conventional.

Legislators in the new Italy recognized this immediately, seeing in matrimony a

“legal territory” it could wrest from the Church. Without victory in this territorial struggle,

Italy’s legal code would continue to be compromised by the legal authority of the Church over the bodies and property of Italians. By allowing vestiges of Canon Law to remain in the

Civil Code, Italy would lack the consistency a liberal state desires as the communal sign of its departure from the old order of things. The goal in addressing matrimony in Italy was to legally establish civil matrimony (and perhaps even divorce) over against the Church’s sacramental matrimony (and indissolubility), and this establishment was seen as ingredient to making Italians out of the peoples of the peninsula. From 1860 to 1920, civil matrimony, and especially divorce, are a legal conundrum openly and fully signifying what historian Mark

Seymour calls the “conquest of the Italian family.”13 Seymour, has carefully detailed this story in his work on the history of Italian divorce legislation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

12 One of the best introductions to the complexity of the Church’s jurisdiction over matrimony in European history is George Hayward Joyce, S.J., Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933), especially 1-37 on matrimony according to nature, 146-85 on the sacrament, and 301ff on the historical development of matrimonial law and sacramental theology. For a more modern treatment, Philip L. Reynolds’s work is essential. Cf. Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods, (New York: Brill, 1994); and How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent, (Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially at 727 and following for the Tridentine context, out of which Leonine matrimonial teaching is born. 13 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 17.

191 Following Seymour’s analysis, we should contextualize family here in terms of the Italian minister of justice, Giuseppe Pisanelli’s, speech to the Senate in 1863: “From the moment

Italians recognized the possibility of being reunited into one single family, the desire for unification of the law has spread among all educated citizens.”14 Pisanelli and liberal legislators following him saw in the Civil Code the chance to accomplish Mazzini’s great dream: the country as family. The conquest signified by the marriage question during the latter half of the 19th century is thus a complex battle over not only the personal lives and relationships of citizens, but also over the public and political language and imagination of the young nation. What social authority will shape the life of la patria? Whoever wins the jurisdictional battle over la famiglia.

In 1852, prior to Leo’s pontificate, there had been an abortive attempt by Piedmont - the most powerful political entity on the peninsula before unification - to introduce civil matrimony. But it is not until the post-risorgimento legal and political context that civil matrimony can really become a social reality for Italians. By January 1 of 1866, the Civil

Code approved the year before was made the law of the peninsula, and within the code was legal provision for civil matrimony. The civil contract was not accompanied by provision for divorce, however, and so Italian liberals created an “anomalous hybrid” - civil matrimonial law that proscribes divorce - that was to prove contentious until the rise of fascism in the

1920s.15 Pisanelli describes this hybrid with great sensitivity:

It almost goes without saying that the new civil code totally excludes divorce. Divorce produces great harm, worse for the children than the parents; but the greatest harm divorce produces stems from the evils generated by the mere possibility. If a law...were to place the idea of divorce at the threshold and in the heart of marriage, it would poison the sanctity of the marriage...because the very idea would cause...a perennial and bitter suspicion.16

14 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 17. 15 The phrase is Seymour’s. 16 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 18.

192 Pisanelli’s description of the hybrid identifies perfectly two legal, theological, and philosophical problems Leo tackles in Arcanum.

First, matrimony is sufficiently distinct from other contractual relations such that both Pisanelli and Leo recognize its peculiarity, albeit from different perspectives. From

Leo’s perspective, matrimony’s peculiarity is constituted by a sanctity given to it by the

Creator and not by any other authority. All other authorities under heaven, including the individual wills of the spouses contracting, participate in this prior sanctity. From Pisanelli’s perspective, on the other hand, matrimony’s peculiarity is almost purely social, rooted in the unique munus occupied by the domestic communitas in society. Second, on account of this peculiarity, both Pisanelli and Leo see dissolution as incompatible with the nature of the contract. Leo roots matrimony’s indissolubility in the Divine Wisdom. He teaches that marriage participates in both natural and sacramental keys in the Lord’s providential ordering and redemption of creation. Pisanelli, on the other hand, roots matrimony’s indissolubility in pragmatic social implications, suggesting that dissolubility would poison spouses, children, and by implication, the society at large. From both perspectives, dissolubility corrodes matrimony, so indissolubility follows rationally from the peculiarity of the contract, which must be maintained for the wellbeing of spouses, children, and society.

But the difference between Pisanelli’s approach and Leo’s is an important one that will work as a wedge gradually dividing liberal matrimonial legislation from Catholic teaching. Though Pisanelli advocates for indissoluble civil matrimony, his advocacy is pragmatic, implicitly relieving the matrimonial contract from the duty of participating in an order transcending anything other than the health of the domestic communitas and the security of the state. Pisanelli thus begins an equivocation regarding the communitas embodied in matrimony. And this equivocation is hidden within his desire to univocate regarding the

193 family as the communitas on which new Italy’s unity should be founded. As we will see below, the trend in Italy following Pisanelli’s advocacy is toward a further perfection of this logic.

To the extent that the health and security of the domestic communitas and the liberal state alike are made to depend in the 19th century on securing society’s liberty from all former hierarchies and mediations, an indissoluble civil contract made within this commitment to liberation can easily be seen as a contradiction in terms. By the 1880’s, this contradiction will be a matter of open debate in the Chamber of Deputies. Though the state may ask its citizens to sacrifice all manner of goods, including life, for the good of the nation, the liberal state that openly asks citizens to see supposedly non-political bonds such as matrimony as indissoluble is being too overt. Indeed, a liberal state that places liberty and indissolubility at the heart of civil matrimony appears to be contradicting itself. It is more convincing for the liberal state to claim it teaches only a matrimonial morality that respects the wishes of the individual wills contracting the union. It is little wonder then that, during the rise of fascism, the divorce question all but disappears from Italian society. In its temporary defeat of liberalism, fascist Italy is civilly capacitated to openly demand everything of the citizen. The maintenance of an indissoluble bond underwritten by the authority of the state is perfectly synchronized with the interests of a fascist regime. A young, liberal nation like new Italy cannot appear so openly fascist. But below we will investigate more thoroughly how Leo exposes the deeper moral formation going on in liberalism’s supposed rejection of this fascist tendency.

In the course of Italy’s history, overcoming the problem of an indissoluble and civil matrimonial contract, at least from the civil power’s perspective, was not helped at all by the popular response to civil matrimony throughout the almost-uniformly Catholic peninsula.

From the enactment of the Civil Code in 1866, to 1877, the year prior to Leo’s ascent to the

194 papal throne, it is estimated that 385,000 marriage contracts were made without the civil ceremony. Instead of following the civil injunction on “Italians” to bind themselves in the sight of the civil power first, these Catholics remained content17 to contract their marriages in the sight of the Church.18 Furthermore, throughout Leo’s pontificate, one important argument was leveled against the divorzisti19 again and again: there was an “almost complete absence of any public clamor for a divorce law.”20 For this reason, as we will see below, Leo is careful to note that liberal legislation appears to be forced on the citizenry.

Whereas the public was largely silent about divorce, the situation was somewhat different in the Chamber of Deputies. Legislative debate regarding matrimony and divorce in the 1870’s proceeded unevenly and usually due to action in the Chamber of Deputies by the

Mazzinian nationalist and proto-feminist, Salvatore Morelli. Morelli proposed divorce legislation to the senate in 1873, ‘75, ‘78, and ‘80. Of these four proposals, the senate voted to hear only the last two. Leo was elected in February, 1878, and Morelli’s first divorce bill was heard in May of that year. On February 10, 1880, Leo released his central teaching statement on matrimony - Arcanum Divinae. And the next month, Morelli proposed his second divorce bill. And so the beginning of Leo’s pontificate coincides with the beginning of the Italian Chamber’s public willingness to finally entertain divorce as the logical consequence of the Civil Code’s provision for civil matrimony. Morelli’s cases for divorce

17 I choose the word deliberately. It would be easy enough to suggest that during this period, these 385,000 couples forewent the civil ceremony on account of their subjugation to and fear of clerical authority. But such an interpretation too easily dismisses or ignores the authenticity of Christian convictions, the reasonability of the Church’s teachings, and the culture-making reality of Christianity. In fact, such an interpretation can only view the Church as desirous of the state’s power. My argument in this chapter is that it is in fact the state that is desirous of the Church’s sacramental munus. 18 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 21. 19 Those advocating for divorce legislation. 20 Ibid., 45.

195 and the senate’s willingness to hear his proposals thus shed a great deal of light on Leo’s early encyclical on matrimony.21

In 1878, Morelli proposed divorce to the Chamber of Deputies as a healing munus the government could provide to a society compromised by broken communitas in the domestic sphere. In legislating divorce, Morelli suggests the Chamber would be accomplishing a number of social goods: strengthening families, promoting mutual affection, preventing the abuses of permanent separation, liberating women, and modernizing Italy’s social imagination. Morelli continues the equivocation introduced by Pisanelli’s pragmatism.

Regarding the form and function of matrimony and the family unit, Morelli suggests that an honest appreciation of the history of these institutions forces moderns to accept their socio- historical instability. His 1878 proposal on the Chamber floor was an effort to demonstrate the logical, moral, economic, and political necessity of Italian divorce.

From Morelli’s point of view, divorce follows logically from the Civil Code’s provision for civil matrimony. Divorce is also a moral necessity given that matrimony’s status as a contract should respect the free will of those contracting the relationship. But in

Italian society, Morelli suggests, many are pressured in a variety of ways to contract marriages that should be dissolvable on account of those illegitimate pressures. Morelli’s moral argument is further supported by his concern for the domestic, social, and political liberation of women. Following Mazzini’s mystical essentializing of woman, Morelli calls for divorce as a tool whereby women could finally be made equal citizens. Economically speaking, Morelli argues that the social costs of dealing with the unhappy fallout of prohibiting divorce far outweigh the costs of permitting it. And politically, Morelli suggests

21 My treatment of Morelli depends on Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 36-58. Seymour’s analysis features much more detail than my summary here. Seymour notes at 55 that though Morelli’s widely publicized arguments in favor of divorce do certainly occasion response from Leo in Arcanum, Alfred Naquet’s pro- divorce proposals during the same time in France are also a key factor for the pope.

196 that permitting divorce would contribute to the reduction of civil strife. Morelli’s proposed legislation is thus a piece of social anthropology that emphasizes the importance of matrimony and family life for personal and social health on the one hand, but that sees divorce in terms of a balm that could restore broken relationships among the new Italian citizenry on the other. This social concern of Morelli’s is wedded closely to an anticlericalism that he does not try to mask. He states on the Chamber floor in 1878 that Italians have

“proclaimed liberty in the town square, but maintain despotism in the family….We have abolished the papal temporal power in the legislative arena, but we permit the adoration of its symbols in the home.”22

The response to Morelli’s 1878 proposal on both the floor (by the minister of justice,

Raffaele Conforti) and in the press (by both L’Osservatore romano and La Capitale) reflects the difficulty I mentioned above regarding the popular disregard for civil legislation. Conforti’s immediate response after Morelli’s proposal was that divorce legislation would be an impossibly radical development. Moreover, Conforti’s pragmatic concern about the radicality of the proposal was situated within a more fundamental question regarding Morelli’s vision of law and its purpose. He “contested Morelli’s argument that it was the legislator’s task to develop laws for the good of society regardless of whether that society demanded them or

22 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 43. Morelli’s comment suggests that Catholic matrimonial law makes the family in the image of the hierarchical, authoritative Church. The implication is that liberal matrimonial law will free the family from being forced into this image. (Giuseppe Ricciardi’s 1876 work, Il divorzio, claims that married women are in slavery, which is to be blamed on “the tyranny of priests.” Ricciardi even suggests that priests use “women as their agents” in order to exercise “far too much influence within the family home” [31-2]). But of course, Morelli will not acknowledge that being freed from this image entails being made in a different image. Morelli’s argument assumes that liberalism can liberate human persons and communitates to be “natural.”

197 not. [Conforti] thought such a substantial revision of the law should first be called for by public opinion.”23 This same argument would come up again and again throughout the era.

The Vatican’s paper, L’Osservatore romano treated both Morelli and his proposal with deep sarcasm, even lampooning his southern accent. And the anticlerical paper, La Capitale, featured an editorial praising Morelli, though it subsequently dropped its coverage of the legislation. The nine committees that vetted Morelli’s bill ultimately buried it through their members’ inability to agree on whether or not divorce was indeed moral and, if it was moral, whether or not the time for the bill was expedient.

Around the time that Morelli’s first bill was dying in committee in 1879, the great military hero of the risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was initiating legal proceedings to dissolve an unconsummated marriage he had contracted almost twenty years earlier. In his old age, he was looking to legalize his subsequent de facto marriage and to legitimize his heirs before his death. This very public legal process ultimately terminated in the state’s granting

Garibaldi and his first wife an annulment based on a Canon Law dispensa for those who desired (for legitimate reason) to dissolve an unconsummated marriage. Garibaldi’s civil annulment in December of 1879 nearly coincided with another very public annulment in

January of 1880. In this latter case, the Vatican annulled the contract of the Prince of

Monaco and the Duchess of Hamilton, though the contract was made eleven years earlier and had clearly been consummated (the spouses had two children). The discrepancy between the state’s fidelity to the canonical requirements for a dispensa and the Vatican’s apparent disregard for those requirements was not lost on Morelli.

23 Cf. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 44-5, where Seymour discusses “the almost complete absence of any public clamor for a divorce law.” Seymour also notes that by “public opinion,” Conforti almost certainly refers to “learned opinion” and not “the masses” or “the people.”

198 In March of 1880, Morelli proposed a second divorce bill. This time, his bill featured a more pragmatic approach that emphasized the logical necessity of divorce following from the Civil Code’s permission of civil matrimony. His bill proposed that divorce should be granted to married persons who had been separated for three years (when no children were involved) or six years (when children were involved). From 1880-1901, all legislative proposals for divorce were based on this feature of Morelli’s bill. Conforti’s replacement as minister of justice, Tommaso Villa, responded favorably to Morelli’s speech, suggesting that divorce should be taken more seriously as a tool for further separating the Catholic Church from the jurisdiction of the state. His response would have made the suspicious Robespierre proud: “[W]here the eye of the civil legislator does not penetrate, religious morals retain the power to do so.”24 The civil power required the development of a more penetrating sight.

In October of 1880, Morelli died in retirement by the sea.25 The development of his argument for Italian divorce fell to Villa, who for the next twenty years worked to persuade the Chamber of Deputies to follow civil matrimony to its logical conclusion, to acknowledge the de facto divorces represented by marital separations throughout every sector of the Italian population, and so to finally administer the medicine of divorce to those relationships wounded by violence, neglect, emotional duress, and other tragedies. Whereas Morelli’s 1878 and ‘80 proposals were known for their rhetorical flair and even their entertainment value,

Villa’s approach on February 1, 1881, a year after the release of Arcanum, was more conservative and systematic. Citing examples from around Europe, stretching from 1789 to the most recent divorce debates in France and Belgium and in other, non-Catholic nations,

Villa argued for divorce in two cases: where a spouse was condemned to death or life imprisonment, and where an official separation had lasted three or five years (depending on

24 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 56. 25 What follows in my narrative of Villa’s activity depends on Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 85-112.

199 the presence of children and their age). The latter case being the more common, Villa’s proposed bill maintained all legal strictures on securing an official separation, and it created, per each divorce case, a council of family members who would be intimately involved in working toward reconciliation between the petitioners. Only following the years of separation and the work of the family council would a divorce then be granted to the spouses. As Seymour rightly notes, Villa’s bill acknowledges the “extent to which marriage was truly a social institution, subject not only to the free will of the participants, but also to the intervention of close family, and ultimately, in concert with them, the state.”26

Villa envisioned his divorce bill to be a continuation of the liberal spirit animating the risorgimento. He granted that the legalization of civil matrimony in 1865-6 was an enormous step for a Catholic nation, and one that would not have been made with provision for divorce added onto it. But now, in the early ‘80s, the time seemed expedient to Villa. As he said to the Chamber, “[T]oday the Church’s power has providentially been returned to within its proper confines,” and so it was time for the state to assume its proper role vis-a- vis matrimony.27 Villa’s sensitivity to the issue is notable. He asks the Chamber “whether the civil law should incorporate the ‘mystical doctrine of the union between Christ and the

Church represented by the sacrament of marriage.’”28 He also wonders why, in the case of marital separations, the civil authority should have to “require the ‘legal fiction’ of the maintenance of the marriage bond, even when in reality that bond no longer existed.”29

Finally, given the essential role played by the free wills of the persons contracting the marriage, Villa wondered why a civil law that recognized this liberty in contracting then refused to recognize that same liberty in dissolving the contract. After all, as Villa rightly

26 Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 92. 27 Quoted in Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 92. 28 Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 93. 29 Ibid.

200 notes, “the civil law did not create marriage but merely recognized the matrimonial state after subjecting it to certain conditions in the name of the public interest.”30

Villa enters the very thicket of issues that occupy Leo’s attention in Arcanum. Taking a step out of this historical frame, it is illuminating to note Seymour’s own interpretation of

Villa’s arguments and their relationship to the Catholic position on matrimony and divorce. I will quote Seymour himself at length, for his interpretation of Villa is a perfect misrepresentation of the Catholic position expressed in Arcanum. By misrepresenting the

Catholic position, Seymour highlights how difficult it is to hear Leo’s teaching in our context:

In a liberal vein, Villa emphasized the contractual nature of marriage, in which the essence of the contract lay in the free consent of the two individuals concerned. He argued that the improvements of the modern world owed a great deal to the tendency for relationships, whether between nations or individuals, to be contractual in nature rather than based upon force. The contractual view of the basis of marriage was anathema to Catholics, for whom the “mystical doctrine” of the sacrament that Villa had rather lightly dismissed was its true essence. These worldviews were fundamentally irreconcilable, and for all Villa’s elegant argumentation, he must have known it.31

Given that Arcanum teaches that matrimony is essentially a contract, that its fundamentally natural form is an indissoluble union, and that the Catholic position is in the state’s best interest, this is a remarkable estimation of the Catholic response to liberal legislation. For as we are going to see, Arcanum does not turn on a Catholic definition of sacramental matrimony over against a liberal definition of contractual matrimony. Instead,

Arcanum turns on whether or not a social contract has the ability to communicate grace and so participate in the salvation of human persons. This interpretation of the nature and capacity of certain human contracts is aimed not simply at defending the sacramental munus of the Catholic Church, but at exposing the dangers of a liberal program to recreate human

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

201 contracts (including vows) in the modern nation-state’s own image: that is, as detached from all authoritative ground prior to the human will and as expressive of the utility of the commercial contract. Put in terms appropriate to the analogia communitatis, Leo’s concern in

Arcanum is to link the indissolubility of matrimony to its natural form. Indissolubility is what separates the matrimonial contract from all other human contracts, making it only analogically relatable to those other forms of contract. Indissolubility is thus the feature of this communitas that defines its integrity and its proper munus among human things. On Leo’s reading, if matrimony is made legally dissoluble, then the liberal state has actually invented a new form of relationship, made not in the image of the covenanting Lord, but in the image of a commercial transaction.

III. Chiesa, Patria, Famiglia: the Analogia Communitatis

As with all other communitates that make up the analogia communitatis, Leo’s concern regarding matrimony and family is not simply the maintenance of the Church’s authority.32

His concern is rather the defense and promotion of the flourishing proper to the social and political animal. We can begin by identifying a constellation of troubles that condition Leo’s teaching on matrimony and family:

First, liberal legislation misunderstands matrimony and family in both their natural form and according to Catholic teaching. Second, the liberal position underestimates the intimate relationship between divorce on the one hand and society and the state on the other. This underestimation is rooted in more fundamental errors regarding the necessary relationship between matrimony on the one hand and society and the state on the other.

32 My usage of “matrimony,” “family,” and “matrimony and family” in any grammatical configuration follows Leo’s. That is, “matrimony” here is only conceptually distinct from “family” when it comes to discussing specific legislation regarding the spousal union, its status as a contract, and its dissolubility. Though the family is impacted by such legislation, it is legally untouched: no one is proposing the legal dissolution of kinship ties. When it seems appropriate, I will use “matrimony and family.” Context will determine whether or not a singular usage of one or the other term is meant to distinguish between the two.

202 And so ultimately Leo identifies a liberal error regarding human communitas and its relation to nature. The overriding concern is that if liberals such as Morelli and Villa have their way, they will indeed succeed in making the nation a family of “ Italians.” But these “Italians” will be morally incapable of perceiving and actively living authentic social and political life on account of their compromised sense of communitas. The task of this second portion of the chapter is to mine Leo’s matrimonial teaching for this deeper moral root of the problem.

Given what we have said so far about the analogia communitatis, it is fitting that we highlight the heart of Leo’s matrimonial teaching precisely in those terms. We find this heart in Rerum novarum’s most important statement on the social nature of the family. Though

Rerum novarum is published after Arcanum Divinae, the former eloquently summarizes our concerns here:

A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, ‘at least equal rights’; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.33

This is a precise analogical response to any social authority - but especially a state predicated on contractual communitas - that seeks to act on matrimony and the family.

First, note from the outset of the quotation that the contest is between a liberal vision of the state as being the primary social authority, and an alternative vision of the

33 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, §13, emphasis mine. Cf. Rerum novarum, §12: “No human law can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage ordained by God’s authority from the beginning: ‘Increase and multiply.’ Hence we have the family, the ‘society’ of a man’s house - a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.” Rerum novarum is not concerned with matrimonial law per se. The socio-economic concerns of the encyclical nevertheless occasion a vital summary of Leo’s estimation of the domestic sphere of society. This summary is perfectly in sync with Leo’s matrimonial teaching throughout his magisterium.

203 state’s analogical relation to other “true” societies. As Leo teaches regarding the Church, the family (the matrimonial union included) is ordered in a way “peculiar to itself” and so in no need of external authorities for its constitution. Though we bristle at the phrase, “the authority of the father,” it is necessary to situate Leo’s language within the broader context of competing social authorities in the nationalizing process. Without a doubt, Leo intends the phrase “authority of the father” to refer to the authority of a male on account of his sex.34 But even if we reject this interpretation of domestic authority’s proper location in favor of egalitarianism, maleness here remains only one factor among several determining the authoritative status of the father. That is, from our perspective, even if we prefer the

“authority of the parent” to the “authority of father,” we can follow part of the Leonine logic in interpreting domestic authority according to its multivalence. The authority that orders the domestic sphere is “peculiar” because it is always already biological,35 religious, moral, spiritual, social, economic, political, educational, etc. No other social authority - not even the Church - can claim such an expansive and complex jurisdiction in all of these bailiwicks. As I mentioned above, some theorists, such as Hegel, were open about the political appetite for just this sort of expansive, complex jurisdiction. But more often, as in the cases of Morelli and Villa, the expression of this appetite is coded in terms of eliminating other authorities - such as the Church - from these supposedly private spheres. Here in Rerum

34 It goes without saying that Leo is a gender complementarian who, from our perspective and standards, emphasizes an inflated distinction between women and men as it pertains to their domestic and public roles. It is uninteresting to point this out. I delivered a paper on Leo’s matrimonial teaching at a conference where a well known ethicist asked me why I focused on Leo when John Paul II’s teaching more nearly - but not completely or sufficiently, this scholar was careful to add - approximates our developing commitment to gender equality. This is a fair, if flat and inevitable, question. In addition to the desire to recover familiarity with the entire Leonine corpus, it struck me as important to note the ways in which Leo’s teaching offers insight that does not depend on his view of gender. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that the value of contemporary papal teaching does not consist of its having left behind certain distasteful elements of past papal teaching. 35 The case of adoption is an obvious exception. But adoption does make it possible to replace the biological relation with a real kinship relation that transcends the merely legal. But even the legal transformation of adoption requires something that states cannot provide: the relational ability to name children as “daughters” and “sons” rather than “wards” or “dependents.”

204 novarum, and in a more developed way in Arcanum, Leo calls this coding into question, suggesting that in seeking to eliminate the Church from the domestic sphere, liberals are in fact intent on gaining a monopoly of social access to their citizens.

Second, note that in Rerum novarum Leo’s description of the domestic sphere’s antecedence to society is expressive of not only the rights of spouses and children, but also the duty of the family. These rights and duties are founded, furthermore, not in legislation or contract, but in nature. Whereas in Rerum novarum the emphasis is on family rights, we will see below that in Arcanum the emphasis is on a family’s duty.

Finally, Leo is concerned about the subjective experience of life in society. In the case of Rerum novarum, he fears that families in liberal states, facing various forms of interference and subject to a lack of proper social and economic support, might come to perceive life in the commonwealth as unbearable. Were this situation to obtain, associational life among families, and so society more broadly, would suffer. Family, on this reading, is a critical factor in shaping how society’s members view the good of human sociality itself.36

At the heart of Leo’s matrimonial teaching, then, is a concern that the domestic sphere be rightly seen from two complementary perspectives. From the perspective of Rerum novarum, the domestic sphere possesses a native integrity that precedes all other social authority. Domestic rights are rooted in this precedence and demand the respect of all other social authorities, most especially a civil authority that sees in the “authority of the father” a

36 Here and at several points below I refer to the subjective aspect of perceiving society as a good, as a goal capable of being idealized, and so as an end intrinsically worth pursuing. The Nobel Prize laureate, Robert Fogel, would refer to this capacity to idealize sociality as a “spiritual resource” essential for human flourishing. The Catholic economist, Andrew Beauchamp, has turned to precisely this subjective aspect in his investigation of the conditions contributing to inequality. Beauchamp shows from a social-scientific perspective that family life provides an irreducibly necessary “input” that contributes to the formation of the human capacity to idealize society and so pursue sociality as a worthwhile endeavor. Cf. Andrew Beauchamp, “Humane Capital: A Re-examination of the social teachings in light of the shift to human capital,” unpublished paper provided by the author, forthcoming as a chapter in Rowman and Littlefield’s Catholic Social Scientists Volume: Catholic Perspectives on Economics.

205 host of prerogatives that would enhance the state’s ability to form its citizens in its own image. But from a second, complementary perspective, the domestic sphere’s native integrity is that of a communitas itself, a “true society,” in a world populated by other communitates.

Domestic duties are rooted not only in the host of relations signified by the term, “father,” but also in the public imbrication of these communitates such that the domestic sphere’s proper integrity and antecedence should never be misinterpreted as social isolation. Thus, in

Rerum novarum Leo succinctly expresses the substance of his critique of liberal matrimonial legislation: civil matrimony and divorce are legal intrusions into the native integrity of the domestic sphere; and these legal intrusions, by permitting the dissolution of familial bonds, corrode the domestic sphere’s ability to realize its duty to be a communitas among communitates.

Indeed, as we will see in our discussion of Arcanum, Leo is concerned that civil matrimony and divorce amount to little more than a liberal pedagogy that forms citizens for individualized membership in a communitas of aggregates, bound together by a commercial contract.

IIa. Arcanum’s Argument

In order to understand Leo’s response to both liberal theory and to pro-divorce legislation in Italy and throughout Europe, we should first appreciate Leo’s interlocutor and the overarching argument of Arcanum:

Leo writes against the “naturalists” who, according to his characterization elsewhere, teach “that marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts, which can rightly be revoked by the will of those who made them, and that the civil rulers of the State have power over the matrimonial bond.”37 Note especially Leo’s identification of a commercial

“genus” of contracts in which matrimony purportedly exists.

37 Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, §21.

206 Leo’s first claim is one we have already encountered in examining Sapientiae

Christianae in chapter three: the Church enjoys a unique competence regarding the eternal salvation and temporal flourishing of the human res sara in temporalibus. By a right rooted in her divine mandate, the Church possesses both temporal and spiritual jurisdiction in matters matrimonial given that matrimony is a communitas implicated in this flourishing.

Leo’s second claim is that matrimony is naturally known as an originally holy, even sacramental, institution. Indeed, “Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it a something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature.”38 Leo’s predecessors, Innocent III and Honorius III, even affirm that

“a sacrament of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and unbelievers.”39 From Leo’s perspective, the witness of antiquity supports this idea that matrimony is a sacrament according to nature, for ancient pagans ceremoniously surrounded matrimony with “religion and holiness.” Guided by the natural law, they recognized the innate sacrality of matrimony, and so Leo argues against modern “naturalists” that “marriage is holy by its own power, in its own nature, and of itself, it ought not to be regulated and administered by the [imperio] of civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone in sacred matters professes the office of teaching.”40 It should be noted, however, that the ancient appreciation of matrimony’s primal holiness is variously obscured throughout history. Prior to the

38 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §19. Regarding the sacraments prior to the incarnation of Christ, cf. Aquinas ST IIIa q. 61 a. 3, resp.: Sacraments are necessary for man’s salvation, in so far as they are sensible signs of invisible things whereby man is made holy. Now after sin no man can be made holy save through Christ, Whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood, to the showing of His justice...that he Himself may be just, and the justifier of him who is of the faith of Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:25, 26). Therefore before Christ’s coming there was need for some visible signs whereby man might testify to his faith in the future coming of a Saviour. And these signs are called sacraments. It is therefore clear that some sacraments were necessary before Christ’s coming.” In ad. 1, Aquinas writes, “Christ’s Passion is the final cause of the old sacraments: for they were instituted in order to foreshadow it.” 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. The pedagogical munus of both the Church and the state will be at issue below.

207 incarnation of the Lord, according to Leo, pagans and even Israel had all but lost sight of the

Lord’s original intentions for matrimony. Through the incarnation, the Lord restores matrimony to its original purity and elevates it to a sacrament of grace. The Lord’s sacramental munus is now the Church’s.41

The third claim is that contemporary efforts to deprive the Church of her matrimonial competence, regardless of their legal, social, economic, or moral justification, cannot in any way truly change the Church’s relationship to the institution. Liberal states try to separate the Church from matrimony, usually by an effort to separate the contractual nature of matrimony from the sacramental. Leo’s argument is that on account of the Lord’s work in history this separation is impossible.

It follows from these three claims that the Church’s matrimonial law, especially as it pertains to the identity of the contract with the sacrament, should not be compromised by the error of civil matrimony, the evil of divorce, or any other perversion. Given that the domestic communitas has been instituted from the beginning by the Creator, and given that it has been elevated to a sacrament of grace by the incarnate Christ, then to disavow the

Church’s law protecting this communitas is to deprive human persons of access to one of the primary sources of human sociality. Leo warns that if civil legislation is severed from Canon

Law, the result will be the corrosion of the very virtues and ideals human society prizes.

IIb. Matrimony’s Origins in Creation

Arcanum Divinae can thus be read as an extended defense of the statement in Rerum novarum concerning the integrity of the family as a “true society.” In order to accomplish this defense, Leo consistently attends to three interrelated factors:

41 There is thus a certain parallelism between a Thomistic account of the natural virtue of religion and Leo’s account of original matrimony. In both cases, the natural is in need of purification. Both receive this purification and further elevation on account of the Lord’s incarnation.

208 First, matrimony and family have a created nature that is discernible from pagan and

Christian perspectives as holy and even sacramental. Second, matrimony and family have a revealed nature expressed in Christ’s elevation of matrimony from a naturally holy institution to a sacrament of grace. Third, the Church has not in any way perverted or interfered with the natural or revealed integrity of matrimony and family, but has on the contrary always defended and promoted them in accord with her divine mandate. I will examine these elements of his teaching as they unfold in the letter.

Leo’s aim is to describe the origin and form of “that family union of which marriage is the beginning and the foundation.”42 The origin of matrimony and its proper form is the

Lord’s creation of male and female persons. From the beginning, matrimony “manifested chiefly two most excellent properties - deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it - namely, unity and perpetuity.”43 Christ further confirms this teaching in the Gospel, emphasizing the one flesh union of the couple in a bond “so closely and strongly made fast that no man may dissolve it or render it asunder.”44 This elegantly simple core Leo then situates within the historical record of the “vices” and “ignominies with which marriage was defiled” by Israel via polygamy and by pagans via licentiousness, concubinage, and unchecked paternal authority.45 Morelli, in his speech on the Chamber floor, had given an historical defense of divorce by developing his own account of the historical record of societies in Greece, Egypt, and Rome that had legalized divorce without destroying themselves. But on Leo’s reading of the history, prior to the Incarnation of the Lord, “all nations seem, more or less, to have forgotten the true notion and origin of marriage [...].”46 Such distortions and perversions of

42 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §5. 43 Ibid., §5. 44 Ibid., citing Matt. 19:5-6. 45 Cf. Ibid., §§6-7. 46 Ibid., §7.

209 the created good of matrimony are a part of the fallen, historical context in which the

Incarnate Lord conducts his earthly ministry: “He brought back matrimony to the nobility of its primeval origin by condemning the customs of the Jews in their abuse of the plurality of wives and of the power of giving bills of divorce; and still more by commanding most strictly that no one should dare to dissolve that union which God Himself had sanctioned by a bond perpetual.”47

Christ’s teaching regarding the origin and proper form of matrimony was then handed on to the Apostles and their successors who, according to Trent,

have always taught [...] that Christ our Lord raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament; that to husband and wife, guarded and strengthened by the heavenly grace which His merits gained for them, He gave power to attain holiness in the married state; and that, in a wondrous way, making marriage an example of the mystical union between Himself and His Church, He not only perfected that love which is according to nature, but also made the naturally indivisible union of one man with one woman far more perfect through the bond of heavenly love. [...] It is for these reasons that marriage is a “great sacrament” [...].48

On the one hand, we can interpret Leo’s meaning here simply enough. Christ teaches that the natural institution of marriage is a sacrament, so it is indeed a sacrament. The authority of the Lord and of the Church stewarding his teachings are sufficient warrant for the Catholic claim that the matrimonial contract is not like any other human contract. But this is not the only way to interpret Leo’s thought. He is arguing that in a complementary way, the unity and perpetuity of the matrimonial relation, in its original, created goodness, is also a reason for its sacramental status. Unity and indissolubility, on Leo’s read, are not artificial or peculiar features of Catholic matrimonial doctrine so much as they are the natural characteristics of the primal communitas that was created to be perpetual. In other words,

47 Ibid., §8. Leo describes Christ here as the “supreme Lawgiver,” standing in the place of Moses. Cf. Matt. 19:9. 48 Ibid., §9.

210 matrimony is a natural human institution that is fitting for certain reasons to be elevated to the status of a sacrament.49

We can appreciate Leo’s perspective here if we attend to how he describes the relationship between the Church’s interests in families and the natural inclinations that give rise to the domestic sphere. According to Leo, Christian matrimony takes up the natural human inclination to propagate the species and situates it in analogical relationship with the

Christian mandate to make “children for the Church, ‘fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God’; so that ‘a people might be born and brought up for the worship and religion of the true God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.’”50 Just as the new Italy looked to matrimonial law as a mechanism by which to “make Italians” and thus consolidate its authority, so the Church looks to the family as its own source of citizens prepared for membership within a very different patria. But the natural inclination to propagate the species is not the only aspect of matrimony implicated in the broader projects of those social authorities that rule over the domestic sphere.

49 Cf. Aquinas, ST IIIa q. 84 a. 1, ad. 1. Asking whether or not penance is fittingly called a sacrament, Aquinas makes the following useful distinction between types of sacraments. “[I]n those sacraments, whereby an exceptional grace surpassing altogether the proportion of a human act, is conferred, some corporeal matter is employed externally, e.g. in Baptism, which confers full remission of all sins, both as to guilt and as to punishment, and in Confirmation, wherein the fulness of the Holy Ghost is bestowed, and in Extreme Unction, which confers perfect spiritual health derived from the virtue of Christ as from an extrinsic principle. Wherefore, such human acts as are in these sacraments, are not the essential matter of the sacrament, but are dispositions thereto. On the other hand, in those sacraments whose effect corresponds to that of some human act, the sensible human act itself takes the place of matter, as in the case of Penance and Matrimony, even as in bodily medicines, some are applied externally, such as plasters and drugs, while others are acts of the person who seeks to be cured, such as certain exercises.” In ad. 2, he writes, “[H]uman actions take the place of matter, and these actions proceed from internal inspiration, wherefore the matter is not applied by the minister, but by God working inwardly [...].” 50 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §10, quoting Eph. 2:19 and the Roman Catechism. Cf. Leo XIII, Nobilissima Gallorum gens, §3, where Leo details the political importance of parental education of children. “Both the Divine and the natural law impose this duty on them, nor can parents on any ground whatever be freed from this obligation. The Church, guardian of the integrity of the Faith - which, in virtue of its authority, deputed from God its Founder, has to call all nations to the knowledge of Christian lore, and which is consequently bound to watch keenly over the teaching and upbringing of the children placed under its authority by baptism - has always expressly condemned mixed or neutral schools; over and over again she has warned parents to be ever on their guard in this most essential point. To obey the Church in this is to obey the requirements of social utility, and to serve in the most excellent manner the common welfare.”

211 St. Paul famously teaches that the spousal communitas itself signifies Christ’s communitas with the Church. From the Catholic perspective, the natural matrimonial contract is thus capable of an analogical, “heaven-born love guiding both [spouses] in their respective duties.”51 So in addition to the human acts of making and rearing children, the spousal communitas images Christ’s love for the Church, drawing together the natural structure of the relationship with the supernatural purposes of the Lord. This primitive, spousal communitas thus participates in a created order that transcends it even as it makes it more intelligible.

From the Christian perspective, the natural teloi of the spousal union are not reducible to the biological, domestic, and social. Instead, these teloi are revealed as signs participating in the broadest possible theological context of human sociality: the family or kingdom or people or city of the Lord.52 Without canceling the natural integrity of these signs rooted in the human need to propagate the human species, without denigrating the natural bonding of kinship ties, and without neglecting the qualitative and quantitative role families play in creating socialized moral agents in history, Leo recognizes that our desire to make more humans who are bound together by blood, convention, law, cooperation, necessity, and pleasure participates in an inclination directly linked to the origin, purpose, and structure of the

Church, both on earth and in glory: bringing persons to communion with the Lord.

It would be most accurate to say then that Arcanum is an argument constructed in diametric opposition to the modern positions I sketched above, for Arcanum’s argument is that Christ’s elevation of the natural sacrament of matrimony to the status of a supernatural

51 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §11. 52 At points, Leo is quite literal about the role of the family in revealing the Lord’s salvific purposes. Cf. Leo XIII, Neminem fugit, in Benedictine Monks of Solesmes, Papal Teachings: Matrimony, trans. Michael J. Byrnes, (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1963), 176-7. This 1892 apostolic letter on the Holy Family states: “[T]he merciful God - wishing to accomplish the work of the restoration of humanity which had long been awaited - so prepared the details and the manner of Redemption that from the beginning this work would present to the world the august form of a divinely constituted family, in which all men could contemplate the most perfect model of family life [...].”

212 sacrament of salvific grace does not extract Christian matrimony from the realm of nature.

Such would be the implied lesson of the various modern theories that teach that only now, after the rationalization and elimination of the old social orders, can we see matrimony in its natural light, unpolluted by the manufactures of Christianity, absolute monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and the like. Morelli and Villa envision just this rationalization and elimination when they propose to relieve Italian marriages of the burdens and obscurities of Canon Law.

Over against this lesson, Leo teaches that Christ’s supernatural elevation of matrimony is the deepest expression in history of matrimony’s naturalness: its fittingness to the redemptive purposes of the Creator. Leo’s insight in Rerum novarum bears repeating here: this primitive union is a communitas. Its diminutive size does not in any way detract from the authenticity of its social nature. Given that the formal cause of the sacrament is in fact the two wills of the spouses consenting to the union, the parallelism to the first nuptial contract in the garden remains perfectly intact. Even if modern interpretations of the history of matrimony imply that the Church and other social institutions have encumbered matrimony in layers of institutional artifice, at the heart of Catholic matrimonial theology is the simple consent of the spouses directly within the sight of the Lord.

So, though Leo’s arguments are preceded in history by political accounts of matrimony’s relationship to pre-social states of nature,53 or by historical narratives of declension from original promiscuity and liberty to social convention and domination,54 or by philosophical portrayals of history’s inevitable progress,55 Arcanum is designed to best these accounts by placing the created goodness of the domestic communitas within its proper context: a first givenness, a priority, of human sociality as a constitutive aspect of the human

53 E.g. Locke, Rousseau 54 E.g. Marx, Engels 55 E. g. Hegel.

213 person’s vocation to image the Lord’s goodness by causing good in others. For their part,

Morelli and Villa - and the liberal pedagogy they represent - do not want the primitive communitas to signify any relation. Strangely, the communitas is made a sign solely of the liberty of the persons voting to contract a certain partnership for a time. Morelli and Villa thus move beyond the univocation that would see in the family a form or pattern for the nation, to a most startling equivocation regarding the matrimonial communitas and its relationship to human sociality. The naturalists must make over the matrimonial contract in terms compatible with the commercial “genus.”

Two different social anthropologies derive from these incommensurable starting points. The “naturalist” position undergirding civil matrimony and divorce legislation is a social anthropology that strikes at the union of the spouses in order to make over the family and society into the image of the liberal nation-state. That is, the state requires citizens adequate to the purposes of forming a political regime (supposedly) based on the will of the people. The Catholic position undergirding Leo’s teaching is a social anthropology that looks not only to the social and political needs of the nation, but also to the historical fact of

Christ’s will to elevate matrimony to a sacrament of grace. Matrimony is indeed a sign of something greater than itself, something in which it participates in its peculiar way. The question is whether or not we have an adequate grasp of this participation and its telos.

This means for Leo that all discipline pertaining to matrimony belongs “as of native right,” not to the social authority requiring properly formed citizens, but to the social authority serving the salvific purposes of Christ. The witness of matrimony’s own complex history suggests to Leo that it would be exactly backwards to capacitate the civil power with all matrimonial jurisdiction and to leave the Church out of matrimony altogether, or to allow

214 her in solely via concession.56 Leo points out that Christ and the apostles did not teach on matrimony by delegation of any civil power. Indeed, the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage and on the unions of slaves and free persons was directly contrary to Roman law and was occasion for several apologists to note the incompatibility of

Christianity and the empire.57 And even with the advent of Christendom, after “all power had devolved upon the Christian emperors,” the Church continued to legislate concerning matrimony.58 The primacy of the Church’s prerogatives regarding matrimony corresponds to the superiority of the end set for matrimony by Christ. The matrimonial contract, being made by the Lord to participate via its natural integrity in the sacramental order, can only become the sole province of the civil power if the connection between the contract and the sacramental order is broken. This is the heart of the matter in Arcanum.

IIc. Severing the Contract from the Sacrament

From our perspective, a liberal matrimonial code such as Morelli’s or Villa’s would suggest that matrimonial matters are finally given to the contracting parties who are, as a

56 Cf. Leo XIII, Ci siamo, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 127: “Therefore, insofar as the substance and sanctity of the bond are concerned, marriage for Christian jurisprudence is an essentially sacred and religious act, the regulation of which naturally belongs to the religious power, not by a delegation of the State, nor by consent of the Princes, but by mandate of the Divine Founder of Christianity and Author of the sacraments.” 57 Cf. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §21. Leo cites Ignatius, Justin, Athenagoras, and Tertullian. 58 Cf. Ibid., §22. Leo lists the councils of Granada, Arles, Chalcedon, Milevum II, and Trent. Cf. Ibid., §13: Leo points out the various historical moments when the Church’s task was to defend matrimony from destruction. He is uncharacteristically direct here with regard to the historical context we discussed above. In history, the Church has protected matrimony from the “Gnostics, Manichaeans, and Montanists.” But even now, the Church is tasked with protecting matrimony from the “Mormons, St. Simonians, phalansterians, and communists.” It is unclear what knowledge Leo would have had of Mormonism, but it is easy enough to suppose that he has in mind here a form of serial polygamy due to legal dissolubility. However, his familiarity with St. Simonians, phalansterians, a.k.a. Fourierists, and communists would surely have been greater. St. Simonians and Fourierists were early socialists rooted in the thought of French theorists, and as we have seen, their thought is instrumental in shaping both Mazzini’s eschatological patriotism and Morelli’s legislative proposals before the Italian senate. Regarding the Church’s record in defending matrimony in history from various abuses, Cf. Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, §§ 14-15: First, the Church overcame the “old distinction between slaves and free-born men and women [...].” Second, the “dignity of the woman was asserted and assured; and it was forbidden to the man to inflict capital punishment for adultery, or lustfully and shamelessly to violate his plighted faith.” Third, the Church has established various impediments to marriage, and these have strengthened the institution by granting more agency to the spouses (rather than to the parents), by preventing close degrees of consanguinity, and by preserving the chastity and honor of the spouses.

215 result, left at liberty to pursue their various preferences. We might even appreciate a liberal matrimonial code as useful for respecting the desires of religious persons who seek to contract matrimony according to their faith. But if Leo is correct, liberal matrimonial code abets a pedagogy that places the state’s influence precisely where the modern state claims it is afraid to tread: within the consciences of its citizens and their capacity to form ideals and visions of the good life.

Leo is acutely aware of the anticlerical animus within Morelli and Villa’s legislative efforts. In an 1879 letter regarding civil matrimony in Piedmont, Leo refers to the autocratic state’s “sorry task of creating a matrimonial morality wholly human, under merely juridical forms and guarantees. The State - insofar as it is able - imposes this by force on its citizens, substituting it for the religious and sacramental form, without which marriage between

Christians cannot be either lawful, honored or stable.”59 He writes again in 1893 that it is inaccurate “to say that the civil power by its law of the precedence of the civil rite does not affect the Sacrament administered by the Church, that it does not deny it and it does not recognize it, leaving to the free will of the contracting parties the right to celebrate the religious service afterwards if they wish to do so.”60

In civil matrimony and pro-divorce legislation, Leo sees at work the appetite of the civil power, looking to consume not only the Church’s authority in matrimonial matters, but even the moral formation of the persons contracting the matrimonial union. That is, Leo has identified in the desire to separate the contract and the sacrament a deeper motive that has little to do with liberating spouses from the strictures of Canon Law or the social conventions of the ancien régime. He writes in Arcanum that the “naturalist” position seeks to

59 Leo XIII, Ci siamo, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 129. The notion that this legislation is being forced on the Italians is not an overstatement on Leo’s part. Recall that above I noted how one of the central arguments, even from liberal legislators, against divorce was the complete lack of public interest in pro-divorce legislation. 60 Leo XIII, Il divisamento, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 180

216 “deprive [matrimony] of all holiness, and so bring it within the contracted sphere [exiguum gyrum] of those rights which, having been instituted by man, are ruled and administered by the civil jurisprudence of the community.”61 If these naturalists have their way, then the sacrament becomes for the spouses an “added ornament” or an “outward endowment,” and nothing intrinsic to the union itself. In so transforming matrimony, the naturalists place an ever greater emphasis on the will of the persons contracting to make their union participate in whatever larger economies of signification they please. The implication of his argument is that if the contract and sacrament are left in their proper identity to one another, then matrimony retains two critical marks of its nature: first, it remains a social institution participating in the analogia communitatis; second, it retains its natural integrity as a communitas immune to the Promethean urges of the civil authority.

Leo makes this clear in the same 1879 letter addressed to the issue of civil matrimony in Piedmont. On the one hand, we observe in Morelli and Villa’s legislative efforts the state’s desire to separate the contract and the sacrament and so arrogate to itself jurisdictions to which it has no right. But on the other hand, the same cannot be said for the Church’s desire to maintain its own jurisdiction in the domestic communitas. That is, on account of both the fundamentally social nature of the domestic communitas, and on account of its natural integrity, Leo’s analogical social anthropology allows him to openly own that the Church’s prerogatives regarding matrimony are not solely her own. Rather, on account of the nature of the animals involved in the sacrament, and on account of the irreducibly social and political nature of matrimony, matrimonial jurisdiction is again an imbricated affair. Leo is explicit about this:

No one can question the State’s rights to regulate the temporal aspects of matrimony for the common welfare and to regulate justly its civil effects. But not so when the State, entering

61 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §17. Exiguus, exigua: small, meager, dreary, scanty, petty, poor.

217 the sanctuary of religion and conscience, sets itself up as arbiter and reformer of the intimate consequences of a sacred bond which God Himself ordained and which the powers of the world, since they have no power to effect it, can never dissolve or change.62

The separation of the contract from the sacrament is thus not a piece of secular legislation. It is instead an alternative theological social anthropology that invades the properly inviolable forums of religion and conscience, arbitrating and reforming matrimony in such a way that it can be remade in a new likeness.

It would seem that the Church - especially as she is presented in Leo’s matrimonial teaching - could be accused of the same thing. And I have apparently argued something similar in suggesting above that both the civil and the spiritual authorities look to the domestic communitas for their supply of properly formed members. But the nature of the matrimonial sacrament according to Catholic teaching prevents Leo - and us - from accusing the Church of the same peremptory invasions. That is, Leo is not arguing against severing contract from sacrament solely because he seeks the preservation of the Church’s privileges.

Instead, Catholic sacramental theology demands that Leo recognize that severing contract from sacrament is inadequate to the natural and revealed status of matrimony as a communitas itself. A “severance of this kind cannot be approved; for certain it is that in Christian marriage the contract is inseparable from the sacrament, and that, for this reason, the contract cannot be true and legitimate without being a sacrament as well. For Christ our

Lord added to marriage the dignity of a sacrament; but marriage is the contract itself, whenever that contract is lawfully concluded.”63 From what Leo has said so far, “it is clear

62 Leo XIII, Ci siamo, 129. Interestingly enough, Leo refers here to liberal matrimonial law as “injurious and disastrous to religion, the priesthood, liberty of conscience and public morals.” That he willingly uses the phrase “liberty of conscience” when he elsewhere derides it serves to show that the debate about modern liberties is truly about the operative definition of liberty and not about a desire for social control. 63 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §23. Cf. Leo XIII, Il divisamento, his 1893 letter to Italian bishops regarding civil marriage in Italy, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 177-87, at 179: “It is a dogma of Faith that the marriage of Christians was raised by Our Lord Jesus Christ to the dignity of a Sacrament [...]. Vain distinction between the

218 that among Christians every true marriage is, in itself and by itself, a sacrament [...].”64 The language here is important.

The sacramental nature of matrimony is both intrinsic (in se) and autonomous (per se).

That is, its sacramental nature is a given feature of the matrimonial union, not determined by the consumptive preference of the spouses contracting nor by the social authorities officiating. And indeed, even though matrimonial law remains within the Church’s jurisdiction by native right, it is important to remember that the Church does not in any way administer the sacrament. Rather, the spouses administer the sacrament with the Church as a witness in the person of the priest or deacon and in those gathered from the community.65

So when Leo argues that matrimony is a sacrament in se et per se, he is reiterating that though the Church has jurisdiction over certain matters of matrimony, she too, like the civil power, must keep her hands off of the nature of the union, lest its created integrity be violated.66 It is clear why Leo consistently characterizes the Church’s role regarding matrimony in terms of stewardship, care, and defense. In keeping with what we have already said about the analogia communitatis, Leo recognizes the importance of this defense against any social

contract and the sacrament from which one would infer therefore, is that distinction that between Christians there can exist a valid marriage contract which is not a Sacrament.” Cf. Leo XIII, Dum multa, §2. 64 Ibid., §24. “Itaque apparet, omne inter christianos iustum coniugium in se et per se esse sacramentum: nihilque magis abhorrer e a veritate, quam esse sacramentum decus quoddam adiunctum, aut proprietatem allapsam extrinsecus, quae a contractu disiungi ac disparari hominum arbitratu queat.” 65 Cf. Leo XIII, Inscrutabili Dei consilio, §14, where Leo notes that the Church’s interest in matrimony is in controlling the “duties of married people and of their offspring.” Leo is consistent in his affirmation of the Church’s incompetence regarding the formal causality of the sacrament. As he writes in Ci siamo, the Church “intervenes” and “interferes” but does not make the contract itself. Liberal matrimonial law, however, would seem to desire to become the formal cause of the union. Cf. Leo XIII, Ci siamo, 129-30, where Leo discusses the state’s use of force to impose matrimonial legislation on citizens. Cf. Leo XIII, Il divisamento, 180: “Now a law that would prescribe the precedence of the civil rite to the true marriage which is contracted in the Church would really have as its object the matrimonial contract itself and not merely its civil effects. Thus the State would pretend to administer the Sacrament.” 66 Cf. Leo XIII, Consistorial Allocution, December 16, 1901, in Papal Teachings: Matrimony, 192-5, at 193: “Elevating it to the dignity and virtue of a Sacrament, He placed it above the type of ordinary contract and above the jurisdiction of civil power, even above ecclesiastical power itself.”

219 endeavor to dissolve the integrity of even the smallest social body into the simple space of the citizen-state dyad.

It is easy to see how severing the sacrament from the contract ensures that the

Church’s historical jurisdiction over matrimony can no longer be a social and political jurisdiction. But this is only part of Leo’s concern in arguing against civil matrimony and divorce legislation . If the contract and the sacrament are severable, and the sacrament is relegated to the preference of those who would like to so ornament or endow their civil union, then the analogia communitatis is again threatened by an omnicompetent state’s desire for a monopoly on social sovereignty. Leo is intent on showing that severing the contract from the sacrament changes the nature of the union. If the sacrament is left to the preference of the spouses contracting, then the sacrament becomes a piece of private sentiment. Furthermore, if the contract is left to the civil power, it too becomes a piece of private commerce, bearing no necessary relationship to society. The spouses, imagined legally as isolable wills, are left attached directly to the law that has taught them this new

“matrimonial morality.” Their persons and their union are thus detached from the social and moral formation of non-state bodies. In Leo’s context, this means not only that the spouses are detached from the formational authority of the Church, but also from the formational authority of matrimony itself.

IId. Competing Matrimonial Moralities

We are accustomed to defenses of traditional matrimony and family that rely chiefly on showing how the ends of matrimony and family are irreducibly necessary for personal and social health. Arcanum is not without such arguments.67 But the more provocative

67 Cf. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §29: “Matrimonial contracts are by [divorce] made variable; mutual kindness is weakened; deplorable inducements to unfaithfulness are supplied; harm is done to the education and training of children; occasion is afforded for the breaking up of homes; the seeds of dissension are sown among families;

220 element of Leo’s teaching, especially with regard to my argument that the analogia communitatis is fundamental to a truly humane society and politics, is his examination of the relationship of the natural form of matrimony to the moral development of the social and political animal. Leo justifies his attention to the original or primal form of matrimony thus: “From the beginning of the world, indeed, it was divinely ordained that things instituted by God and by nature should be proved by us to be the more profitable and salutary the more they remain unchanged in their full integrity.”68 According to Leo’s demonstration of the traditional teaching on matrimony so far, the institution has been divinely ordered to human beatitude. That is, matrimony exists as a part of the divine initiative to order all human inclinations to the benefit and support of the journey toward our ultimate end.69 If humans are to change this institution, they ‘prove’ its original purpose to the extent that their departure becomes the occasion for punitive repercussions. As the psalmists, prophets, and

Paul knew so well, departure from the Divine Law is itself punishment. And so the

“naturalist” who denies that matrimony is holy, or who, by severing the contract and sacrament, relegates matrimony to “the class of common secular things” within the “genus of commercial contracts” is not actually returning to some mythic pre-social, pre-political, pre-Christian aeon of “natural marriage.” Instead, the “naturalist” is “uproot[ing] thereby the foundations of nature, not only resisting the designs of Providence, [but also] destroying the order that God has ordained.”70 We should not be surprised, Leo says, if such resistance to

the dignity of womanhood is lessened and brought low, and women run the risk of being deserted after having ministered to the pleasures of men. [...]. [D]ivorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of families and States, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people [...]”. 68 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §25. 69 Cf. Leo XIII, Inscrutabili Dei consilio, §14: Christ elevated matrimony and family life so that “by the discharge of [the family members’] duties one to another, they might with greater ease attain to happiness both in time and in eternity.” 70 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §25.

221 the Creator’s wisdom results in “evils pernicious in the highest degree both to the salvation of souls and to the safety of the commonwealth.”71 The question is, what are these evils?

We can appreciate Leo’s estimation of these evils from the perspective of the ends of matrimony and family. This is relatively straightforward. Leo thinks that the “evils pernicious” following from abandoning the Creator’s wisdom can be verified by the evidence of how the Lord intends matrimony “to be a most fruitful source of individual benefit and of public welfare. The benefits are: 1) biological - the propagation of the species;

2) conjugal - an increase in the happiness of the spouses through mutual help, constant and faithful love, the sharing of possessions, and the reception of the grace of the sacrament; and

3) familial - the strengthening of parents’ hearts in union with one another, the education of children, the tempering of patriarchal authority, and the cultivation of obedience.72 Put together, we find several personal and public goods.

But this cannot be the end of the discussion for Leo. He also attends to personal and public goods from the perspective of the form of matrimony:

A very torrent of evils has flowed from [abandoning Christian teaching on matrimony], not only into private families, but also into States. For, the salutary fear of God being removed, and there being no longer that refreshment in toil which is nowhere more abounding than in the Christian religion, it very often happens, as indeed is natural, that the mutual services and duties of marriage seem almost unbearable; and thus very many yearn for the loosening of the tie which they believe to be woven by human law and of their own will, whenever incompatibility of temper, or quarrels, or the violation of the marriage vow, or mutual consent, or other reasons induce them to think that it would be well to be set free. Then, if they are hindered by law from carrying out this shameless desire, they contend that the laws are iniquitous, inhuman, and at variance with the rights of free citizens; adding that every effort should be made to repeal such enactments, and to introduce a more humane code sanctioning divorce.73

This is a rich paragraph that deserves comment. While on the one hand it demonstrates

Leo’s open acknowledgement of the many reasons persons have for contracting a divorce,

71 Ibid. 72 Cf. Ibid., §26. Cf. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §17. 73 Ibid., §27.

222 on the other hand, it reiterates Leo’s sensitivity to the deeper moral implications of liberal legislation. Recall that above Leo referred to the biblical teaching that departure from the

Divine Law is punishment in itself. In contrast to departing from the Divine Law, Leo suggests that the maintenance of the identification of the sacrament with the contract contributes to the proper fear of the Lord74 and to our remaining within the care of the

Church. Departure from the prior facts of Divine and ecclesial law results in a very specific moral calamity that perfectly characterizes Leo’s criticism of modern liberalism and the deeper perniciousness of the evils he sees redounding to society from liberal matrimonial law.

We see in the passage quoted that marital duties can take on a certain aspect due to the subjective nature of our experience of duty. In Leo’s account of Christian matrimony, the drive to union with a spouse, the desire for children, and the necessity of maintaining the union and nurturing and educating the children that issue therefrom all constitute the many duties of spouses that are “neither few nor light.” This is a classic understatement. Leo’s key insight here though is that the commission of these duties is a matter of moral subjectivity.

From one perspective, domestic duties are, or can become, onerous. Indeed, from a Marxist perspective, these duties become understandable solely in terms of illegitimate domination.

From another perspective however, this is not the case. Leo writes that, “to married people who are good these burdens become not only bearable but agreeable, owing to the strength which they gain through the sacrament.”75 But in Leo’s mind, if society separates the sacrament from the contract, gives the civil power exclusive control over matrimony, and

74 Cf. Leo XIII, Nobilissima Gallorum gens, §3: “Those, indeed, whose early days were not enlightened by religious instruction, grow up without any knowledge whatever of the greatest truths, which alone can nourish in man the love of virtue, and repress in him his evil passions [...]. Where these [truths] are unknown, all intellectual culture will prove unhealthy; young people, unaccustomed to the fear of God, will not endure the restraint of an upright life, they will not venture even to deny anything to their passions, and will easily be seduced into troubling the State.” 75 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §12.

223 introduces dissolubility, these marital burdens are in danger of seeming unbearable. When the inevitable challenges of marriage are viewed in this way, the experience of them is not an occasion for compromise, cooperation, selflessness, or other virtues we otherwise rightly prize. Instead, the difficulties become occasions for looking to dissolve what is properly indissoluble. The desire to treat indissoluble social bonds as dissoluble cannot help but impact the human estimation of the nature of social bonds themselves.

Thus, we see in the passage quoted that the desire for an end to the union leads to a misrepresentation of the nature of the union itself. Rather than see the union as a tie woven by the Divine Law and the human will’s participation in it, the union becomes a form of bondage wrought by human law and human will. In short, what was an expression of the

Divine Wisdom, even with all its difficulties and burdens, becomes pure convention and artifact.76 Finally, given the developing presupposition that matrimonial bonds are conventional and artificial, those desirous of an end to their union believe that anything standing in the way of the accomplishment of their desires must be “iniquitous, inhuman, and at variance with the rights of free citizens [...].”77

It is important to realize what Leo is teaching against the “naturalists.” From the

Leonine perspective, the sacramental act of covenanting with another person to a perpetual union is a - if not the only - source of the strength required to view that same union and the familial duties that develop out of it as positive human goods that constitute one’s

76 Cf. Leo XIII, Ci siamo, 129, where Leo refers to this tendency as “the sorry task of creating a matrimonial morality wholly human, under merely judicial forms and guarantees.” The Christian counter to this tendency is the Holy Family. Cf. Leo XIII, Graves de communi re, §25, where Leo calls on Catholics to “keep aloof on all occasions from seditious acts and seditious men; to hold inviolate the rights of others; to show a proper respect to superiors; to willingly perform the works in which they are employed; not to grow weary of the restraint of family life which in many ways is so advantageous; to keep to their religious practices above all, and in their hardships and trials to have recourse to the Church for consolation. In the furtherance of all this, it is of great help to propose the splendid example of the Holy Family of Nazareth, and to advise the invocation of its protection, and it also helps to remind the people of the examples of sanctity which have shone in the midst of poverty, and to hold up before them the reward that awaits them in the better life to come.” 77 Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae, §27.

224 flourishing. This appears to be the case for Leo in terms both of the natural-sacramental and graced-sacramental character of the matrimonial contract. The continual act of covenanting with another person is a fundamental human good, the commission of which act increases a person’s ability to appreciate its goodness. From this perspective, binding oneself to another person via duty, rather than separating oneself via right, is the condition for restoring the broken relationships sinful humans have made in history. The bonds of matrimony and family, on this reading, can only trammel human liberty if humans fail to give themselves fully to each other.

This estimation of the human communitas realized in a marriage and in a family does not sit comfortably with the conception of human communitas that is supposed to obtain in a liberal society. We saw that this would be the case in chapter three when we compared ecclesial and contractual forms of communitas. So it is not surprising that Leo’s position in this contest of “matrimonial moralities” is intimately related to his account of the deficiency of three important modern doctrines: political voluntarism, popular sovereignty, and the necessity of the free market. Indeed, one could read his criticism of these doctrines and think he was still referring to the deeper contours of the legislative debate regarding matrimony. In each case, a voluntaristic individualism passes over the Lord’s authority

in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God, or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a State becomes nothing but a multitude which is its own master and ruler. And since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God.78

If Morelli and Villa have their way, Leo fears that the Italian social imagination will eventually countenance a matrimonial unit that has more in common with this simple,

78 Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §25, emphasis mine.

225 aggregated multitude and less in common with a proper human communitas. Put starkly, a matrimonial code that includes dissolubility as a fundamental aspect of what it means to freely contract matrimony encourages the persons contracting the union to place a prophylactic between the initial act of union on the one hand, and the ongoing promise- keeping that sustains that union on the other. Such a legal provision is not unlike a state’s making legal provision for treason, or a religion’s making doctrinal provision for apostasy.

Were we to analyze this strange phenomenon from the perspective of late, global capitalism, we would simply say that Leo knew that eventually, we would approach even the primitive, pristine communitas as shoppers.79

Leo’s entire social magisterium demonstrates his sensitivity to the state’s desire to make over all other social bodies into smaller, lesser images of itself, which self is in turn patterned, not on any participatory communitas, but on the detached, monistic human will. To the extent that this is true, the liberal state is deeply invested in a profound univocation regarding communitas in that it is patterning all communitates on the singular reality of the consumptive will. But what sort of pattern or model or archetype does an individual human will provide for human communitas? Confronted with such a question, the solution is equivocation: all communitas is an artifact of the human will.

Conclusion

Such is the deeper moral root, according to Leo, of the modern advocacy for the reform of the matrimonial code. For Leo, civil matrimony and divorce are not primarily individual decisions or preferences. Rather, they are forms of liberal pedagogy, encouraging

79 In our current milieu, Catholic advocacy on behalf of traditional conceptions of matrimony and family does often look like advertising for brand loyalty. And the typical advertising strategy emphasizes the superiority of the Catholic brand in terms of its benefits. Attention to living the form - something uninterpretable in consumerist terms - is woefully lacking in this advertising. Indeed, knowledge of and advertising for the form and its intrinsic relation to the ends of matrimony are similarly expressed solely in socio-economic terms.

226 citizens to openly countenance dissolution in the first social unity of order within the analogia communitatis. If this contract is “made variable,” then according to Leo it is difficult to see how citizens will have the wherewithal to maintain unity and concordia in the rest of their less proximate social commitments.80 Given that the difficulties and burdens of matrimony can take on the aspect of unbearability, it only makes sense that persons enduring great marital difficulty would dissolve their marriages and feel that they had secured a truly human good from that dissolution. But Leo is more attentive to the public cost of these personal decisions. For him, they are not private in the least. Rather, “private families” and the

“public society” are intimately and necessarily connected and ought to be so connected that they foster harmony and unity both within and between each other.

So whereas Morelli and Villa had presented divorce as a sort of healing sacrament the state could finally administer to the spiritual wounds of those who were truly living through difficult or unbearable marriages, Leo suggests that what appears to be a healing, personal balm is in fact a political poison corrosive of the very ideals that polities should prize in their citizens: human liberty within the duties that make unity, fraternity, cooperation, and sacrifice not only possible, but morally praiseworthy ideals. Leo cannot imagine how civil matrimony and divorce would contribute to unity and harmony between persons and communitates because the argument for these matrimonial innovations appear to him to be founded on a deficient understanding of communitas in the first place. Leo’s argument is thus not with liberals who would see matrimony made over into a contract.

Leo’s argument is rather with liberals who fail to see that the matrimonial contract is analogously related to the promises, agreements, initiations, and other bonds that make all human acts of communitas capable of imaging the Lord’s singular goodness. Leo’s is an

80 Cf. Leo XIII, Longinqua, §: “For difficult it is to imagine a more deadly pest to the community than the wish to declare dissoluble a bond which the law of God has made perpetual and inseverable.”

227 idealistic portrait of matrimony and family life, to be sure. But it is pitted against a supposed liberal realism about the truth of matrimony and family that abets a social anthropology out of touch with human communitas viewed from both a natural and a revealed perspective.

228 CHAPTER 5

THE ANALOGIA COMMUNITATIS, CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, AND

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

I would like to return to the two theologians, working on the problem of how to respond from a Catholic perspective to the unity of the Italian musicians. Recall that my observation was that a perfectly theological and perfectly Catholic response would be to ask the musicians when it was time to play again. I do not want my observation to be mistaken for a dismissal of the theological task or a denial of the theological valence of the event. But it does seem to me that the theologians were caught on the horns of a false dilemma that pitted the natural goodness of the musicians’ unitive activity against the participatory nature of that activity. The theologians avoided affirming human unity as a natural, even mundane, good and as a participation in the Lord’s goodness. And in avoiding both these affirmations, there appeared to be no way to theologically assess the way one’s heart stops and one’s finer hairs stand on end when one sees, let alone participates with, a thousand musicians in perfect synchrony. The desire to find some way of affirming the natural goodness of the humans’ unitive activity while acknowledging that humans’ unitive activities are never independent, final, or closed off from the Lord seems to me to be yet another way of affirming that the natural law is in fact a created reality that remains critical for a theological perception of human persons, and indeed all of creation.

229 In his important work on “modern social imaginaries,” Charles Taylor suggests that there are several ways – not theories exactly, but comprehensive habits of vision or comprehension – of understanding the moral demands of our particular social order in history. Sometimes, Taylor notes, a moral order does not actually “carry with it a real expectation of its integral fulfillment.”1 He offers two examples of this sort of demand. One is the communion of saints as it stands to the Church militant. The communion of saints is the model of what the Church militant in fact becomes in the eschaton.2 The other is the modern utopia, which may refer “us to a way of things that may be realized in some eventually possible conditions, but that meanwhile serve as a standard to steer by.”3 But there are other times when a social order may “demand a more or less full realization here and now.”4 He offers two further examples of this sort of demand. One is the medieval notion that social order is “not so much a prescription as a key to understanding reality, rather as the Chain of Being does in relation to the cosmos that surrounds us. It provides the hermeneutic clue to understanding the real.”5 The other example is the “imperative prescription” that may not yet be realized but must “be integrally carried out.”6 In contrast with the utopia, the imperative prescription brings with it the expectation that the moral demand is realizable now. Society does not wait for a propitious stellar alignment. Rather, society has a vocation to realize the imperative now. This imperative prescription is

1 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6. 2 It lies beyond the scope of my project to question Taylor’s characterization of the communion of saints as a social reality that will not be integrally fulfilled but that nevertheless stands as exemplar to the Church militant. Suffice it to say here that one has to attend to the notion that the communion of saints is not integrally fulfilled in history to the extent that the Church militant is always in via and a corpus mixtum. But it is also critical to confess that the communion of saints, though it may not be integrally fulfilled until the eschaton, is for Christians still the truer story about what is actually happening in history. Sensitivity to this confession may be the reason Taylor suggests that modern utopias are privative of the communion of saints. There is no cynicism or irony in the Christian confession that the communion of saints is fulfilled in the eschaton. There is, on the other hand, a fair amount of cynicism and irony in the modern use of the utopia as a mirror for society. 3 Ibid., 6-7. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

230 decidedly modern, and even revolutionary. We feel its imperiousness all the time now in our advocacy for greater and greater expansion and realization of rights to liberty and equality.

Using Taylor’s description of the possible ways of imagining the moral demands of a social order, I would like to return to the beginning of this project and revisit Beiner,

Hittinger, and Heyer in light of what we have done in the preceding four chapters and keeping in mind the theological task of affirming the natural goodness and participatory dependence of humans’ unitive action. My aim is threefold: 1) to provide some philosophical and theological ground on which to place Beiner’s beautiful and melancholy description of the civic-republican ideal and its utility in political theory precisely as a utopia; 2) to address the enduring relevance to Catholic theology and philosophy of Hittinger’s estimation of the social aspects of the imago Dei; and 3) to address with more theological and philosophical precision the reasons Leo’s social magisterium is incompatible with Heyer’s typology and why this incompatibility matters for contemporary Catholic social thought. By doing this work, we may understand more fully why an analogical social anthropology remains necessary for a suitable Catholic response to the social and political challenges we face today.

I argue that only via an analogical conception of human sociality will we be able to avoid the temptations to finalize the political task. Analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain incarnationally committed to the enduring task of promoting humane unitive activities like society and politics. Leonine analogy enables Catholic social teaching to remain so committed in light of the eschatological, and so completely un-ironic hope that the broken relations of nature and history will be restored only at the end of all things. This eschatological hope funds the incarnational commitment and makes it intelligible in the first place. Precisely this hope enables the theologian to ask the musicians, “When can we do this again?”

231 I. Leo XIII and the Civic-Republican Ideal

In the introduction, I referenced Ronald Beiner’s beautiful, if ultimately melancholic, hope that contemporary political philosophy would not abandon the utopian ideal of civic republicanism and the form of citizenship that ideal entails. I call Beiner’s hope a melancholy one because he has identified in the civic-republican ideal a social order comprised in part by what Christians would call “goods constitutive of human flourishing.” Then he has suggested that the accomplishment of such goods is a utopian dream. Granted, Beiner’s identification of a utopia here is reflexive. He thinks that utopian ideals are important for the philosophical task. And there is plenty to be said about the “utopianism” of the Gospel, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the evangelical life and their relation to the way most

Christians live their lives. As Charles Taylor notes, the communion of saints may be read as functioning this way for the Church in as much as the former embodies for the latter a society “devoid of rivalry, mutual resentment, love of gain, ambition to rule, and the like.”7

Taylor suggests that a modern utopia (and we could insert Beiner’s here) is actually a “distant analogy in another context” to this ecclesial vision of a moral order. But after what we have seen of Leo’s treatment of citizenship within the normative, created structure of the analogia communitatis, it is clear that “utopian” is not the only or the best way to describe the civic- republican ideal. Indeed, as Taylor suggests, there are other ways of describing the social function of a moral order, including the decidedly non-utopian demand for a “more or less full realization here and now.” One of the ways in which medieval – and here, Leonine – visions of moral order demand this realization is by functioning hermeneutically. In Taylor’s words, rather than supplying us with ideals to aim for but never ultimately realize,

7 Ibid., 6.

232 hermeneutical moral orders provide society with the “clue” necessary for a society’s ability to understand reality.8

Beiner’s utopian hope is a poignant manifestation of the hope of 1789 - namely, that citizenship would have an important role to play in the restoration of the broken relations of nature and history. In the introduction, I related this utopian vision of citizenship’s restorative power to Hittinger’s work on the social dimension of the imago Dei. In other words, given what Hittinger claims about the role of social relations in the human vocation to image the Lord by causing goodness in others, it makes a great deal of sense that Beiner would identify citizenship as a human relation possessed of great capacity to contribute to human flourishing. Recall that Beiner’s description of civic-republican citizenship was ultimately a description of a political form of friendship among humans. Beiner’s hope is thus that love would remain the utopian ideal that steers the normative statements of political theory. At a deeper level, it appears to be a hope that love will overcome contract and competition, not in some pre-political or a-political realm, but exactly within political membership.9 But the social anthropology implicit in Beiner’s work and explicit in the magisterial work of the modern popes need not function as a utopia for political philosophy.

It may function hermeneutically, providing us with an irreplaceable clue to how we are to acknowledge the human person and her relations in the most realistic terms.

In the introduction, I agreed with Beiner that the challenge to the civic-republican ideal is indeed a serious one today because it reflects the reality of the complex pluriformity of modern social life wherein people are distracted from political participation by all sorts of

8 Ibid., 7. 9 Beiner sees in the civic-republican ideal an opportunity for a polity to overcome modern contractualism. The work of overcoming contractualism entails, for Beiner, the creation of a political unity based on a form of love (friendship). Thus it seems to me that Beiner is trying to address the problems inherent to abandoning an organic conception of communitas, even if according to his categories, he would find organic communitas (and its hierarchical component) disdainful for various reasons.

233 other proximate social relations that deprive them of the “leisure and disinterestedness that a fully committed civic-mindedness would require.” But after working through the analogia communitatis, is complex pluriformity actually a sufficient cause for civic apathy? It seems to me that the problem for Beiner is again “complex space,” perhaps not the mystical byzantinianism of the ancien régime, but a complex social order nonetheless. Are we being asked again to buy the story that the solution to complex social space is simple political space?

A Leonine read of Beiner’s civic-republican ideal would not see the pluriformity of social commitment as corrosive of the hope for political friendship, but rather as its very condition. If the analogia communitatis is indeed a determination of the Divine Wisdom ordered to the flourishing of the human person and human communitas, then the communitates that comprise the hierarchy are not social over against the political, or pre-political against the political, or domestic against the political, or private against the political. They are not subject to one imperative claim or to steering toward a utopian ideal. Rather, the munus of each communitas is to form persons, per the prerogatives of each communitas, capable of exactly the sort of love that defines Beiner’s hope: friendship. It is worth asking then if we should direct our attention, not to an ideal or a utopia, but rather to precisely this array of communitates in order to realize the moral formation Beiner implicitly requires.

What is that moral formation? Recall that in the introduction, Beiner characterizes the utopian ideal as follows:

citizens motivated by the apprehension of a common good rather than by merely private interests; civic unity rather than an aggregate of subcommunities at cross- purposes to each other; engaged citizens rather than passive and indifferent ones; citizens who treat each other as co-citizens rather than as strangers, competitors, or parties to a contractual arrangement [...].10

10 Ronald Beiner, Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, (Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), 6.

234

In other words, Beiner’s citizenship is characterized principally by the possession of the virtues of (at least) prudence, justice, generosity, and temperance, and by the normativity of self-gift. But where do human persons find the moral formation required for such a character? And are “civic-republicanism” or “civic virtue” sufficient descriptors of that character? Without re-entering the communitarian-liberal debate, of which Beiner was an important part, we can affirm with Leo that this description of character has as much to do with the ultimate human vocation to beatitude as it has to do with the temporal human vocation to political participation. Furthermore, with regard to the question of moral formation, we can affirm with Leo that social pluriformity is precisely what is required if institutional life is to actually correspond to the human need to cultivate virtuous character and the capacity to give the self. Social pluriformity need not function in our moral vision as a problem to be counteracted for the sake of steering more directly toward a utopia. Neither does it need to function as an ideal to be forever approached. It can function as a “clue to understanding the real.”

Leo’s anxiety at the beginning of Sapientiae Christianae is relevant here. Modernity presents us with an amazing menu of human goods that quite easily distract the human animal from the cultivation of the virtues necessary for recognizing self-gift as an ideal. In fact, this menu appears to be designed to do one of two things. It either makes virtue and self-gift seem to be preeminently political, terminating in the fascism that lies at the other end of univocal predications of communitas. Or it makes virtue and self-gift seem to be poisonous, corrosive of authentic human liberty, terminating in the deepest individualisms that lie at the other end of equivocal predications of communitas. If we are to become persons

235 capable of virtuous self-gift even in the political sphere, then the rich imbrication of communitates is where the requisite character must be shaped. One cannot have the one without the other. The rich imbrication may itself be read as one of the “clues” that illuminate the vocation of the human substance, thus further enabling the proper acknowledgement of the person. As Leo teaches, the state must indeed contribute via its proper munus to the creation of this rich, complex space. But a variety of other communitates are additionally responsible for making the human vocation to political citizenship intelligible as a site of individual and social moral action.

Why is this the case? As I stated in the introduction, social pluriformity can be interpreted from a philosophical and theological perspective as the pluriform manifestation of the Lord’s singular goodness. In other words, social pluriformity is the proliferating context in which we make the likeness of the Lord present in creation through virtuous action and self-gift. Though Leo’s focus is on the triumvirate of Church, state, and family, I also noted in the introduction that the move beyond the traditional doctrine of the two spheres signifies that the theological-political problem is an expansive one indexed to the pluriform reality of human relations and needs. As there are multitudes of angels, each created to manifest uncreated goodness in a created mode, so there are multitudes of social relations in which creatures may image the Creator. The rationalization and bureaucratization of modern life sees all this plurality as pointless, or superfluous, or distracting. This is the reason nationalist revolutions eliminated religious orders. Their contemplative vocation could not be interpreted as a cause of goodness in society. If the religious orders were to maintain a public reality, they had to make cheese and beer instead. But even in the more benign setting of the theological conversation about the 1,000 Italian musicians, the anxiety

236 remains: what do we do with all this unitive activity that is not economic, not political, not religious?

The fact that citizens of liberal democracies do not appear to be capacitated with the virtue required for Beiner’s civic-republican ideal thus does not necessarily indicate that the civic-republican dream of 1789 is now best seen as nothing more than a utopia capable of steering political philosophy. It could rather indicate that we live in the republican utopia of

1789, and we do not like it. Consider it. We were told that citizenship would restore the broken relations of nature and history. We were told that political friendship would finally liberate us from the mediations and obscurations of the old orders, where priests and aristocrats told us they were necessary for our proper formation. This is the great liberal dream. Mazzini even promised us a new epoch of universalized civic republicanism, a new religion of humanity and the further incarnation of the divine idea. But as I have suggested throughout this work, all we got from this promise was a mandate to work for empty visions of liberty and for vacuous forms of equality among our supposed fratres. As Mazzini understood so well, we were actually neglecting fraternity. Had we trained our social imaginations on the ideal of fraternity, we would have quite naturally had to count the personal cost of restoring the broken relations of nature and history. That is, we would have developed an account of human duty. This restorative work is a duty – it costs – because it is the work of virtuous self-gift. But virtuous self-gift is an ongoing rational activity not easily comprehended by animals focused on liberty from and equality to others. Given that we have indeed neglected fraternity and focused almost exclusively on liberty and equality, we quite easily avoided the moral demands of the social order we were constructing. The social order provides us with no hermeneutic by which to interpret duty or sacrificial action. Our concern is not duty or sacrifice at all. Our concern is protection from, liberty from,

237 separation from. If one of the goals of destroying the ancien régime was the elimination of old orders of duty in favor of new orders of rights and liberties, then it was actually necessary that the modern civic-republican ideal of fraternité remain unattainable in order for the entire order to stand to our social imaginary as the imperative it still is: the duty to work for the continual elimination of duty. How can this be a moral demand, let alone a demand that must be realized here and now?

In light of the analogia communitatis, Beiner’s characterization of the civic-republican ideal as a utopian concept providing normative steering for political philosophy easily leaves each citizen individually looking to the state as the institution primarily tasked with creating virtuous citizens. Indeed, it is the need of the state itself for a united citizenry that demands that we work tirelessly for the civic-republican ideal. But looking to the state in this way, out of all associational formations, can be read as the exact cause of our civic apathy. If the communitas asking me to make the moral sacrifices necessary to become a virtuous person is itself the communitas that has liberated me from the duties traditionally associated with membership in virtue-causing institutions, it is unclear why I would want to make the sacrifices necessary for the civic-republican ideal in the first place. The dream of 1789 can be interpreted, in other words, as a true utopia – a social nowhere.

Given the reality of my membership in a wide array of communitates, why would I want to imagine the political sphere as the primary sphere of my moral activity? What could it possibly be about the political sphere alone that could occasion my desire to give myself?

As the Italian nationalists, following Mazzini, knew perfectly well, when we propose the nation as the whole to which we should donate ourselves, it is important to use our vision of order to recast that nation itself as some other kind of communitas. Often enough, the nation is recast as a communitas bound together not only by history, law, language, and geography,

238 but by blood. But in the case of Mazzini, we see other options. He recasts the nation as a communitas more akin to a synagogue or a parish, tasked not only with promoting fraternity, but with incarnating the divine in a given chronotope. For Mazzini then, the ultimate source of the moral energy behind the imperative to work for the civic-republican ideal lies in the human capacity to incarnate the divine in history.

This is a lot to ask of the citizen, perhaps especially today, when political relation can seem lost within an array of far more proximate identity communities. Even matrimonial, familial, and ecclesial memberships now exist alongside other voluntary choices expressive of the individual person’s desire to be this or that sort of person. So now, it seems much more likely that the human animal would interpret the vocation to self-gift in terms of the many wholes of which she is a part. In other words, instead of proposing the civic-republican ideal as an imperative that demands our very moral formation, shouldn’t we propose social pluriformity as the hermeneutical key to understanding why and how the civic-republican ideal could ever be attractive in the first place? If Beiner is correct and we should find the civic-republican ideal normatively attractive, if this is truly the condition of engaging in sound political philosophy, then we should not repeat the mistake of asking the modern state to bear burdens it was not created to bear. We quickly grow weary of its failure to bear those same burdens. It is a short step from this weariness to the belief that the political sphere is, ultimately, a tragic comedy only understandable from a cynical, ironic perspective.

Irony like this can even affect our ability to assess other forms of communitas, such as the

1,000 Italian musicians.

On the other hand, an analogical conception of the communitates that make up the institutional powers responsible for forming virtuous, self-giving citizens corresponds more closely to the vocation of the human person to cause good in others, and so to become the

239 sort of animal states rightly desire in the first place. An analogical conception of communitas thus relieves the state - not to mention the Church and the family - of the burden of setting unrealizable imperatives in their own name. The analogy recognizes that all communitates – even groups of musicians – exist hermeneutically, providing us with the clues necessary to discerning the human vocation to image the Lord in creation, manifesting his goodness through our social action.

If Charles Taylor is right, then a “social imaginary” – a way of imagining and being in social order – comes with a moral demand that may be understood as un-realizable or realizable. By moral demand, we should understand Taylor to be speaking of the imperative to create persons and relations capable of corresponding to something external to themselves, be it a communion of saints, a future utopia, a cosmic order, a primal state of nature, or some other imperative. I suggested in the introduction that Hittinger’s work on the social aspects of the imago Dei is essential for understanding the burden of this project. I want to return to Hittinger in order to say more about the imperative that persons and social orders correspond to something beyond themselves.

II. Leo XIII and Social Anthropology

By questioning whether or not it is adequate to follow Beiner in characterizing civic- republican citizenship as a utopian ideal that simply steers political philosophy, we are entering further into contemporary iterations of how to thematize fraternité in modern politics. As I have noted, after 1789 it was not difficult for modern political regimes to thematize liberty and equality. In doing so, modern regimes made a moral demand that our vision of social order correspond not to a reality beyond the social order (such as the communion of saints, a future utopia, or a cosmic order) but to individual human substance.

Rather than viewing social order hermeneutically as a “clue” to the real, and thus as a

240 constitutive aspect of understanding the nature and vocation of the human person, modern regimes proposed a vacuous definition of the human person as a will capable of engaging all relations under the “genus of commercial contract.” The perfection of our capacity to execute commercial contracts became the social imperative.

In the introduction, I summarized Russell Hittinger’s intervention in this issue.

Hittinger suggests that from the perspective of Christian theological anthropology, the doctrine of the imago Dei is not only a doctrine affirming the unique dignity of the individual human substance. The doctrine also features a social aspect. The modern popes - Leo XIII chief among them - illuminated the social aspect of the imago Dei in order to counteract the promise that society could use citizenship to restore authentically human fraternity by making society in the image of the contracting consumer. According to Hittinger, this social aspect of the imago Dei is constituted by the vocation of human persons to image, in the created multiplicity and pluriformity of our social relations, what exists simply in the Lord: namely, the Lord’s goodness. The social aspect of the imago Dei is thus not a recognition that humans are their relations. It is, rather, a recognition that human relations image the Triune

Lord in being perfectible, imitative (which is to say, accidental) sites of moral action in which humans manifest the Lord’s goodness.

As far as I know, Leo never suggests that human communitas is analogous to the relations that are the Triune Lord. This may be attributed to his Thomism, by which he would have understood that only the Triune Lord is his relations. In the created order, no such statement is possible. Whatever analogies might be proper and helpful when speaking of the Creator and creatures, it would have seemed obvious to Leo that having relations to others is not easily analogous to being relation. This is the case with all analogical predication.

A creature can become good only via participation. We do not say that creatures become

241 goodness itself. A creature’s relations, like a creature’s goodness, are always already participated in, infinitely distant from, and utterly dependent on the Divine Goodness. Were a creature capable of becoming goodness or relation, the creature would be capable of becoming the Creator. But this is not the only implication. In time, creatures can neither become their relations to others, nor become others. Instead, their sociality, like every other participated predicate, is never finished. Whereas the individual human substance possesses an integrity precisely as substance, human accidents possess a provisional quality in as much as they are susceptible to cultivation, perversion, and diminution. And whatever finality we can discern in the accidents of the human substance, whatever accomplishments of ideals or realizations of potentialities, the end of human accidents is not resolution into identity with the Creator. It is instead the perfection of worship.

So, with regard to the human substance’s participation in and imaging of the Divine

Goodness, human persons accomplish this vocation through being in relation, which is a form of action. Given that all truly human action is moral action, and so never a private, individual affair, but always a social reality of causing or detracting from good, social relations constitute the primary created site in which human persons live out their vocation as image bearers. We are truly, as Basil the Great teaches, “artisans of the likeness of Christ.”

In a marriage, a family, social relations, like groups of musicians, political relations like citizenship, and in religious relationships, human persons find themselves not only as individual, rational substances, but as volitional neighbors tasked with bringing about goodness in creation. Throughout the work, I have referred to this as the vocation to cause good, or to cultivate the divine image in the self and in the other. And now we may add to this terminology Taylor’s language of the hermeneutical clue. The rich pluriformity of human communitas is not a problem that must be managed by social authority. Neither is it an

242 unrealizable ideal or utopia for which we must strive. Rather, it is a natural given that communicates theologically to us concerning both the structure of reality and human action in accordance with that reality.

Hittinger performs this work on the social aspect of the imago Dei in a theological and philosophical context that is concerned with the category of relation. In the long modern project of negotiating the patrimony of Aristotle, there is a developing notion that

Aristotelian substance is somehow related to an individualism we perceive as corrosive of authentic human existence. W. Norris Clarke, David Schindler, and Tracey Rowland, for example, affirm variants of the beautiful thesis that we “are only ourselves in relation to others, yet in relation to others we are truly ourselves. We must be abroad for the sake of others if we are to be at home with ourselves.”11 Rowland, for her part, suggests that we must pursue this line of bringing relation nearer and nearer to substance in order to out- narrate alternative forms of solidarity, such as the one we find “within the Liberal tradition in the concept of fraternity [...].” The problem with liberalism’s fraternity, according to

Rowland, is that it is “based upon a common citizenship of a given polity,” whereas an authentic solidarity would be based on a theological anthropology derived from scripture.12

After considering 1789’s fraternité, we can affirm Rowland’s characterization of liberal solidarity but also condition it by attending to the ways in which liberal solidarity is not simply a search for national or political unity. It is also a perpetual forestalling of human unity in favor of aggrandizing liberty and equality. The fraternité of citizenship was supposed to restore the broken relations of nature and history because it was able to deliver on an identification of the national task with the human vocation: political membership here, now, in this polity was also simultaneously a restoration, a repristination, of the fraternal relations

11 This is again Aidan Nichols’ useful summary of the project in Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition, xiii. 12 Ibid., 43.

243 humans had before the old orders were made. 1789’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is the befuddled expression of this identification. The Declaration identifies the modern political vocation: the dual search for the concrete solidarity that is supposed to obtain in an historical, cultural form called nation, and the universal solidarity that is supposed to obtain in a transcendent, biological genus called human. How national and cultural differences are to serve universal solidarity is a question that goes unanswered. And the question of how universal solidarity is to be realized within national and cultural differences is similarly neglected. This is our current situation, though Catholics in the west feel it less acutely than they did in 19th century France, Germany, Italy, etc. Now, various migrant populations, and perhaps especially Muslims in the West, live with the consequences of our inability to answer these questions.

The broken relations of nature and history are supposedly going to be restored by two commitments. First, the commitment to the concrete, national communitas is now a commitment to a communitas even stranger than a geographically bound nation. It is commitment to communitas as tolerance, pluralism, and multiculturalism. This commitment is based on a deeper univocation regarding the word communitas and how it is predicated of human groups. That is, authentic human communitas becomes ontologically identical, not to any act or feature of a group as a group, but to a mechanism designed to overcome difference. This vision of communitas is essential if persons are to remain “unencumbered selves.”13 Second, the commitment to the universal, human communitas is now a commitment to something actually unrecognizable as communitas. It is commitment to the only thing that remains universal and stable: individual rights. This commitment is based on a new equivocation regarding the word communitas and how it is predicated of human groups. As

13 The phrase is Michael Sandel’s.

244 Kenneth L. Grasso puts it, even the “deepest commitments” to our form of political life we now see as having their “foundation not in universal truths about human nature and politics, but simply in our culture’s particular traditions and preferences.”14 That is, we simultaneously speak of rights as universal and as human constructions. They are everywhere valid, not on account of their correspondence to anything beyond themselves, but on account of their status as expressions of human will. After equivocating about our communitas in this way, politics is finished and rights are all that is left.

It goes without saying that Leo could never have foreseen any of this. But as

Catholic theology seeks new ways of addressing the hopes and fears of the late modern world, we still require habits of predication, modes of theologizing and philosophizing, and humane ways of imagining sociality that correspond to the needs of human persons and the communitates they form. Taylor argues that our current social imaginary sees society as an instrument designed to perform very limited and specific tasks: 1) to serve the needs of ordinary life; 2) to meet these needs through mutual services; and 3) to engage in this mutual service as free, equal, rights-bearing individuals.15 In this way, by ministering directly to the individual, society (including politics) “is seen as an instrument for something prepolitical.”16

Membership in modern communitates is ordered to a primordial ministry that treats the human person as something isolable. According to Taylor, this vision of the modern social order, with the natural, individual rights-bearer at its heart, encourages a certain distortion in our thinking. He suggests that we are prone to interpret this “rise of ‘individualism’” as something that happens “at the expense of ‘community.’”17 But, cautions Taylor, “the new

14 Kenneth L. Grasso, “Introduction: Theology and the American Civil Conversation,” in Theology and Public Philosophy, ed. Kenneth L. Grasso and Cecilia Rodriguez Castillo, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), xix. 15 Cf. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3-22. 16 Ibid., 19. 17 Cf. Ibid., 17-18.

245 understanding of the individual has as its inevitable flip side a new understanding of sociality, the society of mutual benefit, whose functional differentiations are ultimately contingent and whose members are fundamentally equal.”18

If Taylor is correct, then the contest, it seems to me, is not between modern individualism rooted in a misappropriation of Aristotelian substance vs. postmodern relations rooted in neo-Platonism and/or Jewish and Christian scriptures. Rather, the contest is between rival visions of social order and rival conceptions of the moral demands our social order places on us. If this is the case, it will not do to jettison a philosophy of human substance and a complementary doctrine of the human person as made in the imago Dei for a philosophy of human relations and a complementary doctrine of the human person made in the imago Trinitatis. What is required instead is twofold. First, a philosophical analysis of the analogical reciprocations between the individual person, her social memberships, and the societies of which she is a member. Second, a theological analysis of the analogy between the individual person, sociality, and the Lord. Why is this the case and what does it have to do with Leo?

III. Leo XIII and Theologies Public and Prophetic

In the introduction, I suggested Kristin Heyer’s typology of contemporary

Catholicism’s social witness was helpful, but that her typology of Thomistic and Augustinian modes also obscured elements of Leo’s social magisterium. The latter cannot be sufficiently described in terms of “incarnational humanism” vs. “eschatological humanism,” or “public

Catholicism” vs. “prophetic Catholicism.” I then stated that these binaries seem to me to correspond to Arne Rasmussen’s identification of two different modes of thinking about the

Church and its relationship to the world. One mode Rasmussen identifies as “political

18 Ibid., 18.

246 theology,” and the other mode he calls “theological politics.” My contention in the introduction was that both modes fail to the extent that they do not properly analogize theology and politics. According to Rasmussen’s way of using the terms, “political theology” is a mode of making theology politically relevant. Heyer, following Murray, would consider this the more incarnational mode, expressive of the Christian desire to dialogue and cooperate with the world. “Theological politics,” on the other hand, is a mode of exposing the politics that flows from Christian theology. Heyer, following Murray, would consider this the more eschatological mode, expressive of the Christian desire to measure the world according to the Gospel and to call the world to conversion.

Now I would like to relate Leo’s social thought to some aspects of “political theology” and “theological politics.” After this, I will compare Heyer’s typology to another typology constructed by Tracey Rowland. In doing so, my suggestion is that the difficult work of fitting Leo’s social magisterium into these contemporary typologies should be a warning sign to us that we are engaged in a habit of thinking about our situation that is not constructive. In the end, my criticism is less of the typologies themselves and more of the styles they seek to clarify. If my analysis is correct, these styles are engaged in a mode of reasoning about Church and world, grace and nature that seeks what Rowan Williams cautions against: “a theory that would allow final security and ‘finishedness’ to any form of political life. The claims of such a theory would be, ultimately, anti-political because anti- human: denials of death.”19 Christian reasoning though - especially about the res sacras in temporalibus - should acknowledge that it is not given to humans to establish a “final security.” If the human person is always about the vocation of cultivating the image of the

Lord’s goodness, then the desire to finish the task of politics might demonically correspond

19 Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55-72, at 69.

247 to the desire to finish this vocation. Leo’s social magisterium, on the other hand, demonstrates the humility required of the human creature and of human communitates. Both persons and our relations are to be always engaged in what is ultimately an awkward, provisional, revisable task: living together toward a common good. The theological response can indeed be, “When is it time to play again?”

IIIa. Leo and “political theology”

Whether we are to use Rasmussen’s or Heyer’s terminology to describe “public” or

“political” theology, it is clear that Leo’s social magisterium has much affinity with it. In the way this mode is described, the natural law plays a prominent role in promoting cooperation and dialogue between persons and groups that are otherwise divided according to a wide array of historical, social, cultural, philosophical, political, and theological differences. The hope is that a robust acknowledgement of a universal, stable human nature, accessible to some degree to the historically contingent mind of human persons and communities, will ground dialogue between diverse groups in a stable consensus regarding non-negotiable fundamentals, such as human rights, for example. The complex history of Catholic natural law reasoning, its relationship to Enlightenment and Romantic epistemologies and cultural anthropologies, and its theological resurgence in the 20th century extends far beyond the scope of my project here. But Tracey Rowland has helpfully described why this approach is currently perceived as problematic. Referring to the conciliar period of the 20th century and the Church’s magisterial affirmation20 of “universal values,” Rowland writes:

[T]he concept of “universal values” is itself highly problematic. It can be understood in at least two senses: first, that there are a range of goods or values that are universally required for human flourishing regardless of the peculiar social circumstances of individuals. However, “universal” can also mean transcending all divisions among traditions or “common” to all traditions. In the first sense, the

20 Rowland is thinking especially of the social magisteria of John XIII and Paul VI, though John Paul II’s is implicated in her criticism in interesting ways.

248 expression is but a synonym for the idea of natural law; in particular, what are now commonly called the “goods of human flourishing.” However, in the second sense, it is a postulation of a belief that there are some values or goods which are common to all traditions, or that different traditions, regardless of their theological pedigree, will reach the same or similar conclusions about the goods of human flourishing.21

This description of the problematic is a useful way into Leo’s relationship to a political or public theology. Rowland herself suggests that Leo is in part responsible for the advent of a “Whig Thomism” that seeks, like political or public theology, to affirm an affinity between Catholicism and liberalism based on the reality of “universal values” in the second sense.22 That is, Leo’s commitment to the rational availability of nature - especially a universal, stable human nature - seems to commit him to the idea that different traditions will eventually arrive at similar conclusions about human flourishing. Rowland’s suggestion gives us the impression that Leo was capable of proposing “universal values” as an ideal to be striven for by Catholics, socialists, and liberals alike. This does not seem quite right to me,

Given Leo’s suspicion that liberalism is not actually an adequate political vision of the human person, and that liberalism does not actually conduce to the human person’s vocation to cause good via her social relations, it is unclear why we should affirm that Leo would think that different traditions would arrive at similar conclusions about human flourishing, let alone the idea that Leo opens the way for “Whig Thomism.” First, consider

Sapientiae Christianae, which we have encountered at length above. Recall that in chapter three we saw that Leo cautioned that the great material advancements achieved by science and

21 Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: after Vatican II, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22 Cf. Ibid., 16: “The belief that it is possible to effect a suynthesis of the Liberal and Thomist traditions is described by George Weigel, one of its contemporary proponents, as the project of ‘Whig Thomism”. It can be traced to the works of nineteenth-century “Liberal Catholics” such as Lord Acton in England and the comte de Montalembert in France. It continues in Jacques Maritain’s efforts to reconcile Thomistic natural law with the Liberal natural right doctrine and his endorsement of the natural rights doctrine in the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. This strategy of reconciling natural law with natural right is prefigured in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and ahs been followe in the encyclicals of John XIII, Paul VI and John Paul II.” While Rowland acknowledges that Leo uses the “rhetoric” of liberalism and avoids trying to synthesize liberalism and Thomism, she nevertheless argues that Leo’s work expresses the lack of “conceptual tools” necessary to deal with liberalism as an “ideology.”

249 industry are corrosive of a theologically accurate account of the human person and of society. There, Leo contends that at the level of society and indeed culture - not simply at the level of theory - modernity presents human persons with an alternative vision of all reality as ordered primarily around the practices of material acquisition, physical security, comfort, and even luxury. The historical, social, and cultural reality of this corrosion is the occasion of the social question as Leo confronts it throughout his magisterium. So, as I suggested in the introduction, Leo’s own historical context and his attention to that context seem to militate against the suggestion that he was confident that if people would simply acknowledge the natural law, society would agree on and work toward securing the goods necessary for human flourishing. The plight of labor under the ideologies fostered by both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism prevents Leo from reasoning according to the natural law in this mode.

And yet we have seen that Leo is consistently committed to the intelligibility of creation and to the universal nature of the human substance, made in the imago Dei. Does it make sense to speak of Leo in terms of Rowland’s first definition of “universal values” as the reality of goods necessary for human flourishing, regardless of contingencies like personal preference or circumstance? It seems to me that this is the more fitting way to describe Leo’s confidence in the intelligibility of creation. I have repeatedly claimed above that Leo sees human nature and sociality as a gift of the Creator, ordained to the end of human beatitude in this life and the next. My particular burden has been to show how the analogia communitatis is expressive of a pluriform sociality attractive to Leo not as some sort of lowest common denominator among varying cultures and traditions, and not attractive as some sort of ethical imperative or utopian ideal to be pursued, but attractive as a normative philosophical and theological statement regarding what human persons require and what

250 they in fact create in order to live humane lives. Leo’s hierarchical, complementary “social imaginary” is thus hermeneutical. It provides society with a clue to understanding the real.

Leo’s vision of the analogia communitatis is most certainly dictated by a conviction that human nature is universal and stable. But again, his own context does not inspire confidence that just any tradition will arrive at such a normative statement regarding social anthropology.

Neither does his context inspire confidence that just any tradition will be able to propose an adequately humane ideal for which to strive.

Consider the historical work I have done in the chapters above. What are Leo’s recommendations for the revitalization of society and for the restoration of the broken relations of nature and history? The public authority of the Catholic Church and the purgative benefits of Catholic philosophy. In other words, Leo presents traditioned, theological agents as both dialogue partners and prophetic challengers to the economic and political liberalism of his day. Leo’s claim is rarely, if ever, that the Church and the state, or the Church and society, or the Church and the economy simply need to arrive at an agreement on an ideal or workable definition of justice, or of liberty, or of equality. His claim is rather, nearly always, that the Church and the state, or the Church and society, or the

Church and the economy alike must submit to the law - natural and revealed - of the

Creator. Moreover, this submission to the law must be carried out according to the unique vocation of each “sphere” of society if the human person is to receive care adequate to all her domestic, social, political, and religious complexity. The rational availability of the

Creator’s law, via both reason and revelation, is the reason a social order can be thought hermeneutical at all.

Leo’s idea of a public or a political theology flows from this last conviction about the formation of society according to the Creator’s law. The Catholic Church’s authority and

251 Catholic philosophy’s rational utility are not based on their ability to establish common ground with divergent traditions. Neither are their authority and utility calculable solely in terms of the efficient accomplishment of certain desirable ends. Rather, authority and utility are calculable primarily in terms of their theological ability to witness publicly and rationally to the givenness of Creation and to the Creator’s providential care for humans in both their individuality and their sociality. As a simple test case, consider Leo’s treatment of liberty, undertaken most directly and systematically in 1888’s Liberats praestantissimum, on human liberty. In that encyclical, Leo’s strategy is not to affirm commonality between the Church and liberal democracy based on their mutual recognition of liberty as a fundamental human endowment. Instead, his strategy is to mount a philosophical argument regarding the insufficiency of liberal accounts of liberty and the superiority of Catholic accounts of the same. But given Leo’s proximity to the temporal power of the papacy, and given the uncertainty of the ultimate fate of that power, the incompatibilities Leo identifies between liberalism and Catholicism are not moments of sectarian rivalry or simply a contest of -isms.

Rather, they are public moments in which the pope is prudentially exercising his magisterial office in accordance with its historical position vis-a-vis societies and regimes. From the perspective of political prudence, Leo’s engagement with the “modern world” proceeds according to theological convictions about the intelligibility of creation and the irreducible necessity of the Church in history for stewarding that intelligibility. It is a scriptural theme after all that humans as individual moral agents and in society can fail to perceive the givenness, the goodness, and the naturalness of creation.23 Thus Leo is indeed a “public” or a “political” theologian in that he addresses Catholic theology to the needs, hopes, and fears of a particular social and political context. However, his effort to be “relevant” to this

23 I have in mind here Aquinas and Leo’s dependence on Romans 1:18ff regarding the privative ability of humans to ignore, and then forget, and then deny that the Lord is known through his effects in creation.

252 context takes the shape of developing a rational argument for the public necessity of the

Church as a guardian of society’s ability to recognize the truly human, the actually natural. In this sense, his political or public theology verges on the prophetic.

IIIb. Leo and “theological politics”

In the introduction, I suggested that Leo’s social magisterium has something to do with two modes of Augustinianism in politics. First, I suggested that though we often portray Leo as an incarnational Thomist focused solely on concordia among the spheres of society, he is not at all averse to following Augustine in recognizing that two different loves order the common life of the two cities. In Humanum genus, this theme is front and center. In

Sapientiae Christianae, the theme endures but is historically contextualized so that the love of self that orders the common life of the earthly city is described in distinctly modern terminology. Rather than being ordered around the love of the Lord as the civitate Dei is, the earthly city is ordered around love of the material benefits and luxuries of science and industry. Second, I suggested that though we often associate Augustinianism in politics with this incompatibility between the two loves of the two cities, Leo also highlights the way in which Augustine affirms that Christian formation is actually good for the regime. To the extent that the Church makes virtuous persons, she makes citizens who are capable of living a more authentically political existence.24 To be sure, this Christian formation must often take the form of prophetic living according to a love that has become unintelligible to the earthly city, but both Augustine and Leo see this prophetic living as authentically public and political, ordered to the realization in time of what will be fully present only in the eschaton.

24 Leo typically has in mind the munera of both the Church and the family in society. From a Leonine perspective, these two communitates, especially through their intimate cooperation, form persons who are able to value cooperation, self-sacrifice, patience, and various forms of union.

253 As I noted in the introduction, Rowan Williams’ work on De civitate Dei is useful here, providing us with a suitable way to understand the enduring relevance of Augustine’s thought for affirming the political in just the way Leo does.25 Williams sounds the charge against Augustine, articulated forcefully by Hannah Arendt, that Augustine repudiates the

“public realm” that had defined ancient politics and its relationship to all other social spheres

(especially the domestic). As Williams describes it, Arendt’s criticism of this repudiation of the public realm is a grave one with stark anthropological consequences:

[W]ithout this public realm of active, creative persons taking responsibility for the integrity and continuation of a form of talking and understanding, we are condemned either to the animal pointlessness of the mere effort to subsist, or to the more typically modern unfreedom of “mass society”, in which financial achievement and reward or security replaces glory and repute, the notion of worthiness to be remembered, and the quality of public action as creative, as formative of a “conversation” extending beyond individual death, is undermined. Society becomes increasingly incapable of intelligent speech, common imagination, increasingly enslaved to idolatrous objectifications, fetishes and slogans.26

Arendt’s charge against Augustine is that Christianity subverts the public by self- consciously embodying a community that marginalizes itself from political authority, lives with an eye only for eschatological glory, and rejects all other forms of belonging that do not correspond to the call to Christian charity. According to Williams’ read of Arendt, this last factor is perhaps the most a-political of them all, for the “bond of charity” encourages the formation of a people that is “essentially wordless. [...] Caritas is, in the Augustinian system, a love which is indifferent to merit and achievement: it sees the bonds between persons as resting simply on their common createdness and equal sinfulness, and thus operates impartially and, in a sense, impersonally.”27

25 Cf. Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55- 72. 26 Ibid., 56. 27 Ibid., 56-7. Interestingly enough, it appears that Arendt’s criticism of Augustinian caritas would also be a valid criticism of liberal egalité. For Arendt, ancient politics are attractive in that they provide humans with a venue for the pursuit of excellence and distinction, conceived of here as contributions to culture and not simply as personal gains. To the extent that distinction is the most loathsome feature of the ancien régime, and to the extent

254 Williams’ response to Arendt’s criticism of Augustine strikes me as interestingly

Leonine. And if Williams is correct - and I think he is - then it’s actually the case that Leo is interestingly Augustinian. Williams argues against Arendt that Augustine does not so much give us a politics as a “theological anthropology and a corporate spirituality.” In doing so,

Augustine demonstrates throughout De civitate Dei that “the political and the spiritual are not separate concerns [...] the spiritual is the authentically political.”28 What does Williams mean by this? His answer throws my work here on Leo’s social magisterium into beautiful,

Augustinian relief. Williams suggests that instead of repudiating the public and political for a sectarian, eschatological community ordered around the great equalizer of charity, Augustine is “engaged in a redefinition of the public itself, designed to show that it is life outside the

Christian community which fails to be truly public, authentically political. The opposition is not between public and private, church and world, but between political virtue and political vice. At the end of the day, it is the secular order that will be shown to be ‘atomistic’ in its foundations.”29

Both Augustine and Leo are engaged in a prophetic challenge to the social anthropologies of their times. But their challenge is not issued from a non-political or a- political space (wherever that may be). Neither Augustine nor Leo lives in the wilderness.

Rather, their prophetic challenge comes from a very “incarnational” or “public” concern that human beings require certain goods for their flourishing in this life and for beatitude in the next. Williams puts it this way: that egalité becomes the new form of caritas around which the political community is ordered, Arendt exposes to us both the ways in which the modern social project sharply diverges from ancient conceptions of society and politics and how Christianity has been instrumental in the slow construction of that divergence. Mazzini may have been correct: 1789 simply brought the epoch of Christendom to a close and distilled from that patrimony the liberty, equality, and fraternity necessary to surpass it. What is required then? An acceptance of modernity after 1789 as dilute Christianity and eventually atheism? A rejection of modernity in favor of a new version of a former mode (medievalism, neo-paganism, etc.)? 28 Ibid., 58. 29 Ibid.

255 A social practice which impedes human beings from offering themselves to God in fact denies that central impulse in human nature which Augustine defined as the unquenchable desire for God and his truth. It provides ersatz gratifications, finite substitutes for the infinite. And as such it diminishes humanity itself, in that it takes away the one principle that can rightly order our wills and affections. [...] Thus if the pagan res publica is deficient as a commonwealth, it is not because Augustine polemically sets a standard of unattainably high righteousness or religious probity, but because a society incapable of giving God his due fails to give its citizens their due - as human beings made for the quest and enjoyment of God. Where there is no jus towards God, there is no common sense of what is due to human beings, no juris consensus.30

In chapter three, we observed Leo’s contention with the political practice of separatism. In chapter four, we observed Leo’s contention with the social practice of divorce. In both cases, Leo’s argument is not that the res publica is failing to live up to an

“unattainably high righteousness or religious probity.” Leo does not demand that we measure the res publica by an unattainable ideal or a future utopia. Rather, his argument is that the res publica is simply failing to exercise its native munera. It does not correspond to the real and so fails to be the sign that it ought to be: namely the sign that humans are called to communitas in order to manifest the Lord’s goodness in creation. As I showed in chapter three, Leo does not envision the munera of the state as including the spiritual as spiritual.

Rather, the state has care for the spiritual needs of its citizenry in a mode peculiar to the state: a temporal, material mode ordered to fostering the conditions necessary for what

Williams is describing as authentic political life in the sight of the Creator. Without exercising this temporal care for the spiritual needs of the citizens, the state does not somehow fail to be as spiritual as the Church would like it to be. Instead, the state fails to be a commonwealth. Leo, like Augustine, is interested in speaking prophetically and eschatologically for the sake of the temporal order and human flourishing.

For this reason, it is insufficient to characterize Leo as an integralist, where integralism is defined as the conviction that “the Church, though her own vocation be

30 Ibid., 59.

256 exclusively supernatural, nonetheless has the right, when majoritarian, to dictate to natural society’s shapers the form their work should take.”31 If Williams is correct in his interpretation of De civitate Dei, and if I am correct in my characterization of Leo’s

Augustinianism, then Leo’s social magisterium should be interpreted as working in a very peculiar type of “prophetic” or “eschatological” mode. This mode of “theological politics” is interested in the incompatibilities between the two cities, not simply because the state fails to live up to the Gospel, but because the Church understands its prophetic vocation as existing for the sake of the res sacras in temporalibus. As de Lubac suggested, the spiritual makes the truly temporal possible. We might also borrow Murray’s terms then, and say that Leo is interested in the way the eschatological makes the incarnational truly authentic. As Leo states emphatically whenever he treats the virtue of religion, the political regime that does not acknowledge God is not simply insufficiently Catholic. It is insufficiently political.32 Without the proper acknowledgment of the final end of the human person, human communitates are malformed.

IIIc. Leo XIII and “postmodern Augustinian Thomism”

Tracey Rowland’s typology of modern modes of Catholic engagement with the world, or society, or the state is useful here as we consider Leo’s social magisterium and its relationship to modern modes of doing Catholic theology in relation to modernity.

According to Rowland, Leo should be associated with the “Whig Thomism” of Lord Acton and Montalembert in the 19th century, Murray and Maritain at mid-20th century, and

31 I borrow this definition of integralism from Aidan Nichols’ foreword to Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: after Vatican II, ix. 32 The most systematic treatment of this issue is his 1885 letter on the Christian constitution of states, Immortale Dei. Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae quotes this encyclical once, and in a rather attenuated fashion.

257 George Weigel, John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Robert George in our own day.33 Rowland contrasts “Whig Thomism” with another tradition of Thomistic thought she names

“postmodern Augustinian Thomism.” Whereas “Whig Thomism” adopts pieces of the

“conceptual apparatus of the Liberal tradition, and, in some cases, its substantive content,”

Rowland’s “postmodern Augustinian Thomism” provides modern Catholicism with another method of interpreting and addressing liberalism and (late) modernity. According to

Rowland, Alasdair MacIntyre embodies this latter form of Thomism in that he combines 1) the desire to overcome liberal modernity; 2) an Augustinian emphasis on grace, memory, narrative, and the relationship of the secular and sacral orders; and 3) a Thomist emphasis on natural law, the virtues, and universal moral norms.

In this presentation of modern iterations of the Thomist tradition, we can see an imperfect but illuminating parallel to Heyer’s typology of the public and prophetic, or the incarnational and the eschatological. On Rowland’s reading, “Whig Thomism” attempts to accommodate liberalism, seeking a way of addressing the world in terms that are “relevant” to the world. To the extent that this is true, “Whig Thomism” may be associated with a more public, incarnational mode that emphasizes continuity and complementarity - usually founded on natural law’s universality (in the second sense) - between Church and world.

“Postmodern Augustinian Thomism,” on the other hand, avoids accommodating liberalism by seeking, via ressourcement within its own narrative history, a way of addressing the world in terms that call the world to account and, ultimately, to conversion. This mode of Thomism seeks only that “relevance” appropriate to the Gospel’s ability to still the human heart’s restlessness. To the extent that this is true, “postmodern Augustinian Thomism” may be

33 Ibid. Thomas Pink is currently at work differentiating Leo’s social magisterium from Maritain’s political philosophy and is in fact constructing something like an argument for the enduring intelligibility of Christendom as a political option - something Rowland would appear to support.

258 associated with a more prophetic, eschatological mode that emphasizes - especially in a late- modern, liberal context - incompatibility, rupture, and a MacIntyrean contest of traditions.

Rowland creates this typology of “the Thomist tradition” in order to question the concept of culture (or lack thereof) at work in “Whig Thomism,” in Vatican II’s Gaudium et

Spes, and in post-conciliar Catholic theology. According to Rowland, this broad swath of

Catholic theology is characterized by a naive “openness to modernity” that tries to avoid integralism by affirming the autonomy of human culture and the secular order. This naive openness, however, is so optimistic about the possibility of consensus between the Church and the modern world that it fosters a very specific and dangerous neglect. Drawing from the work of Charles Taylor, Rowland suggests that the bulk of modern Catholic theology has failed to perform

a cultural analysis - an understanding that clusters of values fit together into constellations that become embodied in the practices and beliefs of individuals and the institutions in which they work, and further, and most significantly, that one can have, for example, a culture which embodies a belief in rights and duties without having any interest at all in a notion of justice that is linked to a transcendent truth, including the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.34

The consequences of neglecting this analysis, according to Rowland, are several. But perhaps the most significant consequence is modern Catholicism’s inability to appreciate the ways in which liberalism constitutes not just a constellation of modern ideas in need of repudiation, but an entire civilization incompatible with the Gospel. As she states with regard to John

Paul II’s social magisterium, when it came to counteracting Communism, it was clear that

Communism presented Catholicism with “an entire philosophical system or ideology which had taken a concrete form as the content of a particular culture, understood as Kultur, or civilization.”35 But on Rowland’s read of things, it is unclear that the Council or any of the

34 Ibid., 15. 35 Ibid., 42.

259 modern popes prior to Benedict XVI understand the same cultural dynamic when it comes to liberalism. Too often, when it comes to Catholicism’s relationship to liberalism, the relationship is described in terms of complementarity or genetic relation, and not in terms of dialectical tension or even necessary incompatibility.

In this case too, I think the reading of Leo is insufficient. Thankfully, it is neither my job nor my desire to describe Leo as a “postmodern Augustinian Thomist,” whatever benefits may redound to Catholic theology from that happy coincidence of terms. Instead, I only want to highlight that Rowland’s analysis - much like Murray’s in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s - reduces Leo’s social magisterium to an obsession with binaries such as Church-state or

Church-world, or with modernism as expressed in other -isms: individualism, socialism, liberalism, etc. One of the goals of this project, however, has been to show Leo’s sensitivity not only to the existence of modern theories, but also to their anthropological, social, and cultural consequences. This sensitivity is expressed chiefly in his realization that the Church herself was no longer the sole object of concern for the spiritual authority in its ongoing dialogue with the civil authority. That is, the theological-political problem under Leo’s magisterium begins to countenance a more expansive notion of the political. Indeed, Leo’s social magisterium should be read as the beginning of Holy See’s deepening realization that, in the liberal, modern epoch, the Church’s objects of concern will continually proliferate according to society’s neglect of the created nature of the human. This must be the case where the Church’s munus to conduct souls to beatitude is exercised in a context that is becoming more and more misanthropic.

It is true enough that Leo did not possess the familiarity with Christianity and liberalism’s incompatibility that late modern popes possess. But given the amount of work it takes to fit Leo’s social magisterium within the abovementioned typologies, it seems to me

260 that this is not necessarily a shortcoming. Whether they intend it or not, the structure of both Heyer and Rowland’s typologies suggests that one is either stuck affirming or denying the goodness of a given political regime. Indeed, we cannot even speak of 1,000 Italian musicians playing a song without wringing our hands about fascism and beauty. It remains the case that we continually encounter fears about accommodation and sectarianism and that identifying and criticizing the shortcomings of these approaches amounts to sufficient analysis. One of the refreshing aspects of magisterial social teaching though is that it does not pretend to have the luxury of accommodation or sectarianism. Indeed, trying to imagine any modern pope as either an accommodationist or a sectarian is a very frustrating endeavor.

Leo’s own incompatibility with our contemporary typologies, especially when seen in relation to his historical context, illustrates rather fully the need and the possibility of approaching the social and the political with a humility not always associated with sectarianism and a prudence not always associated with accommodation.

The untidy relationship between faith and reason, law and virtue, nature and grace, public and private, Church and world is a sign of the restlessness that characterizes one of

Leo’s favorite themes regarding the res sacra in temporalibus: the journey to beatitude. In

Williams’ words, “real temporality is [...] vulnerable, and so also more open to radical hope

(hope in God). It is the awkwardness and provisionality, the endlessly revisable character

(morally speaking) of our social and political relationships, that [...] keeps us faithful to the insight of humility - that we are timebound in everything here below, that our love is an unceasing search.”36 The Christian desires for accommodation and sectarianism alike represent a temptation identified by Williams as the promise of “final security” and

“finishedness.” To find a way of accommodating the Gospel to, or preserving the Gospel

36 Williams, “Politics and the Soul,” 69.

261 from, the culture or the state or the world can become a way of eliminating the risk of acting prudentially in complex situations that require nothing less than Christian charity. Leo’s social magisterium, like the bulk of papal social teaching, does not have the luxury of working for this “final security.”

I call these luxuries because they are expressive of two very attractive options. As

Williams puts it, Christians may fall prey to two temptations:

an elitist concept of human commonalty [sic] (immortality as the acquisition of a remembered name) and a nostalgia for some escape from the shapelessness and uncertainty of temporal existence as such (the Manichaean isolation of a pure and inviolate, ahistorical soul in us, the Platonist promise of ecstasy, the Donatist quest for absolute institutional purity, the Pelagian hope to achieve purity of will, unconditioned moral liberty).37

That is, we can imagine the life of the human res sacra in temporalibus in terms of a desire to participate so deeply, or to escape so completely, that we become immortal. Shades of the typologies return. For the desire to participate deeply is another way of speaking of the incarnational humanism that looks for a way for to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. And the desire to escape completely is another way of speaking of the eschatological humanism that prophetically calls us toward an eventual glory.

Some method of analogizing between the two is required. There must be a way of doing more than “balancing the two in tension” or affirming that Catholics are particularly adept at using the phrase “both/and.” It strikes me that a theological anthropology capable of affirming the reality of the human substance as made in the imago Dei is absolutely necessary. It is the foundation of our enduring commitment to participate deeply in the work of recognizing, defending, and promoting the humanum. It inspires the incarnational humanist, repeatedly commends the universal validity of the natural law to us, and makes cooperation among incompatible traditions a matter of justice. In other words, the human

37 Williams, “Politics and the Soul,” 69.

262 substance, made in the imago Dei is one of the chief antidotes to the temptation to finish or secure the political task, to pretend that it is possible to find a chronotope in which we can finally stop working for the good. But it is also the case that a theological anthropology capable of affirming human relationality as the site of our restless effort to cultivate the likeness of Christ is no less necessary. Unlike the substantial unity of the human person, which is ever in need of affirmation and protection, human relationship is never finished or complete or secure. Like all other accidents, it is in via. Relationship is the pluriform and complex space where erotic, hopeful desire for purity and goodness manifests the Lord’s goodness.

Leo’s social magisterium, and especially the analogia communitatis as a central component of its theological coherence, is well aware of both of these aspects of the imago

Dei. Because the analogia communitatis makes a moral demand on the persons and communitates comprising it, calling them to recognize in human communitas a certain way of envisioning order and its relationship to both the Lord and to human nature, we must have a way of accounting for the manner in which it makes demands of the Church’s social vision. Seeing the human as both a substantial unity and as a relational being whose manifold social relations are the context of the journey to beatitude, Leo cannot call Christians to separate themselves from the world. They are indeed citizens of the earthly city. Neither can he call

Christians to acquiesce before the world’s shadowplays of success, power, goodness, or truth. They are indeed citizens of heaven.

Conclusion

After nationalist fascism and in the midst of consumerist fascism, after world wars and in the midst of terrorism and ecological suicide, after revolutions and in the midst of global capital’s triumph, I want the theologians to ask the 1,000 Italian musicians about the

263 possibility of playing together again. And I want that to suffice as a theological response to the sublimity of seeing 1,000 Italians doing something in unison. Why? Because the request signifies a desire to be a part of the performance, to be a part of the communitas that makes music possible. And that desire seems to me to be the perfect analogy for the moral energy

(read: love) required for the many sorts of friendship that are necessary if humans are to be formed into persons capable of seeing many sorts of friendship as goods in the first place.

What if the theologians were to accompany the musicians with an eye solely for accompaniment? What if the theological response to the musicians was a request for friendship? I’m not at all sure how we would characterize such a “Benedict,” or “Francis,” or

“Dominic” option. Maybe we wouldn’t use the term option at all. Maybe we would have to affirm that by nature and by grace we are moved to love the goodness of fraternity as Christ loved it: by sacrificing ourselves for it. If the Lord of creation is the Lord on the cross, then there must be some relation between the love of the Creator, who walked with the humans in the garden in the cool of the day, and the love of the Crucified, who bled in the garden in the middle of the night. The relation between Eden and Golgotha would provide us with a hermeneutical clue to the real: that human persons, made in the imago Dei, have been called to a similar array of friendships, indexed to the many hierarchical and complementary needs of the human substance.

Irony would wither this array. But Leo’s social magisterium, with the analogia communitatis at the center of its theological and philosophical coherence, is an important antidote to irony. Leonine analogy is a way of affirming that the theological task proceeds according to the deeper, eschatological logic of creation and incarnation: that all of reality – including political participation and music making – comes from and is returning to the

Lord, who graciously tasks us with manifesting his goodness along the way.

264 CONCLUSION

This project has been a theological and philosophical reflection on a relatively simple question: what good is political membership? In inquiring into political membership’s status as a human good, we proceeded by way of certain philosophical assumptions, not least of which is the Aristotelian teaching that the human animal’s perfection requires political activity and relationship. We also proceeded by way of certain theological assumptions, including the Christian conviction that the human person’s vocation may be summed up in terms of self-gift. These assumptions have funded an historical interpretation of modern citizenship that trades a great deal on ambivalence and even ambiguity. That is, it is no longer clear, at least in Western states, that modern political membership is a social form capable of restoring broken relations in nature and in history. I would say we have largely lost confidence that this could ever be true. Accordingly, 19th century accounts of nation, state, and citizenship seem terribly far removed from us.

But as Beiner’s work shows, neither is it clear that we have finally shirked the hope that political membership could be a social form implicated centrally in the task of human flourishing. Given the Aristotelian presuppositions of the current project, I would say that one does not need to look to Mazzini or 1789 or any other 19th century phenomenon for a robust calculation of what is humanely good about politics. Though the degradations of politics are always with us, the hope that membership in a whole greater than the self will heal us is a hope that dies hard. Perhaps not at all. Thinking “subsidiarily” with Leo

265 throughout this project has thus been an exercise in giving a theological and philosophical account of the durability of that hope and that hope’s relation to the Divine Wisdom, ordaining the human animal and human communities to both natural and supernatural beatitude. By exploring the consequences of these theological and philosophical convictions via the historical contexts of the Church’s relations with young Italy and of the Church’s contest with liberal matrimonial legislation, we have seen how thinking in an analogical manner with Leo can actually contribute to a natural law perspective on the theological- political problem and the social question that is in fact subversive of modern regimes.

That a natural law perspective on these issues could be seen as subversive of liberal political order should not be surprising to us. The Christian conviction that all natures are proceeding from and returning to the Creator, that they run this circuit according to courses suitable for their flourishing, and that their flourishing is ultimately a manifestation of the wisdom and glory of the Creator – these are not convictions conducive to the maintenance of social imaginations that require us to remain silent about nature. From within such a social imagination, silent as it is about the human person, it is little wonder that we approach a middling topic like citizenship with a certain hesitancy.

I drafted an introduction to this dissertation that I then submitted to my director.

She read it and gave it back to me, frowning and saying flatly, “Okay. I get it. But I still don’t really care about citizenship.” I burst out laughing. She’s right. In the 21st century in the U.S., citizenship is something immigrants care about. For the rest of us who already have it, at least during the election cycle of 2016, it is a badge we want to forget. But if I am right about

Leo’s social anthropology and the place of political membership and action within it, then the ironic distance that comes so easily to us right now is a lamentable response to what

266 humans have traditionally recognized as a responsibility to participate in the Lord’s providence.

Someone asked me what Leo would think of our situation right now in the U.S. The answer is pretty simple, actually. I think he would tell us to pray, worship, and strengthen the social bonds between each other. He knew we would long to go to the desert. But he also knew our longing would too easily be prompted by a sarcastic desire to cut ties, to separate, to no longer associate. Leo’s sensibility here is most clearly seen in his 1882 letter, Auspicato concessum, on the anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death. In that letter, Leo has the remarkable idea that modern Catholics could best respond to the abuses of liberalism and the plight of those suffering under capitalism’s domination by joining a Franciscan Third

Order. Leo saw the “extinction of charity” as the ultimate cause of social upheaval and abuse. And he saw Francis’s life as the perfection of the disciple’s ability to carry the cross – to suffer for love. Associational life ordered around such a commitment was, for Leo, really the only way forward in any era, for any Christian.

As we look forward to the Catholic social teaching of the 21st century, it seems to me that a willing embrace of the cross, precisely within our social and political relationships, will be decisive. Such an embrace makes sacrificial love publicly intelligible. As Pope Francis has recently said, “Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world. Love for society and commitment to the common good are outstanding expressions of a charity which affects not only relationships between individuals, but also ‘macro-relationships, social, economic and political ones.’”1 I have no doubt that this commitment to love will entail suffering. But what friendship doesn’t?

1 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §231.

267 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acta Sanctae Sedis. The Vatican. November 23, 2016.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ass/index_sp.htm.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican

Province. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981.

Atkin, Nicholas and Frank Tallett. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism

since 1750. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Aubert, Roger, et al. The Church Between Revolution and Restoration. Translated by Peter Becker.

New York: Crossroad, 1981.

-----. In The Church in the Age of Liberalism. Translated by Peter Becker. New York: Crossroad,

1981.

Beauchamp, Andrew. “Humane Capital: A Re-examination of the social teachings in light of

the shift to human capital.” Unpublished paper provided by author. Forthcoming as a

chapter in Catholic Social Scientists Volume: Catholic Perspectives on Economics. Lanham, MD:

Rowman and Littlefield.

Beiner, Ronald. Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community.

Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2003.

Bellamy, Richard. “Social and political thought, 1890-1945.” In Liberal and Fascist Italy, 1900-

1945, edited by Adrian Lyttelton, 231-48. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

268 Benedictine Monks of Solesmes. Papal Teachings: Matrimony. Translated by Michael J. Byrnes.

Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1963.

Berkeley, G.F.-H. Italy in the Making, Volume I. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1968.

Berkeley, G.F.-H & J Berkeley. Italy in the Making, Volume II. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1968.

Biddiss, Michael D. The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe since 1870. Atlantic

Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977.

Boggio, Pier Carlo. La chiesa e lo stato in Piemonte: sposizione storico-critica dei rapporti fra la S. Sede e

la corte di Sardegna dal 1000 al 1854, 2 vols. Torino: S. Franco e figli, 1854.

Caldwell, Lesley. Italian Family Matters: Women, Politics and Legal Reform. New York: Macmillan,

1991.

Cavanaugh, William. “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion

and the Rise of the State.” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (1995): 397-420.

Clark, Martin. Modern Italy 1871-1982. New York: Longman, 1984.

Cole, G.D.H. Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850. New York: MacMillan, 1953.

Davidson, Alastair. The Immutable Laws of Mankind: The Struggle for Universal Human Rights.

New York: Springer, 2012. de Lubac, Henri. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Translated by Lancelot C.

Sheppard and Sr. Elizabeth Englund, OCD. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988.

Ehler, Sidney Z. and John B. Morrall. Church and State Through the Centuries. Westminster, MD:

The Newman Press, 1954.

Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: Penguin

Classics, 2010.

269 Forni, Lorena. La Laicità nel Pensiero dei Giuristi Italiani: Tra Traditione e Ennovazione. Milan,

Giuffrè Editore, 2010.

Furet, François. Revolutionary France 1770-1880. Translated by Antonia Nevill. Cambridge,

Mass.: Blackwell, 1988.

Furet, François and Mona Ozouf, editors. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1989.

Gangulee, N., editor. Giuseppe Mazzini: Selected Writings. London: Lindsay Drummond

Limited, 1945.

Gierke, Otto. Political Theories of the Middle Age. Translated by Frederic William Maitland.

Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1958.

Grasso, Kenneth L. “Introduction: Theology and the American Civil Conversation.” In

Theology and Public Philosophy, edited by Kenneth L. Grasso and Cecilia Rodriguez

Castillo, ix-xxvii. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012.

Grew, Raymond. “Italy’s Nineteenth-Century Political Culture.” In Revolution and the Meanings

of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Isser Woloch, 212-45. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1996.

Gueniffey, Patrice. “Suffrage.” In Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François

Furet and Mona Ozouf, 571-81. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge,

Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

Halperin, S. William. The Separation of Church and State in Italian Thought from Cavour to Mussolini.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1937.

Helmreich, Ernst C., editor. A Free Church in a Free State? The Catholic Church, Italy, Germany,

France, 1864-1914. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1964.

270 Heyer, Kristin E. Prophetic and Public: The Social Witness of U.S. Catholicism. Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown University Press, 2006.

Hittinger, F. Russell. “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social

Doctrine: An Interpretation.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition. 7 no. 4 (2009): 791-838.

-----. “Social Roles and Ruling Virtues in Catholic Social Doctrine.” Annales Theologici, 16

(2002): 295-318.

-----. “Toward an Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic

Theology.” In Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, edited by Thomas

Albert Howard, 39-78. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,

2013.

-----. “Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, 50 Years Later.” Presentation at the

University of Chicago. Chicago, IL, November 1, 2012. Accessed June 15, 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zMOH3k8qpQ.

Hobbes, Thomas. On the Citizen, edited and translated by Richard Tuck and Michael

Silverthorne. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hughes, Emmet John. The Church and Liberal Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1944.

Hunt, Lynn. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996.

Jemolo, A.C. Church and State in Italy 1850-1950 . Translated by David Moore. Philadelphia:

Dufour Editions, 1961.

Johnson, Humphrey J.T. The Papacy and the Kingdom of Italy. London: Sheed and Ward, 1926.

Joyce, George Hayward. Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study New York: Sheed

and Ward, 1933.

271 Kelikian, Alice A. “The Church and Catholicism.” In Liberal and Fascist Italy 1900-1945,

edited by Adrian Lyttelton, 44-61. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Kertzer, David I. “Religion and Society, 1789-1892.” In Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796-

1900, edited by John A. Davis, 181-205. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Latourette, Kenneth Scott. The Nineteenth Century in Europe: Background and the Roman Catholic

Phase. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.

Maclear, J. F. editor. Church and State in the Modern Age: A Documentary History. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1995.

Manent, Pierre. The City of Man. Translated by Marc A. LePain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1998.

Mazzini, Joseph. The Duties of Man and Other Essays. Translated by unknown. New York: E.P.

Dutton & Co Inc, 1961.

Mayer, Arno J. The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

McManners, John. The French Revolution and the Church. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Milbank, John. The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell

Publishers, 1997.

Moody, Joseph N. Church and Society: Catholic Social and Political Thought and Movements 1789-

1950. New York: Arts, Inc., 1953.

Murray, John Courtney. “Leo XIII: Separation of Church and State.” Theological Studies 14,

no. 2 (1953): 145-214.

Ozouf, Mona. “Equality.” In Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet

and Mona Ozouf. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 669-83. Cambridge, Mass.: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

272 Ozouf, Mona. “Liberty,” In Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet

and Mona Ozouf. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 716-27. Cambridge, Mass.: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

Parsons, Wilfrid. “The Influence of Romans XIII on Christian Political Thought II.”

Theological Studies. II, no. 3 (1942): 325-346.

-----. “The Influence of Romans XIII on Pre-Augustinian Christian Political Thought.”

Theological Studies. I, no. 4 (1940): 337-364.

-----. The Pope and Italy. No Location: The America Press, 1929.

Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A history of divorce in Western society. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1988.

Pink, Thomas. “The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin Rhonheimer.”

Nova et Vetera, English Edition. 11, no. 1 (2013): 77-121.

-----. “Jacques Maritain and the Problem of Church and State.” The Thomist 79 (2015): 1-42.

Pollard, John. Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861. New York:

Routledge, 2008.

Reynolds, Philip L. How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of

Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

-----. Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early

Medieval Periods. New York: Brill, 1994.

Rhonheimer, Martin. “Dignitatis Humanae - Not a Mere Question of Church Policy: A

Response to Thomas Pink.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition. 12, no. 2 (2014): 445-70.

Rosanvallon, Pierre. “Physiocrats.” In Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by

François Furet and Mona Ozouf. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 763-9.

Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

273 Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2012.

Rosmini, Antonio. The Constitution Under Social Justice. Translated by Alberto Mingardi.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rowland, Tracey. Culture and the Thomist Tradition: after Vatican II. New York: Routledge,

2003.

Schuck, Michael J. “John Courtney Murray’s Problematic Interpretations of Leo XIII and

the American Founders.” The Thomist. 55, no. 4 (1991): 595-612.

-----. That They Be One: The Social Teaching of the Papal Encyclicals, 1740-1989 . Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown University Press, 1991.

Seymour, Mark. Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860-1974.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Sgritta, Giovanni B. and Paolo Tufari. “Italy.” In Divorce in Europe, edited by Robert Chester,

253-81. Leiden, Belgium: Martinus Nijhoff Social Sciences Division, 1977.

Silone, Ignazio. The Living Thoughts of Mazzini. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972.

Soderini, Eduardo. Leo XIII Italy and France. Translated by Barbara Barclay Carter. London:

Burns Oates & Washbourne, LTD., 1935.

Stewart, John Hall. A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Tanner, Norman, editor. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two Trent to Vatican II.

Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

274 Williams, Rowan. “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God.” Milltown Studies 19,

no. 20 (1987): 55-72.

Yenor, Scott. Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought. Waco, TX: Baylor

University Press, 2011.

275