Politics tends to be treated as an unsolvable problem based on the conflicting interests, ideas and ideologies of different groups within society. But the good news is that the unsolvable has been solved. The technical term for this final solution is integralism: the schema for the politics of a properly ordered society. It means applying to the temporal world the full significance of divine revelation, and of man’s position in God’s design.
We must accept the problem has no other tenable solution, a reality which the pagans bitterly realized. Our true end is impossible both to know and to achieve without divine intervention, and all attempts at building fulfillment on human virtue and reason alone led the pagans to frustration, hedonism and despair.
The great Christian men of wisdom from Augustine to Aquinas to Bellarmine to Leo XIII have all gone to work detailing how the integration of the divine with the secular is to be accomplished. Everything begins with man’s ultimate end, our telos. Because our end is divine, it means that politics must always bend the knee to theology, as without her queen a handmaid is hopelessly lost.
Crean and Fimister’s excellent book Integralism (2020) works as the foundation for what follows.
The two cities
Christian tradition talks of two cities, the city of the world and the city of God. The city of the world is ruled by Satan and populated by people who rebel against God. The city of God is the church of Christ, filled with people who understand that their end is communion with God and true friendship with their neighbor. This division of two cities has caused many thinkers to make the mistake of wanting to separate the secular from the spiritual, crudely identifying the city of the world with all things secular.
However, our tradition includes a crucial idea: Christendom. It signifies the secular world as led and directed by the spiritual, constituting the temporal aspect of the City of God. What this entails is that firstly, every secular ruler, whether pagan or Christian, must submit to Natural Law, which being based on God’s will and purpose is in fact simply God’s law second hand. Thus, when a ruler commits to Natural Law, he has unconsciously taken the path towards Christ and his Church. That’s where Natural Law shall direct any society fortunate enough to obey it.
Furthermore, after becoming Christian, every ruler must submit himself to Church authority, particularly in matters relating to the saving of souls, i.e. matters moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical. A ruler of a Christian nation must be a Christian, and they cannot encourage that which God forbids, or deny that which God demands. Should such a wicked ruler emerge, the Church, and specifically the Pope, has the right to depose him or her, as was done with Elizabeth I of England.
“Resting upon the authority of Him whose pleasure it was to place us upon this supreme justice-seat, we do out of the fullness of our apostolic power declare the aforesaid Elizabeth to be a heretic and favourer of heretics.
She and her adherents have incurred the sentence of excommunication and are cut off from the unity of the body of Christ. Moreover, we declare her to be deprived of her pretended title to the crown and of all lordship, dignity and privilege whatsoever.”
- St Pius V
Jesus told Peter to put his sword in the scabbard. This has been understood to mean that while the Church is not supposed to wield the sword of secular power, that power still rightly belongs to the Church. The blade remains Peter’s, though he ought to let others (Christian kings, princes, emperors, presidents, ministers) wield it on his behalf. When this co-operation works as intended, both the royal and the priestly authority defend the Faith as one man. Thus Christendom forms a bulwark around the Church, like a league of knights serving their lady.
What is strong when united crumbles when pushed into disharmony. John Henry Newman understood that “The Church is the natural enemy of governments external to itself.” This is quite natural. A ruler that does not submit to the Church shall naturally see the Church as a competing power of “overweening Italians and meddling Jesuits”, breeding “conflicting loyalties between pope and king”, etc. Only so long as the king himself is loyal to the Church shall he not have to worry about the loyalties of his people. The collapse of this inner harmony within Christendom explains why the Reformation led to such bloodshed, distrust, and persecution.
In modernity it is popular to deny that the Church should have any temporal power. Even many Christians do this, believing it good to make sure the Church should be concerned strictly with spiritual matters and have no hand in politics. But in arguing this, one is arguing against St Aquinas, St Peter Damian, St Bonaventure, St Bernard, St Bellarmine, etc.
So long as secular power refuses to submit to the spiritual, it remains a beast described by Daniel. This is because a secular power that does not obey the spiritual power cannot direct man to his proper end. This unleashes monstrous chaos, the winged lioness of Babylon. But because beastly Nebuchadnezzar ultimately recognized the living God and Daniel as his prophet, we read how “I beheld till her wings were plucked off, and she was lifted up from the earth, and stood upon her feet as a man, and the heart of man was given to her.”
Thus all human societies transform from bestial to human if (and only if) their temporal rulers submit to God, effectively aligning body with soul. In the end, willing the true good of a society is impossible if one does not profess the Gospel. Men who seek temporal good while disregarding God shall never find it. This explains the deadly consequences of secularism. If we deny God what is his due, we destroy ourselves in the process.
Natural society
All society is built on family, and family supported by the authority of the father. The family, and not the individual, is the atom of society. In the family we see politics in embryo: a monarchy led by the husband, with his loyal subjects bound together by mutual love and common good. Scaled up, this is what our societies are to be.
Our era tries its best to make the societal base units dysfunctional. An economic system based on dual income households is a grave disorder. According to Christian social teaching it is abusive if a man’s average wage is not sufficient both to provide a living for his family and to accumulate enough savings for emancipation from wage work. If a frugal, wage earning man needs to live hand to mouth, the system is broken. If the wives of average men need to have jobs of their own to make ends meet, the system is anti-life.
The Christian understanding is that wage work is a form of slavery, as it entails the ownership of one person’s labour by another. If only temporary, this is arrangement permissible but undesirable. Wage work must never be a permanent configuration to organize life around, let alone a whole society! Whenever you become the wage-slave of another, you become the servant of their purpose, unable to orient towards your own purpose. While serving the good purpose of another may be relatively good, it is always less good than fulfilling your own purpose.
To make wage work morally justifiable, it must be directed towards emancipation, i.e. accumulation of enough savings to purchase the means of productions for yourself in a reasonable time. In the past this often meant meant buying a piece of land to cultivate. Now it may mean saving enough capital to set up a business, or growing a big enough stock portfolio to generate a living out of. Overall, the laws of a society should direct men towards economic autonomy over employment, with the latter only serving as a temporary arrangement for the accumulation of initial capital.
We note that the society we now have is so foreign to these principles and so hostile to family life that it’s driving national extinctions all over the world. What could motivate our rulers to something so damaging? What causes them to weaken the family economically, legally and morally? A key reason is that modern societies are based on so called social contract theory. This leads to a general disbelief in the notion that there is anything natural about society, or that there exists a Natural Law that binds it. The Leviathan is an arbitrary ruler whose laws are merely positive, based on dictates instead of the Logos.
At the same time everybody must admit the family is nothing if not a natural society. This proves natural societies do exist, and our nations too could and should function on that basis. Family’s very existence disproves the legitimacy of the Leviathan we live under. This gives the beast the incentive to legalize and encourage divorce, and ultimately to deny the reality of sexual difference itself.
“It is hardly possible to describe how great are the evils that flow from divorce. By it matrimonial contracts are made mutable. Mutual kindness is weakened. Deplorable incitements to unfaithfulness are supplied. Harm is done to the education of children. Occasion is afforded for the breaking up of homes. Seeds of dissention are sown among families. 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.
Since nothing has such power to lay waste families and destroy the mainstay of kingdoms as the corruption of morals, it is easily seen that divorces are in the highest degree hostile to families and states, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people and opening out a way to every kind of evil-doing.
We shall clearly see that its evils are more especially dangerous, because divorce once being tolerated, there will be no restraint powerful enough to keep it within the bounds marked out or previously surmised. Great indeed is the force of example, and even greater still the might of passion. With such incitements must needs follow that the eagerness for divorce will seize upon the minds of many like a virulent disease, or like a flood of water bursting through every barrier.”
- Leo XIII, Arcanum 29-30
Primacy of monarchy
Besides the family, the most dangerous enemy the social contract theory faces is the King. Kingship bucks social contracts. Natural Law dictates subjects have a duty to obey and the king has a duty to lead. Same as the relationship between the father and the members of his family. A wife can decide who she marries, but once a subject to her husband she has no right to challenge his kingship. Children are born subjects of the realm, and their case is even simpler.
The presence of a monarch causes the society to align with the natural model typified by the family, with the national father as its common head, together with a hierarchical structure that flows down from him. While the Church of Christ can coexist with any number of political models, the Christian tradition (just as the classical) gives monarchy the place of primacy as the best of the pure forms of polity. Ideal results are reached when we combine the best facets of aristocratic and democratic systems to the monarchical base, but the core remains kingly.
Hobbes didn’t believe that polities could ever be mixed, with power shared or divided. This was because he didn’t believe man was capable of striving towards common good, but only desired his private interest. Thus, splitting power only creates conflict between differing interests, and the only way to create harmony is to unify everything under one absolute monarch, whose desires though private, are at least those of one man. There is a half truth to this logic, but Hobbes takes the matter too far.
In his cynicism he got a crucial thing backwards. According to traditional understanding, man does not find things are good because he desires them, he desires them because they are good. Of course any given man’s understanding of the good may be misguided, or he may prioritize goods wrongly, but it is always the good that is ultimately driving us, not desire. As long as our rulers are Christians, they shall have a more or less proper understanding of the common good, and the Hobbsian problem disappears.
Although mixing in some of the advantages of other political systems is beneficial, we are still left with the question: what explains the general superiority of (hereditary) monarchy?
It best models the family, and thus best matches with human nature and human intuition.
It best reflects God’s divine, distinctly monarchical rule over of the world.
It has the authority of history behind it, being by far the most popular and long lasting form of government across civilizations.
It does not serve our pride or soothe our egos, instead demanding humility and submission. This means that that there must be something very good about monarchy, being so widely supported by mankind although it does not flatter us like democracy does. It must rise from our true nature, not our fallen nature.
It has Biblical backing in the anointed kings of Israel, and Christendom is to be seen as Israel’s true flowering.
A crown prince can be trained to his position from childhood, and he needs not compete for power and climb up a ladder promising future favors. He may even be a non-ambitious man by temperament
He is bound by dynastic duty and the examples of his fathers.
He is specially incentivized to take care of the common good of his country, as it will be the legacy of his heirs.
He may rule for many decades, which gives time for even a man of below average talent to learn by practice. Even gifted rulers of other polities are only in place for some years, often saying that they had to resign just at the moment when they began to feel they knew something about ruling.
He can defend a people from its politicians.
Practically speaking, one man is always going to be better at generating social unity than a group of many men, or many parties. This is no small benefit, as unity, in the societal sense, is a synonym for peace. This is an important point Hobbes was half right about.
Broken barriers
The integralist understanding has its philosophical foundation in the telos of man. Christian tradition would agree with the Aristotelian thesis that man’s true end is happiness. Everyone seeks it as best they can, and false beliefs concerning the nature of happiness are what mainly make us unhappy.
Reason can reveal us that alongside contemplation of the divine, friendship is the answer, i.e. willing the good of another. The highest form of friendship, in turn, is the civic friendship which unites all the citizens of a realm. Politics is the highest form of ethics, as Aristotle put it.
However, without special revelation a friendship based on reason alone has harsh limits. Even when it is truly altruistic, reasonable friendship is always a tool. We desire it because we perceive it as the way to transcend ourselves. This benefit driven view leads to a darkened understanding as to who is the neighbor we are supposed to love? According to reason (and Aristotle) we may love our spouses, we may love our relatives, we may love our companions and fellow citizens. But what about our slaves? What about our enemies? Our slaves we may safely use, our enemies we may prudently hate.
So it is without revelation. A purely rational conception of friendship cannot get rid of a latent self-centeredness. First we restrict our understanding of friends to a group we deem worthy. Then we love our friends because we want to grow. We esteem them because we find them worthy of esteem. We love them because we desire our own happiness.
Furthermore, God himself is by definition beyond need of personal transcendence, which reason understands to be the end of friendship. Thus, God doesn’t have friends. He does not love anyone, and we cannot love him. This is the closed door the noble pagans had to hit their heads on time and again.
But it is here we find the lock that Christ is the key to. The answer to a puzzle unanswerable by reason. The good news is that God does want to be our friend. He does love us. We can love him, and he wants us to love each other the way he loves us: sacrificially, unreasonably. Thus Christ destroys the walls that ever stood between a man and his enemies, between a man and his slaves, and between man and God. When these barriers are broken, the City of God may arise.
“I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends.” - John 15:15
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