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The Church is for everyone. Through baptism, the saving hand of Christ reaches into the blinking irrationality of infancy; it pursues heartless academics with preaching and exhortation. For the illiterate, it paints pictures and stains glass; for the bored and ungrateful, it feeds eucharist after eucharist; for the sinful, it offers reconciliation; for the belligerent and the evil, the great gifts of excommunication, censure, correction, and rebuke.
The Church is for everyone. The world cannot comprehend her, because it is comprehended by her, as the sky comprehends the globe. She maternally encircles and nourishes every possible state of being and life, from heresy to sainthood, saying, as Lenin said, “to each according to his need.” This is the great anxiety of the atheist — that he is known, that his rebellion is categorized, and that monks and nuns are already praying and providing for the very needs that he denies. This is the guilt and protest of the ex-Catholic, that what he has left continues to constitute him, and with greater insistence than whatever worldly cult of commerce he has joined in its stead. There is a claustrophobia that comes with the rejection of a love that will not reject you. The damned squirm to find themselves yet embraced.
The evil of totalitarianism is the attempt by states to reproduce the true totalitarianism of the Church, which, as an order of love, is the only power on earth that can relate to everyone, totally, without doing violence to their particularity. The Church does not hem us in, any more than a good mother hems in her children, but we can say of our nation-states what Job could only say of God: “Will you never look away from me, or let me alone to swallow my spittle?”
The Church is for everyone, but not like a sweatshop producing shirts to fit all shapes. “Come as you are,” as the youth-group adage has it, but Christ will not leave you as you are. Blessedness is the goal. A new shape is what’s needed. To imagine the Church providing “to each according to their need” without admiring the way in which she transforms us, needs and all, would sell the Bride short. She is a mother, giving ungracious, selfish, and irrational infants what they need, not so they can remain infants, but so they can ascend from milk to meat. And so there is a sting in every sacrament; a whip in every good homily; a new man rising in the Body and the Blood.
Sohrab Ahmari is quite right to argue that Christianity is fundamentally political, destined to bring, not just individual hearts, but states, principalities, and powers to prayer. Indeed, this is the great awakening that integralism has to offer. Far from mewling abdications of the human capacity for governance, integralism would utilize the power of the state to carve out the material and social conditions necessary for true Christianity; to “seek better civilisational conditions for the faith.”
But if the Catholic utilization of state authority and power does not produce a social order in which the faithful are tugged up the ladder of divine ascent; if the use of state power produces stasis rather than a pant after perfection; if it sucks the sting out the sacrament; all this would be rather good evidence that something “Catholic” has been missed in the program of political Catholicism.
Ahmari comes near to this vision, but escapes it in the end. For Ahmari, our current civilization is a bed of thorns which chokes out the true faith. Political Catholicism would use the power of the State “to tame the thorns, so that a Christian people may once again emerge.” Opposed to this is a certain spiritualist vision, the infamous Benedict Option, in which “we prune our own little patch...and let it stand as a prophetic witness amid the bed of thorns.” Ahmari argues that such a retreat into the creation of private, exemplary worlds would have been “unintelligible to the statesmen of historic Christianity and likewise to its greatest sages.”
Unintelligible, because historic Christianity is Catholic, not Protestant. The examples Ahmari gives of the retreatist position are all Protestant — “anabaptists” and “Amish communards” who have converted the call to convert the nations of earth into the call to carve out heavenly spaces while the nations go to hell. In mutual condemnation of all such sad political theologies, we agree. But Amari goes on to argue against this political Protestantism by saying that, while there is a place for such a spiritual elite, there is also a place for “the crowd of baptized Christians for whom Christianity is hardly anything more than an external routine.”
There is only a place for such Christians in the sense of a starting place; they are only who Christianity is for insofar as the Church makes them who they are not: saints. Jesus preached to the non-elite, to “those unprepared for martyrdom,” not as a fixed category of human being, but in order to prepare them for martyrdom. Who else is Peter but a non-elite fisherman perfected by grace into a martyr?
Ahmari lauds the conversion of Constantine insofar as it removed the Roman persecutions and so prevented Christianity from requiring “a strength of a character of which the majority are not capable.” But it would be absurd to reduce the saving hand of Christ to the material, civilizational inclusion of “the ordinary Roman” without understanding this inclusion as being for the gracious production of extraordinary Romans — saints.
Ahmari does not advocate for a static Christianity. He says of the pagan who converts in a society made civilizationally Christian that “his soul benefited from efficacious sacraments, and his family and community benefited from a more virtuous order.” It would be impossible not to understand this “benefit” of the sacraments as a perfecting, upwards-rocketing benefit that has its end in the life of perfection. Christ leaves no child behind.
But there is something about integralism that, unless checked, tends towards the advocacy of a static Christianity, a kind of boring Anglicanism in which Christians receive their Christianity in and through the laws of the State, and this is deemed sufficient, indeed, victory. Integralists are right that Christians should lead the world, take its political offices, and orientate the political communities over which they have care towards the supernatural end of all humanity: God Himself. But they uncritically take up the modern State as the tool through which to effect this Christian revolution. They should not, because the modern State cannot perfect people in virtue. It cannot tug them up the ladder of divine ascent.
It can be difficult to distinguish the integralism of Adrian Vermeule from the integralism of Andrew Willard Jones, but what seems fundamental is this:
The state is not a natural political form that springs up from man’s political nature like a rose from its rosebush. The state is a recently developed technology for the production and maintenance of absolute sovereignty; a contingent, perverse condition of modern societies, in which, rather than society being ordered by the families that constitute it, families are ordered by the rule of one who rules through the threat of violence, and by the subsequent subjugation of all human wills unto his own.
This is “a work of human hands” that began in the Reformation, was first given the name “State” by Machiavelli, took on its more obvious and silly form in the era of Divine Absolutism, when mortal men still had the naivete to simply claim the sovereignty of God as their own, and then morphed into the fiction of “popular sovereignty” that we all indulge today, wherein the police forces that threaten us with violence are, in fact, our own will; wherein the “sovereign” who rules by violence remains invisible because, we are told, we have all entered into a contract to be ruled by violence.
This is a departure from a radically different view, one in which there simply was no such thing as “the State.” There was only the Church. The Church had two powers, the temporal and the spiritual. To coerce the wicked into impotence and to protect the faithful against the violence of the unjust and the heretical was the office of kings and governments — but these were not understood as some “other thing” apart from the Church. Kings were anointed by Popes as priests were ordained by Bishops. Coronation was a sacrament. The Church was the society. Civil power was a particular office of the Church. That these offices were held by the baptized laity, rather than the baptized clergy, did not make them something “apart from the Church” any more than the laity themselves can be considered “apart from the Church” by virtue of their unique, lay vocation. Again, because one must repeat the point, there was no State, only offices of temporal rule given to the laity as part of their vocation in the One Church.
“The State” is the name for the new thing we have when we try to have the temporal power of the Church apart from the Church; an impossible, abortive task. This means that the State, as opposed to the temporal power of the One Church of Christ, is not a neutral tool that can be wielded by Christians for the conversion of the nations into the Catholic Church. It is the structural, institutional rejection of the society of the Catholic Church. It is not some interesting political order that we just happen to find ourselves under. It is the daily, repeated, fictitious divorce of the temporal power of the Church from the Church itself.
When, overawed by the normalcy of life under modern states, integralists seek to use the State to create the conditions for the Church to flourish, they look to the devil to clear the ground for God. The result is a temptation towards a static Christianity. The perfection of the human person is her growth in virtue, and modern states cannot produce virtue in the souls that they govern.
This is because the State can only act through positive law and its enforcement. This is simply what a State is, as opposed to, say, a club, a church, or a business. Laws enforced through coercion can be a part of the dynamic, perfecting process by which the “ordinary Roman” becomes a Roman saint; positive law and punishment can work to perfect the human person in virtue; but only insofar as they are subordinated within an order of love, as love’s tools. To understand this, consider that society which the Church holds up as the model for all human society: the family.
Here, there is law. Here, coercion, punishment, and discipline. Parents know the failings of their children, their pettiness, their selfishness, their greed, and so they institute laws and punishments in order to discipline and perfect them. But law and punishment are not the source of a family’s unity. We know this intuitively: Law and coercion are effective in producing and perfecting virtuous children only insofar as they are operated for the sake of what comes first, for love.
It is precisely because all law, power, and punishment are used for the sake of love that law, power and punishment perfect, rather than squash, the children for whom they are administered. Within the family, law is provisional; punishment is not essential, but a reaction to sin; an order of power, descending from the “sovereignty” of parents to their children, is limited and temporary. In love, such techniques are swords destined to be beat into ploughshares whenever and wherever the children are perfected and empowered so as to have no need of discipline, punishment, or positive law.
What horror, to find a family of children in their twenties who still fear the discipline of their father, who need and suffer the punishments of their mother. What sadness, to find a father who believes that the society of his family is constituted and maintained by the power he administers through his law. Such parents say of their children: you are always, only, and ever evil. Such children say of their parents: you are always, only, and ever the police. Such families might achieve a kind of “peace” if their children continuously submit to the fear of punishment. They may even make a permanent mental habit of submitting, as dogs make a permanent habit of submission to their masters. But this is a peace that is only effective by turning children into animals and parents into trainers. It would be absurd to call this submission “virtue.” It would be tedious to call such parenting “just.” In fact, to the extent that such families really do exist, they tend to produce, not “peaceful” submission, but anger, resentment, dissent, rebellion, pride, distrust, and anxiety. What else could we expect to result from the attempt to have law apart from love?
But what strikes us as absurd in relation to the family seems normal when we consider the State, for the State utilizes laws, not within an order of love, but within an order of violence. Law and its enforcement is the whole and the extent of the State’s operation because it is apart from the Church, apart from that family which has love as its ordering principle, apart from that society moving towards the perfection of its members. As an office of that society we call the Church, carried out by the baptized laity, law and coercion are provisional reactions to sin, and coercion and punishment are only used in love and as love, teleologically orientated towards their own irrelevance. Ripped from the loving Family of God, this office loses its provisional nature and becomes closed in on itself. Temporal power, mutilated into the State, exists for itself. Laws and punishments are still a kind of sword, but the sword has been changed: its final cause has been changed from a ploughshare into a bigger and more effective sword; its efficient cause has been plundered from the Church and placed in the hands of the heathens; its formal cause is no longer love, but violence; its material cause is no longer the bodies of the wicked, but all bodies, for law and punishment are no longer limited by love to real instances of sin, but are applied ubiquitously — everyone lives under the law.
On the other hand, to imagine all institutions of law, coercion, and punishment as destined to their own non-existence in love is simply to no longer imagine the State. It is to make the family the foundation of society, which takes love and dynamic progression as its animating force. To imagine the withering away of police forces, standing armies, positive laws, and prisons as a society becomes more and more virtuous is simply to imagine the conversion of a nation into the Church, the destruction of the idolatrous State, and the subsequent re-acknowledgment of temporal power as an activity of love performed by the faithful. Insofar as integralists would use the State as a natural kind or a neutral tool they are simply not integralist enough — true integralism aims for the reunification of the two powers in the one Church, and so for the destruction of the State which holds them apart.
The use of the State to produce Christianity produces stasis in Christianity. If a State makes laws that support the faith; if Christians utilize its monopoly over the use of legitimate violence to mandate the orientation of all institutions towards Christ, their king; if America becomes a confessional State, rather than abolishing the State, then the faithful will receive the content and motivation of the Catholic faith as law. But this is not law orientated towards its fulfillment in grace. This is law produced and maintained apart from grace, and so it is positive, concretized, and permanent. It is the Old Testament without the New. It does not produce a people who, through the law, move beyond the law into freedom. It produces a people who are Christian insofar as they continually submit to the law, to a human sovereign. This is Hobbes’s vision, not Christ’s.
Adrian Vermeule argues that “law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” But it is not parental outside of the Church. No good parent begins and ends with law. No good parent continues to rule their children through the threat of punishment once and wherever their children have become virtuous. Such an integralism cannot ultimately imagine a people free from the law, only habituated into submitting to it, as Vermeule says:
Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.
True integralism, the integralism that Jones and myself are trying to articulate, aims at the reunification of the two powers in the One Church, where the temporal power is subordinated to the spiritual precisely because love is the beginning and the end of the human adventure, and the Church’s temporal power only is what it is in service to this great love. True integralism does not uncritically use the State — it destroys it, ending the great divorce and celebrating the renewed marriage. This orientation allows us to escape a static vision of political Catholicism, in which a people become externally Catholic because the laws of a given State tend towards Catholicism, making it easy, normal, and politically opportunistic for the weak to convert (precisely because Catholicism now means submission to the will of a human sovereign) without moving beyond this external Catholicism; without enjoying the freedom of the sons of God.
For such a static society, a monastery can only be as Ahmari describes it — a garden in the bed of thorns, a hiding place for the spiritual elite who somehow manage to transcend the juridical, external, civilizational Catholicism by a strength that separates them from the masses who are only Catholic in their own self-interest. But within the dynamic society, in which all law is fulfilled in love insofar as it is in and from that family we call “Church,” the purpose of the “spiritual elite” is not Protestant isolationism. It is the establishment of microcosms of prayer which fulfill the law and so perfect the social order as a whole — the monasteries.
Monasteries are not gardens amid thorns. They are herbicide and blazing fire. They do not merely provide a theoretical example of a more perfect society, in the vague hope that civilization might follow suit. The prayers and penances of the religious orders are actually efficacious; they produce a trove of merit which enables men mired in worldliness to become holy, not by their own effort, but in and through the love and sacrifices of their brothers in Christ. Properly lived out, the monasteries are open to the laity and the religious, not merely as examples of perfection, but places to go in order to actually become perfect.
Because it images the life of perfection, the monastery is the end, the flower, and the fruit of any social order that perfects its members towards Heaven. True political Catholicism, in which Catholicism orders the polis, does not provide an elite, monastery option here, just as it provides a civilizational, external, non-elite option there. True, political Catholicism orientates all of society towards the monastery. To be imperfect is not to enter into a static category of being, for whom Christianity takes on a particular, limited, external, political form. To be imperfect is to exist under the injunctive to build monasteries, to receive the graces that flow out of the monasteries, to rely on their merits, to send one’s children and one’s alms towards the monasteries, to be willingly, gradually perfected by one’s relation to the monasteries, their liturgies, their feasts, their land, their bells. The integralists are correct — the Catholic laity should sanctify their social order by taking dominion over its political offices. This is their vocation. But they do this not to operate the State, but to destroy it; not to utilize its sovereign posturing, but to humiliate it; not to make Catholicism the theoretical goal of an untransformed regime of violence, but to allow the Catholic Church to do what she always does, to abolish violence in the order of love, and to build the kingdom of Heaven on earth, a kingdom that the tradition has always held to reign, really and sacramentally, in and through the monastery.