John Paul II asserted with confidence that the two natural societies recognized by the Church’s social teaching are the family and the nation and that these two are bound up together. The relations of the family are ordered toward unity with a social grouping larger than the family, and so a person emerges through the cultural education provided by the family into the nation, whose culture makes truth accessible, whose culture incarnates, we might say, truth in a way that is not foreign but native to who the person is and to the social and physical geography in which he dwells.[1] The family we might go so far as to say is the training ground for the nation, the place where new sharers in the national culture are formed. And sharing in a culture is essential to what it means to be a man. As John Paul II expressed it: “Man always lives according to a culture which is his own, and which, in turn creates between men a bond which is also his own, by determining the inter-human and social character of human existence.... Culture is that by which man as man becomes more man, ‘is’ more, has more access to ‘being.’”[2] And in another place, the pope asserted: “culture must be held as the common good of every people, the expression of its dignity, liberty and creativity, and the testimony of its course through history. In particular, only from within and through culture does the Christian faith become a part of history and the creator of history.”[3]
The pope is here expressing a profoundly “thick” understanding of peoplehood, so thick, in fact, that it takes ecclesiology up into itself—the Church emerges as always already integral to peoples, and never somehow a-historically abstracted from them. The great pope was working, of course, within a deep tradition focused on the sociality and historicity of Christianity and which had been newly revived in the work of the ressourcement theologians and in the texts of Vatican II. This theology places the world of human construction back into the world of divine creation. St. Thomas Aquinas, following the tradition, explained that God created a plurality of things because each nature finitely expressed a different analogical trace of the infinite divine nature. The more things there were, and the more they interacted with each other in the endless dynamism of relationships of act to potency, the more perfectly the divine nature was expressed.[4] But because each and every thing’s similarity to the divine was offset always by the analogical ever-greater difference, this ever-more perfect expression of the divine nature never closed the infinite gap between creature and creator, but on the contrary revealed more perfectly the gap’s extent: as the similarity of the while to the divine grows, at the same time and in the same movement, the difference from the divine becomes “ever-greater,” a metaphysical dynamic that was explored extensively by the great Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara and his many students, including especially, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
The 20th century’s “thick” ecclesiology and anthropology moved human action and so creative dynamism into this metaphysical cosmology. By participating in divine reason and divine providence, human beings order the created world—which bears already the Divine trace--into endlessly variable instantiations of the human imaging of the divine. The divine is imaged twice over, in both the materials and the work of art that human rational creativity fashions from them, a work of art that we call culture. John Paul II wrote:
“Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death. At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. When this question is eliminated, the culture and moral life of nations are corrupted.”[5]
Through culture the world is reconstructed, we might say, as a humane world, as an interpretation of reality expressed in the mode of human life, and through which men are, at least potentially, moved toward the fulfillment of human nature. We construct material and social environments that include intrinsically the mutual formation of persons through families and friendships and so shared worlds—peoples or nations, we can call them--emerge as the bearers of cultures[6]—each one bearing a unique image of the divine without ever closing the gap between the creature and the creator, and without ever exhausting the possibilities available to other cultures. The more cultures, then, the more perfectly the image of God is realized in culturally imbedded persons.
But even more importantly, it is only through such finite participation that the infinite is encountered in the temporal world of men. John Paul II asserted “Culture is the vital space within which the human person comes face to face with the Gospel.”[7] This is so because “All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture.”[8] In other words, the universal is always encountered as instantiated in the particular.[9] The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith under Joseph Ratzinger asserted: “only the vast numbers and rich diversity of people can express something of the infinite richness of God. Finally, this dimension is meant to find its accomplishment in the Body of Christ which is the Church. This is why social life, in the variety of its forms and to the extent that it is in conformity with the divine law, constitutes a reflection of the glory of God in the world.”[10] It is particular, historical, social, actual and not abstracted human nature, that is presupposed and perfected, but never destroyed, by grace. Henri de Lubac could write: “Catholicism is essentially social. It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions, but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery, in the essence of its dogma.”[11]
The universal Church, then, is a harmony of diverse particular churches, not accidentally, not because of some happenstance of history, but essentially, in its very nature.[12] Through the riches of various Christian cultures, Gaudium et Spes suggested, a “greater light is thrown on the nature of man and new avenues to truth are opened up.”[13] The universal Church as such becomes more perfectly itself as unique “source churches” emerge through the flow of history—each one providing a distinctive interpretation of truth, a distinctive mode of Christian life, while simultaneously exposing God’s ever-great difference from that interpretation and mode. Transcendence is revealed more perfectly, then, through a more perfect immanence, as particular churches come more perfectly into themselves as particular exactly as their unity with the universal Church becomes more complete. The Church is, Lumen Gentium asserts, “destined to extend to all regions of the earth, it enters into human history, though it transcends at once all times and all racial boundaries.”[14] The unity of the universal People of God is therefore in no manner in competition with the reality of particular nations fulfilled through their particular churches. It is, of course, only through its individualization that a species subsists. Membership, then in the People of God, takes nothing away from the peoples of the world, but rather purifies them, makes them good and true, eliminating the sin and disorder which internally wars against their subsistence, and so makes them ever more perfectly themselves.[15]
This rich theological tradition has profound intellectual and social implications. At the same time, if it is true, it raises a fundamental question: What is a people? It is the bearer of culture and so of truth, that much is clear, but nevertheless, what historical form does it take? Is it a tribe, a clan, a city, an empire, a modern nation-state, a linguistic group, dare I say, a race? It seems strange that this question has received so little discussion. It often seems as if the Church has just assumed the self-evident existence of this unitary thing that it calls “a people.” I think this lack of attention is explicable, though. During the 20th century, the assertion of the essential nature of any cultural grouping, in any form, was at odds with the dogmas of liberalism and Marxism; Both capitalism and communism had little use for “peoples” and, in fact, viewed them as either drags on economic efficiency or superstructural to systems of economic exploitation. And so simply asserting the essential significance of peoples as bearers of cultures, was enough to resist these dogmas, without having to delve too deeply into what “a people” properly was. This perhaps made sense—especially to the third world resisting the imperial ambitions of both sides. But the Cold War is now over and so it seems that the problem of “the people” can no longer be treated naively. The assertion of its essential importance is no longer enough. We can no longer simply equate culture, people, and nation as if it is obvious what groupings of humanity we are talking about. If we are to advance the theological insights of the 20th century, we must ask “what is a people?”
This question is especially important if the Church is going to engage with the contemporary widespread resurgence of identitarian populism that explicitly arrays itself against both the liberal and socialist abstract universalisms of the late Enlightenment in favor of some sort of fundamental peoplehood. As JD Vance recently asserted: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.” He continued, saying of the poor of the heartland, “they love this country, not only because it's a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home. And it will be their children's home and they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America's greatness.”[16] The New Right, unlike the Cold Warriors of the old right, is decidedly not liberal. And the political and economic hegemony against which the New Right struggles is decidedly not socialist. It is rather an oligarchic, technocratic, neo-liberalism that is attempting to realize the universal, mechanistic claims of the Enlightenment without its humanitarian baggage. It is clearly working toward the dissolving of peoplehood, not only through old-fashioned imperialism, but also through the far more effective and subtle mechanism of globalized economics coupled with unrestrained, and even orchestrated, mass immigration and near universal propaganda asserting that it is racist to attribute any significance to cultural and geographical integrity, or even distinctiveness. This is a sort of inverted imperialism, aimed at importing cheap labor and cheap voters who lack any roots that might provide strength, while simultaneously destroying the economic and cultural strength of the native populations. As political theorists have long known, cultural integrity is a drag on the centralization of political and economic power wherever it is found, and so oligarchic neo-liberalism seeks to undermine it both at home and abroad – reducing culture to yet another privatized consumer good and so destroying what it essentially is, a way of being and living in an integral world. The political right has responded by steadily abandoning libertarian universalism in favor of identitarian thinking. It is adopting more and more the language and thought patterns of 19th and 20th century nationalism. This move to nationalism is often explicit. They are reading the old texts, talking about the old ideas, and assimilating the old aesthetics.
This is jarring for many, I think, because the horrors of the Third Reich and the scientific racism that made them possible largely rendered post-war the whole nationalist tradition retro-actively taboo. But we are not excused by this taboo in forgetting that the story of modernity cannot be reduced to the contest between liberal and socialist universalisms. There was, of course, a non-universalist, nationalist modernity, an alternative modernity, we might call it that was directly opposed to Enlightenment universalism of both the liberal and socialist varieties. This tradition’s roots are found in the “baroque” cultural thread of central and southern Europe— as Rocco Buttiglione has helped me understand, the baroque emphasized complexity, distinctiveness, incompleteness, dynamic movement, the notion that the world was always inadequately participating in a spiritual reality that surpassed it and so was always open, always capable of changing in unexpected directions, even while the world’s immediate configuration was wrought with contradictions, with sin and disorder that itself was somehow brought up into a greater order that surpassed control: the baroque world could not be mapped by ideological formalisms and then mechanized because human being was not lifted out of it and turned against it, but rather subsisted within it. The world then was not a machine to be manipulated and fine-tuned but a work of art, to be contemplated, loved, purified, and deepened.
This alternative modernity did not die out when Spain lost to England during the Early Modern period. Rather, this thread continued and was transformed through the 19th century, through its encounter with Hegelianism, romanticism, and secularization, being often contorted into ideological monstrosities as Christianity was steadily pushed aside, reaching perhaps its most perverted form with the introduction of Darwinian thinking, a cold, ugly, universalist and technocratic scientism that is the near opposite to the baroque mentality. Nevertheless, something of the old tradition is clearly present in the pantheistic Hegelianism of the Italian nationalist Guiseppe Mazzini, who distained rights in favor of duties and who could assert:
God created [the world] as the medium through which we may ascend to Him. The earth is not a mere sojourn of temptation, or of expiation; it is the appointed dwelling-place wherein we are bound to work out our own improvement and development, and advance towards a higher state of existence…The Earth is our Workshop. We may not curse it, we are bound to sanctify it.[17]
Mazzini argued that the human person emerged as himself only within the social whole. Only through participation in the law of man, Mazzini contended, could the law of God be known.[18] He saw the diversity of peoples as the direct act of the creator, as the means through which he could be ever more perfectly realized in history, and he argued that peace would not be established until peoples stopped attempting to dominate and homogenize each other and rather each people would be impowered to take control of its own destiny.[19]
Something of the old baroque tradition is likewise clearly present in the insistence of the spiritual reality of the nation that we find in the French nationalist Ernest Renan, for whom “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, in actual fact, are really one and same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to exercise the heritage one has received undivided.”[20] For Renan the nation emerges out of the flux of history not as anything necessary, predetermined by genetics or geography, but rather as a great solidarity, as a great choice to sacrifice for each other in fraternity. It is based therefore on friendship.
Likewise, the old baroque tradition is still visible in the Spanish nationalist José Antonio Primo de Rivera. His writings read often as extended restatements of classical medieval political theory translated into a romantic and nationalist register. He talks of subsidiarity, of solidarity, of the dignity of labor, but most significantly for our purposes, he talks of a people as “a total, indivisible, living entity, with a destiny of its own to fulfil in the universal order.”[21] He continues,
We need two things: a nation, and social justice. We shall not have a nation so long as each one of us regards himself as the holder of a separate interest, the interest of a group or a faction. We shall not have social justice so long as each one of the several classes, in a system of conflict, seeks to impose its own domination upon the rest. Therefore, neither Liberalism nor Socialism is capable of providing us with the two things we need.[22]
Even Heinrich von Treitschke, the hard-core German nationalist of the late 19th century would sometimes reach back into this tradition; for example he declared in one of his speeches: “The rays of the divine light only appear in individual nations infinitely broken; each one exhibits a different picture and a different conception of the divinity. Every people has therefore the right to believe that certain powers of the divine reason display themselves in it at their highest.”[23]
Throughout this mostly central and southern European nationalism, we can find an emphasis on the beauty and profundity of the embodiment of reason in the diversity of cultures. One branch of this tradition became the fascists of the 20th century – this is clear, but the entire tradition does not thereby lose whatever truth it carried. And the contemporary populists who are taking up again this neglected thread deserve much more than to be summarily dismissed – in fact, given the contours of the 20th century ecclesiology that I just described, they demand serious attention. Indeed, the question before us is obvious.
If, as 20th century theology clearly asserts, Christianity is made present through a diversity of cultures, which must have real identity as distinct from each other and who occupy real lands, real geographies that are shaped by their real historical presence and so are integral to who they are, if these diverse peoples, as the bearers of culture, are also the bearers of the divine image into the world and as conduits of truth and grace are necessary, as particular, to the universality of the Church; if Christianity is this way, is Christianity, therefore, nationalist? If real diversity of cultures is essential to orthodoxy, does not orthodoxy then demand concern for the maintenance of cultural identity? Is 20th century ecclesiology directly related to modern nationalist thinking? And if this is so, must Christianity see in the nationalist tradition and so in its contemporary populist heirs an authentic expression of a Christian ethos? In other words, must the Church become MAGA?
For my part, I know I find my nationalist blood pumping a bit when I read John Paul II’s impassioned exhortation: “take care, by all the means at your disposal, of [the] fundamental sovereignty that each Nation possesses by virtue of its own culture. Protect her like the apple of your eye for the future of the great human family. Protect her! Do not allow this fundamental sovereignty to fall prey to any political or economic interest. Do not allow it to become victim of totalitarianisms, imperialisms, or hegemonies, for which man counts only as an object of domination and not as the subject of his own existence.”[24] Or when Pope Francis asserts: “We need to sink our roots deeper into the fertile soil and history of our native place, which is a gift of God.”[25] John XXIII, after all could write of the Church without controversy,
She is certainly too wise to discourage or belittle those peculiarities and differences which mark out one nation from another. It is quite legitimate for nations to treat those differences as a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs. The Church aims at unity, a unity determined and kept alive by that supernatural love which should be actuating everybody; she does not aim at a uniformity which would only be external in its effects and would cramp the natural tendences of the nations concerned. Every nation has its own genius, its own qualities, springing from the hidden roots of its being. The wise development, the encouragement within limits, of that genius, those qualities, does no harm; and if a nation cares to take precautions, to lay down rules, for that end, it has the Church’s approval. She is mother enough to befriend such projects with her prayers.[26]
J.D. Vance couldn’t have said it better-- And I can clearly hear the long nationalist tradition stretching back into the baroque depths of early modernity.
So, is Christianity nationalist? The problem goes back to the question I raised earlier. The question of what is a nation? The Church clearly thinks the nation is essential and worthy of defense, but what is it? Is the Church’s nation, which I think we would be better to call a people, is it the same as modern nationalism’s “nation.” To answer this, we must explore the historical genesis of the modern “nation” itself.
As historians have definitively demonstrated, the construction of the modern nation was integral to the construction of the modern, sovereign, administrative state and the industrial economic system that accompanied it. The modern nation was formed not only through the destruction of the unifying structures of Christendom, but also through the destruction of the diversity of sub-cultures that made up the complex structures of pre-modern societies. Divorce from supra-national order was simultaneously homogenization of intra-national order.[27] It was these two movements that created the cultural thing that is the modern nation and both these movements occurred through the construction and agency of the modern state. The fragmentation of Christendom and the consolidation of the nation-states was one historical dynamic. The modern nation as a self-sufficient cultural unit is inseparable from the modern state as a self-sufficient political unit; they are the same historical phenomenon. In modern nationalism, the individual’s relationship to the nation is not mediated by “thick” social structures – such as the family – which always have cultural content native to them. Rather, the individual as Frenchman, as Englishman, as German, is formed in direct relationship with the nation as a whole, a formation that is accomplished through centralized educational, political, economic, and media apparatuses.[28] Real cultural structures that subsist within the nation must be either derivative of and subsidiary to the nation or else a threat to the nation’s claim to seamless extension across the social and geographical field. What we might call the nation’s “cultural sovereignty” is directly parallel to its corresponding state’s political sovereignty, which ultimately must be unitary and logically prior to all other nodes of authority.
To the extent this description is accurate, then “the nation” cannot be treated as a synonym for “the people” as understood by the Church. I began this talk with the foundational observation of John Paul II that both the family and the people are natural to humanity as such. What we mean by “the people,” then, must include essentially what we mean by “the family.” And the family is certainly not posterior to the state. Rather, a proper people and a proper politics flows out of proper families without competition between them. And the same holds true of other forms of social solidarity that stand between the family and the state. A thick anthropological understanding of subsidiarity is simply not compatible with the cultural hegemony of the modern nation or the political hegemony of the modern state.
One of the difficulties that we face when we approach this sort of problem is equivocation of terminology. We often fall prey to formulations such as this: The Church has stated clearly that the “nation” is natural to man. The nationalists think that the nation is natural to man, therefore, the Church is nationalist. We face the same problem when we discuss politics with a certain type of integralist who is prone to argue something like this: the Church has asserted that political authority is natural and good, the modern state is political authority, therefore the Church thinks the modern state is good.
If we are going to address the relationship of Christianity to nationalism, we must overcome this fallacy. We must begin with the realization that all “peoples” or all “nations” are not proper peoples or proper nations, and then we must try to distinguish certain marks that help us sort proper from disordered forms. But this is not easy precisely because one mark of peoples that we are certain of is diversity. Peoples and nations are in their essence diverse from each other. Nevertheless, this diversity must subsist within certain commonalities or traits that distinguish the proper or the just from the disordered and so unjust.
Let’s take for comparisons sake, the family. The family has historically taken many, no doubt legitimate, forms. The way in which families are is clearly an aspect of culture. In some cultures, the family takes on the form of the extended kinship network, all the way to the point of forming a tribe or a clan. In other cultures the family takes on a small, even nuclear, form. We can assert the legitimacy of such differences and yet, at the same time assert that all properly ordered families are built upon the union of male and female in life-giving love, through which new persons are born and educated into the communion of the Church. This commonality allows us to identify disordered families, perversions of the family, abuses of the family that are ordered not to the formation of holy persons, but toward usefulness to the powerful, such as polygomous or ancient paterfamilias structures. The same type of move must be made with regards to “the people.”
If a “people” is to be the carrier of an analogical trace of the divine through the formation of a cultural world in communion with nature and with God, then there must be certain characteristics that establish this capability. A central characteristic, I would suggest, is that of openness. Let me try and explain. If every cultural formulation is a certain world, a certain instantiation of truth in a particular historical moment, then a truthful culture would necessarily be one that at some level knows this about itself, that does not mistake its “similarity” to the divine for the divine itself. It must have humility before that which transcends it. This means, I believe, that it must perceive its boundaries not as walls, but as a horizon. It is not that one can see past the horizon. If one could, of course, it would not be the horizon. An open society, then, need not be one that can articulate the limitations of its cultural construction from within that construction. Such an articulation is an impossibility if we are to retain our understanding of cultures as truly subsistent and not as mere local color to a more fundamental universal essentialism. Rather, the horizon is a real boundary that is nonetheless essentially open to what is over it, but without possession of what is over it. As Pope Francis explained in an interview “You cannot live without a horizon. You must have a faith that is deeply rooted, but with a horizon to grow. Otherwise, there would be no freedom, there would be no Christian freedom.”[29] The horizon is a boundary that is experienced as an openness. Not only can one move toward the horizon and in doing so push it further out, but others can cross over the horizon and into one’s line of sight, without destroying the horizon or rendering it no longer a boundary.
A horizon, then, is very different from the borders of the modern nations. The modern nation self-consciously conceives of itself as in a world of other nations. What is on the other side of the border is not out of sight, but is perceived entirely within the self-perception of the nation, is already contained within that nation as the other against which it stands. The subsistence of the nation is tied directly to its native conception of the other nations that push against its borders and so render it constrained and closed. The unity of the nation is, in fact, produced exactly in contrast to the unity of other nations. War, then, takes priority over peace. This is why the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt asserted that the unity of the nation came only through a “friend/enemy distinction,” with the emphasis always on the enemy. Schmitt was here simply asserting with clarity a principle that is present in nearly all the nationalist thinkers I mentioned earlier. Nations are formed through war. The same dynamic works internal to the nation. All nodes of order that have subsistence prior to or separate from the nation, even those that fall inside the nation’s borders, are enemies or potential enemies. The war at the borders is always at the same time a civil war within the borders. Everywhere in the nationalist literature are polemics against regionalism, provincialism, sectarianism, localism. Unity is compelled by the enemy without while it is being formed through war against the enemy within. But at no point is there an “other” that is not comprehended within the notion of the nation itself. The “truth” of the nation, therefore, does not analogically participate in a truth that transcends it, but rather the “truth” of the nation is final, is complete, is closed. Ultimate truth, the truth that somehow bridges between nations or between nodes of authority within nations, can, therefore, only be understood as the truth of power, of war, the truth of the winner. Of course, modern nations are not perfectly closed in this manner. They are made up of human beings and so something of a proper nation is always present.
Nevertheless, this description comes close to capturing how the modern nations were formed. It is instructive to consider the actual historical genesis of our nations. As nationalist thinking began to form, it was, for example, unclear what would become the locus of nationalist energies. Europe had several options on offer. The dynastic, multi-cultural regime of the Habsburgs was an option. The hegemonic imperial regime of revolutionary and Napoleonic France made a play. Then there were the various pan-movements, there was pan-slavism, pan-latinism, pan-Teutonism, pan-anglosaxonism. But there were also movements toward smaller units. The unification of Germany, Italy, and the United States, for example, were all resisted by “nationalisms” that focused on smaller groupings. The modern nation-state as we experience it is the result of a complex history that, I think, is largely contingent on the fact that England managed to subdue its island early and to become disproportionately powerful internally because of the fortuitous gift of its natural moat. It was then in a position to be both emulated by its rivals and to throw its weight into the power politics of the continent, supporting one power for a time, and then switching to another power for a time, intervening with subsidies here, and then with direct military force there, playing one power off another, making sure that nothing too much bigger or stronger than itself emerged, while not having enough power to restrain entities of roughly its size or power from emerging. When you go back and read the sources of 19th century politics, , it is remarkable the degree to which they are obsessed with Britian. Britian was the model and the threat – it was the ultimate “other,” and so the nation par excellence against which the other nations eventually formed. We have to remember that there is nothing natural about the size of the modern nation-state. Through most of human history, people have been grouped in tribes and cities, that from time to time are brought together into empires. Things the size of France, Italy, Germany, Spain are really rather strange.
My point here, though, is two-fold. First, our modern conception of the nation is historically contingent and should not be confused with some sort of a-historical essential type. Second, that the consolidation of the contingent nation-state was from the beginning a consolidation through war, through struggle, and so the others against which it is arrayed externally are essential to the form of “truth” it enforces internally. This is expressed everywhere in the nationalist tradition, and is borne out in the historical record.
I think I can assert that such “truth” is not the truth that resides in a proper people, but a perversion of it. In contrast, a proper people’s unity, I would contend, is constituted within a peaceful openness, without necessary reference to its enemies. Aristotle remarked that conversation between friends concerning the true and the false, the just and the unjust, the useful and the useless was what constituted first households and then cities. Aquinas agreed. The free giving and the free receiving of the analogical truth embodied in language creates a shared world. Each friend agrees in trust, in faith, to inhabit a world that transcends his own formulations, that relies upon those of his friend as much as his own for its coherence. When I speak to my friend, at some point, if the conversation is to continue, I must in humility accept his understanding of my meaning as my own. I must modify my own understanding in the direction of his understanding, even as he in humility sincerely aspires to sharing my meaning. In doing so, we together form a subsistent world with a horizon, a world that includes the other essentially and yet a world that remains open always to expansion, always to transcending its limitations through the integration of new conversation partners.[30] A people’s peace and its openness are identical. As John Paul II expressed it, “from the open search for truth, which is renewed in every generation, the culture of a nation derives its character.”[31]
The people and its territory, then, is the home of the person, the place where he dwells as himself because it is formed as a “place” in the very process of him being formed as a person. And yet this home can never be closed down, but its openness is what provides him freedom to move, to think, to build a more complex and so more beautiful world. If we think of the family as the setting for the most intimate of friendships, then the people must be conceived as those friendships’ reaching out to and welcoming in of other friends, and so the creation of a larger shared world. As Pope Francis has stated: “Genuine social friendship within a society makes true universal openness possible.”[32] The horizon of the family is pushed out to that of the parish, the town, the region, the nation. Each expansion, if made through the discourse of truth, is an expansion deeper into the diverse identities of these different groupings, is the construction of a shared world in which they dwell, with a horizon. What I am ultimately suggesting here is that a true people and so a true nation is identified as the place where truthful discourse is occurring. Such discourse is a process of con-corporation, of the modification of all the participants in the direction of an ever-greater participation in truth itself, and so an ever-greater recognition of its incompleteness and so openness that which lays beyond the horizon. Such a people would necessarily take on the form of subsidiarity internally and openness to its neighbors externally. This means that rather than being “nailed down,” peoplehood remains always fluid; always real— – there is a shared horizon— –yet always being modified in complex ways both internally and externally.
The problem with modern nationalism, therefore, is that shared discourse is replaced with unilateral communication, with propaganda, which aims to shape the individual into a member of the fixed nation, to incorporate them into the unitary whole, where the individual is in direct relationship to the overall power structure, unmediated by smaller nodes of power or meaning. The nation attempts to dragoon unity into existence through enforced conformity, largely through playing on individuals’ hopes, loves, fears, and especially on his profoundly human desire for fraternity, which is to say, by playing exactly on the truths that underwrite his real friendships. The family, if it to be true to itself is threatened by such a nation, so too is the parish, the town, and any other locus of real conversation. The construction of the modern nation, to the extent that it is capable of being realized, is, therefore, the destruction of exactly those human societies within which the person is formed as a member of a people, again, to the extent this is possible.
Does this mean that the Catholic ideal, if we can imagine a humanity that never fell into sin, is a continuum of belonging, from the family through humanity itself, with one group bleeding into the next without distinction? I don’t think so. If for no other reason than because of the natural bottle necks and friction points of physical geography, it seems to me that discourse would always be unevenly aimed, with more pointing in certain directions than in others, which, given our mimetic social behaviors, would result in the development of nodes of discourse, centers of contemplation that are distinct from other centers, which would, in time, develop their own language, history, and so culture. In such a sinless hypothetical, diversity is real, and there would, it seems to me, be de facto borders of a sort, geographical formations that mark a line of demarcation between groupings of more intense discourse, which would acquire, no doubt, names. And yet, nowhere would we find a fence, or a wall and every people would be open to and in fact desirous of discourse with their neighbors.
This is a nice thought, and perhaps helpful. But the obvious problem, of course, is that man did fall. All aspects of cosmic and anthropological order are infected with disorder. The City of God is everywhere and always intermingled with the City of Man.[33] It is always possible, maybe even likely, that the neighbors coming over one’s horizon are invaders, seeking to pillage your people, to destroy its culture. It is always possible, maybe even likely, that the sub-cultures that emerge within a people are disordered, are criminal, and aim at subduing other nodes of order under some claim to definitive “truth,” aim at building a hegemonic “nation.”
In the same sort of way, then, that the individual, the family, and small communities require rights in order to protect them from being absorbed into more powerful groupings, it would seem that borders are necessary precisely in order to maintain the diversity of peoples.[34]
Consider, for example, Catholic social teaching’s approach to private property. The Church teaches the principle of the universal destination of all goods. All material resources are ultimately for the common good. It would be awfully easy, therefore, to just condemn all private property, to just assert that anyone who dares to say “mine” is greedy and violating the principles of social justice. But this is not what the Church does. Rather, she understands that the common good is exactly the good of countless rational actors who work toward the common good as the realization of their own good. Each of them rationally plots a course toward the common good and in doing so brings material reality as the fruit of their work, up and into the pursuit of their end. They have a right to the property that is the fruit of their work exactly because it is their responsibility as a free human being to order their work toward the common good. It is their responsibility and it is the ground for their dignity and their freedom. To take this from them, to appropriate the fruit of their work, would be to deny them the power to freely order themselves in justice toward the whole, which is to treat them as an instrument, a slave. Therefore, it is exactly the universal destination of all goods which demands that individuals have a right to private property, which they can assert, not against the common good, but against those sinners who would attempt to deny them the ability to work toward the common good. What I am suggesting is that a robust understanding of peoplehood demands a similar move with regards to borders.
Both borders between people—which is all rights, laws, and norms ultimately are—and borders between peoples, nations, are necessary in order for man to move deeper into the City of God and away from the homogeneity of the City of Man. Without borders, would not the most powerful of the disordered peoples, the most powerful of the “nations,” subsume all humanity within its univocal and unilateral construction of a closed world? Such a construction need not be explicitly political— – economic or cultural imperialism, in either its traditional or inverted form, is as much, perhaps more, of a threat to the distinctiveness of peoples. A people would seem, then, not only justified but duty bound to defend as John Paul II put it “the fundamental sovereignty of society which manifests itself in the culture of the Nation.”[35] Isn’t this very truth the reason that God dispersed man at Babel, giving him different languages and rendering one people a mystery to another?. This intervention must be read as a divine mercy: the incomprehension and so diversity between languages is a situation more conducive to the inculturation of the truth under the reign of sin than the alternative, the homogeneity of the inevitable hegemony of the strongest.
And so, ironically, we must have borders precisely in order to maintain the possibility of crossing those borders, in order to maintain the reality of horizons.[36] De jure borders are necessary in order to maintain a more profound de facto order of the proper openness of peoples. And this openness, the willingness to risk the other through an extension of fraternity, is precisely integral to the social message of the Gospel, to the bringing of the nations into the historical dynamic of the restoration of the unity of humanity, but without destroying its diversity. Pentecost did not undo Babel through the restoration of a single language. It undid Babel through deepening it, through the revelation that each language, each people, is capable of bearing the universal truth of the Gospel and in doing so both retain its distinctiveness, maintain its borders, and yet see past those borders and to the horizon.[37]
So, where am I. The modern nation is disordered in its homogeneity and its closed nature. It ought to have more diversity internally and ought to be more open to what is outside and this may very well mean that it ought to be a different size or have a different power structure: my suspicion is that there are countless ways of organizing proper peoples—tribes, clans, cities, nations, even empires. And yet whatever form this would take, there would remain both de facto cultural boundaries between peoples and the necessity of de jure material borders, even walls, between political entities.
I think Latin America’s Theology of the Peoples’ emphasis on the poor can help us sketch a shape to a proper people. The poor are the ones with little power. The poor are the simple, the ones who dwell in their people naively, loving it, without seeking to dissect it or use it, who perceive their world simply as the world. The poor are having the most honest conversations. A properly ordered people, then, must be a people that emerges out of the discourse of the poor. The cultural and political agenda that the powerful in society advance, that they propagate and manipulate prudentially for the common good, must not be unilaterally imposed upon the poor, not introduced through the sorts of centralized mechanisms that we see building the nationalisms of modernity, but rather ought to be expressions of the life of the poor in a different register, perhaps with less naivety, but always with the same devotion and respect for the coherence of the people’s world.[38] The elites of a proper people, unlike the elites of the ancient pagan polities and unlike the fascist rulers of the authoritarian regimes, must be honest participants in the discourse of the poor and in so being construct the necessary borders of a people always to protect and advance that discourse—a discourse that takes a great deal of time and patience as a history is built, a history that becomes the possession of those who inhabit it as their own.[39] The elites must be shepherds and not lords, who have always the common good of the poor at heart.[40] It is only in this way that they can prudentially build and enforce prudential borders – rights, both internal and external.
These thoughts, I hope, contribute in some way toward opening a way for us to approach the “alternate modernity” of nationalism, affirming that which is true and just while correcting that which is erroneous. I think we must see that much of the unity to which the modern nationalist aspired is true and good. The spiritual nature of the people that they so often invoke can be confirmed. The people is real. The people is more than the sum of its parts. The people is ordered to a destiny unique to it. The person is revealed as more perfectly himself in and through his people. And so, it is right that the distinctiveness of peoples be defended. The contemporary populist—more often than not poor—is not wrong to desire that his history, his language, his culture, survive in the land on which it was generated.[41] He is not wrong when he levels grievances against his ruling classes, which seem not merely indifferent to this survival but hostile to it. If Theology of the Peoples is correct, these ruling classes’ neo-liberal destruction of the diversity of peoples in favor of a profoundly homogeneous mixture of cultural “pieces,” stewed up together in a consumerist conglomerate whose only unity is therefore found in technocratic apparatus, in bureaucracy, money, and war, is not only morally wrong, it is a profound move against the very possibility of the inculturation of the Gospel. It is a move toward the inoculation of humanity against the very possibility of accepting the truth. The divine truth cannot be instantiated in administrative procedures, stock exchanges, or battle fields. We can commend and support, then the populists’ and contemporary nationalists’ resistance to such developments in defense of identity, and yet assert that Christianity modifies one’s conception of identity:, it replaces borders with horizons as identity’s final contours. It precludes, then, all chauvinism.[42] It makes possible always the welcoming of the other into the fraternity of the people—not only the foreigners without, but the foreigners within. As Pope Francis has written: “The different cultures that have flourished over the centuries need to be preserved, lest our world be impoverished. At the same time, those cultures should be encouraged to be open to new experiences through their encounter with other realities.”[43] Through a robust Theology of the Peoples, the peace of a people is no longer understood to rest on conflict between cultures, but seeks always to overcome conflict by finding the analogue to which both people’s cultures refer and so deepening both in a movement toward fulfillment. This is the movement of the City of God. The leaders of peoples, then, find restored to them the profoundly difficult, architectonic task of prudentially protecting their people even as they lead them forward toward the horizon, which is, of course, politics classically understood.
While the populists make many mistakes and are therefore dangerous, I think, the uneven bias against them that one finds so often in Catholic circles is misplaced. Of course, there are terrible abuses among populists. There have been horrendous abuses among liberals and socialists as well, and yet we seem comfortable seeing where they are right and appropriating their insights into our social doctrine. It may be the case, I think, that populism is particularly prone to a sort of rhetoric that the intellectual and culturally sophisticated find unattractive. But even this is rooted in the truth of the Theology of the Peoples. The poor live in their worlds naively. This is part of what makes them the poor. To the extent that their world is an instantiation of truth, they do not seek to change it, to transform it, to remake it as some other ideal, and so there is little clamoring for “positive,” progressive change. But when their world comes under attack, its contours suddenly appear, the horizon of their peoplehood is suddenly recognized and the necessity of borders is perceived, and so they get defensive and then aggressive. Yes, this sometimes looks ugly or simplistic or vulgar, but none of that means that there is not truth behind the grievances—normally that truth is the betrayal of the poor by the powerful.
Rocco Buttiglione’s book, as with the pontificate of Pope Francis, provides a jumping off point for the serious advancement of Catholic Social Teaching. We are in a post ideological era. The Cold War is over and ideological liberalism and socialism are dead. The meaning of identity is the question that now roils societies. Pope Francis is instructive here: “Just as there can be no dialogue with ‘others’ without a sense of our own identity, so there can be no openness between peoples except on the basis of love for one’s own land, one’s own people, one’s own cultural roots. I cannot truly encounter another unless I stand on firm foundations, for it is on the basis of these that I can accept the gift the other brings and in turn offer an authentic gift of my own. I can welcome others who are different, and value the unique contribution they have to make, only if I am firmly rooted in my own people and culture.”[44] It is to the question of identity, then, that Catholic Social Teaching must turn.
Notes
Pope St. John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (Rizzoli: New York, 2005), 60-69. Pope St. John Paul II, Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 12, 14. Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum domini, 109. Also: Laborem exercens, 44.
Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 6-7, also 11.
Christifideles laici, 44.
ST I, q.47, a.1.
Centesimus annus, 24.
Pope St. John Paul II, Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 8.
Ecclesia in Asia, 21. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 90.
Centesimus annus, 51
See Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 28-30
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction of Christian Freedom and Liberation, 33.
Catholicism (1988), 15.
Ad Gentes, 6, 9
Gaudium et Spes, 44.
Lumen Gentium, 9
C.f. Lumen Gentium, 13.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/07/17/jd_vance_america_is_not_just_an_idea_it_is_a_nation.html
The Duties of Man, 39, 45
The Duties of Man, 59
Ibid. 87
What is a Nation?, 35
Anthology of Speeches and Quotes, 18
Ibid 80
Selections from Treitschke’s Lectures on Politics (1914), 10.
Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 15.
Fratelli Tutti, 145.
Mater et Magistra, 181
See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 19, 44, 55.
See Graig Calhoun, Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5, 39, 44, 108; Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd Edition (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2008), 56.
Dec. 18, 2022 with the Spanish newspaper ABC.
See Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (Bloomsbury: London, 2014), especially pages 77, 99, and 167. Also Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism in: Basic Writings (Harper: London, 1993), 237.
Centesimus annus, 50.
Fratelli Tutti, 99.
As Pope St. John Paul II observed: “In fact there is a risk of passing uncritically from a form of alienation from culture to an overestimation of culture. Since culture is a human creation and is therefore marked by sin, it too needs to be ‘healed, ennobled, and perfected.’” Redemptoris missio, 54.
Pope St. John Paul II writes: “If, in the name of the future of culture, we must proclaim that man has the right to ‘be’ more, and if for the same reason we must demand a healthy primacy of the family as a whole of the work of the education of man to a true humanity, it is also necessary to situate in the same line the right of the Nation; it too must be placed at the base of culture and education.” Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 14.
Pope St. John Paul II, Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 14.
Fratelli Tutti, 143.
Ad Gentes, 4
See Pope St. John Paul II, Redemptoris missio, 54.2. There is, of course, a clear parallel here with the concept of the sensus fidei. See Lumen Gentium, 12–13, 35. Pope Benedict XVI remarked: “The People of God therefore precede theologians and this is all thanks to that supernatural sensus fidei, namely, that capacity infused by the Holy Spirit that qualifies us to embrace the reality of the faith with humility of heart and mind. In this sense, the People of God is the ‘teacher that goes first’ and must then be more deeply examined and intellectually accepted by theology.” Audience of July 7, 2010.
Pope Francis has written: “Yet becoming a people demands something more. It is an ongoing process in which every new generation must take part: a slow and arduous effort calling for a desire for integration and a willingness to achieve this through the growth of a peaceful and multifaceted culture of encounter.” Evangelii Gaudium, 220. Pope St. John Paul II, Address to UNESCO, June 2, 1980, 14.
See Pope St. John Paul II, Pastores gregis, 29.
Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 134.
As Pope St. John XXIII wrote: “No Christian community anywhere will ever achieve unity with the Universal Church, from which emanates the supernatural life of Jesus Christ, if the local clergy and population succumb to the influence of a particularist spirit, if they arouse enmity in other nations, and if they are misled and perturbed by an ultra-nationalism which can destroy the spirit of universal charity—that charity upon which the Church of God is built and is called “Catholic.” Princeps Pastorum, 26. Also Gaudium et spes, 75.
Fratelli Tutti, 134.
Fratelli Tutti, 143.