The terms Right and Left, as the absolute dichotomy of modern politics, originated in the days preceding the French Revolution. In the tense and divided National Assembly of 1789, partisans of the King gathered on the right side of the room while partisans of the brewing revolution gathered on the left. Thus, they accidentally crafted the most influential seating chart in history, one still carefully obeyed to this day.
It is easy to complain about the dichotomy. The issues of the culture wars have changed dramatically over time: for example, no public figures in the U.S. debate prohibition or women’s suffrage these days. And the issue of economic policy involves even more constantly shifting alliances: in the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater (R) ran a campaign which strongly supported the civil rights movement (in the face of the Harlem riot of that year, he sternly exhorted reporters to avoid stoking racial tensions) and strongly opposed the New Deal. It was called the “New Right.” Presently, a very different movement of “national(ist) conservatives” in the same Grand Old Party is rallying around opposing critical race theory (eagerly stoking racial tensions in the face of the BLM movement) and supporting a revival of New Deal economic policy. They refer to themselves as the “New Right.”
I
The Inescapable Dichotomy of Modernity
Is the branding of Left and Right obsolete? Actually, the very effort to set aside the Left/Right dichotomy is old news: in the 1930s, communist and fascist movements across Europe claimed they were “neither to the right nor to the left” (they are known now as far-left and far-right, respectively). In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair won elections as part of the “Third Way” which went “beyond left or right” in favor of the “radical center” (these neoliberals are now known as either center-right or center-left depending on how you measure). The late aughts saw the publication of The Coming Insurrection by the “Invisible Committee” in France; this anarchist tract is a foundational text of “post-leftism” (and yet, they are known as far-left). In the 2020s, Andrew Yang founded his new “Forward Party” with the slogan “Not Left. Not Right. Forward.” (He is widely named as another centrist.)
In short, there is no hiding from the Left/Right Spectrum. The international press describes every political party, movement, activist, and terrorist in these terms. The Church’s laity have come to do the same: it is common to speak of Catholic journalists and journals as right-wing or left-wing. The only way to avoid this is to stay quiet about “politics” altogether.
Those who do choose to speak “politically” can draw from a long and variegated history of Christian responses to the Spectrum, beginning with the most vulgar opportunists, who reductively identify the Church with only one side (thus, we have the Koch-funded Acton Institute and the Ford-funded Catholics for Choice). Other Christians are uneasy, if not disgusted, with these framings but take the easy way out: they describe the Church’s social teaching as a partisan platform, calling Her centrist or neither/nor because She has “policies” on both sides (e.g. “left” on economics, “right” on abortion). The most interesting are the most extreme: integralists who claim that to be Catholic is to be the perfect reactionary, the Platonic ideal of the Right, and liberation theologians who claim that to be Catholic is to be the perfect revolutionary, the Left in its purest form.
La Nation, la Loi, le Roi
If there is really any essential meaning to the terms Right and Left, we will find it by observing their history and noting those characteristics that remain consistent across time and space. Let us return to the National Assembly of 1789: here the Right stands for the ancien regime, the political power of throne (nobility) and altar (clergy). De Maistre, the greatest thinker of France’s reactionary Right, wanted to return to the status quo ante the Revolution, arguing that only these divinely-instituted hierarchies could produce social cohesion. Is this the same Right as that of Edmund Burke, a liberal conservative, who watched events play out from across the Channel? In Britain, there was (and is still) a monarchy and a state religion, defended by Burke, but these ornamental institutions ceded their power to Parliament after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. However, continuity of the Right over time is even harder to see than the continuity over space. What about the American Right of the Civil War, the Southern Democrats, who were united around the supremacy of the white race? Here there is no monarchy nor confessional state. What about the Right of Ronald Reagan, a Republican, who pitched himself as defending the Nation, the Family, and the Free Market? Or the Right of Trump, who has shifted the GOP away from its enthusiasm for globalization and foreign invasions?
Clearly, the Right cannot be reduced to a penchant for monarchy or integralism, industrialism or imperialism, racial castes or traditional sexual ethics. But what is common to the kinds of things Rightist movements love and defend is that they are all hierarchies, upheld in the name of nature, tradition, and order. Burke and De Maistre may disagree about how powerful the monarchy should be, but they agree that a fundamentally unequal relationship between ruler and ruled is in harmony with human nature, an enduring historical form of antiquity, and part of finding our place in the cosmic order. Because of this love, Rightists, whether Metternich or Guizot, the American Confederacy or the Anti-bimetallists, the European Fascists or the NATO Anti-communists, all hate the forces of revolution and chaos, precisely because they rebel against (various) hierarchies, that is, necessary and natural systems of unequal power. This rebellion, wherever it appears as an intentional, political effort, the Right calls “the Left”—their ultimate enemy.
Defined positively, the Right is a modern movement which defends hierarchy for the sake of the common good. Defined negatively—that is, from the perspective of the Left—the Right is a modern movement opposing “the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors,” as Corey Robin puts it in his book The Reactionary Mind. Defined most broadly, the Right is a modern movement which defends established hierarchies and opposes the liberation movements of the Left.
This contrast between established hierarchies and liberation movements gives credence to the French colloquialism that calls the Right “the party of order” and the Left “the party of movement.” The Right, then, could be defined as an organized resistance to some change demanded by a supposedly inferior class which has organized into the Left. Now, this does not mean that the Left/Right Spectrum goes all the way back to the Fall itself, when hierarchies first encountered sedition. Oppressive hierarchies are certainly nothing new. They have their revealed archetype in pagan Babylon (cf. Revelation 19:5,18) and their first iteration in Babel (cf. Genesis 11:4). But while we can find something close to what we call “the Right” (i.e. an idolatrous love of hierarchy at the expense of liberation) in ancient paganism, one looks in vain for its counterpart on the Left. Precisely because there is no Left, the modern Right simply does not exist as a pagan form. While pagan tyrannies often justified abuse of power on the basis of power (“might makes right”), the uniquely modern phenomenon of tyrannical hierarchies is this: they seek to justify themselves precisely in the name of universal liberation. To this point, we must now turn.
Revolutionary Revolutions
Some would argue that movements for emancipation and liberation are as equally as ancient as hierarchy. If so, there is nothing uniquely modern about the Left. Here an important distinction is required. There is no debate that the premodern world saw many seditions and revolutions. Aristotle wrote the Politics V entirely on this topic. More recently, Graeber and Wengrow have devoted their mammoth The Dawn of Everything to exploring “anarchist” politics in prehistory and the Bronze Age. But despite the antiquity of popular uprisings, there was never a universal and eschatological dimension to these bygone liberation movements. Landless Greeks might overthrow an oligarchy, but in their new democracy, they would not even think to extend suffrage to slaves or women, nor was it imaginable that their revolution was a participation in a world-wide liberation movement meant to be enjoyed by all humanity. Oppressed Mayans might have desecrated the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, but they would never have called their “social housing” a “human right.” In the words of Hannah Arendt,
Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political theory to distinguish between government according to law and tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the lawful, civil rights of the governed. Under no circumstances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the revolutions quickly were to be driven. (On Revolution, page 129-130)
The Left, then, is not a revolution against a particular tyrant or tyranny, but rather, a revolution against a hierarchy which is taken to be universally tyrannical. If you ask Leftists what they stand for: the response will not be “Saturnalian Chaos” but rather some variant of the Jacobin motto, which summarized the Enlightenment ideals: “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” Since the advent of modernity, the Left’s mission (framed attractively) has included the abolition of slavery and the socialization of the wealth of nations—not in one time or place, but everywhere, forever. To quote Arendt once again:
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. (On Revolution, page 28)
This does not mean that every modern revolt is left-wing—there are plenty of reactionary insurrections against both “centrist” (as in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch) and far-left governments, (as in Pinochet’s military junta)—but rather that there is new type of revolutionary form which exists in modernity.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
To prove this point, let us return one more time to the National Assembly of the French Revolution. We can see now that this prototypical Left is unique from ancient insurrections because it did not merely want to depose King Louis XVI, nor even to transform the government of France, but to establish and declare that political freedom (in the form of republicanism) was impossible without the abolition of monarchy and the Church—both of which comprised the foundation of France’s hierarchical social form at that time. The same had just occurred in America, with the exception that Throne and Altar could be gently (yet eternally) laid aside, rather than guillotined, in the blank slate of the New World. Immediately afterward, the Haitian Revolution did the same with the institution of slavery (though interestingly not with regard to the Church, at least in its first constitution of 1801). As the Right is characterized by a defense of hierarchy, though what counts as a ‘hierarchy worth defending’ remains historically contingent, so the Left is characterized by the abolition of tyranny, generally, though the power structures identified as ‘tyranny’ are not always the same. After the Napoleonic War, the Church and the customary claims of both local and imperial governments were targeted by nationalisms across Italy, Germany, and Austria—but monarchy received mixed reviews. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), private property and marriage were included in the list of institutions that must be abolished, but the envisioned proletarian state was to be given temporary clemency so it could be used as a cudgel against other hierarchies. Later, dissatisfied with Marx’s faction, the other wing of socialism took aim at the newly created industrial nation-states forged in this Age of Revolution. Anarchism called for the abolition first of the state, then more broadly of all involuntary hierarchies.
As the century turned, the Left widened its scope to include what we now term the “culture wars.” Feminism abolished one aspect of hierarchy between men and women with the advent of women’s suffrage and quickly moved on to others. The sexual revolutions (nascent in the 1920s and fully grown in the 1970s) took aim at emancipating the unmarried, divorced, or homosexual from the tyranny of monogamous heteronormativity. The tyranny of sex and gender is opposed by the transgender movement while the tyranny of the body itself is opposed by the transhumanist movement.
This summary would not be complete without mention of certain leftist movements, interwoven throughout all of the above, which do not fit neatly into the linear path “modern progress,” namely, anti-racism (against the hierarchy of racial castes), post-colonialism (against the global empires initially built by the First World—sometimes these were reducible to nationalism, but in other cases identified with all “peripheries” which were subject to an imperial “core”), and luddism (in the case of primitivism, seeking to liberate “nature” from “technology”).
Just as the Rightist can mix and match the hierarchies that she exalts, the Leftist can pick and choose those that she abhors. One can find anti-queer anti-imperialist socialists (e.g. in Castro’s Cuba), anti-queer imperialist socialists (in the Stalin-era USSR), and pro-queer legislators who are staunch capitalist imperialists (in the contemporary U.S. Democratic Party). What is shared across all these iterations is the following definition of the Left: a modern movement which seeks to abolish established hierarchies in the name of the liberatory ideals of the Enlightenment.
Where do these utterly novel ideals come from? Most Leftists do not like the answer. All these radical ideals—of universal human dignity, of participation in the liberation of mankind, of the possibility of peace on Earth—fall from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Christian Origins of the Modern Left
It is only among the Jewish Prophets that a linear, rather than a circular, view of history can be found in human civilization. This view of time, which begins in a benevolent Creation and culminates eternally on the Day of the Lord, when that Creation will be renewed, is where all modern concepts of “Progress” originate. Likewise, the very idea of universal human dignity and of “human rights” began with the Christian insistence that “God wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). While the Roman Empire was the first civilization to conceive of a universal humanity (over which she alone was destined to rule, cf. Aeneid VI), Jesus Christ, Who chose to be born at the foundation of that very empire, proclaimed an alternative universality grounded on love rather than domination. No premodern empire, particularly Rome, imagined that it could survive without continual warfare, but Christ was confident in a Kingdom “not of this world” which would survive “even to the end of the age” with a peace given by Him “not as the world gives.” All of this constitutes the “entirely new story,” per Arendt, of Christianity breaking into the world of pagan hierarchy.
Most important of all is the participation in the eschatological Kingdom of Heaven, an eternal reality which is “already here but not yet.” The Reign of God is the end and purpose of history, so that whenever we act socially in accordance with it, we are directly participating in something which is entirely broken off from the sinful, worldly history of the City of Man. Christianity is not a particular spiritual uprising which replaces Caesar with Christ; Christianity is a universal spiritual revolution which damns the entire cosmos of the pagan Caesars and inaugurates the Kingdom of Heaven.
It is Christianity—not Enlightened Reason, nor the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat, nor the Racial or National Spirit—which provided the concepts on which all future Leftisms have been built.
This truth in the history of ideas has been traced by many thinkers. Pope Leo XIII notes, in an aside praising the Third Order of St. Francis,
…the great benefit of drawing the minds of men to liberty, fraternity, and equality of right; not such as the Freemasons absurdly imagine, but such as Jesus Christ obtained for the human race… (Humanum Genus 34)
Pope Benedict XVI makes this theme the topic of his encyclical on Hope: “Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man, the hope of a better world which would be the real ‘Kingdom of God’” (Spe Salvi 30). Eugene McCarraher argues that Christian enchantment was not in the least overcome or set aside by the Enlightenment, but that all these hopes for the restored Paradise of Eden and the eternal bliss of Heaven were projected onto the promises of industrial capitalism or productivist socialism. D.C. Schindler, in his Politics of the Real, makes the theo-philosophic argument that political liberalism is made possible by shattering the integrity of the “Christian form” and re-interpreting all of reality against the Church’s tradition. Even the popular leftist podcaster Matthew Christman (not himself a Christian) is quick to emphasize “Before you can get the dream of a Communist Utopia, you have to have the religious dream of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
This explains why so many Christians, over the last several centuries, have attempted to trace a continuity between various modern ideologies and the True Faith. There is, after all, a kind of continuity between socialism, liberalism, and nationalism—all of which have their origins on the Left—and Christianity, but it is the kind of continuity between a clay jar and a mosaic made of the jar’s shattered pieces. Without the jar, there is no mosaic, which is not to say that the mosaic is the fulfillment of, nor superior to, the jar. Indeed, while both may be crafted attractively, the latter cannot hold water. To this point, we must now turn.
II
The First Sundering
Though a precondition for Leftism, Christianity is not the Left. Historically, this is evident from the brutality that the Left has employed against the Church—whether Robespierre presiding over the beheading of the Martyrs of Compiègne or Lenin ordering St. Elizabeth the New Martyr thrown into a mineshaft along with several grenades. Theologically, the New Testament is rife with hierarchical motifs: Jesus Christ comes as King of the Jews, enjoining obedience to the Father’s Will. Saints Peter and Paul likewise command the subjection of servants to masters, subjects to rulers, wives to husbands, laity to clergy, and all mankind to the natural and divine laws which flow from God.
Right-wing Christians, ranging from reactionary conservatives to monarcho-integralists, are quick to harp on both the persecutions and scriptures mentioned above. Their view is simply the mirror image of left-wing Christians, ranging from progressive liberals to liberation theologians, who cite all that has been stated above about the Christian denunciation and annulment of tyrannical institutions and hierarchies in order to assimilate the Church to the revolutionary project of the Left. Favorite New Testament passages on this side include the Magnificat, the Lucan Beatitudes, Matthew 25, the Epistles’ condemnation of the rich (e.g. James 5), and St. Paul on the primacy of the Spirit over the letter.
Both these errors are possible because Christians have surrendered to modernity’s assumptions, believing there to be a fundamental conflict between liberation and hierarchy. In Eden, however, we encounter hierarchy and liberation as inseparably intertwined: Adam and Eve are liberated in the fullest sense. They suffer no hunger, no oppression, and indeed no desire which they cannot happily fulfill. And yet, humanity is hierarchically ordered from the first instant: all things are ruled by God, the beasts are subject to man, Eve is under the leadership of Adam, the passions of our first parents are dominated by their intellect, and (as St. Thomas neatly explains) if enough time would have passed for generations to grow up in Paradise, there would indeed have been political rulers, though no form of slavery or exploitation (ST I Q96 A4). Dr. Andrew Willard Jones masterfully describes this Edenic hierarchy in the opening of his book The Two Cities:
The natural law is real, but it is not authoritarian. It is our participation in the divine reason, a participation in God’s real creative freedom, and what flows out of that participation is the ability to create within the world and not against it. The natural law is the setting, then, for true liberty. (pg. 6)
It may be hard to imagine a world of hierarchy without domineering and abuse; it may be hard to imagine that harmonious peace and love requires patriarchs, princes, and priests; yet this is what Genesis depicts. The poverty of the modern imagination is revealed in Marxists who must depict Eden as “primitive communism” and de Maistre’s dictum on the state of nature: “since man is evil he must be governed.” Submission to a superior is either unjust oppression or just punishment, but never a gift and a joy.
It is for this reason that the very first falsehood, which the serpent of old used to destroy the harmony of Paradise, introduced a specious division between hierarchy and liberation, law and love, nature and grace: You certainly will not die! God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil (Genesis 3:4-5). Satan caused the first sundering by proposing that the submission to God’s law concerning the forbidden fruit (v. 17) was oppressive, rather than integrated with the gratuitous gift of Creation (v. 16) in which man’s true liberation is found. At the Fall, we rejected the Source of our freedom and became enslaved by the godforsaken hierarchies that remained.
Ages beyond number ran their course and the fallen children of Adam endured a world in which liberation was unthinkable. Fathers, kings, gods, and fate itself were cruel tyrants, according to the myths and customs of imperial paganism. Here and there, heathen virtue or extraordinary grace grasped at the integration of Eden, but there was no historical event or philosophical framework which could fully escape the perverted hierarchies spawned by our slavery to sin. Even Aristotle believed that some men were natural slaves, and even Spartacus made no attempts to rally urban slaves. Even Cicero made sacrifices to the gods of Rome, and even Queen Boudica could not have imagined post-colonial world peace.
But then, after so much preparation under the Covenant, the Law, and the Prophets (in the twenty-first century since Abraham), with the poor of this world languishing yet again under a mortal tyrant proclaimed as a god (in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus), Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since his conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man. So goes the Christmas Proclamation, a liturgical text which makes evident the place of the Incarnation in world-history. In this marriage of God and Man, hierarchy and liberation are reunited, justice and peace have kissed. The next several centuries entailed the spread of this Good News to the ends of the earth, to the joy of people of good will and to the terror of the demons who had ensnared men in idolatry.
Medieval Christendom, therefore, can be understood as a civilization premised on this gracious reunion of hierarchy and liberation that Christ achieves eschatologically and historically in His Church. Many secular historians attempt to characterize post-Constantinian Christianity as essentially comparable to other civilizations in India, China, or Mesoamerica: in all cases, there are liturgies and priests, sacred kings and feudal lords. Such superficial analyses fail to recognize how the Gospel’s liberatory ideal suffused Christian hierarchies, leading to civilizational anomalies wherever the Gospel spread. Whereas in pagan societies, there are esoteric and elite liturgies, there is no equivalent in the Holy Mass, where king and the peasant worship and receive the same Sacrament. Likewise, the Catholic priesthood—from the diaconate to the papacy—was doctrinally prevented from absorbing hereditary or caste requirements (the requirement of celibacy also playing an important role here). Before the modern era, Christian kings had no pretensions to divine right monarchy. Unlike their pagan counterparts, they did not speak with the voice of God, nor did Christian emperors rule with the mandate of Heaven. Either could be (and were) excommunicated by sinning against God’s justice. At the very dawn of this era, Bishop Ambrose excommunicated the Emperor Theodosius I for his involvement in a massacre of civilians (390 A.D.). Conversely, the ideal of the monarch was not an imperial conqueror, but a defender of the poor. Saint King Louis IX personally giving alms and washing the feet of beggars on a regular basis violates all pagan sentiments of ritualized sovereignty, but it is par for the course in the lives of canonized nobility. The same king’s letter to his son evokes what the Church would later call the “preferential option for the poor”: “And if a poor man have a quarrel with a rich man, sustain the poor rather than the rich, until the truth is made clear, and when you know the truth, do justice to them.” During Christendom, all forms of power—both temporal and spiritual—were conceived as for the sake of the weak, and when they failed to act in such a way, they could be challenged as tyrannically mismanaged, not only by the Church’s clerical hierarchy, but also by the diffusive and endlessly reforming revivals of monastic life. Together, these forces gave rise to the Church’s Canon Law—a project of purifying and sanctifying Imperial Rome’s legal theory for the sake of human liberation—to which we owe what we today call “universal human rights.”
It was these same religious orders that created the first public hospitals, schools, and shelters. Asceticism can be found in many religio-philosophic traditions, but the zealous fixation on the Works of Mercy is unique. Later on, the mendicant orders would be sent around the countryside preaching fire and brimstone against usurers and hoarders, whose souls were endangered for their sin against their poor brothers. The economic effects of the Gospel also saw the slow abolition of slavery throughout Europe, the development of urban Guilds and agrarian Commons, and a cultural hermeneutic which located sanctity in poverty rather than wealth. As Hillaire Belloc concludes in his sweeping history of this social conversion:
Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. Today, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State. (The Servile State, Section III)
None of this history should be taken to dismiss the manifold sins of Christendom and its citizens. Rather, this reflection is meant to highlight the unique process by which the Gospel absolves and heals those civilizational wounds, even as Church herself is full of broken members who continue to both bear and perpetuate the evils of society to which they belong. The sins—murderous wars and persecutions, avaricious exploitation, cruelty towards wives and women, abuse of clerical authority, widespread anti-semitism, etc.—need not be ignored or downplayed. No clear-headed Christian claims that Christendom is utterly free of guilt or stain, but that while all pagan civilizations are rife with the same evils, Christendom alone was engaged in a constant, internal struggle to repent of them and to build a new social order according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And at times, most especially in the lives of the saints, the recognized heroes of that era, this Gospel triumphed.
The Second Sundering
Within the existing critiques of modernity—as the consequence of nominalism or the origin of capitalism—the view of modernity as a second sundering of hierarchy and liberation provides a complementary narrative. In part due to the wrath of the enemy at the advance of the Kingdom, and in part permitted as chastisement for the failure of Christians to be known by their love, another round of tares was sown amid the wheat. This time, unlike at the Fall, which occurred before the Incarnation, liberation can not be entirely set aside. C.S. Lewis famously noted in Mere Christianity that the devil “always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse” (IV.6). It was precisely in this manner that the age-old liar sundered Christendom: not by eliminating liberation once again, but by using the language of that liberation to war against the Divine Order of the Kingdom that the Gospel was meant to restore.
Because the entrance of the Incarnate Word into human history can never be undone, the enemy seeks to divide and obscure it, even within the Holy Church. Chesterton explains it as such:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. (Orthodoxy, Chapter 3)
Marc Barnes can be taken to summarize this point, in his essay explaining that liberalism is a Christian heresy:
Whenever Christian heresy flares up, it is by a gross exaggeration of a particular teaching of Christ over and against the whole teaching of Christ as it is lovingly received by the Church, the living ear to the living word.
While, by the time of the French Revolution, the rationalists could have forgotten that they took their ideas from Christianity, this was not true in the nascent “Left” of the Reformation, both magisterial and radical. Regarding the former, Martin Luther, fixated on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as the foundation of Divine Revelation, sought to “liberate” the Magisterium and thus abolish the doctrine of Papal infallibility; fixated on the doctrine of the priesthood of all the baptized, he sought to “liberate” the priestly office and thus abolish the doctrine of apostolic succession. Regarding the radical Reformation, Thomas Müntzer, fixated on the doctrines of universal brotherhood and the universal destination of goods, sought to liberate the peasantry from princes and privation and thus abolish the doctrine of natural law. The more enduring and pacifistic wing of the radical reformers, the Anabaptists, agreed with Müntzer regarding natural law, but pursued the Kingdom of Heaven exclusively through martyrdom rather than revolt. They were fixated on the doctrine of the universal call to holiness and so, seeking to liberate the evangelical counsels from the cloister, abolished the laity’s unique vocation to perfect and restore the temporal order (as defined in Apostolicam Actuositatem). In all of this, the revolutionary aspects of the Kingdom of God were essential to the Reformation, particularly the radicals. While predictions of the last days could be found on all sides, the Anabaptists revived the millennialism which had remained largely dormant within medieval Christianity since Augustine.
It is important to emphasize, against all reactionary triumphalism, that during this time the Catholic Church was scandalously corrupt, both in Her priestly and princely rulers. The majority of Luther’s 95 Theses do not propose heresies, but denounce the shameless simony which many Catholic reformers also abhorred. Many were attracted to Protestantism and Anabaptism because of the sins of Catholics, but this did not stop many false shepherds within the True Church from doubling down on their sins. Pope Leo X, who excommunicated Luther, was a Medici and one in a line of “Renaissance Popes,” whose spectacular sins ranged from orgies in the papal palaces (Pope Alexander VI) to expanding the Papal States through unprovoked conquests wearing full armor (Pope Julius II). The Catholic humanist Erasmus (1466-1536) pictured the latter pontiff meeting St. Peter at the pearly gates in a dialogue entitled Julius Exclusus:
PETER: You think, then, that the only thing to be considered is the royal authority of the papacy rather than the welfare of the entire Christian community?
JULIUS: Every man must look to his own interests; I mind my own affairs.
[…]
JULIUS: …But then when things had reached the stage where I wanted them, I had only to act the role of the real Julius [i.e. Caesar] and drive that barbarian trash out of Italy.
PETER: What kind of animals are those you call barbarians?
JULIUS: They are men.
PETER: Men, then, but not Christians?
JULIUS: Yes, Christians too, but what does that matter?
[…]
PETER: Oh, enough of your triumphs, you braggart soldier! You surpass in hatefulness even those pagans—you who, while claiming to be the most holy father in Christ, have caused thousands of Christian soldiers to be killed for your own personal advantage, who have created only new legions of the dead, and who never by words or deeds brought one single soul to Christ!
Each one of these wicked Popes were enmeshed in the resurgent usury of mercantile city-states such as Genoa, Venice, and Florence. (These financial poles would quickly migrate to Germany and the Netherlands, where magisterial reformers declared moderate usury to be without sin.) While the Counter-Reformation, especially through its saints, weeded out the most severe scandals, the Catholic hierarchy (including kings alongside the bishops) would spend the next few centuries clinging to their worldly dominion like so much sand. The tighter they gripped the dust of Christendom, the quicker it slipped away.
In this sketch, we have the entire Left/Right Spectrum, even if it would require the legacy of a French seating chart to name more explicitly. On the Far-Right, we have a reactionary Catholicism, asserting the doctrines concerning hierarchy over and against the doctrines concerning liberation (many of which were known to the saints, but would only be officially formulated at the Second Vatican Council). In the “Center,” we have the Magisterial Reformation, which began with Leftist logic (rejecting the hierarchy of the Catholic Church) and then codified itself as Rightist logic (by persecuting the Anabaptists for taking the Reformation “too far”). And on the Far-Left, we have the Radical Reformation, asserting the liberatory doctrines over and against the hierarchical doctrines.
At the time of the English Revolution (1642-1660), reactionary Catholicism remains on the Far-Right, albeit morphed by absolutism; Protestant liberalism, having given up on a singular denomination, represents the shifting Center; and the Levellers, who began turning Anabaptist premillenialism towards a temporal horizon, are the latest proto-communists of the Far-Left. After this the American Revolution remade the New World and the French Revolution remade the Continent, but perhaps most important of all, the Industrial Revolution remade the now-global economy. The modern shackles of hell may have been forged before 1776. But they were definitively hung on humanity beneath the incense of the Steam Engine and new law of the Constitution.
Such is the world we know today, where propagandists across the Left/Right Spectrum have forgotten that their cherished, jagged ideals were once the well-ordered property of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The Far-Right tends to prefer the Nation-State in place of the Church; the Center, restoring Mammon to divinity, comes into full form with Liberal Capitalism; and the Far-Left abandons all need for God’s grace to obtain the prophesied eschaton of Socialism. The old strains of the Spectrum survive in pockets or enjoy an occasional comeback, but the international nature of modern civilization eventually insists that all mankind uses the most recent updates of techno-paganism.
Conclusion: In Conspectu Domini
This concludes our cursory historical study of the Left/Right Spectrum and its centrality in the destructive maelstrom of modernity. Much more can and should be said to integrate these observations into the corpus of postliberal thought, but here we shall only gesture to two topics: the unity of this analysis with other criticism of modernity and the Christian alternative to the Spectrum.
As noted above, D.C. Schindler argues that “Christianity is a form that receives, heals, and transforms the three distinct traditions of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews” and that while these three dimensions “remain with us… they do so in distorted forms insofar as they lost their unity in Christ, a unity gathered up and handed down in the Christian tradition that is the Church” (The Politics of the Real, page 179). I propose that precisely the same is true of the Right and Left, each understood as a tendency around which various doctrines and practices align, like metal filings around the two poles of a magnet. Divided from their unity in Christ, they are destructive, despite their apparent similarity to the hierarchical theology of the Chain of Being or the liberating virtues of the New Jerusalem. Jacques Maritain describes the Left/Right dichotomy in the same terms:
The pure man of the left detests being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is. [cf. Schindler pg. 56: “an indeterminate potency now made absolute”] The pure man of the right detests justice and charity, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Goethe (himself an enigma who masked his right with his left), injustice to disorder. (The Peasant of the Garonne, pgs. 21-22)
Maritain, in this same brilliant reflection, lays the groundwork to renew a true Christian politics in a world where, “to be neither right nor left means simply that one intends to keep his sanity.” There is one last, mostly untested, Christian response to the Spectrum. Scripture often speaks of the just man who, as in the case of King Josiah, who “did what was right in the Lord’s sight, walking in the way of David his father, not turning right or left” (2 Chronicles 34:2). And immediately following the Ten Commandments, God commands the people through Moses:
Be careful, therefore, to do as the Lord, your God, has commanded you, not turning aside to the right or to the left, but following exactly the way that the Lord, your God, commanded you that you may live and prosper, and may have long life in the land which you are to possess. (Deuteronomy 5:32-33)
We are capable of turning aside neither to the left nor to the right only if we have our eyes fixed on God. Only in His Revelation, which both rules and releases us, can we find not a man-made “Third Way,” but the Way (and the Truth and the Life), Our Lord Jesus Christ.
As more and more voices are noting, true Christian politics will indeed have accidental resemblances to those of the world. On “economics” we may seem to be Leftist (and yet the communists will call distributists reactionaries); on “sex and gender” we may seem to be Rightest (and yet the fascists will sneer at the feminism of a postliberal Theology of the Body). On “race” we appear Leftist (yet our desire for racial justice aims at reconciliation rather than vengeance); on “patriotism” we appear Rightist (yet our love of the particular is given to our local reality, rather than nationalist fictions). If we were thrown back to the seating chart at the start of it all, we should find ourselves pulled between the Papist Right who defended God in His Holy Name and the Abolitionist Left that defended God in His beloved poor. Per Maritain:
All the same, if I happen to find myself in agreement on some point, either philosophical-theological, or politico-social, with either the [Left] or the [Right], I feel a serious uneasiness. And I don’t know which I detest more: to see a truth that is dear to me disregarded and abused by one party or the other, or to see it invoked and betrayed, by the one or the other. (pg. 26)
Prophetically, back in the 1930s, Maritain wrote that to arrive at “a vitally Christian politics,” rather than finding convenient alliances for the Church amid the worldly Spectrum, our aim “should be to protect the inner germ of such a politics against everything that would risk altering it.” And that “even though the invisible flame of the temporal mission of the Christian, of that Christian politics which the world has not yet known, should burn in some few hearts only, because the wood outside is too green, still the witness borne in this way would at least be maintained, the flame handed on.” That invisible flame, guarded throughout the last dark century by saintly Popes, and kindled further by the responses of the laity (Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, for instance, or the ressourcement theologians), has begun to burn brighter since the Second Vatican Council. So if we desire “some inkling of what it is ‘to accept as a child the kingdom of God,’ without which, Jesus said, no one can enter it [Luke 18:17]… it is certainly not a question of closing our eyes, for a child looks.”
So let us pray before the Father that we be given fresh eyes, unclouded by the wisdom of this world. May we study the Scriptures and the Sign of the Times with the wisdom of the God-Man, Our King and Brother, Our Master and Bridegroom, Our Lawgiver and Liberator.
Sean Domencic is contributing author for New Polity and the former editor of Tradistae. He and his wife, Monica, are involved in the Catholic Worker Movement and raising their children in Lancaster, PA. He prefers to write for free but would appreciate your support through prayer and alms. Donations can be made at patreon.com/tradistae