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Union of Church and State (Catholic World, 1867)

 

[From the Catholic World for April, 1867.] The political changes and weighty events that have occured since, have alomst obliterated from the memory the men and the revolutions or catastrophies of 1848 and 1849. We seem removed from them by centuries, and have lost all recollection of the great questions which then agitated the public mind, and on which seemed suspended the issues of the life and death of society. Then an irreligious liberalism threatened teh destruction of all authority, of all belief in revelation, and piety towards God; and a rampant, and apparently victorious, socialism, or more properly, anti-socialism, threatened the destruction of society itself, and to replunge the civilized world into the barbarism from which the church, by long centuries of patient and unremitting toil, had been slowly recovering it. Among the noble and brave men who then placed themselves on the side of religion and society, of faith and Christian civilization, and attempted to stay the advancing tide of infidelity and barbarism, few were more conspicuous, or did more to stir up men's minds and hearts to a sense of the danger, than the learned, earnest, and most eloquent Donoso Cortes,Marquis of Valdegamas. He was then in the prime and vigor of his manhood. Born and bred in Catholic Spain at a time when the philosophy of the eighteenth century had not yet ceased to be in vougue , and faith, if not extinct, was obscured and weak, he had grown up without religious fervor, a philosophist rather than a believer-a liberal in politics, and disposed to be a social reformer. He sustained the Cristinos against the Carlists, and rose to high favor with the court of Isabella Segunda. He was created a marquis, was appointed a senator, held various civil and diplomatic appointments, and was in 1848 one of the most prominent and influential statesman in Spain, I might almost say, in Europe. The death of a dearly beloved brother, some time before, had very deeply affected him and became the occasion of awakening his dormant religious faith, and turning his attention to theological studies. His religious convictions became active and fruitful, and by the aid of divine grace vivified all of his thoughts and actions, growing stronger and stronger, and more absorbing every day. He at length lived but for religion, and devoted his whole mind and soul to defend it against its enemies , to diffuse it in society, and to adorn it by his piety and deeds of charity, especially to the poor. He died in the habit of a Jesuit at Paris, in May, 1853. Some of out readers must stil remembe the remarkable speech which the Marquis de Valdegamas pronounced in the Spanish cortes, January 4, 1849-a speech that produced a marked effect in France, and indeed all throughout Europe, not to add to America-in which he renounced all liberal ideas and tendancies, denounced constitutionalism and parlimentary governments, and demanded the dictatorship. It had great effect in preparing even the friends of liberty, frightened by the excesses of the so-called liberals, red-republicans, socialists, and revolutionists,if not to favor, at least to accept the coupe d'etat, and the reestablishment of the imperial regime in France; and it, no doubt, helped to push the reaction that was about to commence against the revolutionary movements of 1848, to a dangerous extreme and to favor, by another sort of reaction, that recrudescence of infedility that has since followed throughout nearly all Europe. It is hardly less difficult to restrain reactionary movements within just limits than it is the movements that provoke them. The Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism necessarily loses much in being translated, but Mrs. Goddard's translation comes as near to the original as any translation can. It is singularly faithful and elegant, and reproduces the thought and spirit of the author with felicity and exactness, in idiomatic English, which one can read without suspecting it to be not the language in which the work was originally written. There is scarcely a sentence in which the translation can be detected. It must have been made con amore, and we can reccomend it as a model to translators, who too often do the work from the original language into no language. The work shows no great familiarity with the writings of the later theologians, and no fondness for the style and methods of the schools, but it shows a profound study of the fathers, and a perfect mastery of contemporary theories and speculations. The author is a man of the nineteenth century, with the profound thought of an Augustine, the eloquence of a Chrysostom, and the tender piety of a Francis of Assisi. He has studied the epistles of St. Paul, and been touched with the inspiration of that great apostle's burning zeal and consuming charity. He observes not always the technical exactness of modern theological professors, and some French abbes thought they detected in his Ensayo some grave theological errors, but only because they missed the signs which they were accustomed to identify with the things signified, and met with terms and illustrations with which they were unfamiliar. But he seizes with rare sagacity and firmness the living truth, and presents us theology as a thing of life and love. The principles of the essay are catholic, are the real principles of Christianity and society, set forth with a clearness, a depth, a logical force, a truthfulness, a richness of illustration and an eloquence which have seldom, if ever, been surpassed. But some of the inferences he draws from them, and some of the applications he makes of them to social and political science are not such as every Catholic even is prepared to accept. The author was drawn to religion by domestic afflictions, which saddened while they softened his heart, and he writes, as he felt, amid the ruins of a falling world. All things seemed to him gone or going, and he looked out upon a universal wreck. His spirit is not soured, but his feelings are tinged with the gloom of the prospect, and while he hopes in God he well-nigh despairs of the world, of man, of society, of civilization, above all, of liberty, and sees no means of saving European society but in the dictatorship or pure despotism acting under the inspiration and direction of the church. He was evidently more deeply impressed by what was lost in the primitive fall or original sin than by what in our nature has survived that catastrophe. He adored the jutice of God displayed in the punishment of the wicked, justified him in all of his dealings with men, but he saw in his providence no mercy for fallen nations, or a derelict soociety. This life he regarded as a trial, the earth as a scene of suffering, a vale of tears, and found in religion a support, indeed, but hardly a consolation. The Christian has hope in God, but is a man of sorrows, and his life an expiation. Much of this is true and scriptural, and this world certainly is not our abiding place, and can afford us no abiding joy. But this is not saying that there are no consolations, no abiding joys for us even in this life. Consolations and joys a Christian has in this world, though they proceed not from it. It can neither give them nor take them away; yet we taste them even while in it. This word is not the contradictory of the world to come; it is not heaven, indeed, and cannot be heaven, yet it is related to heaven as a medium, and the medium must partake, in some measure, of both the principle and the end. The great merit of the essay is deducing political and social from the theological principles. This is undoubtedly not only the teaching of the church, but of all sound philosophy; and what I regard as the priincipal error of the book is the desire to transfer to the state of immobility and unchangeableness which belong to the church, and institution existing by the direct and immediate appointment of God. The author seems to be as unwilling to recognize the intervention of man and man's nature in government and society as in the direct and immediate works of the Creator. He is no pantheist or Jansenist, and yet he seems to me to make too little account of the part of second causes, or the activity of creatures; and sometimes to forget, or almost to forget, that grace does not supersede nature, but supports it, strengthens it, elevates it, and completes it. He sees only the divine action in events; or in plain words, he does not make enough of nature, and does not sufficiently bring out the fact, that natural and supernatural, nature and grace, reason and faith, earth and heaven, are not antagonistic forces, to be reconciled only by the suppression of the one or the other, but really parts of one dialectic whole, which, to the eye that can take in the whole in all its parts, and all the parts in whole, in which they are integrated, would appear perfectly consistent with each other, living the same life in God, and directed by him to one and the same end. He, therefore, unconsciously and unintentionally, favors or appears to favor a dualism as unchristian as it is unphilosophical. God being in his essence dialectical, nothing proceeding from him can be sophistical, or wanting in logical unity, and one part of his works can never be opposed to another, or demand its suppression. the one must always be the complement of the other. Christianity was given to destroy the law or the prophets; I am come to destroy, but to fulfil." The misapprehension on this subject arises from the ambiguity of the eord world. This word is generally used by ascetic writers not to designate the natural order, but the principles, spirit, and conduct of those who live for this world alone; who look not beyond this life; who take the earth not as a medium, but as the end, and seek only the goods that this world offers. These are called worldly, sensual, or carnal-minded people, and as such contrast with the spiritually minded, or those who look above and beyond merely sensible goods-to heaven beyond the earth, to a life beyond the grave, a life of spiritual bliss in indissoluble union with God, the end of their existence, and their supreme good as well as the supreme good in itself. In this sense there is a real antagonism between this world and the next; but when the world is taken in its proper place, and for what it really is, in the plan of the Creator, there is no antagonism in the ease; and to despise it would be to despise the work of God, and to neglect it would be not a virtue, but even a sin. This world has its temptations and its snares, and as long as we remain in the flesh we are in danger of mistaking it for the end of our existence, and therefore it is necessary that we be on our guard against its seductions. But the chief motive that leads or souls hungering and thirsting for perfection to retire to the desrt or the monestary is not that they may fly its temptations, or the enemies of their virtue, for they find greater temptationsto struggle against and fiercer enemies to combat in solitude than in in the thronged city; it is love of sacrifice, and the longing to take part with our Lord in his great work of expiration that moves them. Simply to get away from the duties and cares of the world, is no proper motive for retirement from the world, and the church permits not her children to do it and enter a religious order so long as they have duties to their family or their country to perform. Nothing could better prove that the church does not sufefr us to condemn or neglect the natural or temporal order, or regard as of slight importance the proper discharge of our duties to our families, our country, or natural society. The same thing is proved by the fact that the process for canonization cannot go on in a case where the individual has not fulfilled all his natural duties, growing out of his state or relations in society. Gratia supponitnaturam. In consequence of his tendancy to an exclusive asceticism, a tendancy which he owed to the unsettled times in which he lived, and the reaction of his own mind against the liberalism he had at one time favored, Donoso Cortes, countenanced, to some extent, political absolutism; and he had great influence in leading even eminent Catholics to denounce constitutionalism, legislative assemblies, publicity, and free political discussion, as if these things were uncatholic, and inseperable from the political aetheism of the age. There was a moment when the writer of this article himself, under the charm of his eloquence, and the force of teh arguements he drew from the individual and social crimes committed in the name of liberty and progress, was almost converted to his side of the question, and supported popular institutions only because they were the law in his own country. But without pretending that the church enjoins any particular form of civil policy, or maintaining the infallibility or impeccability of the people, either collectively or individually, a calmer study of history, and the recent experience of our own country, have restored me to my early faith in popular forms of government, or democracy as organized under our American system, which, though it has its dangers and attendant evils, is, wherever practicable, the form of government that, upon the whole, best conforms to those great catholic principles on which the church herself is founded. But the people cannot govern well, any more than kings or kaisers, unless trained to the exercise of power, and subjected to moral and religious discipline. It is precisely here that the work of Donoso Cortes has its value. The reaction which has for a century or two been going on against that mixture of civil and ecclesastical government which grew up after the downfall of the Roman empire in the West. and which was not only natural but necessary, since the clergy had nearly all the learning, science, and cultivation of the times, and to which modern society is so deeply indebted for its civilization, has carried modern statesman to an opposite extreme, and resulted in almost universal political aethesim. The seperation of church and state in our age means not merely the seperation of the church and state as corporations or governments, which the popes have always insisted on, but the seperation of political principles from theological principles, and the subjection of teh churfch and ecclesiastical affairs to the state. Where monarchy, in its proper sense, obtains, the king or emporer, and where democracy, save in its American sense, is asserted, the people takes the place of God, at least in the political order. Statolatry is almost as prevelant in our days as idolatry was with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even in our own country, it may be remarked that the general sympathy is with anti-Christiam-especially anti-papal insurrections and revolutions. We should witness little sympathy with the Cretans and Christians of the Turkish empire, if they were not understood to be schismatics, who reject the authority of the pope in spirituals as well as temporals. Yet, prior to the treaty of Paris in 1856, the Greek prelates were, under the Turkish sovereignity , the temporal lords of their people, and the design of that treaty , so far as relates to the eastern Christians, was to deprive them of the las remains of temporal independance, and to complete the conquest of Mahomet II. The comeplete subjection of religion to the state is called religious liberty, the emancipation of conscience. Our American press applauds the Italian ministry for laying down the law for the Italian bishops, restoring their sees, from which the state exiled them, and prescribing them their bounds, beyond which they must not pass. The Italian state does not, as with us, recognize the freedom and independence of the spiritual order, but at the best only tolerates it. It asserts not only the freedom and independence of the state in face of teh church, ut its supremacy, its right to govern the church, or at least to define the limits within which it may exist and operate. This is what our age understands by the seperation of church and state. If it forgoes, at any time or place, the authority to govern the church, it still holds that it has the righ to govern churchmen, the same as any other class of persons; that the civil law is the supreme law of teh land; and that religion, when it happens to conflict with it, must give way to it. The law of the state is the supremem law. This is everywhere the doctrine of European liberals, and the doctrine they reduce to practice wherever they have the power, and hence the reason why the church visits them with her censures. Many devout believers think the seperation of church and state must mean this, and can mean nothing else, and therefore that the union of church and state must mean a return to the old mixture of civil and ecclesiastical government of the middle ages. Hence a Donoso Cortes and a Baron Ricasoli are on this point in singular accord. Our American press, which takes its cue principally from European liberals, takes the same view, and understands both the seperation and the union of church and state in the same sense. Yet teh American solution of the mutual relations of church and state is a living proof, a practical demonstration that they are wrong. Here the state does not tolerate the church, nor the church either enslave or tolerate the state, because the state recognizes the freedom of conscience, and its independence of all secular control. My church is my conscience, and my conscience being free here, my church is free, and for me and all Catholics, in the free exercise of her full spiritual authority. Here it is not the state that bounds conscience that bounds the state. The state here is bound by its own constitution to respect and protect the rights of the citizen. Among these rights, the most precious is the right of conscience- the right to the free exercise of my religion. This right does not decide what the cicil law shall be, but it does decide what it shall not be. Any law abridging my right of conscience-that is, the freedom of my church-is unconstitutional, and, so far, null and void. This, which is my right, is equally the right of every other citizen, whether his conscience-that is, his church-agrees with mine or not. The Catholic and the Protestant stand on the same footing before the law, and the conscience of each is free before the state, and a limit beyond which the civil law cannot extend its jurisdiction. Here, then, is a seperation of church and state that does not enslave the church, and a union of church and state that does not enslave the state, or interfere with its free and independent action in its own proper sphere. The church maintains her independence and her superiority as representing the spiritual order, for she governs those who are within, not those who are without, and the state acts in harmony, not in conflict with her, because it confines its action-where it has power-to things temporal. The only restriction, on any side is, that the citizen must assert his own right of conscience as not to abridge the equal right of conscience in his fellow-citizen who differs from him. Of course the freedom of conscience cannot be made a pretext for disturbing the public peace, or outraging public decency, nor can it be suffered to be worn as a cloak to cover dissoluteness of manners or the transgression of the universal moral law; when it is so made or worn it ceases to be the right of conscience, ceases to be conscience at all, and the state has authority to intervene and protect the public peace and public decency. It may therefore, suppress the Mormon concubinage, and require the Latetr Day Saints to conform to the marriage law as recognized by the whole civilized world, alike in the interests of religion and of civilization. But beyond this the state cannot go, at least with us. It may, be doubted whether this American system is practicable in any but a republican country-under a government based on equal rights, not on privilege, whether the privilege of the one, the few, or the many. Democracy, as Europeans understand it, is not based on equal rights, but is only the system of privilege, if I may so speak, expanded. It recognizes no equal rights, because it recognizes no rights of the individual at all before the state. It is the pagan republic which asserts the universal and absolute supremacy of the state. The American democracy is Christian, not pagan, and asserst, for every citizen, even the meanest, equal rights, which the state must treat as sacred and inviolable. It is because our system is based on equal rights, not on privilege-on rights held not from the state, but which the state is bound to recognize and protect, that American democracy, instead of subjecting religion to the state, secures its freedom and independence. Donoso Cortes can no more understand this than can the European democrat, because he has no conception of the equal rights of all men before the state; or rather, because he has no conception of the rights of man. Man, he says, has no rights; he has only duties. This is true, when we speak of man in relation to his Maker. The thing made has no right to say to the maker, "Why hast thou made me thus?" Man has only duties before God, because he owes to him all he is, has, or can do, and he finds beatitude in discharging his duties to God, because God is good, the good in itself, and would not be God and couold not be creator if he were not. But that man has no rights in relation to society, to the state, or to his fellow man, is not true. Otherwise, there could be no justice between man and man, between the individual and society, or the citizen and the state, and no injustice, for there is no justice where no right is violated. Denying or misconceiving the rights of man, and conceiving the state as based on privilege, not on equal rights, the Spaniard is unable is conceive it possible to assert the freedom and independence of the state, without denying the freedom and independence of the church. But, if republican institutions based on equal rights are necessary to secure the freedom and independence of the church, the freedom and independence of the church, on the other hand, are no less necessary to the maintenance of such institutions. I say, of the church, rather than of religion, because I choose to speak of things in the concrete rather than abstract, and because it is only as concreted in the church that the freedom and independence of religion can be assailed, or that religion has power to protect or give security to institutions based on equal rights. The church is concrete religion. Whether there is more than one church, or which of the thousand and one claimants is the true church, is not now the question. The answer of the Catholic is not doubtful. At present I am treating the question of equal rights, and asking no more for the church before the state than for the several sects. Of course, I recognize none of the sects as the church, but I am free to say that I regard even the lowest of them as better for society than any form of downright infidelity. There is something in common between Catholics and the sects that confess Christ as the Son of God, incarnate for our redemption and salvation, which there is not, and cannot be, between us and those who confess Christ at all. But this is a digression. Equal rights must have a foundation, something on which to stand. They cannot stand on the state or civil society, for that would deny them to be rights at all, and reduce them to simple privileges granted by the state and revocable as its will. This is precisely the error of the European liberals, who invariably confound right with privilege. All European society has been, and still is to a great extent, based on privilege not right. Thus in England you have the rights-more properly, the privileges or franchises-of Englishmen, but no rights of man which parliment is bound to recognize and protect as much. There is no right or freedom of conscience which the state must respect as sacred and inviolable; there is only toleration, more or less general. In the new kingdom of Italy there are privileges and franchises of Italians, and, within certain limits, toleration for the church. Her bishops may exercise their spiritual functions so long as they do not incur the displeasure of the state. The supremacy of the state is asserted, and the ecclesiastical administration is at the mercy of the civil. It is so in every European state, because in none of them is the state based on equal rights. The United States are the only state in the world that is so based. Our political system is based on right, not privilege, and the equal rights of all men. The state with us rests on equal rights of all men; but on what do the equal rights themselves rest? What supports or upholds them? The state covers or represents the whole temporal order, and they, therefore, have not, and cannot have, their basis or support in that order. Besides the temporal there is no order but the spiritual, covered or represented by the church. The equal rights, then, which are with us as the basis of the state, depend themselves on the church or spiritual order for their support. Take away that order or remove the church, or even suppress the freedom and independence of the church, and you leave them without any support at all. The absolutism of the state follows, then, as a necessary consequence, and might usurps the place of right. Hence political principles must find their support in theology, and teh seperation of church and state in the sense of seperating political from theological. But there is a very important question for the American people to ask themselves. With the multiplicity of sects, the growing indifference to religion, and the political atheism consciously or unconsciously fostered by a large portion of the secular press and but feebly resisted by the religious press, will they be able to preserve the freedom and independence of the spiritual order, or protect the equal rights on which our political institutions are founded? Instead of asking, as some do, are the presence and extension of the church dangerous to our institutions, should they not rather ask, is she not necessary to their safety? The higher question to be addressed to the sects undoubtly is, can men save their souls without the church? but in addressing politicians and patriots, it is not beneath the Catholic even to ask if the republic, the authority of the state, and the liberty of the citizen, both of which rest on the freedom and authority of conscience, can be saved or preserved without her? Are not the unity and catholicity which she asserts and represents, and which the sects break and discard, necessary to maintain the freedom and independence of the spiritual order against the constant tendency of the political order and material interests to invade and subject it? This is the great question for American patriots and statesmen, and I have written in vain, if this article does not at least suggest the answer. Hitherto almost everywhere Catholics have found themselves obliged to contend against the civil power to gain the freedom and independence of their church, and at the same time, in these later centuries, to sustain that power, even though hostile to liberty, in order to save society from dissolution. Here they have to do neither, for here church and state, liberty and authority, are in harmonious relation, and form really, as they should, but two distinct parts of one whole; distinct, I say, not seperate parts. There is a true union , not unity, of church and state-a union without which neither the liberty of the citizen nor the authority of the state has any solid basis or support. The duty of the Catholic on this question is, it seems to me, to do his best to preserve this union as it is, and to combat every influence or tendency hostile to it. Donoso Cortes demonstrates most clearly that religion is the basis of society and politics, but he is apparently disposed to assert the unity of church and state, with European liberals, but differing from them by absorbing the state in the church, or by virtually suppressing it; while they would suppress the church or absorb her in the state. My endeavor in what I have written has been to preserve both, and to defend not the unity, but the union of church and state. This union, in my judgement, has never existed or been practicable in the Old World, and I do not believe it is even yet practicable there, and consequently, I regard whatever tends to weaken the political influence of the church as unfavorable to civilization, and favorable only to political atheismm virtually asserted by every European state, unless Belgium be an exception. But here the union really exists, in the most perfect form that I am able to conceive it; and for the harmonious progress of real civilization, we only need the church, the real guardian of all rights that exist independently of civil society, to become sufficiently diffused or to embrace a sufficient number of the people in her communion, to preserve that union intact, from whatever quarter it may be assailed. This, we are permitted to hope, will ere long be the case. The sects, seeing their freedom and independence require its maintenance, must in this respect make common cause with us; and hence the spiritual power is probably already nearly, if not quite strong enough to maintain it against any and every enemy that arise. As to the controversy between the churches and the sects, I do not expect that to end very soon; but truth is mighty and in the end will prevail. They will, no doubt, struggle to the last, but as the state cannot intervene in the dispute, and must maintain and open field for the combatants, I have no doubt that they will yield at last, because the church has the truth in its unity and integrity, and they have it only as disunited or broken in scattered fragments. Reason demands union and catholicity, and where reason is free, and assisted by grace, she must win the victory.