The Church Embraces Democracy

Long ago, the Church left the Constantinian political context which the Roman Empire and its successors, the old monarchical regimes of Europe, provided for it. The Church had formally accepted this context. She saw in it the natural political form within which she was to carry out her various missions. It was natural because the human city, while inclined towards evil, nonetheless recognized God as Lord, and accepted that the emperor or king received his power—potestas—from the Lord. It also affirmed that the human law guided itself in theory by the principles of the natural law, and that the natural law modeled itself structurally on the eternal law.

Within this assumed context, the Church was as happy as one can be with one’s family, that is to say, not very happy. The innumerable conflicts between the Church and the State, however, remained exactly that, family quarrels, and did not create a fundamental insecurity. As a member of a family, the Church had to make itself recognized. It had to acquire a status. In the East, she developed the rather suffocating theory of “symphony.” In the West she developed the more quarrelsome and separatist theory of the “two swords.” By its means, she could assure for good, or evil, her liberty as a body and her mission of salvation. Across a thousand often dramatic conflicts, and a thousand often shameful compromises, “the ship continued.”

The Church, however, also passed through this intermediate period of which there still remain many consequences. The long period which extends from the ruin of the old regime to the definitive establishment of the new regime is that of democracy. The period lasted at least four centuries: the seventeenth century witnesses the preparation and accomplishment of the English Revolution; the eighteenth and nineteenth the French Revolution; the nineteenth and twentieth the German, Spanish, East European revolutions and, finally, the still ongoing Russian Revolution.

All these different routes end at the same point— democracy. We know its principles: all legitimacy is founded on individual or collective consent; men enjoy equal rights; law is sovereign; the state is the representative instrument of a society distinct from it. An artificial mechanism is put in place so that the conflicts between men may be resolved by observing the rules of the game.

The intellectual fathers of the new system—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau—agreed that the Church was the principle obstacle blocking the arrival of the new regime. The Church therefore was attacked both for its dogma and its place in the city. The first battle was quickly won. From the end of the seventeenth century almost the entirety of the intellectual elite no longer felt themselves bound by the dogmatic teaching of the Church. The second battle was more difficult, and we cannot here trace its history. But through all the democratic revolutions, be they by violent means (as happened in France several times), or by imperceptible ones, the Church in practice was expelled from the State. After so many centuries this was such a cruel defeat that it is only recently, one could say only in my generation, that the Catholic Church has taken stock and has resigned itself to the new situation.

The Utopias of the Church

Thus the Church is in the process of leaving a period of its intellectual life which corresponded to these intermediate centuries, and which was marked by utopias of its own.

The first utopia is simply reactionary: it is the hope of a return to the Ancien Régime and a head-to-head struggle against the democratic attack. This utopia was not dogmatically affirmed by the Magisterium, which has never affirmed that the Church was bound to any particular political system. But since the Church underwent the full brunt of the struggle for the new regime, she found herself thrown back on the old regime in which she reclaimed her old habits and, one hesitates to add, her home. In France, in Spain, in Italy, throughout the nineteenth century, she found herself in the party of resistance. This, moreover, was not necessarily a utopian mistake, except to the extent to which the Church, effectively attacked from all sides, underestimated the irresistible force of the democratic process and missed several occasions to make peace with the new order. In this way the French episcopate sabotaged the “rally” to the republic proposed by Leo XIII, and the papacy took some time in coming to an agreement with the Italian State (to the great despair of Cavour) on the status of Rome.

A second series of utopias was born of the search for alternative solutions to representative democracy. In fact, during this age-old transition from the old to the new regime, some transitory political forms appeared which, on the one hand, were opposed to representative democracy and suspended certain political liberties, but, on the other hand, favored economic development, social egalitarianism, and the destruction of ancient elites. In this way, they worked toward the establishment of the equality of conditions, an important page of the democratic program. Among what could be termed anti-democratic democratizations, we should cite Napoleon III, Mussolini, Franco, Pilsudski, and even Petain.

These political formations sought the support of the Church. For its part, the Church had no reasons to refuse the negotiated accord, which could culminate in the Concordat. She fell into utopia only when she considered these movements a stable solution to the political problem, and a better solution than democracy because they were more organic, less individualistic, more protective of the poor, capable of eliminating class struggle, while attaining harmony in the social body. When all that proved illusory and the democratic process took new force, the Church found itself compromised with the losers. She was included in the malediction which struck them.

The third series of utopias, much more dangerous for the Church because with them she was not only compromised but tempted, developed in contact with the socialist idea. They can be enumerated in the chronological order of its principal elements:

• The underlying theme of the entire episode is the old millenarian heresy, seen in medieval Joachimism, revived by Romanticism, which dreamt of a perfect society, regulated by love and not by law, by gift and not exchange, with the absolute sharing of goods and the disappearance of conditions.

• This deception was provoked by those conservatives nostalgic for the Ancien Regimé and those merely looking for a reactionary stance towards what was new. Among conservative clerics and laymen, this deception provoked a mutation into and a leap toward the revolutionary hope of the left. The prototype of these transformations is Felicité de Lamennais. An entire posterity will imitate him, sometimes beyond progressivism, but always irreconcilable with bourgeois democracy and a free market economy.

• The tremendous impact of Marxist-Leninism, with its almost age-old duration, its worldwide extent, its intensity, cannot be analyzed in a few words. In many respects Marxism was a perverse imitation of Christianity, and represented one of the most mortal attacks in its history.The Catholic Magisterium quickly sized it up, as witnessed in the encyclicals and attitudes of Pius XI and Pius XII. But after the death of Pius XII, because of circumstances of war which had weakened the moral position of the Church, the effect of the irresistible terror which discouraged even calling the enemy by his name, the Christians living under Communist domination, and, finally, because of the infiltration of communist ideas into the clergy, the Magisterium kept a silence for which the Church without doubt will have to pay the price.

Benefiting from this silence, three utopias were able to develop. The first was the attempt to baptize communism, by admitting its vision of the world and adding to it a dose of spiritualism and idealism of a Christian tint. This was characteristic of progressivism and, later, liberation theology.

The second was the search for a third way between the real alternatives. This is the most utopian of the utopias. One begins by admitting that the socialist utopia exists, that is, that there exists a socialist society. Then one accepts the Leninist definition of our society as capitalist. Finally, one imaginatively places oneself outside of this double reality which is already imaginary.

The third utopia is apoliticism. However, since it continues in the new state in which the Church is entering, it should be treated in the next section of exposition—the Church in the context of an uncontested and incontestable democracy.

The Strategy of Babel

Since 1946 the Church has decided in favor of democracy. Despite all the consequences and wounds of former times, this line has been confirmed and is no longer seriously contested within the Church herself. However, does this suggest that in addition the Church has converted, or ought, or can convert to the democratic ideal? Nothing is less certain.

Relative to the Church’s mission, which is to conduct human beings to eternal salvation, the new regime does not enjoy any superiority vis-a-vis the old. The democratic principle asserts that the citizen obeys himself when it comes to interests and preferences he himself defines. In this sense, the democratic ideal is inferior to that of the ancient cities and monarchical regimes which did not, in principle, lose sight of the education of the citizen in virtue nor the search for a common good transcending individual interest. The prevalence of the human will over the divine will, the acceptance of a divide between the civil law, natural law, and eternal law have no reason to elicit the enthusiastic adherence of the Church.

More exactly, the democratic regime in principle discredits the idea of truth, of an absolute truth, revealed and then transmitted by the Church’s tradition. This is inscribed in the foundation of the first and most exemplary of modern democracies, the United States.

Many Americans crossed the Atlantic in order to gain shelter from religious conflict: English dissidents, Dutch Arminians, German Lutheran antipietists, French Huguenots, and Jews. When they thought of establishing a free government, the American constitutionalists evidently thought of how to establish the right of religious liberty. They sought an “artificial” mechanism to forestall reli¬gious conflict and persecution. Madison’s solution was to multiply rights and the subjects of rights, that is, to assimi¬late religious convictions to the multiplicity of interests. “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects.”

Madison’s point of view is doubtless connected with the idea of tolerance as it had been developed by Locke and the Anglo-French Enlightenment. But it also contains a trace of biblical influence. American Calvinism retained, against the optimism of the European Enlightenment, the consciousness of original sin. Madison did not seek to render man good, nor did he count on his goodness. He knew man’s corruption and, thus, deployed what I will call the strategy of Babel. Following the Eternal, who had dispersed men so that they could not unite in the project of a fatally bad goal, Madison dispersed citizens into innumerable interest groups and religious denominations, in order to render them incapable of building the totalitarian city, of persecuting and oppressing one another, which would happen if a denomination became powerful enough to impose its will politically. Since men, because of original sin, see their most sublime enterprises (and especially those) turn to disaster and to crime, let us divide them so that they will only be capable of partial and localized evils. Since the government of the United States is to abstain forever from legislating in religious matters, the denominations fragmented and as numerous as possible (the more, the better), see withdrawn the power of the State, the instrument par excellence of their malignant will. The strategy of Babel marvelously attains its goal. The different denominations were able to disdain, to hate, to compete with one another. They never were able to enter into warfare nor seriously oppress each other. What is the situation today, after two centuries of living under this strategy?

The different religious groups found things with which to be satisfied in the generalized apartheid. Tranquil, sheltered from one another, they have organized and prospered. God, introduced afterwards in the redaction of the Constitution, is today the object of a devotion and reverence more sincere and widespread than in most European countries. This God presides over a sort of child’s garden of religions, a vast playpen in which all the denominations can play together, without harming each other, under the gentle surveillance of constitutional rule. Since no one can cause his claim to the truth to prevail, the search for the truth has become in each something that is secondary. Religion has become a community affair devoted to the prosperity of the community, to charitable works, to the moral health of the faithful. But no religious truth can assume for itself a status superior to that of a persuasion, of a legitimate opinion which the constitution authorizes as opinion but not as truth. The political benefit of such an arrangement is evident and immense. But not everyone is equally happy as a result.

The happiest were the Jews, who, for the first time were recognized as full citizens, entirely free to lead a decent and productive life; for this they rejoiced. Then the Protestants who had fled Europe in order to be able to lead a decent, productive private life. They were habituated to individual religion, to the interior illumination, to a religious community of small proportions, to the fragmentation of the churches and the variations of dogma.

It could not be the same with Catholics. While they have done very well and showed an irreproachable loyalty, they retained a discomfort. American democracy did not have complete confidence in them, and with some reason. To begin with, the Catholic Church has attained a size a little too large for the spirit of the Madisonian constitution. She is twice as large as the denomination which comes after her, the Baptists, who are fragmented. If, as one can fear, there occur schisms, one must acknowledge the part of the “constitutional” factor, that is the lines of fracture that Madison foresaw and hoped for the sake of the public well-being.

In addition, the Catholic Church could not completely renounce its claim to possess the truth. To be sure, in America she put it between parentheses as much as she could, and she was hardly preoccupied with dogmatic theology. But this renunciation could not be total.

Finally, the Church is hierarchical and this hierarchy is designated by the Roman monarchy. This goes against not only the principle but also the mores of American democracy, where the election of the superior by the community is the unique source of his legitimacy.

The effective renunciation of its claim to the truth weakens the Church. As a result, she loses her title to define the rule of conduct. In democracy, mores are like political power. They belong to the domain of the human will. Like religions, they are relative to the human group which, enjoying democratic legitimacy, grants them consequently a moral legitimacy. The demand for equality for women overturns the fragile barrier surrounding the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The demand for the moral legitimacy of divorce, of abortion or of homosexuality are equally authorized by the democratic principle and from the relativism which flows from it. In order to resist, the Church is obliged to attest to a divine authority in matters of moral truth which democracy cannot but deny. In this situation of comfortable disease, which can turn fatal, what can the Catholic Church do now that it is willingly immersed in democratic society?

The Splendor of the Truth?

The Church is often tempted by an apoliticism of principle. Apoliticism is a way of taking note of the political errors where the Church went astray in predemocratic times. Since her interventions were rarely crowned with success, isn’t it tempting no longer to intervene at all? Apoliticism is also a way of taking stock of the situation circumscribed by democracy for religion: it is to remain a private affair. But it is still a utopia. The Church must engage in politics in order to assure her existence and her status in the city. She must do so because she cannot concern herself with men without taking into account their nature, which is, as one has known since Aristotle, political. There would be something ridiculous about legislating with so much care and to the last detail sexual conduct, while leaving the faithful without guidance in what constitutes an essential domain of their life. Finally, because of the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Church cannot leave her teaching to float in the domain of the ideal and interiority of individual life without any hope of seeing it incarnate itself in the real, concrete, social world.

Another temptation is to confuse her preaching with the discourse of democracy. Many sermons today enjoin the Christian to be “nice,” “fraternal,” to be responsible and egalitarian, to be solicitous for the “excluded,” the immigrants, the handicapped, even the animals. But all this is only the development of democratic discourse. Democracy contains an indefinite program of including all human beings—and soon the animals—in an egalitarian community. Communism was a perverse imitation of Christianity which lured many Christians. But there is also an imitation, less perverse no doubt, and more livable, in the democratic ideal, which from the beginning envisaged a society of a Christian or Evangelical type, once the Church, its principal obstacle, had been placed in a condition where it could do no harm.

However, the confounding of democratic discourse and Christian preaching does nothing for modern man in his deepest ill, the deprivation of the truth. In communism, the contrary of the truth was the lie, and the lie was the very nature of communism. In democracy, the contrary of the truth is the meaningless, and the meaningless is a menace of democratic life. The relativity of truth, its reduction to opinion, the progressive weakening of opinion, create a metaphysical void of which modern man suffers, and, if it doesn’t cause him suffering, it diminishes and mutilates him, which is worse. This is what such diverse minds as Tocqueville, Flaubert, Nietzsche, and Peguy have seen and denounced.

For a full century the Church has attempted to promote the social spirit. In this she has rendered great services to democracy and for this democracy no longer persecutes her. But she does not help democracy to heal itself from this deficit of truth which is its secret and deep ill. The Church’s effort would be better employed in healing herself from the intellectual deficit which inhibits her from spreading the truth she believes is her privilege from fructifying, shining and convincing.

One of my friends, an old Spanish diplomat, having looked over this text, returned it to me, sighing: “Therefore one cannot put one’s confidence in either History or the Church!” And in fact, if democracy is inevitable and the Church cannot subsist within it, the temptation of nihilism presents itself. In the Church it takes the form of millenarianism. To overcome this temptation, the Church can do no better than to make available to democratic man the pleasure of intelligence seeking faith and faith seeking understanding. It is this salubrious pleasure which democratic man gropes for in the dark, and which causes him often to end up in inferior religions or murderous ideologies. If, herself capable of a well-ordered charity, the Church renders this eminent service to democratic man, democracy itself will become livable and acceptable to her. But for this to occur she must continue to think about thinking.

Translated from La Pensee Politique (#2, 1994) by Paul Seaton and Daniel Mahoney for CRISIS.

Author

  • Alain Besancon

    Alain Besancon is director of studies at l'Ecole des Houtes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and is the author of numerous works, including The Rise of the Gulag, L'image interdite, and The Falsification of the Good.

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