The “social Catholicism” of 19th-century reformers such as Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler tried to remedy social and economic dislocation not through the invention of new forms but through the revival of the forms of traditional society.
With that respect for experiential reality which characterizes both Christianity and Thomism, Rerum Novarum warns in paragraph 18, “Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek elsewhere, as We have said, for the solace to its troubles.” No doubt the weight of the paragraph lies in its emphasis upon a transcendent reality, but the advice to look upon the world as it really is cannot be ignored.
Nevertheless the historian is all too aware that 19th-century social theorists, including those who framed Rerum Novarum, rarely looked upon the world as it really was but rather brought to their view of the world a host of distorting theories and limiting perspectives.
One of the most valuable lessons of the age of historicization which has characterized 19th-and 20th-century thought has been the increasing awareness that all symbolic utterance is conditioned by time (Zeitbedingt), and bears the imprint of the temporal context in which it is lodged. Theology no less than the other sciences clothes eternal verities in the inadequate symbols of a particular moment in time. If this is the case of the language in which we express the truths of our religion how much more time-conditioned are the changing character and institutions of politics and economics, of social and political institutions. It is, no doubt, true that common human needs and the fulfillment of an enduring human nature can be expressed in general and in universally valid concepts; however, the invention of specific institutional, political or economic forms to answer to these needs and this universal nature is the work of every particular age and the expression of prudence rather than the triumph of definition.
Even the definition of that which is an authentic aspect of human nature, the right to private property, it is clear from the history of the development of the text of Rerum Novarum, is conditioned and shadowed by the development of Western thought. It is important to note in the first place that the arguments used in the defense of private property are not derived from scripture or the Church fathers. This is astonishing only if we do not realize that the attitude of scripture and the Fathers towards private property as distinguished from common property is ambiguous and contradictory. When Leo XIII sought a text which would refute socialism it was likely, therefore, that his writers would defend private property from the standpoint of natural law.
In many respects a reliance upon the “natural law” arguments as the encyclical expresses them was unfortunate. The tone of the 19th and 20th centuries has been historical if not historistic. The revival of natural law in the 19th century was a part of the great medieval revival which was associated with the onset of modernity. Lord Acton characterized this revival of medieval thought and institutions as equivalent, in terms of its impact and importance, to the Renaissance.2 Initially, however, the natural law of the Medieval Revival was not the natural law of Thomas, a natural law close to empirical observation, but rather a dry and abstract system which knew nothing of the particularities of history or the changes which time produces. Joseph Ratzinger calls attention to the fact that the chief weakness of the Catholic social movement in the 19th century was in its ties to a speculative system based upon natural law which was in turn derived from the hierarchical corporate notions of an idealized medieval world and its consequent neglect of historical reality. One notes this fact, in passing, in the neglect of the time factor with respect to the nature of credit in 19th century treatments of usury and the effort by Leo XIII to revive the usury prohibition in Rerum Novarum as a part of his general attack upon capitalism.
The problem is an even greater one when we realize that Rerum Novarum shifts the argument for private property from the natural law theories of Aristotle and St. Thomas to the “natural law” theories of John Locke. Because the defense of private property in the classical and scholastic position seemed weak and no doubt because they did not involve an emphasis upon either appropriation or labor as a defense of property rights, Cardinal Zigliara, one of the framers of Rerum Novarum, elaborated the Lockian argument with respect to property rights. These arguments are described in the encyclical as based upon “natural law” though the fact that the “nature” of John Locke is radically different from the “nature” of St. Thomas is not disclosed by the authors of Rerum Novarum. Whether this conflation of “natural laws” was pragmatic or simply the result of ignorance we do not know.
Whatever the case may be, the concept of the relationship of property to labor as expressed in the encyclical is hardly one in keeping with the realities of industrial society. One has the unmistakable impression that the authors were writing for Italian peasants rather than the industrial workers of Manchester, Essen or Pittsburgh. The application of “natural law” in terms of a specific property form (land), which by the 19th century increasingly took second place to capitalist and industrial forms, tended to increase the ineffectuality of Rerum Novarum and the tradition of social encyclicals which derive from it.
One must consider the Leonine corpus as a whole and the establishment of a retrospective corporate, hierarchical, ideological structure, especially as it is reflected in Quadragesimo anno, if one is to understand the impact of the medieval revival on Catholic social thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. The great conflict between historical theology and neo-scholasticism which culminated in the first Vatican Council was an essential moment in the development of Catholic social theory. Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) reaffirming the authority of St. Thomas was an important preparatory step in the re-establishment of a medievalizing social ideology.
It is no less important to understand the impact of the medieval revival on the development of Protestant social thought and indeed on 19th-and 20th-century secular conceptions of labor, community and alienation. The medieval revival which began in an aesthetic revolt against the artificial order of neo-classicism culminated in the organically ordered confusion of neo-medieval social theory. Nonetheless the aesthetic element persisted. Much of the opposition to capitalism and industrialism was based on the fact that capitalist human relationships were so ignoble when compared to feudal paternalism and industrialism, so ugly when compared to the fantasy, freedom and elegance of preindustrial society. From Walter Scott through Coleridge, Southey, Carlyle, Ruskin,’ and William Morris to Eric Gill, the complaint is always the same, “Industrialism is not pretty and ugliness is a type of immorality.” Christian Socialism in England is an effort to re-establish the community and the esthetic sense which characterized pre-industrial England. Augustus Welby Pugin, the greatest of the gothic revival architects and a convert to Catholicism, believed that the restoration of gothic architecture would lead to the reconstruction of the social order. These medieval enthusiasts who were the ancestors of the arts and crafts movement failed to understand that guild-produced handicrafts were beyond the economic reach of the masses and were, in fact, affordable only by the rich, particularly the new rich who have risen to affluence through the massive production of industrial waves. Moreover, in the course of the 19th century these medieval enthusiasts became more and more secular in their outlook. Christian socialism in the course of time, as in the case of William Morris, became simply socialism.
In England the movement of aesthetic medievalism was coupled to religious and political medievalism. From the outset, aesthetic, religious, political and social ideas developed out of a common matrix and shared common values. In Germany the medieval revival was, from the outset, political in its orientation, a revolt against the uniformitarian rationalism of the absolute state. To be sure the aesthetic element was important in Germany as it was in England. In Germany, still largely untouched by the industrial revolution and with the guilds still exercising an important influence upon economic and political life, the medieval world was still something more than a ghostly shadow. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries the development of capitalism and middle class social forms was in Germany halting and incomplete. Germany remained down to the National Socialist revolution a status society. It is for this reason that the development of neo-medieval social theory was so powerful in Germany and it was through Germany that this medieval model of social reconstruction came to influence the main stream of European thought, both Christian and secular. It was the German revival of medieval social forms which directly influenced the development of “social-Catholicism” and supplied the basic institutional formulations of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.
The form and tone of this “social-Catholicism” was Romantic conservative. The opposition to economic liberalism derived in substantial measure from the fact that economic liberalism was revolutionary in theory and in consequence. Increasingly social-Catholics found themselves drifting leftward because socialism, whatever its materialist basis, seemed to them less revolutionary than economic liberalism. The fears of Franz von Baader and Bishop von Ketteler of the revolutionary character of the proletariat led these two founding fathers of “social-Catholicism” to their conservative concern for social justice and the integration of the worker into a pattern of organic social relationships. No doubt religious and moral concerns played an important role.
The key to the neo-medievalism of “social-Catholicism” was the revival of the medieval guilds and corporations. The revived guilds and corporations would provide, it was hoped, an institutional form for the development of integrative, organismic social, economic and political structures. They would overcome alienation, ensure the just price and the just wage, sanctify labor and decentralize the decision-making process in society. Moreover, they would achieve this in a paternally organized, hierarchical society in which social inequality and differentiation of social and political function were markedly manifest. The revival of the guild and adaptation of corporatism to industrial society were a reactionary effort to solve the problems of social and economic dislocation not through the invention of new forms, but through the revival of the forms of traditional society.
The chief concern of these social theorists was the “proletarianization” of labor whether that labor was agricultural or industrial. The failure of capitalist society to achieve “social justice” was only one aspect, in the eyes of the neo-medieval social reformers, of the impoverishment and degradation of the workers. Equally important was the notion of “alienated labor” which, as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson realized, was part and parcel of the processes of rationalization, capitalism, science, technology and industrialism. It was argued that the division of labor which was characteristic of industrial society would impair the creative, intellectual and physical capacities of the laborer, that the organization of capital for great agricultural and industrial undertakings would separate ownership from labor and that the community of labor would disappear to be replaced by isolated individuals all laboring in a giant enterprise whose total organization and meaning were beyond the individual. Community would dissolve and disappear and the void in the soul of the worker would be filled with a host of new corrupting and meretricious wants.
“Alienation” in all of its forms and manifestations is perceived as the great social evil of the past two centuries. The isolation of man from man, of labor from capital, of the part from the whole are the problems which the re-establishment of the guilds and corporations seek to remedy.
Nineteenth and twentieth century German sociology, politics and economics developed around this effort to restore corporate life, to reintegrate the industrial worker into the social order and to abolish alienated labor.” This background of neo-medievalism is the matrix and inspiration for “social Catholicism.”
In this development German thought and German society played a key role. The German sources of Coleridge and Carlyle are well known. The influence of German thought on French Catholicism is much greater than is usually appreciated.12 Both the Tubingen-Munich historical theologians and the Mainz circle of Jesuit Neo-Thomists had close French connections which went back to the 1830s. It is not surprising, then, to learn that German “social-Catholicism” was powerfully influential in the development of the social encyclicals.
We are aware of how important the idea of the revival of guilds and corporations was to Leo XIII. The notion first appears in Humanum Genus (1884), paragraph 35. The subject is taken up with renewed interest in Rerum Novarum and is worked out in detail by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno. It is of interest that these notions of the guilds and the corporations served as inspiration for the clerical fascist state in Austria, the “corporativist state” in Fascist Italy, and the social philosophy of Father Charles E. Coughlin, the Detroit radio priest and editor of Social Justice.
We are less well aware that these ideas had their source in neo-medievalism and were directly inspired by German “social-Catholics,” particularly Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler and Freiherr Karl von Vogelsang. Â Vogelsang was the mentor of Counts Gustav von Biome and Franz von Kuefstein. It is this circle which drew into its circumference of influence Rene de la Tour du Pin and Albert de Mun. They, in turn, found support and encouragement from Bishop Gaspard Mermillod. The activities of these groups culminated in the establishment of the Union de Fribourg. It is a matter of record rather than conjecture that these men and the groups with which they were associated had direct influence on the formulation of Rerum Novarum. It is possible that Count Franz von Kuefstein was in direct contact with the Jesuit, Liberatore, who would later frame one of the working drafts of Rerum Novarum. Both men were associated with the Cercolo Romano degli Studi sociali ed economici. In any case, German ideas were already well established in Rome as, according to James A. Weisheipl, it seems likely that Josef Klutgen, the German Jesuit who was known as “Thomas redivivus” actually framed Aeterni Patris, the key document of the pontificate of Leo XIII.
What conclusions are we to draw from this neo-medieval revival in Christian social thought? The first, I think, is that the social theories that derive from neo-medievalism are reactionary rather than genuinely conservative. They are attempts to conserve the form, albeit in altered shape, of past institutions rather than accommodating the spirit to new and transformed social and economic environments. The church still, very obviously, identified too completely with the politics and economics of a past age. In these social encyclicals it surrenders its universality and the fact that Christianity is trans-historical and trans-cultural to the forms of a past age.
Nor can one maintain that the lot of Christian men and women was more just, more moral and less alienated in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries than it was in industrial Birmingham in the 19th century. One need only read Piers Plowman to disabuse one’s self of that notion. The Jacquerie is not a form of social unrest which develops subsequent to 1789.
In the third place the anti-capitalistic, anti-industrial note struck by neo-medievalism, if carried to completion, would have returned Western society to a condition closely resembling that of contemporary village India.
Moreover, it is simply a fact that a social order organized on the basis of neo-medieval principles simply would not, indeed could not, support present levels of world population. In 1926 Walter Eucken, one of the founders of Germany’s “Social-Market economy” wrote an article under the pseudonym of Dr. Kurt Heinrich, in which he argued conclusively that Europe using pre-capitalistic economic and social forms simply could not feed the increase in population over that of the 18th century.
Finally, the social encyclicals assume a society which is far more homogenous culturally, unitary from a religious standpoint and hierarchical in terms of social organization than is the case with contemporary pluralistic and democratic societies. The neo-medieval social, political and economic forms which are offered as remedies are simply inappropriate to the age.