Abstract
This ‘essay’ is an admirably concise examination of the history of Catholic political thought over more than two centuries of liberalism and democracy. Its considerable interest for political historians and political thinkers (and philosophers and theologians) lies in the originality of Emile Perreau-Saussine’s approach. This lies, first, in his organising the conceptual analysis around defining proclamations of the First and Second Vatican Councils, undertaking to demonstrate their theoretical consistency as adaptations of the Catholic Church’s authoritative ecclesial and political tradition to ‘modern’ historical developments. Second, it lies in his taking the history of Catholic political and ecclesial thought in France from the Revolution onward as the matrix of these conciliar proclamations and the historical key to their theoretical consistency.
The overall rationale of Perreau-Saussine’s approach runs counter to the prevailing tendency within and without the Catholic world to polarise the conciliar pronouncements of 1870 and 1963−5 as wholly antipathetic moments of Catholic political teaching, pitting the illiberal, anti-democratic ultramontanism of Vatican I against the liberal, democratic laicity (laicité) of Vatican II. Perreau-Saussine’s contrary aim is to display Vatican I’s liberal element—namely, its adaptation to political secularisation by asserting the Catholic Church’s juridical liberty—and conversely, Vatican II’s backward-looking element—namely, revival of the venerable Gallican emphasis on the autonomy and dignity of secular rule and civil community. As befits the author of a book on Alisdair MacIntyre, Perreau-Saussine’s reading of the epochal councils exhibits the dialectical presence of continuity and discontinuity in the rational adaptations of Catholic tradition. The study is structured in two parts, the first traversing the historical path to Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility, and the second the path to Vatican II’s pronouncements on the human right to religious freedom and its constitutional protection (Dignitatis Humanae), and the common priesthood of the laity and episcopal collegiality (Lumen Gentium).
Perreau-Saussine’s historical account begins with the reconstruction of the French church by the revolutionary Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790). He construes this reconstruction as an enterprise of politicising and laicising the church in the direction of democratic monism, pursued by a state rapidly shedding the constraints of divine and canon law in favour of a formalism of individual rights. In so doing, it undermined the authority of the clerical hierarchy, protected for centuries by the Gallican constitution of the Ancien Régime which (magisterially presented by Bossuet) had balanced the monarch’s temporal (jurisdictional) sovereignty over the estates of his kingdom, conceived on the model of Israelite kingship, with the superior spiritual authority of the episcopal hierarchy, as successors to Christ’s apostles, under the pope’s Petrine primacy.
Perreau-Saussine traces three broad historical trajectories of response from French Catholics to the revolutionary project. Two paths of ‘ultramontane’ resistance, distinguished as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, lead to Vatican I; the third path of ‘neo-Gallican’ co-operation leads to Vatican II.
Conservative ultramontanism was the reactionary repudiation, not only of the revolutionary principles of liberty and democracy, but also of pre-revolutionary Gallicanism, in favour of a stronger political entrenchment of papal legal supremacy in spiritual (doctrinal, ecclesial and moral) matters. From the early anti-revolutionary writings of Joseph de Maistre and Vicomte de Bonald to Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), the theo-political rationale of reactionary papalism was the depth of sinful humanity’s rebellious depravity and blindness, manifested in the attempted subversion of Christian truth by totalitarian democratic individualism, and the consequent necessity of popular subjection to the discipline of God’s ordained and equipped rulers: Christ’s spiritual vicar, pre-eminently, and after him, the temporal prince.
The author describes how the inescapable political unreality of reactionary papalism was historically demonstrated, first, by the heady project of Napoleon’s failed 1801 Concordat with Rome, to order and pacify the French church through a combination of unrestrained papal dictatorship and secular (non-confessional) civil jurisdiction; and second, by Auguste Comte’s influential, reactionary parody of Catholic papalism that envisaged an authoritative scientific priesthood presiding over the ‘religion of humanity’ as the ‘external’ source and guardian of social morality and public law (p. 86).
By contrast, the path of liberal ultramontane resistance did not repudiate the revolutionary embodiment of principles of political liberty and democracy in a secular constitution, but only insisted that the constitution be more thoroughly secular, divested of the Gallican vestiges of civil jurisdiction over the French church. Its concern was with restoration and protection of the church’s institutional independence (theological, political and economic). For French Catholics in this camp, unhindered papal authority over the church was indispensable to the integrity of her faith and ministry in the face of aggressive state interference.
Despite its uneven endorsement of liberal democratic principles and institutions, Perreau-Saussine regards this trajectory as having closer historical and theoretical affinity with the naturalistic philosophical analysis of both the political merits of liberal democracy and the causes and failures of the French revolution masterfully set forth by (the ex-cradle Catholic) Alexis de Tocqueville. Convinced of the independence of the ‘political and religious spheres’, such Catholic opponents of secularist church oppression could appreciate the labours of Montesquieu and Tocqueville to explicate political life in terms of immanent principles of causality and order. The author points out, with approval, the continuity of their labours with Thomas Aquinas’s ‘sharp distinction between divine law and human law’ predicated on the natural existence of ‘the state’ (p. 55).
In relation to the conservative and liberal ultramontane trajectories, Perreau-Saussine casts Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution on papal infallibility as the more fitting terminus of the latter trajectory. For although Pastor Aeternus fulfilled the conservative demand for a supremely authoritative judge over the universal Church, it confined the pope’s unchallengeable judgment, when speaking ex cathedra, to the sphere of ‘doctrine concerning faith and morality’ (to quote the bull; p. 49). In not extending papal infallibility beyond the ‘spiritual sphere’ (into which the author smuggles church polity tout court, pp. 62−67), or negotiating with Catholic states for legal recognition of the bull in advance of its promulgation, the Catholic hierarchy was not merely exhibiting acquiescence in the contemporary separation of state and church in France and elsewhere, but was repudiating national church establishment (‘ecclesiastical Gallicanism’), and its inevitable encroachments on the church’s liberties.
The victory of ultramontanism at Vatican I did not, however, entirely arrest the course of Catholic neo-Gallicanism—the third post-revolutionary trajectory—to which, throughout the nineteenth century, an assortment of eminent Catholic clerics, academics and politicians remained committed. These continued to uphold, on both political and ecclesial grounds, the compatibility of close state−church collaboration with the French state’s non-confessional, liberal-democratic constitution. They argued, on the one hand, that Catholicism was the religion of the democratic majority, and its traditions were still vigorous currents in French society, culture and institutions, and on the other, that the vitality of the French church resided in the integrity of the faith of the laity and their clergy under the pastoral oversight of a capable national episcopate. Perreau-Saussine appeals (again) to Tocqueville for a philosophical formulation of the dual grounds of the neo-Gallican position: that liberal democratic society can neither be motivated solely by, nor be understood exclusively in terms of, private interests and individual freedoms (‘rights’), but must also be formed by and understood in terms of those moral and social, private and public virtues and limits arising from Christian beliefs and practices; and conversely, that liberal democracy serves the evangelising mission of Christian institutions by protecting their integrity and enhancing their spiritual influence over the totality of social and political life.
The aspirations of the neo-Gallicans were above all challenged from 1875 by the aggressively secularist and rationalist, ‘Jacobin’ and ‘Comtean’ project of the Third Republic, that entailed the unification of education (wrested away from the Catholic orders) by the ideology of progressive republicanism, the thorough subjection of the church in externals to civil jurisdiction (including the vesting of her property in civil bodies), and the detachment of privatised, individualistic faith from clerical organisation. Only the neo-Gallican insistence on the inseparability of individual and corporate religious freedom in a secular polity ensured that the legal separation of church and state in 1905 actually freed the Catholic Church from civil intrusion, rather than protracting and tightening it. While emancipating the civil realm from ‘political theology’ of all stripes, this moderate laicité—Emile Littré’s ‘Catholicism of universal suffrage’—could accommodate a level of public Catholicism, in, for example, state support for ‘private’ Catholic-dominated education and Catholic chaplaincies in public institutions.
Unfortunately, the twentieth century saw neo-Gallican moderation giving way to the battle between conservative and socialist messianisms. It witnessed the swing from the monarchist nationalisme intégrale of Charles Maurras, ideologue of Action Français, in strategic alliance with reactionary Catholic Thomism, to the post-war social gospel of Christian Marxism—both political theologies alike in their hatred for bourgeois liberal individualism and commercialism, their totalising rejection of the historical present, and their confident ‘reading’ of Providence.
Fortunately, systematic opposition to the totalitarian subjection of human freedom to ‘revealed truth’ came from such theologians as Henri de Lubac, Gaston Fessard and, most importantly, Jacques Maritain, who charted the path for Vatican II to ‘recover a sense of tradition’ that reconciled ‘defence of the truth’ with ‘search for the truth’, ‘the acceptance of revelation with its reinterpretation’ (pp. 114−115). Largely thanks to Maritain’s war-time sojourn in America, nearly 150 years after Tocqueville’s visit, the Catholic Church ‘effectively deferred’ to the Tocquevillean insights of French neo-Gallicanism (pp. 116−117). Lumen Gentium emphasised the ‘primacy of the laity’ and its ‘specifically Christian service’ in diverse ‘temporal’ or ‘secular’ spheres, including the political, and Dignitatis Humanae recognised the universal, natural right of human beings to freedom from political coercion in their rational pursuit of religious truth and action in conformity with it. Together the decrees restricted temporal political power by the individual and corporate right to religious freedom, and so protected the exercise of moral and spiritual authority by the clerical hierarchy.
Situating the liberal-democratic laicity of Vatican II in the Gallican tradition of Bossuet, Perreau-Saussine conceives the former’s advances on Bossuet as constituted by its endorsement of popular rather than monarchical sovereignty, of firmer constitutional limits on secular jurisdiction, and of the vital contribution of civil society to human welfare. Together, these advances express most fully the teleological and epistemological self-sufficiency of both the state and the church on which a relatively harmonious relationship may be built. As the state’s secular service to God in making just laws for the common good and protecting inviolable human rights requires no ‘legitimation or justification beyond the purely human [power of law]’, so it excludes ‘the competence to decide on the truth claims of a religion’ (pp. 130−31).
The Vatican II climax of Perreau-Saussine’s historical narrative of Catholic political tradition is followed by a dénouement addressing the condemnation of more recent totalitarian tendencies in liberal democracy contained in the encyclicals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Papal criticism, the author emphasises, is not directed against the principles of liberal democracy, but against their increasing subservience to a degenerate libertarian moral culture which fosters legal violations of the fundamental rights of vulnerable human beings, and deploys the ideology of ‘nondiscrimination’ to suppress the social and political expression of religious and moral commitments by Catholic (and other) citizens and organisations. Rome’s pastoral censure of these totalitarian tendencies is most adequately understood, not as a regressive turning back from Vatican II to Vatican I (conceived as unreconciled theoretical polarities), but as a further adaptation to historical developments of one synthetic ecclesiological and political tradition.
My review has devoted so much space to conveying the analytical strands of Perreau-Saussine’s historical account because therein lies the intellectual fascination and challenge of this study. In deciphering the adaptive rationality of the Catholic political tradition in the modern epoch, the author presents us with an historical eschatology (my term) in which the antithetical principles of that tradition—the search for truth and the defence of truth, lay autonomy and clerical rule, secularity of temporal power and its service to the church, individual rights and popular sovereignty—are reconciled and their institutional embodiments held in balance. The lynchpin of this historical eschatology is the replacement of political theology by political philosophy in the public realm.
Even the most devoted critic of historical eschatology cannot but appreciate the deftness, discernment and balance that Perreau-Saussine brings to his analysis of, and apology for, the French Catholic and Roman conciliar political tradition(s), and their illumination of contemporary issues. However, his work invites critical observations on both interpretative and apologetic fronts.
First and foremost, an adequate interpretation of the relationship of Roman conciliar to Gallican/neo-Gallican political tradition(s) requires a more developed and discriminating theological exposition of these two than Perreau-Saussine offers. His references to foundational theological concepts such as ‘temporal power’ and ‘spiritual authority’, ‘creation’ and ‘divine law’, and to central thinkers and official church statements—from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius and Bossuet to the pronouncements of Vatican I and II—leave the informed reader with too many unresolved queries, thus detracting from the cogency and plausibility of his theoretical project. For example, his tracing of the Gallican/neo-Gallican tradition is highly equivocal as to whether it construes the pope’s ‘spiritual authority’ as essentially pedagogical, or as pedagogical (universally) and juridical (in the ecclesiastical forum), marshalling quotes and making comments that appear contradictory.
Closely related is his interpretation of the pronouncements of Vatican II as definitively repudiating or excluding the ‘confessional state’. Although the conciliar documents (including Gaudium et Spes, which is overlooked) unambiguously make room for the ‘non-confessional state’, they do not appear to preclude civil governments acting with a confessional rationale in, for example, conferring exclusive legal privileges on the Catholic Church and church-linked institutions, or paying such deference to canon law as is compatible with the church’s sovereign mission. Finally, his appeals to the longer Thomistic tradition neglect its influential anti-conciliarist, Tridentine strand that contrasts the natural-law basis of civil jurisdiction with the divine-law basis of papal jurisdiction in order to refute the conciliarist ecclesiology favoured by Gallicanism and the author.
As an apologist for the Catholic political tradition, Perreau-Saussine maintains that the contemporary alternative to a non-confessional ‘rights’ state in historically Catholic territories is secularist democratic totalitarianism. He nowhere denies that the situation may be differently nuanced in states with established churches not historically constituted as a (potentially) rival jurisdiction. As a theological apologist for English church establishment, I would argue that the state’s historic legal recognition of the universal authority of the church as a community of witness and worship continues to provide a bulwark (admittedly not altogether effective) against the totalitarian monism of the ever more repressive secular ideology of egalitarian rights pluralism.
Sadly, Perreau-Saussine’s premature death has deprived many grateful students and readers of further offerings of his distinguished scholarship and stimulating thought.