Jacques Maritain on political theology

Abstract

While ‘political theology’ has attracted widespread attention for decades, it is often taken to be too fideist for orthodox Christianity and too illiberal for secular politics. But in the work of Jacques Maritain one finds a defence of a certain political theology, one whose character is key to grasping Maritain’s justification of another controversial concept: ‘Christian philosophy’. In this study I draw out Maritain’s distinction between Christian philosophy and theology, paying particular attention to the relevance of their differences in the realm of practical thought. To illustrate what Maritain has in mind by these claims, I further consider his intriguing classification of the political works of Thomas Aquinas. I argue that distinguishing between rival notions of political theology clarifies the opportunities for dialogue between believing and secular citizens.

Keywords

Carl Schmitt Christian philosophy Jacques Maritain political theology Thomas Aquinas

The rise of Islam as a political problem has had a two-fold effect in the West. On the one hand, it has awakened our communal identity as a particular culture bound by tolerance and reason. On the other hand, it has raised questions about the integrity of that identity, and particularly whether western religion has been adequately reconciled to modern secular rationalism.¹ The first effect was famously anticipated by Samuel Huntingon in The Clash of Civilizations.² Yet the great objection to that thesis, namely that culture is not destiny, is as pertinent as ever, for persons can question the norms and mores of their culture. And so today we question whether the western culture of our time has assayed the proper relation of religion and politics, and especially whether a religion that claims to be based upon revealed truths is ‘irrational’ and therefore ‘illiberal’.

This problem emerges most fully in discussions of political theology, or rather in the lack of discussion. For Carl Schmitt’s name has become a conversation stopper. His critique of liberalism would seem to require a radical reorganization of political society along theological lines that satisfies no one. Yet political theology has been a possibility for millennia before Schmitt, and in many other forms.³ Moreover, the questions raised by the concept go far beyond debates about secularization, the relation between early and late modernity, and the collusion of philosophers in the Nazi regime.⁴ Is a political theology necessarily closed to reason? Does it sacramentalize the state and thereby exclude non-believers from citizenship and office? And can believing citizens contribute positively to the life of a liberal or secular polity through that faith?

The specific issue of Schmitt’s political theology occupied the French thinker Jacques Maritain for only a few paragraphs, yet even a cursory study of those words reveals that the problems at issue in the nature of political theology are among the dominant themes of Maritain’s work. To think seriously about political theology, Maritain argued, requires an examination of the full range of man’s rationality, and to what if anything higher it is open. His treatment of political theology thus emerges from a far wider consideration of the inner connections between philosophy, theology and what he called ‘Christian philosophy’. This approach clarifies the meaning of political theology and whether it is in fact necessarily irrational and illiberal.

This article proceeds in three steps. First, I consider Maritain’s brief discussion of Carl Schmitt. I then outline Maritain’s arguments on the distinction between theology and philosophy, which are the key to differentiating political theology from what Maritain calls ‘separated philosophy’ and ‘Christian philosophy’. After briefly considering some helpful criticisms of Maritain’s arguments, I return to the problem of Carl Schmitt.

Political theology: German and French

In chapter 3 of Integral Humanism, Maritain proposes to discuss the spiritual/temporal distinction as pivotal to making sense of the modern conditions in which Christianity finds itself (IH 212). Above all, Christianity must so distinguish the temporal from the spiritual because the spiritual transcends man:

For the Christian, the true religion is essentially supernatural and, because it is supernatural, it is not of man, nor of the world, not of a race, nor of a nation, nor of a civilization, nor of a culture, nor of civilization, nor of culture – it is of the intimate life of God. It transcends every civilization and every culture; it is strictly universal. (IH 213)

The great challenge of Christian culture, Maritain argues, is to keep what is particular and accidental to each society open to that which transcends it. For one thing, no culture can be as universal as the supernatural faith, so it must conform itself to the faith’s universalism rather than demand that this faith conform itself to that culture. Yet if conformity to faith is a goal of culture, it is nonetheless a goal man cannot attain on his own merits. The supernatural basis of Christianity reveals temporal existence as intermediate and thus subordinate to the supernatural order.

Distinguishing between the temporal and spiritual, Maritain says, requires we be clear about the distinctions between world, church and the life beyond. If worldly life prepares us for that life beyond, it is nonetheless this life in which we now live. Maritain promises to take up three influential approaches to that task that he finds in error. Before he makes good on this promise, however, Maritain raises the issue of political theology.

The life beyond, or the ‘Kingdom of God’, had been the subject of recent German discussions about political theology when Maritain wrote Integral Humanism in 1936. Maritain notes that the meaning of this ‘politische Theologie is altogether different from that of the French words théologie politique’. While Maritain begins with a discussion of this French meaning, it will be more helpful for our purposes to discuss the German one first. The German political theology takes ‘political realities … [as] themselves of the divine and sacred order’. Political ideas of modernity are ‘a transposition of essentially theological themes’ on this account not simply because of some ill-founded modern attempt to appropriate the religious through secularization, but because politics itself is of a religious order.

The connection to Schmitt is too obvious, and Maritain in fact names him as the leading figure behind this transposition thesis concerning all of ‘the major political and juridical ideas of modern times’ (IH 215). As Schmitt himself famously put it:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.⁵

The problem with liberalism for Schmitt, at least in part, is its evasion of this simple fact in its flight to immanence. But his formulation is ambiguous. Must we have ‘divine politics’? Is the problem of politics simply the problem of God as lawgiver and his miracles as exceptions? Or might we re-evaluate our metaphysical image of the universe and self-consciously revise our visions of politics? Schmitt never has much to say about this God besides his character as the source of the juridical concept of sovereign, so from a strictly theological position his claims are obscure at best.⁶

Clearly, however, this political order will have a religious goal, which according to Maritain is ‘the messianic and evangelical idea of the kingdom of God’, a kingdom wrapped in an ideology of Sacrum Imperium, or Holy Empire’ (IH 215). Such a political theology does not simply claim to recognize a spiritual dimension to political activity or acknowledge the implications for religious forms of a given political order. The supernatural is collapsed into the natural, and the explicitly supernatural goal of Christianity, the Kingdom of God, becomes a temporal and earthly goal. The regime organizing itself through such a political theology must itself become the Kingdom of God, being responsible for ‘the fulfillment of the redemption’. This account thus abolishes the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual that Maritain held to be so critical only a few paragraphs before. It also challenges the classical liberal sensibility that politics and religion are distinctly autonomous spheres of activity.

What is the French alternative? ‘The French meaning of the expression théologie politique’, Maritain writes,

… is that politics, like everything that relates to the moral order, is a subject for the theologian as well as for the philosopher, because of the primacy of moral and spiritual values engaged in the political order itself, and because these moral and spiritual values imply, in the state of fallen and redeemed nature, a reference to the supernatural order and to the order of revelation, which is the proper object of the theologian. Thus there is a political theology as well as a political philosophy – a science of an object secular and temporal, which judges and knows this object in the light of revealed principles. (IH 215; emphasis in original)

All things in the moral order are subjects of theological and philosophical study, thus giving rise to a political theology and a political philosophy. This is for at least two reasons. First, politics engages ‘moral and spiritual values’. Such values are as much in the purview of theology as philosophy, and apparently both are meant to have a substantial teaching for politics given the ‘primacy’ of such values. Yet if this first reason speaks of the common interest of theology and philosophy, the second one seems to be grounds for their distinction. Politics as the ‘proper object of the theologian’ involves the manner in which these values ‘imply … a reference to the supernatural order and to the order of revelation’. The context of ‘the state of fallen and redeemed nature’, which is revealed, somehow also matters. This would then not seem to be a complete rejection of German political theology. After all, Maritain assigns here a significant role for theological speculation in politics. As the site of activity of considerable spiritual and moral significance, politics must call on theology not only to weigh in on those underlying values, but also to speak to the very condition of that activity, taking place as it does in man’s ‘fallen and redeemed’ state. Thus while we note that Maritain validates a role for political philosophy in the same breath as he urges one for political theology, the latter appears to have a special significance vis-à-vis politics.

Yet what follows complicates our task of distinguishing théologie politique from politische Theologie. Politics is ‘an object secular and temporal’ even when studied by theology. Thus politics as the secularized ‘sacred’ and ‘divine’ is rejected: the secular is a legitimate concept in its own right. If the theologian ‘judges and knows this object in the light of revealed principles’, politics itself nevertheless remains temporal and earthly. Thus the nature of theology would seem to be very different indeed from philosophy, which is a presumably secular pursuit, although Maritain does not say as much. Maritain also acknowledges that Schmitt’s argument is not simply epistemological. Schmitt’s historical thesis presupposes a metaphysical argument that no distinction between the spiritual and the temporal exists within politics, if anywhere. Maritain thus meets Schmitt on his own terms in Maritain’s metaphysical claims that the status of the political object itself is at issue, not simply our source of knowledge of politics.⁷

After this description, Maritain goes on to explain the German sense of political theology. What is striking, however, is that while it is easy enough to accept his critique of German political theology, the meaning of this French alternative is not so obvious. Indeed, the former critique seems to flatter the sensibilities of those who would find it painfully evident that politics and religion are two separate spheres, but the latter sends those conventions into a tailspin. For if Maritain’s rejection of politische Theologie rests upon a clear distinction between religion and politics, his endorsement of théologie politique would appear to blur that distinction. Somehow theology can treat politics as a moral activity, yet politics remains secular and temporal. In this case ‘secular’ refers not to something illicitly liberated from the divine, but rather to something naturally and properly in the realm of reason. Further, Maritain indicates an asymmetry between the relations of philosophy and theology to politics. While we have some sense that theology uses revelation, what would it mean for theology to consider politics ‘in the light of revealed principles’? What would it mean for the condition of politics to demonstrate its ‘reference to the supernatural order’? What role does this notion of political theology leave for political philosophy? What, fundamentally, does it mean for politics to be an activity both spiritual and moral? In glancing back at his definition of German political theology, which takes as heilig what is ‘secular and temporal’, we might think that we do not quite yet know what Maritain means by this.

Maritain does not directly address these questions in the chapter, although the careful reader will find significant clues there. Maritain after all only means for this excursus in political theology to be a ‘digression’ in his treatment of other political themes, and in fact asks the reader’s permission to ‘return to our subject’ (IH 215). So if we are to find answers to these questions, we must seek them elsewhere. Luckily Maritain’s writings on the relation between theology and philosophy, written just before Integral Humanism, are rich in such answers.

Christian philosophy

Maritain rejects Schmitt’s political theology, yet the French version he contrasts it with poses several difficulties, particularly his distinction between political theology and political philosophy. We now turn to his Essay on Christian Philosophy to sort them out.

This work, part of a lively 1930s French debate, seeks to define philosophy and theology. Maritain’s great question is whether and how they can be reconciled. This is the question of ‘Christian philosophy’.⁸ Maritain begins the book with an observation about two ways of viewing philosophy’s relation to theology: they both have sound ‘reproofs’ against one another, meaning neither one can be entirely correct.

First there is the approach that ‘tends to deny to human wisdom, to philosophy, an autonomous character in relation to religious faith’ (ECP 3). On this view it is ‘akin to blasphemy’ to suggest that philosophy does not depend upon faith and revelation for its nature and principles, or to argue for any ‘purely natural wisdom’ apart from piety. Maritain does not note what reproof this view has for the second, but his emphasis on its aloof antiquity suggests that its advocates are disinclined to engage in direct controversy.⁹

If this view comes to us from ancient Israel, the second hails from ancient Hellas, the tradition of the ‘Grecian Minerva’. While this second view rightly sees that philosophy has a certain autonomy from faith, it takes this premise too far in its conclusion that philosophy thereby has no essential connection with faith. Maritain often refers to this conception of philosophy as a ‘separated philosophy’. Although both descriptions are brief, this is the shorter one. But there is good reason for this. According to Maritain, while many do not give ‘open assent’ to this view, they nonetheless ‘develop their thought as if it were so’. Maritain thus raises doubts about how often this position is clearly articulated and justified. Could its chief strength then be the status of its conventionality (ECP 3–4)?

In what follows, Maritain makes it clear that these views correspond roughly to two of his interlocutors in the aforementioned debates (ECP 4–11).9 What is interesting for our purposes is that both of these views have advocates in a thoroughly Christian milieu. In fact, Maritain singles out ‘neo-Thomists’ along with other rationalists as among the proponents of the second view. One expects to find Christians among those supporting the first view, including perhaps Carl Schmitt. If politics is itself a sacred category, then philosophy will radically depend upon theology for knowledge of the revelation that explicates the divine character of the political, if philosophy has any role at all. But how does a Christian embrace a view of reason that grants philosophy complete autonomy from theology? While we might think that liberalism posits such a distinction between the practical reason of politics and the metaphysics and theology of religion, can this position be a genuine fruit of the Bible and the classical Christian tradition? If it is easy to reject Carl Schmitt’s understanding of political theology, it is not so easy to imagine an alternative to it that does not slip into an equally facile rationalism. This is Maritain’s goal in setting out his théologie politique.

To find the via media between these two positions, Maritain sets out three key distinctions in this work: the nature and state of philosophy (ECP 11–29); philosophy and theology (ECP 34–8); and practical and speculative philosophy (ECP 38–43). I will now consider each in their turn to summarize the guiding themes of the book.

The nature and state of philosophy

Put simply, the nature of something is its essence, or ‘what it is in itself’, while its state ‘pertains to its concrete conditions of existence and exercise’ (ECP 11). By its nature, philosophy investigates the nature of things through the full range of reason’s power. The mind’s ‘particular development and dynamic organization’ yields a philosophy of both natural and rational knowledge. It is natural because the mind can attain to the knowledge ‘through the natural faculties of the human mind’. It is rational in turn because the objects around us are inherently graspable by our discursive intellects. It is in this sense that Maritain argues that philosophy is ‘essentially related to an object to which it makes our intelligence adapted and co-natured’. The object of the mind’s investigation and not the mind is the central determinant of philosophy’s nature (ECP 13).

Yet to the extent that humans do enact philosophy, it is not an abstract concept but an activity within time. Thus the state of philosophy comes to matter. Revelation, or what God speaks to man as studied through theology, can present data to philosophy that philosophy can then investigate rationally for itself. This is the ‘order of exercise’ that philosophy finds itself in, a world in which the philosopher knows revelation as a historical fact (SW 109).¹⁰ In the first place, revelation can present things to philosophy that philosophers could in principle discover but in fact have not. Maritain finds support from this claim at the very beginning of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, in which Aquinas argues that parts of revelation concern things that, if uncovered by philosophy, ‘would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors’, as the canonical Blackfriars translation puts it.¹¹ Theology can also verify what philosophy takes to be true or likely to be true, as with St Augustine’s work showing that the act of faith is a reasonable act. This is thus a ‘confirmation of the validity of reason’ itself. Finally, philosophy can explore the supernatural mysteries that are not properly philosophy but theology. It is in this limited sense that philosophy is a ‘handmaiden’ of theology (ECP 22–3).

Perhaps an example of revelation so impacting philosophy will illuminate Maritain’s meaning. It is often said that the idea of the ‘person’ is a distinctly Christian inheritance of the West. And, indeed, for Maritain the most significant such datum delivered to philosophy is the notion of person developed from the revelation of God as Trinity, or three persons in an integral community, of which the human person is an image (ECP 23). Ancient philosophers of course knew of the human as an ‘individual’, or as part of a whole or as a token of a species. With the Christian notion of the person, however, the individual becomes a whole in himself. The person does not exist only as part of or for the sake of the community, but forms a whole that in some sense supersedes that of the political community. While one might think that the ancient notion of the common good subordinates the good of the individual to the good of a community or even man as a species, for Christian-inspired political thought the good of the human qua person cannot simply be sacrificed for the common good. This thus raises the question of the obligations of the citizen to the state, particularly if the dignity of the citizen is asserted to the disadvantage of the community. There is also a question of whether liberal political philosophy imputes the rights and dignity of a person to its citizens without the trinitarian God that makes sense of such things.¹²

This is ‘Christian philosophy’, rational in its nature yet in its state open to learning from revelation. It should be clear that Maritain’s postulation of such a philosophy depends upon the recovery of a pre-Cartesian openness to wisdom from all its sources, a philosophical spirit that does not arbitrarily deny recourse to knowledge arising from man’s engagement in all of his rational and spiritual activity. That sort of scepticism, Maritain thought, cuts the ground from underneath one and turns philosophy into dogma.¹³

Philosophy and theology

At its simplest, theology is a descent from knowledge of God to knowledge of things; philosophy is an ascent from the nature of things to God.¹⁴ Thus there is for Maritain as for Schmitt an intrinsic connection between philosophy and theology. Yet the manner of that connection is not identical for each thinker. For while according to Maritain theology and philosophy can and do study the same material objects, they view them from unique formal perspectives. While they can both arrive at a truth that is fundamentally one, theology and philosophy characteristically see things in different lights, and thus it is crucial to maintain their formal distinction. Yet they cannot be simply continuous, because the privileged access of theology to revelation leads to a certain asymmetry in their relation. To say that one is higher than the other is not, however, to reduce philosophy to a ‘philosophy of insufficiency’, as Schmitt would have it (ECP 9).¹⁵

Speculative and practical philosophy

What has been said thus far bears more upon speculative than practical philosophy. While speculative philosophy seeks to know (the words ‘speculative’ and ‘theory’ both come from Latin and Greek roots meaning ‘to see’), the point of practical philosophy, as Aristotle says of ethics, is not to know but to do.¹⁶ Because a person always acts in pursuit of some end, the principles of practical philosophy are those ends, and the ultimate principle is the final end of action. Christian revelation, of course, specifies man’s final end as beatitude. Christian practical philosophy thus takes as its first principle man’s union with God.¹⁷ Practical philosophy therefore is subject to revelation not only as it finds itself in its concrete state, but in its very nature. If the nature of philosophy is ‘specified’ by the object that it seeks to understand, then practical philosophy is specified in its nature by this union with God. But of course this end is revealed by God. There is, moreover, the question of the state of this philosophy. Knowledge of ‘the integral conditions of man’s actual existence’, namely the conditions of sin and redemption in which man seeks that end, would of course be critical to any thorough explication of his activity. This knowledge, too, must be supplied by revelation.

Thus practical philosophy has a much closer relation than speculative philosophy to theology (ECP 62–3). Speculative philosophy is what Maritain called ‘infravalent’ to theology as it occupies a lower position without being directly subordinated to it, only benefiting from revelation in its state rather than its nature. Practical philosophy is directly subordinated to practical theology in its nature and state, in fact ‘subalternated’ to it in the same way that optics depends upon geometry for its first principles. While theology does exercise an external check on philosophy, it is much more than this, and particularly so in the case of practical philosophy.¹⁸

The unity between philosophy and theology stems from a specific view of the relation between nature and grace. Because grace completes or perfects nature, Maritain was able to see man’s temporal activities (including politics) as subordinated to man’s spiritual and eternal ends in a very robust way. But because grace does not destroy nature in so perfecting it, Maritain is keen to develop a subordination of ends that does no injury to the temporal as the realm of human liberty. These positions thus have considerable political implications. The status of political science illustrates the relation between philosophy and theology Maritain advocates.

According to Maritain, there has never been a true political science. What has passed for it is largely ‘political pseudo-science’, he says, with a particular note on Machiavelli’s Prince. Lest the modern political scientist dismiss this as irrelevant to his work, let us ask what Maritain means by this provocative statement (SW 121).

Maritain reiterates only a few pages before his Machiavelli comment a dominant theme of his moral philosophy:

I have already said that the domain of human action concerns both moral theology and moral philosophy adequately considered. But the problems posed and resolved by each throughout this domain will always differ either with regard to the question posed, or at least with regard to the formal perspective. (SW 116–17)

Theology proceeds ‘in the light of revelation’ because theology fundamentally seeks to explore and reflect upon what God has revealed of Himself. Even when it touches upon human things, which it invariably does, the final referent is God. That means it can take the truths of revelation as given. For the philosopher, and in this case the Christian philosopher, revelation is neither denied nor ignored, but in the method of philosophy remains ‘a matter of inquiry’ (SW 118). The philosopher begins with the phenomena of daily life, taking stock of how they speak of nature, faculties and relations with other men. God and religion, as one can imagine, emerge very far down such a road, however early premonitions of them might arise.

Practical theology, for instance, will have much to say of politics, but will not consider politics ‘from the point of view of the ordering of man towards temporal and political life’. It will rather be concerned with that of ‘the ordering of man to spiritual and supernatural good’ (SW 117). Thus it will not in the first place ask political questions: it may well lack an adequate understanding of the phenomena of political life, and such inquiry must always return to theological questions. This political theology turns out to have great respect for political philosophy, for unaided reason, by respecting such differences. For to be a proper political science, practical or political philosophy must take stock of human affairs from the ‘point of view of temporal life’ (SW 121). Thus while it accepts that man’s end is beatitude, it would not focus on that beatitude per se; that is for theology. But it would presuppose the continuity between philosophy and theology that would allow it to borrow from theology and for theology to borrow from it.

There are thus two dangers to avoid. The first is a ‘separated’ philosophy, the great crime of Machiavelli. A political theory denying the relation of philosophy to theology denies the relation between nature and grace, or worse presumes that grace has abandoned nature, essentially conflating earth with hell (cf. IH 217). If this seems an extreme characterization of Machiavelli, consider that the God upon which Machiavelli’s political science rests is one that has left us no clear way of knowing good from bad, and in fact created a world in which this moral ambiguity is to be embraced.¹⁹ On the other hand, an ‘imperial’ theology that seeks to colonize philosophy will not be considering a science of temporal activity, politics, from the perspective of that activity. It will thus not only do the task of another science badly, but will neglect its own (SW 102–6). Maritain is frank that if modern philosophy operates under some questionable assumptions, it at least has been granted considerable freedom to be itself in ways sometimes denied it in the medieval period, and without necessarily opposing itself to theology. Much of Maritain’s later work develops a defence of the compatibility of putatively secular and rationalist political concepts, particularly modern democracy and human rights, with Christian political philosophy.²⁰ Whether or not one agrees with Maritain’s conclusions in those specific arguments, they embody the fundamental insight that an overweening theology fails to recognize the liberty intrinsic to man’s nature as a cooperator in governing the universe through his reason.

The function of political theology is thus for Maritain ‘theologico-political’, to use an increasingly well-known phrase. The supreme principles of politics can be developed ‘from the viewpoint of [politics’] relation with man’s eternal destiny’, thus providing a standard to judge all political activity and valuable data on the moral significance of politics and the conditions in which human beings conduct politics. But this is not the same thing as deliberating upon desirable institutions, regimes and economic arrangements, nor does it give easy recipes for advice on war, peace and prosperity. It will not advise one on where to settle, what foods to raise, how many chambers of parliament to have or whether to implement cap-and-trade policies. There is thus no recourse here to political theology as a totalizing ideology with easy answers for every political problem. Politics is a means to a higher end, yet it is also is an integral end within its own sphere of activity.

What revelation can best teach practical affairs is the sense of man’s fallen state. A political theology that has nothing to do with God and everything to do with man is thus most ironic, and we might wonder if this thought rests upon wisdom or some ambition masquerading as truth. Thus Maritain’s théologie politique can only function when political philosophy and theology are each true to its own purpose.

We earlier touched upon Maritain’s claim about the absence of a true political science in modern history, but we should note that he held the same belief about ancient and medieval philosophy. As to the ancients, we have noted that political science as the study of man’s actions needs to know the end of that action. The end of our actions, however, cannot be known through our natural faculties because it is a supernatural one. Thus revelation alone can supply this. Yet neither Aristotle nor Plato had Christian revelation (ECP 64–5). Moreover, not only does man learn from revelation of his supernatural end, but also his concrete state, which is precisely not natural because of the moral evil of sin. While Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were aware of something like the infirmity of man’s intellect and will, they had nothing like the testament to it presented through Christian revelation.

As to the medievals, Maritain primarily discusses Aquinas. Strictly speaking, he argues, Aquinas’ De Regno might be seen to be a work of political theology, and his Commentary on the ‘Politics’ can be taken as a work of political philosophy. Yet the Commentary concerns a work that is not adequately political philosophy, which might in part explain why Aquinas did not complete it.²¹ Thus Maritain in a revealing footnote describes it as well as the Commentary on the ‘Ethics’ as ‘merely as a preparation for an adequate practical form of knowledge’ (ECP 108, n. 55; emphasis in original).

As for De Regno, a neglected letter Aquinas wrote to a Cypriot Crusader-king on kingship, Maritain is cagier. While Maritain avers that De Regno is a ‘theological book’, he admits that in it ‘St. Thomas points out the supreme principles of politics’. Yet Aquinas does not ‘get down to details’, and thus ends up not ‘adopting the point of view of temporal life’ (SW 120–1). It does not seem to me that the case is so simple, as much of De Regno is thoroughly naturalistic and devoid of theology. If it becomes more overtly theological in the latter half, that only makes the apparently philosophical nature of the first half more perplexing. It is to be regretted that Maritain never made an extensive study of the text. In any event, future work on De Regno will be better for considering Maritain on the distinction between political philosophy and theology.²²

The critics

Pace his French interlocutors, Maritain determined that theology cannot be merely an external check on philosophical inquiry, but nor can theology undermine the autonomy of philosophy; in fact this autonomy is the source of theology’s many debts to philosophy. This balance or tension informs Maritain’s explanation of the unity of theology and philosophy.

But Maritain might be said to open himself up to other objections. One could first argue that this subordination of philosophy to theology misunderstands the nature of philosophy, which is first and foremost a way of life, not a method, but a zetesis towards wisdom. Someone like Leo Strauss could be taken to make this argument. Strauss’s emphasis on the erotic nature of philosophy, on the fully engaged character of the philosophic life, is a help to reading Maritain, as Maritain very much concurs with Strauss in this understanding (ECP 34–8). On the other hand, Maritain need not accept Strauss’s insistence that faith and reason are interminably opposed. He surely did not accept Strauss’s quiet suggestions that medieval Christianity adulterated or compromised philosophy in finally rejecting Averroism. As D’Andrea puts it:

In … Plato and Aristotle, we certainly see a clear awareness of, belief in, and respect for, an order that transcends the merely human … Plato and Aristotle’s treatment of these matters is, to be sure, complex, but they do not seem to have feared that interest in, knowledge of, and involvement with such a divine order would taint their life profession as philosophers … They are ready to avail themselves of the wisdom that comes from this source even though it come by way of gift and though not all of it be susceptible of subsequent scientific demonstration or be seen as evident of human reason.²³

The careful reader of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, particularly the Republic, Euthyphro and the Laws, cannot doubt that many ancient philosophers were rightly sceptical of claims men made about divine revelation. Yet it is not clear that they doubted revelation as such. Moreover, if Christian revelations are definitively unique events in man’s history, then it will be difficult to simply apply those ancient critiques to Christianity. If ancient philosophy was open to faith, it is even clearer that faith in the Christian God is open to the life of reason. Maritain’s argument that theology and philosophy are ultimately continuous is a claim that only together do they provide knowledge of the whole. There will thus be no way to disprove philosophically revelation.²⁴

Second, one could accept Maritain’s definition of philosophy but object to the subordination of philosophy to theology, as Robert Kraynak does in his Christian Faith and Modern Democracy.²⁵ While Kraynak nowhere explicitly discusses Christian philosophy, he criticizes Maritain for failing to distinguish the secular from the spiritual. Christianity after all does not endorse or mandate any one regime, so neither should Christian political thinkers. With specific reference to Maritain’s arguments in favour of liberal democracy, Kraynak argues that thinkers like Maritain vitiate the intermediacy of man’s political ends to his supernatural ones, turning philosophy into ideology and harmfully simplifying knotty theological problems. Thus Kraynak seeks to oppose a regime-oriented politics with a prudential politics of the Augustinian Two Cities.²⁶

As an argument about the need for prudence in political activity, Kraynak makes a good case. Yet it is unclear how far Kraynak takes Augustine to be abandoning a sense in which God is the final end of politics, and whether there is such a thing, according to Kraynak, as practical theology. And while Kraynak makes a faithfully ancient argument that prudence must be exercised in any situation to assess what regime is best suited for a given people, he seems to underplay that this call for prudence presupposes another ancient preoccupation, namely that there is a best regime.

Kraynak, like many of Maritain’s recent interpreters, tends to focus on Maritain’s Man and the State. One cannot deny that this work has its share of problems, and it should be a cautionary tale for Maritain’s students. Natural law came to play a central role in Maritain’s thought, but it was never simply the natural law of Aquinas. Maritain’s integration of his notion of the person into it, as well as his defence of subjective human rights as a necessary development of classical natural law, was rhetorically powerful, and he succeeded in co-opting a great many concepts from liberal modernity. But the question remains whether he met liberalism more than halfway. Did Maritain’s defence of subjective modern rights bolster the position of those rights without reforming them in the direction of natural law, and in fact confuse many as to the nature of natural law? Kraynak’s point would seem to be that Maritain was imprudent in emphasizing superficial similarities between Kantian natural rights and Thomistic natural law, thereby disastrously blurring key distinctions. This remains a subject of wide disagreement, but it raises the question of the conditions in which Maritain’s conception of Christian philosophy in its encounter with secular reason can be political efficacious.²⁷

While most critics of Maritain exhibit an ambivalence towards confronting the nature/grace distinction, we find nothing of the sort in our third critic, Eric Voegelin. Voegelin’s most famous works of political theory describe the hazards of conducting anti-Christian political theology, yet his deeper preoccupations with these problems relate to what he sees as Christianity’s own fundamental misapprehensions of man’s nature. He in fact holds the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal to be one of the chief roots of modernity’s spiritual illness.²⁸ Man through his culture represents truths he holds about the nature and order of the cosmos, finding his place within it and ordering his politics after it as much as his understanding of his self contributes to his perceptions of the order of things. Yet Christianity in positing a temporal now and a transcendent future beyond time denies the inner connection between man’s politics and his cosmic vision. Politics becomes irrational and violent, as Voegelin sees in the politics of Hobbes, Hegel and Marx. By making political theology impossible, Christianity has desacralized politics without granting it any new form of stabilizing legitimacy.²⁹

Voegelin’s spirited reading of Christianity presupposes a highly eschatological vision of Christianity, one in keeping with the German theology that overcame Harnackian liberalism after the First World War and advocated by such theologians as Schweitzer, Bultmann and Moltmann.³⁰ Maritain rejects this understanding of Christianity, although he acknowledges that it is a common error. After Maritain’s disquisition on political theology in Integral Humanism, he goes on to consider the ‘Ambivalence of the World’ (IH 214). Just as it is a mistake to view the world as a project to be converted into the Kingdom of God, it is also a mistake to view the world as cut off from God, either because of a conception of nature that is somehow self-subsisting or a more sinister vision of the world as abandoned to sin until the Second Coming.³¹ Maritain notes that a purely immanent understanding of the world can easily lead to a ‘secularization’ of the notion of the Kingdom of God, an example of which is Auguste Comte’s ‘kingdom of pure humanity’ (IH 219; emphasis in original). Maritain cites as scriptural support against this Matthew 4: 4: ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ While the first part of this verse is well known, the words following it are seemingly denied by Voegelin’s Christianity.

Voegelin is right that we must fear that violent dystopias will arise from abuses of Christianity, and one such abuse might be exploiting the political modesty that is essential, Maritain urges, to a proper understanding of Christianity. Yet acknowledging the ambivalence of the world entails recognizing the difference between a theocratic or ‘theophantic’ programme that is bound to misjudge the pervasiveness of pride and self-deception among men, which Jesus clearly rejects in the first temptation of Matthew 4: 3, and declaring ‘Man cannot live on bread alone’ in the interest of making the world a ‘place of a truly and fully human earthly life’, despite its obvious and persistent defects (IH 221). Voegelin has identified a potentially volatile political risk with Christianity, but it is not one that Christianity itself has failed to predict or counter.

Rival political theologies

Eric Nelson has recently argued that, far from being an age of secularization, the early modern period was a time in which religion became more central to politics.³² Thus the 17th century has been called the ‘biblical century’, one that according to Nelson witnessed a renaissance in political theology. In fact, he argues, political theology had a prominence in that time surpassing that of even the medieval age. While there is a certain truth to this claim, namely that political theology has an importance in the modern era that has often been overlooked, it is not clear that political theology did not matter before Hobbes, Filmer and Bodin. Perhaps rather the ways in which political theology matters have changed.

I noted earlier that Maritain rejects politische Theologie because of its failure to make distinctions between religion and politics; yet his endorsement of théologie politique seems to blur those very distinctions. Based on what we have seen in Maritain’s account of political theology, perhaps we can say that these two rival conceptions of political theology are answers to different questions. On the one hand, these ‘German’ and ‘French’ political theologies seek to identify the relationship of revelation to politics. Yet German political theology emphasizes the practical, the legitimizing and ultimately man, while the French emphasizes the speculative, the critical and finally God. Where politische Theologie seeks to achieve practical results by justifying some particular regime in the interest of advancing political affairs, théologie politique reflects and analyses with the object of synthesizing human knowledge about God. As Brague says, what is ‘bothersome’ is not ‘the coexistence of two fields of knowledge’, but rather the very fact of the divine’s intervention or presence in man’s life.³³ This is not to deny that political theology cannot have practical implications or does not reflect upon man.³⁴ But it primarily inquires into the presence of the divine in human affairs as such, and only secondarily judges this or that regime or order.³⁵ Ultimately Maritain wants political theology to be theology in a meaningful sense, and thus makes a space in politics for philosophy denied by ‘German’ political theologies. For, if théologie politique claims to complete political science and ethics, it nonetheless welcomes what natural reason has itself discovered about man and his community.

It is in terms of this contrast that we must see the significance of Nelson’s point. The rich variety and presence of political theology throughout history cannot be denied, but there seems to have been a shift from the mediaeval mode of political theology to the modern one, even if the two modes to some extent coexist in our time. As he says:

If … political theology should be defined as the practice of appealing to divine revelation in order to ground political principles, then it is far from obvious that even Thomas Aquinas was a political theologian. His project, after all, was to establish that the truths of revelation are consistent with those arrived at by natural reason – not to ground the latter in the former.³⁶

We can take Nelson’s point further and say that while Aquinas seeks through political theology to affirm what has already been uncovered by political philosophy, this is not the primary or final task of political theology. Political theology, as Maritain says, situates politics itself within the wider theatre of man’s engagement with the divine, as Aquinas himself situates man’s activity in the context of God’s action in the Summa Theologiae. Thus Aquinas did not see fit to elaborate a political science properly speaking.

Schmitt’s political theology, on the other hand, grants politics no such autonomy from theology. Perhaps it would be preferable to refer to Maritain’s or Aquinas’ political theology as a ‘theology of politics’, and reserve ‘political theology’ for Schmitt’s brand of the concept.³⁷ This suggestion makes clear that for Schmitt political theology is pre-eminently political, a programme for changing and controlling politics. Aquinas, on the other hand, seeks to approach politics speculatively as a theologian. Yet in another sense Aquinas’ and Maritain’s political theology is actually more political than Schmitt’s. For, as I said earlier, they accept politics and the findings of political philosophy as they find them. The goal of their political theology is genuine engagement with political questions, with the aim of clarifying and sharpening the essential features and tensions of political life, not with viewing politics as a problem to be solved and eliminated through a theological programme. This search for knowledge naturally leads to respectful and questioning engagement with citizens of all kinds, much as Socrates spoke to Cephalus as willingly as to Gorgias.

Schmitt’s political theology seeks not understanding but control.³⁸ The most speculative things are in man’s hands according to his political theology, and subject to his manipulation. Thus political theology becomes a weapon, abandoning its speculative functions to operate as a defence of particular political programmes. Justifying certain conventions and attacking others, it sees its mission as primarily practical and its relation with philosophy as largely hostile. Its would-be interlocutors are reduced to enemies. If this critique resembles some accounts of modern political philosophy, perhaps this modern political theology only mirrors that philosophy in reacting against it.³⁹ What is less clear is in what relation to ancient political theology the medieval and modern stand. This question deserves future investigation.

Conclusion

Maritain invites believers to articulate the inherently rational nature of their faith with their non-believing compatriots with his arguments that politics has a necessary autonomy from theological questions, yet is itself open to theological wisdom. As much as philosophy and theology must be in dialogue, so must secular and believing citizens. Thus rational dialogue is not an implicit victory for or surrender to secular reason, but the beginnings of communal dialectic. These sentiments were echoed by a most unlikely figure in a similarly unlikely public exchange:

This [postsecularism] refers not only to the fact that religion is holding its own in an increasingly secular environment … [or] in view of the functional contribution they make to the reproduction of motivations and attitudes that are societally desirable … In the postsecular society, there is an increasing consensus that certain phases of the ‘modernization of the public consciousness’ involve the assimilation and the reflexive transformation of both religious and secular mentalities.⁴⁰

Religion, Jürgen Habermas argues, is not a political challenge simply because it remains and must be reckoned with. Religion is also a political challenge insofar as it asks us if we as a polity are fully rational, compelling the ‘secular consciousness … to deal in a self-reflexive manner with the boundaries of the Enlightenment’.⁴¹

Yet this is not just a call for dialogue. It is dialogue in search of unity.⁴² As Habermas’s interlocutor, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, put it, ‘the essential values and norms that are in some way known or sensed by all men will take on a new brightness’ through the mutual purification of reason and faith, ‘so that that which holds the world together can once again become an effective force in mankind’.⁴³ This ‘purification’ toward unity is the new or renewed task of contemporary political theology. And it must be mutual. Leo Strauss once argued: ‘In our age it is much less urgent to show that political philosophy is the indispensable handmaid of theology than to show that political philosophy is the rightful queen of the social sciences’; today many proponents of political theology, following Schmitt, hold the opposite.⁴⁴ But this oscillation tends to obscure one side of the coin as it illuminates the other. Maritain had an apt phrase for the solution to this problem: distinguer pour unir, or distinguish to unite. Making sense of philosophy involves making sense of theology, for the whole point of analysing is to synthesize. And what we are trying to synthesize is not simply disparate orders of knowledge, but the mind’s vision of reality. As Maritain put it: ‘What theory sunders is at one in life’ (ECP 38).